Now and Then

Ok so here goes – my first post for the Offline People, and to be honest I’m a little nervous amongst these literary heavyweights. For my first tentative steps I thought a good place to start would be to give a little intro of myself and my general raison d’etre (at least in this blogging territory). I suppose I’m an artist of sorts (well who isn’t?!...though that’s a whole new post) and most of my interest seems to boil down to an understanding or belief in a Lacanian doctrine. I’ve been fighting it for a while now, but having just watched ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, I’m starting to realise that Slavoj Zizek is fast becoming my cult leader and ‘Reality’ my religion. 

It seems that the other Offline contributors are no strangers to investigating the post-modern condition also, so I am in good company.

I was interested to read Bill Drummond’s piece on the implications of recorded material and it got me thinking about a recent show by Douglas Gordon: ‘K.364’.
‘K.364’, a Mozart symphony for two violins, is now also the name of Douglas Gordon’s 2-screen video installation based around a visual recording of this very piece of music. At one stage we hear the protagonist, (a principal violinist from Poland) say: ‘Music only reaches you when it hits your ears…no past…no future…only present’. Yet a recording (which this is) can only ever exist as a reference to a past event no matter how ‘in the moment’ we feel as we experience it. The result of this message is that we are pulled into a state of flux between two opposing temporal spaces – ‘then’ (the history of the actual event) and ‘now’ (the screening of the film). The question arises, can music (or live video for that matter) ever be truly immediate, the answer, I believe, is no.

In order to understand an immediate experience, it must first of all be constructed, positioned and referenced within that which we already know – an historic context – a scheme of semiotics, language without which, the ability to understand can’t exist.


We live within our own means but that does not mean that we should give up our search for the ‘Real Thing’…and I’m not talking about coca-cola.