Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966-2016

by Peter Gidal, Mark Webber (Editor)

This collection of essays by Peter Gidal includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation. Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include “Andy Films and Paintings” (1971) “Understanding Beckett” (1986) and “Materialist Film” (1989). “An essential point of access to the questions and considerations through which Peter Gidal has consistently fought for film – and vision itself – as a process of interrogation. This collection renews the agency of his primary ‘What is it to view, how to view the unknown?’” (Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York) “Radical, spirited, provocative … Inspiring and invaluable, really. In here we find a welcome voice, singularly unpatronising, nuanced yet fearless in the face of the mind-narrowing opacity of ‘everyday life’.” (Cerith Wyn Evans) FLARE AESTHETICS 1966–2016 is edited by Mark Webber and Peter Gidal.

282 pages, Hardcover

Published April 11, 2016

Reviews

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Signifiers approaching emptiness means merely (!) that the image taken does not have a ready associative analogue, it is not a given symbol, metaphor or allegory; that which is signified by the signifier, that which is conjured up by the image given, is something formed by past connections but a very low key, not a determining or overdetermining presence, merely a not highly charged moment of meaning. Thus, although this example is terrifyingly oversimplified, the edge of a leaf seen for a moment only, or only seen (in a film, for instance) slightly, related to other equally insignificant signifiers (within a context which allows them to operate as insignificant) does not necessarily lead to associations stronger than ‘leaf’, or ‘another leaf quite similar’ or ‘room, leaf, not extremely emotional, no extreme existential angst, doubt, etc. A leaf. Not: a mere leaf, fluttering image or lonely fragility. Etc.’ And that low level signifier in momentary interplay with other low level signifiers, foregrounds, brings forth a materialist (possibility) play of differences which don’t have an overriding hierarchy of meaning, which don’t determine the ideological reading, which don’t direct into heavy associative symbolic realms. The actual relations between images, the handling, the appearance, the ‘how it is’, etc., takes precedence over any of the ‘associative’ or ‘internal’ meanings. Thus is presented the arbitrariness of meaning imbibed in, for example, such an image-moment of a leaf. The unnaturalness, ungivenness, of any possible meaning is posited. Such practice thereby counters precisely the ideological usages which are dominant; the usages which give meaning to images, things, signs, etc., meanings which are then posited as natural, as residing within. The whole idealist system is opposed by a materialist practice of the production of meaning, of the arbitrariness of the signifier. (Meaning is made.)