Nothin to advertise,
just a text on the art
of Phill Niblock
Mathieu Copeland
(p. 105-107)
Phill Niblock offers a comprehensive
understanding of an art
that blurs any possible attempts
at definitions. An art that cannot
be limited to a singular approach or
by one medium. An art that has to
be engaged with as a whole. His
music has since the late 1960s changed
the way we engage with music,
and renewed our perception of
time. His compositions must be
heard loud as within the volume of
the sound we experiment with the
overtones, and as such is a direct
equivalent to the very large scale of
the projected images where we are
to be immersed within their density
and materiality.
Since beginning working in 1968
on his
Environments series of intermedia
performance events, Phill
Niblock's art has always been about
associating all the different forms
that are music, filmmaking, photography, slide shows and dance, in
what was to be later defined as Intermedia
Art. Elaine Summers, with
whom he began working in 1965,
founded in 1968 the Experimental
Intermedia Foundation, and
Niblock became director in 1985.
Phill Niblock was born in 1933 in
Indiana - USA and began his career
as a photographer, documenting
the Jazz greats such as Duke Ellington
and many others between 1961
and 1964. Phill Niblock, an avid
jazz fan, began to photograph in
clubs and recording sessions. Following
to his meeting with Jerry
Valburn, a recording engineer and
recording archivist, Phill Niblock
was invited to a concert of the
Ellington band on Long Island - NY,
then to a session of Ellington at
Columbia Records. This led him
to be invited to many Ellington
recording sessions. As Phill
Niblock recalls, “I met Mercer
Ellington, Duke's son, who was
involved in Ellington's archive.
I began to supply prints of my work
to them. The last record to be
issued by Riverside Records was
an Ellington and Strayhorn Duo
LP, which had one of the pictures
in this set on the cover. It was not
credited to me (
sigh)”.
Phill Niblock subsequently stopped
his photographic practice to
privilege projected images before
returning to photography at the
turn of the eighties. In 1979 he
began documenting the social
transformation of New York in
works such as
Streetcorners in the
South Bronx, photographing the
derelict and deserted area of the
south Bronx in New York City in
the late 1970's. The approach to
realising these photographs was
to systematically “look down each
street, in all four directions from
the intersection, with a street name
sign in each photo, standing on a tall
kitchen stool in the middle of the
streets. The prints are mounted
in a grid, with north at the top”. In
1988 Niblock realised the series
Buildings along Soho Broadway, a
work that covers a few blocks of the
“cast iron” district along Broadway
in New York, from Howard Street
to Prince Street. All were photographed
with a very high resolution,
fine grain 35mm film, Kodak
Tech Pan, using a Nikon camera
and lens. As Niblock recalls, “all
the photos were taken at the same
time of day, not with direct sunlight.
I stood close to the buildings, looking
steeply upward. So the result is
like a landscape. I had walked this
street, close to where I live, many,
many times, but had seldom looked
up at the tops of the buildings”. In the mid 1960s Niblock began
realising films for the Judson
Church dancers such as Elaine
Summers,
Yvonne Rainer, Meredith
Monk, Tine Croll, Carolee
Schneeman and Lucinda Childs,
a practice that led him to realise
between 1966 and 1969 the cult
series known as the Six Films,
among which are the classics Max
with Max Neuhaus, and
The Magic
Sun with Sun Ra with his Arkestra.
Breaking away from traditional
filmmaking, Niblock worked between
1968 and 1971 on a series of
Environments, and subsequently
undertook in 1973, for over twenty
years, what would become his
major oeuvre—
The Movement of
People Working.
The
Environments were a series
of non-verbal theatre and museum
installations that, as
Jonas Mekas wrote, “presented movements
and images which contained life
energy with a minimum corruption.
One left the performance
revived, strengthened”. The four
environment
produced at the turn
of the 1960s were Environment
(1968), Cross Country/Environment
II (1970), 100 Mile Radius/Environment
III (1971) and finally Ten
Hundred Inch Radii/Environment
IV (1971). These were originally
presented in as various venues as
the Judson Church, NYC, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse,
the Herbert F Johnson Museum at
Cornell University and again the
Whitney Museum in NYC. As they
evolved in form, starting from a
being a split event in 1968, by 100
Miles Radius the Environment consisted
of a large one thirty six foot
wide screen where side by side were
projected three movies or two series
of slides, interrupted three times by
dancers who performed, as
Mekas recalled, “simple, one-themed
pieces that merged perfectly with
the serenity of the images”. Of
these, Abigail Nelson wrote that
Niblock had tried to make “nature
simpler, more abstract in the way
he has looked at it, (…) by the closeness
of the image, by the exclusion
of background”. This series
of work encompasses the possible
understanding of what is an environment
in both capturing the reality
of several environments—the
last two environments presenting
through the still image and films
respectively a geography of a 100
mile radius and ten hundred inch
radii of the Adirondacks in New
York State; and creating a temporary
environment of projected
images, music and movement, in
the space of the museum.
The series of films
The Movement
of People Working portray human
labour in its most elementary
form. Filmed on 16mm colour
film, and later video, in locations
including Peru, Mexico, Hungary,
Hong Kong, the Arctic, Brazil,
Lesotho, Portugal, Sumatra, China
and Japan, for more than 25 hours
of films
The Movement of People
Working focuses on work as a choreography
of movements and gestures,
dignifying the mechanical
yet natural repetition of labourers'
actions. Phill Niblock said of
these that
The Movement of People
Working “came out of necessity
because I was doing music
performances with live dancers,
and it was too cumbersome and
expensive to tour with so many
people. So I started doing those
films that I could project when
performing”. These films, when
screened, are accompanied by the
whole corpus of Niblock's slowly
evolving, harmonically minimalist
music, realised between
1968 and 2011. The sound level
of these compositions offers a
visceral experience of the long
drones and inhabits the ringing,
beating overtones. The layering
of tones echoes the repetitions of
the workers' actions; the evolution
of the films on each screen (changing
throughout the day), combined
with a program that randomly plays back different music pieces, results
in a constant renewal of forms, continuously
offering an exhibition of
new juxtapositions of sound and
image.
The Movement of People…
offers a strong social and political
comment, as highlighted by the
title and represented by the closeness
with the workers. In this,
the series of film echoes the work
of several filmmakers including
Jean-Luc Godard or
Chris Marker who as from 1967 gave workers
the cameras and informed them of
cinematic techniques so that they
could actually make their own
films. In a fascinating turn of
events, rather than doing fictional
or pure documentary film, some
workers formed the Groupes Medvekine
and decided to film themselves
working.
At the intersection of so many
fields—minimalist music, conceptual
art, structural filmmaking,
system or again political art, to
name but a few, and in collaborations
with so many artists, dancers,
choreographers, and again musicians,
Phill Niblock's art gives us
nothing more than this ever so rare
opportunity, the experience of an
art realised with time, and of times.
