Page 52 - Studio International - November December 1975

In an issue devoted to film the position of David Dye's
work must be an ambiguous one. Certain of his works may
be seen to belong to the area now termed 'expanded
cinema' —and these works have been shown in
such places as the London Film Co-op. Yet few of them
can be actually 'shown', in the sense of being projected
by anyone who can operate a projector. Most require an
element of 'performance' on the part of the artist himself.
Again, taking Dye's work over the past six years as a
whole, most of it has been shown in 'gallery' rather than
in 'cinema' situations. It is not that Dye is an artist who
shows in galleries and who also happens to make films.
Since 1971 a// his works, without exception, have had
film as their material. More than that, film—the process of
filming, of transmitting images onto celluloid and of
projecting these images onto a screen — has been the
central concern of his work. Dye's relation to film
emerges more clearly if seen as falling not into two, but
into four categories : films, performance pieces,
installations, still pieces. But first I should like to say
something about the work that led up to his adoption of
film as his medium.
By his third year at St Martin's School of Art, he was
becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the kind of
sculpture then — and still — associated with that school.
(Interestingly, he is one of the very few film-makers to
have emerged from sculpture, rather than from painting.
In a sense, he still is a sculptor). He was drawn to certain
forms of 'process' art (Robert Morris, etc.) and began
experimenting with what he saw as less permanent, less
monolithic, less assertive, less 'industrial' materials than
the ubiquitous steel and plastic — cloth, tape, hardboard,
plasticene. In some of these works an element of
movement was introduced. This search for an 'empty',
transient, insubstantial medium led, in his last year at St
Martin's, to a series of works using mirrors.
One of these, Distancing Device, appeared in the
Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1970. The spectator
was presented with a vertical row of nine 'hoods'
projecting from the wall, rising above a mirror placed on
the floor. As the spectator moved towards or away from
the 'device', he would see individual letters reflected in
the mirror (from one or other of the hoods). The letters
arrived in a meaningful sequence only when the spectator
continued to move back, away from the mirror—forming
the instruction 'Keep Going.' In Dye's own words, 'I was
trying to do exactly the opposite of what sculpture
normally does, which is to draw you into it or around it'
(interview with Anne Seymour, The New Art catalogue,
1972). We find embodied here a reticence about
making any positive statement or gesture, coupled,
ambiguously, with an urge nevertheless to state that
reticence, which pervades all his subsequent work. Such
an attitude is summed up most forcefully by Samuel
Beckett : 'The expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to
express, no power to express, no desire to express,
together with the obligation to express' (quoted in Hugh
Kenner, Samuel Beckett, 1961).
The message encoded in Distancing Device is itself
ambiguous : it is not simply a spurning of the spectator,
apparently invited to share in the delights of an aesthetic
experience. It is also an injunction not to stop there, but to
move on : not to substantify the aesthetic experience in an
object set in a special kind of place, but to seek it out in
the world, to see art not as a matter of objects, but of
relations. Dye's attitude to the spectator is analogous with
that of the Zen master, who, asked by a pupil to define
enlightenment, replies : 'The watering-can in the garden.'
If the pupil persists in believing that the master is the
'subject-who-is-supposed-to-know', the possessor of
some transmittable secret, then he will miss the point and
cudgel his brains as to what enlightenment has in
common with a watering-can. For the master could as
easily have said anything, or nothing, or delivered a blow
with his stick. Dye's work is full of watering-cans,
silences and gentle blows. It operates a kind of ascesis on
the receptive spectator. The unreceptive spectator will Distancing Device 1970
feel cheated of his expectations. Painted wood and mirror 84 x 12 x 24 in.
Another of these works, Window Piece, is still in place
at St Martin's— in a stairway just outside the Sculpture
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