(selected by Sally O'Reilly)
Superpower - Dakar Chapter, 2004
Mark Aerial Waller makes films and videos that reference cinema, providing both an interpretation and interruption of its history. With recourse to technological and narrative mechanisms, Waller stretches, reiterates and at times perverts the mainstream vocabulary of structure and dramatic staging. He selects very particular cameras, stock, transfer processes and camera shots through which to approach narrative time-based work with a painterly, self-referential touch.
The cast of a film rarely comprises professional actors, and little direction is given beyond the text of the script. The resulting dialogue and action is wooden or obtuse, the nonsensical situations made less readable by the non-naturalistic performances. Actors are cast, however, so that their concerns or intentions coincide with those of the character they portray. An imminent change in the real person's life might find a correspondence in their fictional counterpart in the form of aggression or confusion, for instance. Through this careful scripting and casting, Waller creates a fluctuation between performance and authentic action: although these situations are not real they in some way tangentially reflect reality for the performer.
This metafictional texture of the acting and dialogue is carried through the film's subject matter, which often makes reference to arcane areas of scientific research, albeit with sci-fi or literary overtones. In addition, time is often subjective within a single piece, a refusal of linear causality and encouragement of anachronism making little sense in the traditional causal way. Waller's political and aesthetic influences are undeniably Brechtian, while also referring to the political Utopianism of HG Wells and the structuralist approach of Alain Robbe-Grillet. His relationship to video art, on the other hand, is less clear, as it is his embracing of narrative which signals a break with the majority of his art-historical precursors. (Sally O'Reilly).
Working primarily as a film and video artist, Waller could also be described as a sculptor, an installation artist and an occasional writer and editor. His practice is characterised by its interdisciplinarity, bridging the gap between the cinema and the gallery, and bringing narrative concerns to video installations as well as the critical concerns of art to his work as a film director. The structure of his films are equally heterogeneous, operating somewhere between investigatory reportage, linear and experimental forms. Often moving through different time planes, Waller constructs deliberately jerky concoctions of overlapping compositional strands that can have the effect of being dragged through several interpenetrating time zones.
'Waller is interested in how narratives come together in a schizophrenic manner to provide multiple readings and misunderstandings of meaning. All the works are like songs, using condensed, sparse dialogue with wide implication. The films are structured around and explore time cycles, but rather than employing a continuous, linear present, Waller investigates heterogeneous time. For him this heterogeneous time is extended both by memory and an expectation of what is about to be repeated. There is a movement backwards and forwards between the two, with expectation becoming shortened and memory enlarged'. (Lesley Sanderson, Transmission: Speaking and Listening, 2003).
Superpower - Dakar Chapter
Shot in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, West Africa, 'Superpower - Dakar Chapter' (2004) is a science-fiction documentary set amidst the aesthetic and cultural logic of an African Modernist cityscape. The film follows three astronomers, played by local TV soap stars, as they prepare for a futuristic event which is about to become real. An introductory passage to the film presents Jack Horknelmer from the internet show Star Gazers TV, who provides the insights into the constellation 'Orion the Hunter' and light travel, (key astronomic information underpinning the film). Stuart Comer, Curator at Tate Modern, London comments, 'By jamming multiple time streams and technical formats he stages elliptical psychological landscapes in which fantasy and documentary become almost interchangeable'.
Other recent works include 'Reversion of the Beast Folk' (2004), a film of a law giving ceremony, installed in an expanded foam cave; 'Paris-Franprix' (2003) a documentary about a branch of a French grocery chain; and 'Midwatch' (2001), a small blacked-out cabin housing six seats and a video monitor replaying the horrors of the 1956 Christmas Islands nuclear test.
The Wayward Canon
In 2001 Waller founded The Wayward Canon, a shifting platform for the re-evaluation of cinema. Projects include 'My Kleine Fassbinderbar', (5 Years Gallery, London, 2002), a 15-hour screening as a monument to Fassbinder's television series 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'; 'The Sun Set', a 15-hour screening of US television epic Sunset Beach, with accompanying publication of drawings, poetry and critical essays by artists and theorists (1,000,000mph project space, London, 2003); 'Simon & The Radioactive Flesh': 7 artists videos inter-cut Louis Bunuels 'Simon of The Desert', (co-production with Giles Round, Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2004) and most recently 'La Societe des Amis de Judex', film and spatial montage aligning Apollinaire poetry, 60's Batman and Louis Feuillade's Judex with a smoke machine (Redux, London, 2005).
Biography
Mark Aerial Waller (b. 1969) studied sculpture and film/video at Central St Martin's College of Art, London, graduating in 1993, and has exhibited extensively throughout Europe. Group shows include Changing Times (Tate Britain, 2003); Beating About the Bush (South London Gallery, 2004); Biennale! Artist Film and Video (Temporarycontemporary, London, touring to China, 2004); Pass the Time of Day (Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2005) and Go Between (Magazin 4, Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria 2005). His international profile has developed over recent years, with solo shows at Groupe de Recherches et d'Essais Cinematographiques, Paris (2002), T1+2 Artspace, London (2004) and Counter Gallery, London (2004).
Peter Suchin, Gesamtkunstbeast, (review), 2004
Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Glowboyzone (review), 2004
Interview with Mark Aerial Waller and Tom McCarthy, 2001
Lux, London
(June 2006)
Further information
Overt Surveillance - Micro-Salons Stuart Bailey: Over the past year you've organised a series of salon meetings alongside your regular practice. Can you briefly describe their location and nature? read on
Transmission: Speaking and ListeningThe following discussion took place after a lecture given by Mark Aerial Waller, as part of the Transmission Series 2 of artist's talks entitled
The Surface of the Image and The Impulse of... read on
