The Orientalist
a map. In perhaps his desperate moment of play with the artist, he hurriedly sutures the split frame at the wrong ends. He reframes the image—his own—with the 'line of power' that the dead crocodile (Is it dead yet? Why is death, as always, caught in the last grimace of life?) might hopefully come to signify for the 'other'; the Orientalist stops the space with his body, 'cuts' it into a middling unity in order that it may not spill beyond the techno-narcissistic facade of his 'self. For, isn't his journey but a horizontal enterprise? And yet the space to his right shoots up, as if in a high-angled overview as a forest becomes rhythmically dense. But, then, this may also be a space dotted with signs of prowl. And also colours remembering a nascent map in someone's short-term memory. The space to his left opens up onto a flattened sea now receding into colour. (The objects and spaces are ever so close to colour, here.) The boat at the sea-shore is almost willing to capsize in its last grimace before death (like a bull at the fag end of its physicality—groaning and snorting—before an indifferent matador). But this is also the tilt of an aerial shot. The women reversing the earlier motif of 'life-in-death', in their nudity and sickness and fatigue, sharpen even further the line of power' on which the Orientalist stands perched fully clothed in health, and posing as health.... The space, though quiet, moves invisibly and spills out of the frame onto an 'outside' where a historical subjectivity witnesses its own sea-shore becoming unfamiliar territory under a still, unchanging light even as the Orientalist 'poses' his culture (clothes, gun, indifference: health) as against the darkness of the hunted crocodile glistening under his feet, the sea as a thin, flattened gauze, the women listless in their nudity and the boat now almost a totem—vestiges all of a vanquished nature (raw, antiquated power, nudity: sickness and death)...
I wonder if it is possible to conceive this mobility in Vivan's work also in terms of paradoxes of sounds and silences. In this transformed geography, ears pick up totally new sounds and in strange depths. There are reverberations of distances even in the most mundane sounds that emanate from the boat. And these are not just sound perspectives. In the mobile performance of the image—in the frame spilling out of itself—just as there is an unseen 'outside', likewise there is an 'unheard' sound between the 'outside' and the image. In this sudden relationship, the ears have not as yet synchronized fully with the new spectacle—of the boat arriving on the seashore before an 'outside' and, conversely, of a landscape unfurling before the Orientalist. The journeys bring in their wake an entire range of sounds and silences that may have been heard but not known and vice versa. A certain still quality of unchanging light now also begins to emerge as rather a certain quality of lighting (this switching is stretched even further in his recent charcoal drawings exhibited as The Long Night' series) as when the familiar sounds are flattened by a quietude that has begun to throb with movement somehow. It is through this mobility, of things in the middle, of an a-centred narrative that a sense of time (if not of history) is created. However, this mobility does not aspire to reproduce a metaphysic of naturalism. Within the map of these journeys, the sound, for instance, would be heard in quietude and silence in the midst of turbulence.
This reversal of the classical image is stretched in yet another way: The movement spilling out of the frame does not attempt to capture the objects in the materiality of
Journal of Arts <&• Ideas