Someone filmed me painting for eleven hours and I cannot use a single second of it
A gallery in the 6e asked me for video for their Instagram before my show in March. I said fine, come Tuesday, I'm working on the large interior with the window. She set the phone up behind my shoulder and left it running, eleven hours over two days.
I have watched it. It is unusable. Painting is mostly standing still. I put a passage down, then I go make coffee, then I come back and I look at it for nine minutes without touching anything. On camera that is a hostage video. The one moment something real happens, when I take a rag and wipe out the whole left side of the canvas because the shadow had gone dead, it lasts forty seconds and reads as nothing if you don't know what you're looking at. It was the best decision I made all week and it looks like cleaning.
So I understand why the videos that travel are the ones with a knife and sparks and resin pouring. The thing I don't accept is that this means the work is less watched. My finished photograph of that same canvas got three inquiries in two days. The eleven hours got me nothing but a strange feeling about my own hands, seeing them from outside.
Anyway, the show opens the 14th. I'll paint the poster myself, with a brush, and if that is too slow for the algorithm, voilà.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The wipe is the whole thing. Of course it is. The one second that carries the entire painting is the one they will bury in the middle and everyone will scroll past looking for the "action."
I have a whole room of found objects people threw out, and the joke I have made for years is that the interesting part happens when nobody is looking. Video has no interest in that. It wants the gesture, not the nine minutes of standing there deciding. Those nine minutes are the work. They are just impossible to sell to Instagram.
You could do what I do when somebody wants a "process film." Give them the coffee cup, the hands, the wide shot of the empty room. Let them edit the myth. The wipe stays yours.
the nine minutes thing. yes. i've had people ask what i'm doing when i'm standing in front of something and the honest answer is i'm deciding, and there's no footage of deciding. it looks like nothing because it is nothing, right up until it isn't.
the part i'd push back on is giving them the gesture they want. i did that once. handed over a timelapse of the whole build and they cut it to the one big move and put a trending sound on it. the piece sold and everyone who bought it quoted the reel back to me. never again. i'd rather hand them the hostage video and let them figure out the wipe is in there.
"No footage of deciding." I am going to steal that, I hope you don't mind. It is exactly the thing they cannot understand: the work is in the looking, and the looking has no shape.
And you are right about the gesture. I was half tempted to give them the wipe, framed nicely, because it is a good second of film. But then the painting becomes that second, and the buyer arrives already knowing the story. I would rather they come and stand in front of it with nothing in their head.
So, hostage video. Let them scroll. The ones who stay will be the ones worth having.
"The interesting part happens when nobody is looking", c'est exactement ça. I have been trying to explain to this woman why I don't want a time-lapse and she keeps saying "but people love to see the transformation." The transformation is nine minutes of standing there and one second of destruction. You cannot speed that up, the speeding up IS the lie.
And yes, the deciding. There is no footage of deciding because deciding has no surface. You stand in front of the passage and the only thing moving is your eye. Every painter I know looks like they are doing nothing right up until the moment they ruin something on purpose.
The found-object room sounds like a real body of work though. Do you photograph it, or does the joke fall apart the second a camera gets near it?