Text: Pablo Fanego

Deviations of the technical image

One of the weariest debates in the evolution of cinematographic art in the last decades is the one referring to the authenticity of the filmic image and the truthfulness of the documental image. The ‘alleged’ pureness of both ways of representation confronted a wide spectrum of notions that, under the influence of the post-structuralist thought, were specially problematic: the idea of authorship, the representation of the historical, the possibility of naturalism... In this period there were, by means of the ‘cinema’ institution, a lot of visual showings grouped as experimental or documental cinema that tried to solve the eternal disagreement between fiction and reality.
The appearance of the video in the sixties also brought up the demand of a critical separation between narration and information, and would lead to, just as Godard denounced, the increasing formal contagion between television and cinema. On the other hand, video-art led to the gradual admission of the moving image in galleries and museums by means of the presence of screens or the creation space sites designed for the projection of images, until the traditional avant-garde cinema was able to find room at the museum.
But it was in the last ten years when the moving image ‘expanded’ into the museum to the point of transmuting the experience of the spectator into a sort of images montage across the darkness of the rooms, deconstructing the classical narrative shapes into a lot of screens, or reproducing the sequences extracted from the audiovisual culture in all kind of installations. The convention list of the filmic or documental image interlaces at the museum in a sort of interdisciplinarity outside the dogmatism of its predecessors’ generation. A sort of ‘secondary mimesis’ in which the same media filters existing between us and the world like an interposed reality are taken on. It is what Nicolás Bourriaud has successfully defined with the term ‘post-production’ so as to refer to those practices in which the artist uses materials or images already elaborated.
Those are some of the images deviations Oliver Añón is interested in exploring. So we can find the echoes of the ‘found cinema’ in an interesting piece such as Una película colectiva made up of several video fan pieces transferred to the artist in which different degrees of fiction and real kind are fluently used. Or something that could act as a perfect illustration of Bourriaud’s thesis, the sequence of images of this double page: the artist appropriates a series of ‘unconscious’ length from the shot dead interludes of a TV producer. The inactivity of the scene and the lonely presence of the cameras in front of the supreme void of the ‘chroma key’, seems to reveal how reality is now programmed and recorded in images, before being directly consumed.