Torqued Chandelier Release

<p>Vancouver-based Rodney Graham has adopted a variety of roles as an artist—musician, performer, philosopher, scientist, and writer—but he has been primarily recognized for his moving-image installations in varying formats of film and video. A nimble and rigorous reinvestigation of 1970s Conceptualism, Graham’s oeuvre has led him to be described as an artist who works on “multiple tracks” rather than in sequential stages.<br><em>Torqued Chandelier Release</em> is the third—and most ambitious—of a trio of films that the artist described as “illustrated ‘thought experiments’ documenting transitory lighting events within the context of a single roll of film.” Inspired by Sir Isaac Newton’s famous water-bucket experiment, which explored the nature of rotational motion, <em>Torqued Chandelier Release</em> documents a crystal chandelier—wound up on a rope off-camera and then released—spinning in one direction until the rope unwinds, slowing, then spinning in the reverse direction, and so on, until finally coming to rest.<br>The film was shot at twice the normal speed with a 35mm camera placed on its side, and is shown in a vertical format through a custom-built, high-speed projector. The image of the spinning chandelier becomes hypnotic—it takes on a sculptural, three-dimensional appearance that is unlike anything made by conventional filmic means; the intensified resolution and lush texture transform the simple event into a dizzying, glamorous spectacle. As Christina Bagatavicius has explained, however, all this glitter is used to make a historical and intellectual point as well: “The luminosity of the chandelier also takes on a richer meaning when related back to Newton’s status as a central thinker during the age of Enlightenment. Within this context, the chandelier takes on the dual role of recreating a historical experiment as well as cleverly personifying the illumination of the mind through thought.”<br>Graham’s deadpan humor permeates his work. Here, he chose the image of the chandelier from his memory of an incident in the 1952 film <em>Scaramouche</em>, in which the lead character is nearly impaled by a falling chandelier (yet another Newtonian lesson) and escapes his enemies in the guise of a Commedia dell’Arte buffoon. Likewise, Graham often conceals his own identity—in this case, as an artist-cum-experimental scientist—as a means of subverting the authorship, originality, and identity issues that have been at the forefront of contemporary art discourse for the last two decades.</p>