Vida Sačić + H.R.Buechler

/ / notes for a conversation on “Like Some Female Hamlet” / /

Following a phone call held on 9.April.2017 between 11:45-12:30 pm (est), the decision was made to have an extended conversation about Vida Sačić’s recent animation work, Like Some Female Hamlet, via a series of conversations held over Google Docs. The conversation is also informed by a visit with Sačić at her studio in Chicago, Illinois, on 12.June.2017. The conversation is formated, relatively unedited, and begins post phone call.

20.Feb.2018: Post-production / Digital Production Notes:

This interview is available as 1) Google Docs “Publication” 2) embedded .pdf into Wordpress 3) a limited physical publication for the Assembly, where it is put into conversation with other physically printed materials.  

1. If you are viewing this from the link provided by Google Docs for the “publish” function - please note mild modifications were made to this iteration online following its production in forms 2 + 3. Additionally, you are experiencing a complete lack of formatting that can only be adjusted by you (the user) modifying your browser frame to replicate a standard sheet size. Even then, it does not retain the stability of the 2) .pdf or 3) physical production. This itself, is a unique conversation.

Do think of these eccentricities/qualities/properties that each of these medial transactions and transitions possess and present during your reading.

HR

     +  

        VS

Vida was encouraged to create a new animation for a show Barb Tetenbaum was curating in NYC.

(the work is very) quiet

(there is) an absurdity (to it)

Did not want to say it was about gender or “reversed feminist art”—but kind of is?

Thinking about traditional gender roles and the history of women playing Hamlet, this iconic male protagonist, and also that it is written in English *the King’s Language*. There is this implicit authority of Shakespeare, of Hamlet, of Men, and of (the) English language. The Shakespearean quotations (all containing birds, perhaps 3 total) are in big blocky wood type, while Vida’s personal interjections/narrative are all in a lower-case serif, some in Croatian, some in English, the spoken component in Croatian. The narratives are interwoven—flowing—(into the sea? the sea of what? a literal sea?)

Vida, Croatian her first language, remembers reading Shakespeare as a young woman on the beach, as a way of learning English.

The beach, the birds, a sea, a sky, this fluidity of dualities and absurd hierarchies—upturned/subverted

that remain despite translation.

English as King’s language

/ dominant / second to?

Croatian as personal and first language

Male protagonist performed by a woman

Using letterpress as first means

(louder action || physical) but moved into AfterEffects (softer, smaller actions || minutiae?)

It’s all rather absurd isn’t it?

What is interesting here is the multiple layers of subversion. The historic subverted by the contemporary lense, which is effective due the very fact these hierarchies remain constants in the everyday. English, maintains this power / Men still remain more powerful / Even the platforms of production have an established hierarchy—though that remains unclear to me at this juncture. Additionally all of these subversions could perhaps be articulated as acts of translation, things getting lost. But also found.

My initial takeaway is this subtle yet powerful subversion of hierarchies, while absurd, is pointed, speaking to the unspoken maintained power of the subject of subversion.

I am interested in language and expression and also this idea of “the other” and the absurdity of “othering”

At one point, the narration says “I was getting ready to swim in the sea” and I love the idea of swimming as a symbol for movement through life, but also a venture into the unknown and plunging into the depths of something you can’t quite see, but are determined to move through

Also, swimming is an action in direct opposition to the drowning of the, here absent, character of Ophelia, the more famous of the (only) two female characters in the play Hamlet

Ophelia Syndrome - being defined in relationship to something else

There is this inherent tension between individuation and togetherness that is an intrinsic part of our experience as readers and as people

Returning back to the parallels of the sea and the sky: we addressed the sea, and the birds in opposition to the sea, being objects of the sky. What does the sky represent in this work? Is the sky at all present in this discussion outside of operating as the potential to escape from the sea?

Both the sea and the sky offer the opportunity of a subject “floating” or “escaping,” but also in literary use possess dark qualities of an “unknown.”

Escape into the sea / sky

Float into the sea / sky

The dark abyss of the sea / sky

A murky unknown

A vast unknown

Does the sky not also have qualities of the unknown? Of “other”? Perhaps the sky here is the other, possessing not a fluidity (as the sea) but a lack of concreteness, an air, a space for a more scattered fleeting, less easily contained, as the sea may be. That is if we are speaking in terms of physical properties as vehicles for metaphors of this narrative.

I suppose in the context of the sea, and moving through (as you have articulated previously), it is the density of that unknown which is the subject of concern.

You define Ophelia Syndrome as “being defined in relationship to something else,” however, clinically this syndrome (because it has become an established psychological syndrome in contemporary medicine), is defined more as a dependency on another, or rather, thinking or feeling in a particular way because one is told to do so.

When viewing the piece within this context I wonder how we can think about an experience of language as a construction or experience under influence? How the isolation of language in the static textual object grounds our understanding of an idea, of our reading, in some sort of established empiricism?

This comes back to the implications of English as the King’s Language, and Croatian as secondary. This seems to going down a lofty hypothetical rabbit hole.

Something else I also want to talk about is this movement between media/mediums, and the appropriation of your own works.

As someone familiar with your printed works, you can immediately identify the imagery as being taken from your Body/Language series. This series, as a printed series that is expressive, yet calculated and possessing its own feeling of fleeting, is ultimately static in its final form as a printed object. By extracting parts from this work, and moving them into AfterEffects, these forms change dramatically. They become formerly static objects now put into movement; objects with the historic residue of one medium (letterpress) now moving in a new medium (digital animation/film/cinema?).

Does this translation (of sorts) of the static, printed text to a moving image somehow liberate the works from drowning in some way? Much like Ophelia, they are liberated from a dependency, offered a new space to move into and through, the potential to swim in another field, experienced in the language of another medium?

Would you say that this movement across production platforms also echoes an “inherent tension” in “our experience as readers and as people”?

I do think so because it is a process of translation. We all translate content we encounter.

It is interesting that you use the word “echo.” As an immigrant, as a woman, as some “other,” have certainly in my practice often found myself echoing what I thought was acceptable.

This might be also related to my personality but I take perverse pleasure in identifying and dissecting this quality.  Not even with necessarily an intent to change it but to catch it, catch the echo…

Moving between platforms is intentional, to catch the echo as well as the noise of the medium. It is a fishing exercise, one that is both calculated and irreverent.

This absolutely goes hand in hand with the Ophelia Syndrome, as you correctly expanded upon. It is impossible for me not to see a link between this syndrome and gender. Individuation of women has not exactly been supported by our social constructs. This is certainly true in Croatia, but also in the United States. Progress has been made but our world is still fundamentally patriarchal… Oh, now I definitely sound like an angry feminist! I mean, the bloody patriarchy!!

Was this consciously woven into the animation? Not consciously. I’m afraid that would make it far too dry and not juicy.

It’s nice to see those pink moving shapes, don’t you think? I am pleased with the way animating elements from the Body/Language prints brought new life to the form. Animating the body!

The choice to do so was born out of a necessity (I needed to animate something!). Now, all I see are all kinds of connections to the ideas of consciousness, presence, to make an inanimate object move, to breathe anima into the form. To move between print to screen and/or projection is to translate movement, movement of my own body printing into a static print and then animating it again.

And moveable type, moving words, what’s more powerful than that?

Visual presentation of written information is a big part what drew me to the field of Graphic Design. It’s what I enjoy teaching, especially to non-traditional students in a public University.

I am simply glaaaaazing over the brief points on Progress and the patriarchy (those two are BFFs or PPFs). But not to dismiss it. It’s important to acknowledge just how far-reaching, how perverse, these social constructs are in our cultures. They are implicit whether intentional or not. Though, I think that they act here as a subtle undercurrent, yes, effectively makes the work more juicy! Then we get to tease them out!

And with all the content that is out there, we really just have to filter, or curate, what we need to move into the work. Right?

When you start discussing that action of translation, translation, I can’t help but often think of concepts I am struggling with within my own work right now around that action. I regularly like to break down the word “translation” as an activity, and while reading your work (both visually, textually, and conversationally) the word kept breaking down as: TRANS(ATLANTIC)ATION in my subconscious—as if there is an entire ocean somewhere between. And I mean, there kind of is, particularly in your case. There is a physical ocean between Croatia and America. Immigration itself almost seems tied to translation, when considering that etymologically the word itself is built upon the notion of carrying something across.

Hmmm…to carry something across also makes a gap or a void implicit.

What’s there?

Is that where the echo is? And does that tie back to these waves moving outward from a source?

Your acknowledgement of noise feels somewhat like presented as a moot point, but I think we should go back to that. The echo and noise? I’m really interested in the “noise of [a] medium” but particularly in reference to moving across mediums. And I wonder if where we catch that noise is where we encounter it? In that space between, in that movement that maybe begins with mimicry? Where does dissection occur?

Early in the animation there are these two circles spinning and spinning and from the far right corner of the screen this triangular form juts up and seems to split them—it’s very of the body, feeling particularly feminine. It feels as if the forms themselves were dissecting themselves, or pollinating one another. That in their playful engagement on the screen they kept trying to connect or integrate, though seemingly with no success, each form ultimately scattering, escaping on their respective rivulets.

Of course animation of the body, of a static form, is liberating! What is key with what you’ve said is that you have tied the “movement of [your] own body printing into a static print and then [animated] it again”. This acknowledges that the content of language (or the visual representation of language / moveable type / words / etc.) begins in a state of movement—that what these forms contain, and what their bodies are subjected to, are free and fluid before they are contained.

How would you say “liberate the content of form!” (form here the patriarchy?!)

Et ex species Conent Liberate?!

In Croatian…?

                                                Trans-atlantic-ation - now there’s an activity I could talk about! ha ha

Economic migration is such a huge topic in Croatia, where 5% of total population emigrated in the last 4 years! We are talking working age, educated people. It’s a huge loss for a small country. Those that leave, now occupy a cultural no-man’s land, a Trans-atlantic-n-ation.

On the other side of the ocean, in the United States, we are having heated conversations about immigration. Yet, our identity as immigrants is an essential part of what makes us Americans! People who flee carry with them a consciousness that crosses cultural and language gaps. We are lucky to be citizens of a country that has historically recognized and benefited from this consciousness.

“The noise of the medium” can refer to the physical traces that the equipment leaves. Like scratches or stains; mistakes to the old masters. For a contemporary artist, these become points of interest, the idiosyncratic miraculous unseen hand in action.

Any tool you use to make art also informs the meaning of the work produced. Letterpress prints carry innate information related to history, as these types of printing presses are a key historic tool. This can also be a kind of a noise, a subtext.

Forms translated between mediums echo each other, they are reflections of each other, but never completely identical. A printed circle will have a  different quality when scanned and animated. It is altered by the medium which is inextricably tied to the message.

“Liberate the content of form!”  that sounds like something I would say though I can not remember the context!! haha

I usually speak about the form / content dichotomy in the context of typography. It is interesting to consider the form of type versus verbal content. For example, the look of letters versus the meaning of the word they spell out. What do the shapes of the letters themselves tell us? Why were they selected? I’m obsessed with this!

Form is content, yes, but artwork has to have conceptual content beyond form. It is not enough to print a beautiful lowercase “g,” no matter how intricate the bowl of the descender! The artist must relay a story.

Alright Vida, you’re going to bear with me while I try to connect a few things in your last statement. But I think through all our waywardness we’ve kind of arrived at something wonderful? Maybe? I also desperately want to keep going back to previous thoughts, but in an effort to move forward here, y’know, progress (ha!), I’m going to take a stab at this without pulling out a book to help me.

There’s something to the “Trans-atlantic-n-ation” and this “cultural no-man’s land”—such a strange place to occupy, isn’t it? A sort of cultural in/between? But this is quite poignant and definitely speaks to your work, the animation, and how we’re thinking about moving between mediums and across platforms (both linguistically and conceptually).  

You said, “People who flee carry with them a consciousness that crosses cultural and language gaps.”  For me, and I think for you too (maybe), this draws a very clear parallel with the knowledge that “any tool you use to make art also informs the meaning of the work produced.”

The mediums by which we produce/reproduce narratives (or other cultural content), have their own consciousness, they all possess “a kind of noise, a subtext.”  That noise and subtext is subjected to an interrogation of sorts in each reproduction, each translation.

Your questioning of shapes of letters themselves, their reason for existing in a particular form, speaks to this desire to understand and question the consciousness of the medium, the consciousness of material, just as you have had to question and understand the consciousness of multiple cultures. It is the echo—a reiterative state informed by its past state but not whole, it is always losing something based on its constant subjugation to new environments.    

I would argue that this noise and subtext that occurs to visual (and non-visual) content traveling across mediums is a language in-it-of-itself.  

That in mind, the intricate bowl of that descender on that beautiful lowercase ‘g’ is of course, secondary. It is how we arrived at visualizing the ‘g’, that dichotomy of the utterance (a fleeting movement) / typographic form (an attempt to capture). And also asking why is that descender deemed beautiful? Why did English take priority?  Of course we understand the historic chain of events, but in an effort to reinforce earlier points, I want to highlight the greater progressive narratives our materials carry, right? That’s what you’re stabbing at in the echo.

Yes, it is a sort of materiality but not entirely of one medium but that which happens to the content as it passes between mediums. Pushing the static into the animated, the analog into the digital, is not new per say, but I think the ways in which we are now thinking about how we relate to these technologies and the poetic parallels that can be drawn in that action is the compelling distinction. A sort of immigration of materials and means.  

Our tools bring their own implications, their own consciousness, inasmuch as the space they ultimately occupy possess.

The tools do bring their own consciousness. I just spent five days in Slovenia, printing using the European version of my American press. I kept looking at how the press is different and also worn out in certain parts because of how my predecessors used it. Those qualities impact my printing and it comes through in the final print.

The noise, the subtext is a language connecting us below our consciousness; it is a non-linear communication but nonetheless, just as effective.

Speaking of immigration of materials and means, this week I brought to America one font of wood type with diacritic marks from my hometown. I’ve inherited about 20 cases of local wood type. The type has its own consciousness, it has marks made by those that used it and has memory. One barely used font is cyrillic, as the official language in the area used to be Serbo-Croatian, written in two alphabets. Language has been a mirror of identity in the region and, as such, it has always been vulnerable to political manipulation. But then, language is a manipulation of a sort. I imagine the speaker/writer and the listener/reader sitting on an imaginary verbal seesaw, trying to reach an understanding using only a beam and a fulcrum. As enlightening as type and language is, it can be just as cryptic…

It’s been good writing with you - I’ve never done anything like this before so thanks for the opportunity!

 Vida, it has been my pleasure!

/ / IMAGE LIST (in order of appearance) / /

1.        Like Some Female Hamlet - animation still

2.        Ko Neki Ženski Hamlet - letterpress print, 2017

3.        Like Some Female Hamlet - animation still

4.        Like Some Female Hamlet - animation still

5.        9.April.2017, Notes with Vida - digital scan

/ / COLOPHON / /

The printed publication/iteration of this interview was produced in late winter of 2018 by H.R.Buechler for OXBLOOD between/at the Wells College Book Arts Center and Macmillin copy room in Aurora, NY. All design was conducted within the constraints of the Google Docs platform with the exception of page numbers. The Google Doc was exported as a .PDF, with the pages paginated into 11” x 17” spreads via InDesign for laser-printing on 28# Mohawk Color Copy Premium with i-Tone.

The covers were letterpress printed on a combination of (primarily) salvaged file folders from the Wells College “Rumpus Room” - a home for wayward and used office supplies - and a few “new” file folders from the cabinet next to the desk in office #32 of Morgan Hall. The broken wood type ‘V' comes from H.R.’s personal collection, with the rest of the type provided by the Wells College Book Arts Center. Some monotype was harmed in the production of proper diacritics for typesetting.