Stillness and Movement Studies: Portraiture, Identity, Time

This thesis discusses my video art practice in relation to the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson and Deleuze have written extensively on time, consciousness, matter, and the universe, holding that the only constant is change. What I find useful from the two philosophers is their shared attempt to give materialist and immanent (not transcendent) accounts of time, change, movement and representation. In my video art, I have been producing a kind of extended portraiture that introduces time and change into what I think is usually a static form. The works of Bergson, Deleuze and other philosophers/cultural theorists who write about their work have helped me to develop and discuss what I see to be a different approach to portraiture. My ‘video portraits’ approach questions of identity from the hypothesis that both the self and representations of the self are expressions of material forces, temporality, and change. This has many implications that are discussed in this paper. The most important implications are: One, the self is treated less an unchanging essence and more as process occurring through time. Two, representation, although it tries to delimit and fix a certain idea of the self, is still nonetheless subject to the forces of change. The thesis begins with a short autobiographical discussion and explanation of some pertinent undergraduate work I did, putting it in Deleuzian/Bergsonian context. It then elaborates two key notions for understanding my recent work: Bergson’s duration and Deleuze’s virtual. Roughly speaking, these are concepts that treat time, consciousness and matter as being continually shifting and indivisible. These concepts are used to explain some recent artistic developments as well as contextualizing my work in a broader artistic context, linking it to painting and music.