Between Still Image and Time Image

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Mauricio AlejoBetween Still Image and Time-Image

Erandy Vergara*

After having worked with a photo series concerned with the movement of an object from one place toanother, Mexican photographer Mauricio Alejo began working with video. He then realized his imagesneeded time and some extra frames to accomplish the idea of action and movement. Since then onvideos extended time of 30 frames per second has allowed Alejo to play with the viewers perception ofdaily objects. e audience is confronted with still images slowly transforming with the passage of timeand with minimum interventions by the artist. e purpose of this paper is to analyze the differencesbetween photography and video and to explore the notions of duration and instant in relation to Alejo's.

Drawing from Henri Bergsons thesis on the duration of time and Gilles Deleuzes notion oftime-image, this paper explores how the illusion of duration created by the thirty frames of videoextends Alejos conceptual and formal possibilities. is paper argues that Alejo pushes the boundaries ofphotography and video, serving to builda conceptual link between them. For that I will rely on G. E Lessings discussion of the spatial propertiesof painting and demonstrate that Alejos videos are not limited to what Lessing describes as the singlemoment of art, but rather, that they unfold within many frames.

It is my thesis that the videos under discussion investigate two different kinds of temporality:endlessnessand eventfulness. ese notions will be discussed in relation to Bergson, Lessing and MichaelFried, respectively. I argue that Alejos videos are still photographs embedded in time, and it is thisrelationship between still image and moving image, between the instant of the photographic image andthe unfolding image of video that I discuss in the following pages.

*Erandy Vergara. Mauricio Alejo: Between Still Image and Time-Image.Luna Crnea 33: Viajes al Centro de la Imagen (Mexico: Centro de la Imagen/CONACULTA, 2012).


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Mauricio AlejoTower(2007)

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Photography and the Single MomentMauricio Alejo1 began working with photography in the late 1990s, basically constructing still

lives with ordinary objects. He devoted the rst year of his career to the construction ofctions, placing

the objects at the core of his investigation, as he explains: I thought I was photographing pure ideas, theobject as collective memory. [en] I realized that I was not talking about the idea, instead it wasabout the specicities of the objects.2 His work changed after 1999, specically with the seriesAirports,consisting of photographs taken from X-Ray lters installed on Mexico Citys airport. Unlike Alejosprevious formal images, this work moves towards a different approach in the production of images andmeaning, it was more about surveillance and control.

In 2000, Alejo moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at New York University. isexperience and his previous workAirport transformed his approach to photography, which is clearlydifferent in the trio Two Cubes, created in 2001. is work, as will be argued below, is crucial to thisanalysis as it represents Alejos move towards time-based arts. As he puts it: I had never done any workembedded in time, it was always the suspended time, the frozen instant. And yet at the same time, it

seemed to me a very interesting aspect of photography, because it required the creation of a past and afuture. However, the passage of time was something I had not considered in my work before. When Imade this piece I started thinking about time and then I began working with video.3

e point of departure of this essay is the still image and more specically photography. For that,I will draw from Lessings canonical text Laocon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766),and FriedsArt and Objecthood(1967). Although these approaches address different periods in art history,both Lessing and Fried defend what in their view is the material limitation of spatial arts, that is thesingle moment. For Lessing, painting and sculpture must restrict to the single moment while arts suchas poetry and literature must conne to the succession of time.4 Similarly, Fried is opposed to theexploration of time in the visual arts. For him, the work of art can be meaningful in a single moment andhence, it must surrender to it.5 Neither Fried nor Lessing talk about photography, but they do write

about a key element of photography: time.Indeed, photography functions with time, not only the mechanism and process of time exposure;

regarding the kind of temporality it depicts, photographys time is the instant. Certainly, the elements ofa photograph are frozen in time. Although they can suggest movement and action, what we see in a

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1 Born in Mexico City in 1969, Mauricio Alejo received his BA in Communications at the Universidad Intercontinental in

Mexico City in 1987, and a MFA at New York University in 2002. He lives and works between Mexico City and New York.2 Gabriella Gomez-Mont. Mauricio Alejo: Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo, Fahrenheit (Dec. 2002) 25.

3 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo, Replica21 (March 2003) 19.

4 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon; an Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Trans. Ellen Frothingham. NewYork: Noonday Press, 1957) 91.

5 Fried focuses specically on literalist art; his main thesis is that these kinds of art practices are theatrical, therefore they areantithetical to art. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical

Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968).


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photograph is just one shot, an instant represented in space.6 As art historian Alberto Ruy Snchezwrote, [n]o one can possibly doubt that time is a fundamental element of photography. It is one of thematerials from which photography is made. e photographic apparatus itself is a machine for measuring

time: among its other functions, it calculates and controls the entrance, the movement, of a ray of lightit is the river which transforms the ow of life into the image of an instant.7 Photography freezes bodies and actions, and even when bodies move there is the possibility of

opening the diaphragm and accelerating the speed in order to freeze the passage of time. Obviously thisdoes not mean that time stops, but only that the action is frozen within the lm. For example, one ofAlejos photographs entitled Tower (2007) portrays a dish lled with soap bubbles. We ignore how thebubbles were made as we do not see anyone playing with them or building the tower, and we certainlydo not see the bubbles breaking as time passes; what we see is the instant that the camera captured.Another example is Todream (2004), which consists of a pile of pillows arranged in the middle of anempty room. e pillows forming a tower that goes from top to bottom are frozen in time, that is whatwe will always seein this image, not another time within its construction, but this very instant.

Mauricio AlejoTodream (2004)

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6 Here it is important to clarify that, for example, in the early years of the daguerreotype, the process took several minutes andrequired subjects to remain still. erefore, what seems to be an instant was in fact the result of a long process. In fact, some ofthe rst images of Daguerre did not show living beings because of the long exposure times. Beaumont Newhall, La Historia dela Fotograa (Barcelona: G Gilli, 1978).

7 Alberto Ruy Snchez, Nina Subin: Time Within Time, Luna Crnea 19 (Jan.-April 2000) 96.


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e time that Lessing and Fried discuss is this instant that will remain frozen in the photograph,the problem is that they consider it its limit, they see it as the only possibility of spatial arts, thereforetheir time it is not any instant, but the most important one, the single moment. Accordingly, Lessing

elaborates on the selection of the right moment, and Fried on how the action and meaning must bereduced within the work. Again, photography captures instants, but the single moment is just one wayto explore static images. Another way is Alejos series of photographs and videos, which complicate thesingle moment thesis.8 As lm theorist Peter Wollen points out: Film and video art, however, exhibitonly a small fraction of the possible ways in which time can be used and understood. Time, which wetend to think about in purely linear terms, is in fact incredibly complex.9

For example, Alejos research on time and photography is pushed forward in Hot Water(2004), aseries of progressive steaming up of the artist's bathroom. e position of the camera is xed in abathroom with beige walls and white ceramic in the shower. On the front wall there is a small mirror andwe can also see the cabinets on the left side of the image. In the rst photograph the shower is open andthe action of falling water is frozen in time, we see its shadow on the ceramic; the mirror reecting the

beige walls.

e second photograph was probably taken a few seconds after, but here the space haschanged: the drops of water and their shadow are diffused and the mirror is not reecting the wallsanymore, instead it is turning white and a kind of light irradiates from it. In short, the image seemsblurry. On the third photograph, the mirror has almost fused with the background, is only then that wedistinguish that the previous image is not blurry. As we associate the effect with the space, we realize it isthe vapor transforming the space, hence the image. e last photograph is completely diffuse: we canonly recognize a few elements, the edges of the cabinets and the edges of mirror.

Each of these photographs depicts an instant, but together they explore the passage of time inthat specic space. In other words, although each image has its own characteristics, as a whole theyencompass duration. According to Dolev, the passage of time is the becoming present of future eventsand then their becoming past.10 is succession of events is explored in Alejos Hot Water, the images

being transformed by water as it becomes vapor. What we see is an expansion of the instant that worksthrough the series of multiple instants, not a single moment but an extended instant, a momentunfolding in time, yet limited to these four images. Of course this is just metaphorical, as we cannotmeasure or divide time (Bergson). Time is absolute duration, but what we do measure is time in itsspatial terms. at is what happens in these images, Alejos work is engaged in a succession of instantsrepresented in space.Duration, for Bergson, is real time, perceived and lived, and that is a condition as there is no timewithout consciousness. Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what doesexist, but it is not constituted by instants; we think of instants because we are used to think time inspatial terms.11 In fact, for him, instantaneity involves two things: continuity in real time and spatializedtime. Spatialized time is described by a motion that has become symbolic of time, so what we perceive is

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8 Minimalist art is a perfect example of the posibilities of painting. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood.

9 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 238.

10 Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007)viii.

11 Drawing from Einsteins theory of relativity Bergson argues that there are two kinds of time, the time of the philosophers(real time, pure duration) and the time of the physicist (which is measurable as it is perceived in space). See Henri Bergson,Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, (Ed. Robin Durie; trans. of supplementary material MarkLewis and Robin Durie, Manchester, England: Clinamen Press, 1999), specially chapter two and three.


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that time passes, and yet, as Bergson assesses, it is we who are passing it is the motion before our eyeswhich, moment by moment, actualizes a complete history given virtually.12

In Alejos images, the spatial transformations suggest the passage of time, the idea of motion and

change within the image gives rise to our perception of duration. Bergson remarks that through space wecan measure every interval of time and his elaboration is pertinent here because the spatial allows thepassage of time in photography. Furthermore, in the specic case of Alejos work, through instants hesuggests duration.

Mauricio AlejoHot Water(2004)

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12 Ibid, 43.


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Two Cubes(2001) is a key example, because it represents Alejos move from photography to video.e work consists of a series of photographs documenting the movement of a transparent acrylic box ona mound of snow. Here again, duration is suggested through instants, through the movement of the cube

on the snow, and it is this exploration of the image in time that lead to Alejos decision to work withvideo. As he has stated, he needed time, and that's why this ideas deserves investigation. e question of time in photography is less about the fact that the medium is limited by itself(Lessing), than it is about another kind of exploration beyond the instant. Rather, Alejo explores adifferent relation with objects and space, another kind of perception of images in which time is not theabstraction that occurs when we project space into timeBergsons time of the physicistbutpure time,lived time with no resemblance to numbers or to instants.

Alejos move from photography to video is representative of his philosophical repositioning withthe media and his artistic practices; it has to do with his preoccupation to expand the still image. isdoes not mean that he stopped working with photography, it just means that some of his projects did nott within its space. And even then, Alejos work oscillates conceptually and visually between

photography and video, for he does not rely so much on movement but on time, hence the boundaries ofthese media fade.At this point, it is important to mention that Alejos early videos are reminiscent of the rst

experiments with lm of the Lumieres brothers, Geroge Mlies and in fact, various seminal lms andvideos As Peter Wollen has noted, Many artists' videos, it seems, are atavistic works, deliberatelyreturning to the single-shot technique which ruled at the very dawn of cinema, setting up a continuousaction and then lming it within a given time-limit without any edits or even camera movements.13 iskind of work is representative of numerous artists from the sixties and seventies such as Vito Acconci,Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, William Wegman. And certainly this has also been thebeginning for Alejo. What is important to note is that his background as a photographer highlyinuenced his exploration with video; as he explains, his early videos are photographs with time.14

A clear example is Line(2002), afty-second video of a white screen divided by a line. Certainly,neither the image nor the audio provide directions to see it other ways, what we see is only what the titlesuggests. Furthermore, it seems that we are looking at a photograph since there are not evidenttransformations and the light does not seem to reect movement. It is a photograph until Alejos

interventionhis hand emerges from the right and literally interrupts the lineat which point thefragility of perception becomes clear: the line is in fact the steady stream of water. It is then that we makeassociations and realize that the sound, indeed, corresponds to falling water, but it is so subtle that,paradoxically, we need to know what we are seeing to realize what we are hearing. In addition, the videois so short that we need to see it more than once to grasp the whole and to understand what justhappened. Especially when encountering Alejos videos for the rst time we cannot know there is anelement of surprise accompanying some of these early works.

is discussion leads us to the issue of Lessing single moment, which is in fact very restrictive, asfor him each medium is clearly dened in scope and characteristics. Painting and photography, as spatialarts, are supposed to be limited to the representation of the single moment. But Alejo seems to strugglewith this form of temporality, he complicates the single moment and pushes further. In fact, Alejos workin video extends the pregnant moment as the thirty frames per second unfold. is applies to Crack(2002-2004), which is only thirty-two seconds of a static image unfolding in time. e object here is a

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13 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 234.

14 Alejo, Personal Interview, 10 Nov. 2008.


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white plate apparently cracked, or at least that is what we see at rst glance. On a closer look however, theplate is lled with milk and by the time we realized it we hear someone blowing on it to reveal that thecrack is formed by hair oating on the milk. Again, the elements of the video are minimal, so is the

sound and the artist intervention, and yet what seems to be a still image is in fact another statement onperception unfolding in time, another extended still image. According to Alejo this video is aboutfragility and alludes to two kind of ruptures, that of representation and that of perception. I argue thatthese ruptures happen through the passage of time. Following Bergson, the suggestion is that the rupturecan be experienced by the observer, in as much as her/his consciousness provides duration to time.15

Furthermore, in both Lineand Crack, the process of perception is complicated by the artist, whoforces the viewer to think of the image differently and to approach it with more attention in order toexperience the expanding instant. Alejo also raises a key question: is it photography or is it video? Heworks with this question and explores how the instants and durations are negotiated in video.

Beyond these forms of temporality there is an interesting tension between Alejos works andcinema. Deleuzes elaboration provides insight. For him the single image in lm is an immobile-

instantaneous section of movement re

ecting actions through innumerable instants. In other words,cinema is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as afunction of equidistant instants, selected so as to create the impression of continuity.16 According toDeleuze, the frame in cinema is any-instant-whatever, and as such there is a fundamental differencebetween painting and the individual frame in lm, as the later is not the illusionist synthesis of anarrative context, but a single incidental moment (any-instant-whatever) in an overall narrativestructure.17 Concerning Alejos video, the any-instant-whatever is put into question. e works in videothat have been previously discussed are, especially at the beginning, any-instant-whatever and yet at thesame time that instant unfolds, it becomes important by itself, is like a photograph extending the singlemoment -which is not a single moment anymore. Line, for instance, is a photograph until the hand ofthe artist disrupts the image allowing us to recognize that time was unfolding before we noticed it. To be

clear, however, that does not mean that because there was not consciousness there was not time

inBergsonian termsin fact it is at the very instant of the artists intervention that we acknowledge thatduration was unfolding before our eyes.

Another still image embedded in time is Twig (2002), a tiny branch and its shadow standing inthe middle of a bright bed of snow. e still life is suspended in time as the twig rests in what seems awinter morning in a park. e camera is positioned close to the branch and so we do not know exactlywhat space is being depicted, but in the distance we hear voices of kids playing as well as the sound ofsteps approaching the camera and then going away, so the sound suggests action, and yet the branch isfrozen in time. Suddenly, the wind blows, taking away the calm of the scene and the twig shadow, which,in fact, is not a shadow but a thin slice of wood identical to the branch. Here, thirty-ve seconds areenough to suspend the observers attention in an instant that unexpectedly moves from still to movingimage.

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15 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.

16 Deleuze quoted in Susanne Gaensheimer, Moments in Time, Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness (Markham,Ont.: James Lumbers Pub) 41.

17 Ibid.


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Mauricio AlejoLine (2002), screen shot.

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Mauricio AlejoCrack(2002-2004), screen shot.

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For the artist, Lineand Twigare about illusive facts that engage viewers to experience reality in adifferent way because they break the charm of illusion. e minimal elements and contrast of colorcapture the viewers attention, so in a way these works are what Deleuze calls time-image. In Twig,

everything that changes is in time, but time does not in itself change, it could itself change only inanother time, indenitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts thephoto, it also becomes most radically different from it.18 Alejos twig endures, it represent[s] theunchanging form of that which moves, so long as it is at rest, motionless19 Deleuzes time-imageincites the viewer to think of the image and to engage in a different process of perception. In Alejos workthis is possible through the spatial representation of time. For him video and photo are the means ofsharing his observation of daily spaces, a way to say maybe there is another space within the samespace.20

At this point is crucial to call attention to the title of the works, a very important element ofAlejo videos. In fact, he uses the titles as a strategy of distraction, the verbal element preceding the imagefunctions as the linguistic message, in which Roland Barthes distinguishes two functions: anchorage and

relay, the former helping the viewer to understand the meaning and the later complementing theimage. Alejos videos combine both anchorage and relay, directing the audience to focus its attention onthe wrong place at the right time. And yet, once the image unfolds, the visual structure breaks thelinguistic.21

From within this context of the instant and its extension in video, the following section focuseson another kind of temporality that Mauricio Alejo has explored, that of endlessness.

Video, Loop and the Rhetoric of Endlessness Mauricio Alejo has produced other videos that formally deal with Bergsons denition of pure

duration. is is particularly evident in the videos entitled Endless Sphere (2007) and Memory (2002).Endless Sphere is a video in loop that depicts a coin spinning on its edge, and, as the title suggests, theaction takes place endlessly. is temporality is consistent with Bergsons notion of duration, in as muchas pure duration consists in the passage of time from one moment to another; time is succession and it isnot conceived without a before and after. However, it must be remembered that this unfolding does notrefer to a clear present and past, but rather to an endless ow of duration.22 Endless Sphere is that, acontinuous ow that lasts as long as there is consciousness. In addition, this video is endlessness inmeaning. A spinning coin alludes to luck, and yet at the same time is paradoxical because the coin neverfalls, so luck is never decided, but instead, is suspended in time. Furthermore, the spherical form drawsattention to innity, in both the action (time) and the form (space).

In light of this work, the suggestion of endlessness is very interesting if related to Fried's critique

of literalist art. As it has been previously mentioned, Fried is against duration in the visual arts and he

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18 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London: Athlone, 1986-1989) 17.

19 Ibid.

20 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.

21 Barthes elaboration will be further discussed regarding the video Fact and Fiction.

22 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.


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critiques the idea that the work of art and the experience exists and persists in time. Moreover, thisarticulation is crucial because Alejos work has been described as minimalist. e most obviousconnections are forms, shapes and other spatial elements; basically the number of elements is extremely

reduced and the backgrounds are mundane spaces but always empty and clean. For example,Milk(2002)a white sinkll with milk; Empty (2006), a series of translucent empty plastic bags of different colorsplaced one inside the other. In addition, the artists interest with objects projects objecthood. However,the most important connections between literalist art and some of Alejos videos are in terms of space andtime.

Mauricio AlejoEndless Sphere (2007), screen shot.

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According to Fried, literalist art is open to multiple interpretations and the meaning isinexhaustible, endless. at is, able to go on and on, even having to go on and on23 In addition,there is the passage of time, as the experience persists in time its duration is innite. For Fried, literalist

work deals with the duration of the experience, which persists in time, in short, at every moment thework itself is wholly manifest.24 Fried critiques this idea and argues that the work of art can be meaningfulin a single moment. Alejos exploration with time is embedded it these forms of temporality, between thesingle moment and endlessness. His videos unfold in time, whether endlessly (in loop) or in a fewseconds. In terms of space and meaning, literalist art does not respect the boundaries between the work ofart and the outside world. is is obvious in Alejos videos; by depicting daily objects staged in ordinarystages and by directly intervening in the image, the viewer is taken outside the work of art and is broughtback to the ordinary world. e possibility of time and duration in art, that is, the wholly manifestation of art that Freid is soafraid of, is the core of Alejos videos Endless Sphereand Memory. ese works play with this form oftemporality and they are endlessness in meaning and action. What does a coin spinning in perpetuity, for

as long as you watch, mean? Alejos work is full of interpretation, it goes on and on and back again andthe single moment is not a still image but a moving image, a digital signal that extends and unfolds inlight and time. Memory consists of a crumpled ball of paper on a white background. e image istherefore neutral, extremely clean and subtle as the ball of paper slowly unravels. We imagine whatcomes next: the paper will regain its original form, retrieve its composure, reassert its purity, the camerawill be put on rewind and the sequence of events that lead to the balling-up reversed. But instead theimage fades out after approximatelyve seconds and it is replaced by another shot of a tightly crumpledsheet, which begins to unravel only to be cut and replaced yet again. is occurs 43 times25 In agallery space, this video is presented in loop so the unfolding of the piece of paper is innite and thesound increases the feeling of abstraction and suspension. e duration of the eventper seis not even aminute, but the duration of the experience is endless. As Bergson wrote, it is impossible to distinguish

between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connectsthem, because duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist.26 istension is at play in Memory.

On the other hand, Short Term Memorys temporality is a clear representation of time in space,but is not endless, at least not obviously. Here, the camera is xed on a roll of toilet paper with a blackdot of ink in the middle; as the artist pulls it, the paper unfolds and the black spot becomes smaller andsmaller until it disappears. is work is extremely poetic and it functions as a metaphor of what Bergsondescribes as the inner duration that accompanies us from the rst to the last moment of our consciouslife.27 e time is literally unfolding and yet the temporality is not clear; is it pure duration? Is it aninstant, or is it the way our memories vanish with the passage of time? Further, is it really short termmemory or is it nostalgia? According to the artist it is an emotional and sentimental choreography and if

we consider his previous work, the idea of choreography functions in the level of movement, an aspectthat was not completely explored in most of his early videos from 2002-2004.

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23 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum, 166.

24 Emphasis of the author. Ibid, 167.

25 Christopher Ho, Doubting Saint omas, Modern Painters (February 2005).

26 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 33.

27 Ibid, 34.


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On the other hand, the reference to memory escapes Bergsons two forms of memory, purememory and habit-memory as the ink fades and there is no way to restore it. In fact, the image may berestored but not the ink; it has vanished. If, as Bergson wrote, memory is the intersection of mind and

matter, then this work restores the perception of images to the real. Unlike Memory, Short Term Memoryalludes to life and its inevitable decay, to the certainty that everything in life is hopelessly bound tocollapse. However, [Alejo] manages to nd beauty in the fact that within even the most annihilatinginertia, there is a moment when all things make sense. ere is a moment when everything appears to benot only tied together, but also fullled and removed from the mechanism of deterioration. It is fromthese very moments that Alejo attains a precious feeling of wholeness; a feeling that eventually wears outand becomes the very essence of nostalgia.28

Mauricio AlejoMemory (2002), screen shot.

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28 Galeria Ramis Barquet, Mauricio Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge, press release (March, 2006).


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Mauricio AlejoShort Term Memory (2006), screen shot.

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Mauricio AlejoFact and Fiction (2002-2004), screen shot.

Also key is Fact and Fiction (2007), a video showing the front cover of a book entitled Fatti eFinzioni. e title and the work allude to the presence-absence of the artists and to the idea ofction andconstruction in video. e same can be said about the image, because we see the book and the artists

moist hand imprinted on the matte paper, but the video is edited in a way that we are not allowed to seehis hand. Moreover, the video is presented in loop so the action is unfolding in time; past present andfuture fading in circles. At stake here is the artists strategy to recreate and to record motion, because theonly thing remaining is the trace that his body left on the object, the moisture draws and erases thesilhouette and we can almost see his bones on the book creating the sense of movement and at the sametime acting as the only testimony of Alejos presence. It is for this reason that Fact and Fiction revealsanother kind of approach to the media: the camera is xed and of course the book is static, it is themoisture as it abandons the book that gives us the illusion of movement, but in fact, it is through timethat the silhouette fades in and out endlessly.

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In a way, Fact and Fiction is consistent with Deleuzes crystal-image for its main element is time,as he describes: since the past is constituted not after, the present that it was but at the same time, timehas to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or,

what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one which islaunched towards the future while the other falls into the past.29 At the same time, there is apreoccupation with the recording of events and its ctitious reconstruction, an invitation to the audienceto think about the image; this bring us to another elucidation of Deleuze since the construction of realityand ction has to do with time itself. e kind oflms (and video) that Deleuze calls the series of timebrings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is tointroduce an enduring interval in the moment itself.30 As the title suggests this video is in between factand ction, and so conceptually it is also suspended in a loop, showing us that the ideal of Truth was themost profound ction.31

On the one hand this relationship between ction and video (of course inherited fromphotography) will now be briey discussed in terms of Barthes. For him, the linguistic image is denoted

and the symbolic image is connoted, and although this distinction is merely operational as there is not aliteral image in pure state (42), photographys supposedly exact recording of reality "naturalizes thesymbolic message, [and] it innocents the semantic artice of connotation."32is is something that Alejouses to confront the viewer with an image that is not what it looks like. As he comments, critically, I amonly interested in contributing to the skepticism of the image, that is, the photographic image and theimage of video are discourses, they are not reality and they are not absolute truth. e media is a greatction disguised of truth.33

Similarly, Gravity (2002-2004) plays with the idea ofction and viewers perception. e videostarts when a white balloon is thrown in the air and then it slowly deates, becoming smaller until it iscompletely empty, but, when it is expected to fall, the balloon instead goes upward, and then the soundof it falling to the oor is heard. at is what we can see, the empty balloon is not going downwards but

it rather drifts to the top of the screen. Gravitycontains an element of surprise, but it does not seem to bepossible, let alone real; gravity is absolute, isnt it? Once again at stake is perception and visual illusionsthat seem to be staged in the theater of the obvious and yet pose the ability to surprise and make viewerssee that what they see is not reality but a spatial construction. Technically, it may not be hard to rotatethe video 180 degrees to subvert the image, but the surprise forces the viewers to shift the process ofperception in a very short time, taking them out of the habit-memory.34 Hence, they experience surprise,disappointment or disillusion because certainly that is not what they expected. In that sense, this workalludes to Deleuzes thought-image, in which thinking becomes an element of the image. It must no

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29 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81.30Ibid, 155.

31Ibid, 149.

32 Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 45.

33 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.

34 Henri Bergson, Of the Recognition of Images, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer(New York: Zone Books, 1990) 77-132.


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longer be understood as an object exterior to the image that the latter is supposed to represent.35

e question of audience is key to Alejos work because it requires the viewer to enter his game ofperception. According to Alejo, what interests me about video is that it invites an intelligent audience, I

mean you dont want to lie, you want that they take part in the lie with you, that in the moment of thetrick there is not greater surprise than believing that reality can be another way or many different ways.36

Here it is pertinent to think of Gravity and probably most of Alejos videos in terms of Bergonsperception, which is the intersection of attention and memory. For him, past images are always preserved,but they are stored in two different places, pure memories are stored within consciousness while habitualmemories are stored in the brain. e former images while the later repeats. ey both live on forever butthe habit memory is practical in our daily life, thus it is the most recurring. erefore, if perception isalways affected by memory, what we see on Alejos images is not only what we see but what we remember.e most important aspect of his work regarding perception, I argue, is that it challenges the habitmemory, thus disrupting our perception of daily objects and spaces.

Although each image will appeal to different memories and its impact will depend on each

observer, because the images are staged in mundane spaces there is no need for a speci

c audience, hencerecognition does not rely on exclusivity: there can be connections and even identication. at is whatmake Alejos work strong: few elements in mundane spaces and concise actions in short time: simple tostore in the brain. For example in Line, the only elements are the line and the artist hand, thus they getstraight to the point and straight to the brain; powerful enough to persist in time and in our memory.

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35 Heme de Alcote quoted in Barbara Filser, Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema, Future Cinema: e Cinematic ImaginaryAfter Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. (ZKM/Zentrum fr Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge:MIT Press, 2003) 215.

36 Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento, 19.


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Mauricio Alejo

Gravity (2002-2004), screen shot.

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Replica 21 (March 2003): 19.Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical

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Between Still Image and Time Image

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