Memory & Meaning
Could the structure of Dachau's architecture, the linearity and symmetry, the pathways, guard towers, barracks, crematoria, murmuring tourists and shuffling feet speak of a past now visibly concealed? The fragility of memory with the passing of time became part of the implicit content of the work. I returned the following day, a beautiful, sunlit day filled with visitors, and recorded.
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When I returned to my studio in New York City other questions arose—specifically, how to bring life to the static and spare images I had recorded primarily using a tripod with very little movement. The answer of course lay in the previous years works. For several years prior to making Dachau 1974, I had been the co-editor of a magazine, Radical Software, founded in 1970, which focused on alternative television and the information environment.
Not only was the multiple channel format a challenge to the formats of broadcast television, but it literally removed the viewer from the living room into the public exhibition space.
In early 1974, while working on early video experiments, I became interested in the handloom as an ancient technology and as the first computer on earth in that it programmed patterns according to a numerical system. What struck me as fascinating was that in all three media—video, weaving and print—the information was encoded in lines, though at greatly different speeds and through totally different processes.
I was also attracted at about the same time to the developing genre of multiple channels. Not only was the multiple channel format a challenge to the formats of broadcast television, but it literally removed the viewer from the living room into the public exhibition space. By multiplying the images, you could increase scale and also play with image/time relationships in a very plastic way. However, it was through my understanding of the programming of multiples on the loom that the clues to working with new genre coalesced. And so, in my studio, a four channel work emerged drawing on both the ancient technology of the loom and the modern technology of video.
The minimum number of threads necessary to bind a cloth is four. Channels (l and 3) and (2 and 4) formed the interlocking "thread" combinations of paired images as the work proceeded in time to create a non-verbal narrative to take the viewer through the site of this former concentration camp.
The four screens were placed side-by-side into cutouts in a free-standing 8'x10' wall, like four holes puncturing a rigid film screen. Horizontally, through the juxtaposition simultaneously of specific paired images, and vertically, through their movement and interrelationships structured in time according to a logical sequence, a video tapestry of Dachau in 1974 is represented.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Paired images on monitors take the viewer on a journey from mundane traffic outside the camp's walls (Figure 1) to the inside walkways, from barracks far to barracks near (Figure 2), to inside the barracks with tourists murmuring, and finally from barracks to crematoria (Figure 3) and to the stream punctuated with barbed wire which flows through the camp. A woman laughs behind me while playing with her child as I record the crematoria doors and ovens. A bell from a nearby chapel tolls as I record the ovens.
Figure 4 (Dachau 1974 structural diagram), detail
Each channel is assigned a slightly separate rhythm of image and 1 second black pause for the duration of the work. These pauses interrupt the narrative, allowing identical images to be played against one another but with slightly different timings. (See Figure 4 for overall structural diagram of the work.) In a sense this is a fragile work. In its verbal silence, rigorous formalism and focus on the present, it ultimately must engage the memory of the viewer to endow it with meaning.