Manuel Saiz’s The Differend
The Differend
A video installation by Manuel Saiz
At the Vtape Salon: 401 Richmond St. West, Suite 452
416.351.1317 www.vtape.org
October 11 – November 8, 2003
Tuesday-Friday 11-5 PM, Saturday 12-4 PM
Presented by Vtape in association with
The Tranz<–>Tech Toronto International Media Art Biennial
www.tranztech.ca
FRED (Chris Eigeman) : …Plays, novels, songs — they all have a subtext which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious — they never talk about that. What do you call — what’s above the subtext?
TED (Taylor Nichols) : The text.
FRED : [pause] OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.
- Whit Stillman, Barcelona (1994, 101 minutes, 35mm)
If video installations were Hollywood films, the tagline for The Differend would read:
“1 scene. 2 characters. 4 camera setups… 11 languages!”
The Differend (2002, 16 minutes, DVCam) is not a Hollywood film, but it is part of one, a scene from William Wyler’s The Collector (1965, 119 minutes, 35mm) restaged with Manuel Saiz as Terence Stamp’s unhinged abductor and Sophie Whetnall as Samantha Eggars’s hapless abductee. Their subtext-laden debate on the worth of cubist art is reenacted verbatim and shot for shot, first in its native tongue (English) and subsequently repeated in ten other languages.
This stunt is reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s feature film Schizopolis, which also starred its creator, and which presented a single day three times, from three different points of view, dubbed in three different languages. But there the similarity ends; Soderbergh’s repetition was in service of a transmigrational narrative, and its structure was such that the Japanese and Spanish scenes referred directly to their English predecessors. No such luck with The Differend; it’s presented as a loop, and the frame of reference is wafer-thin unless one walks in when “one’s own” language is playing, and/or happens to be familiar with the Wyler film. The odds are not good.
The “differend” is Lyotard’s term for a dispute resulting from the fact that one party cannot voice her complaints (or points) because the other insists on speaking within a different language game or genre of discourse.
- Manuel Saiz
Saiz’s artist statement implies that the differend in this case is the dispute between the two characters. However, taken in literal terms (and how else can we attempt to use text?), the differend is the dispute between you and The Differend. In the dynamic between installation and viewer, the installation is the one, which obstinately insists upon speaking within a different language game (approximately eight- to ten-elevenths of the time (assuming you watch all eleven versions)).
It seems especially futile to apply such an old-fashioned yardstick as artistic intent to this particular piece of work, but I’m starting to feel a little alienated so I have to try. Saiz’s recent curatorial statements include such assertions as “The idea is neither to behold the beauty of the videos, nor to consume them, but to use them” (25HRS catalogue; Jorge Bravo, Luisa Ortinez, Manuel Saiz) and “In the amniotic liquid of post-modern experience useful and sublime are tinted in the same colour” (Xpert Scheme; Manuel Saiz).
What use, then, has The Differend? At the very least, it fills the discursive niche lamented by Whit Stillman in Barcelona. Here is a work, which is nothing but text. Context and subtext are burned away in the fires of excerption and incomprehension. All we have to work with are words (sans meaning) and pictures.
Perhaps its use is the teaching of the lesson that text on its own is not enough. But I feel myself refusing to learn that lesson, and The Differend refusing to teach it. For, as it progresses, I search for discernible similarities and differences… and they are there for the finding: every time Saiz tears up the painting, I know that he is uttering a word which means “rubbish”; the more “foreign” the language, the less expressive the actors’ anger; the Russian version for some reason contains a dialogue overlap; shots #2 and #8 (the only non-sync-dialogue shots) are repeated identically in each version but at different durations; the French version is markedly more suave than the others.
Compelled to apply a narrative to The Differend, one wonders if the onscreen characters are doomed to live in this reiterative loop, never coming to agreement, finding small variant solace in the different translations of their debate. The other possibility is that these are eleven parallel universes independent of each other… in which case I note my own bias as I decide that the English argument is the best of all possible worlds. What The Differend does offer is a stubborn refusal of engagement. This refusal results in introspection by default. For a crash course in how your particular brain struggles to make meaning, and how it responds to failure or invents success, watch yourself watching The Differend.
Manuel Saiz as Terence Stamp as Freddie says, “It doesn’t mean anything… You just say it does because some professor somewhere told you it did.” I unfortunately have already taken the bait that Saiz so obstinately offers. I feel that he has kidnapped me and turned me into the professor.
Perhaps the previously proposed tagline is not so breathless or threatening as good ad campaigns ought to be. Perhaps a better one would be:
“Lost in a world of text, one man and one woman struggle to make differends meet. Dive below the surface… if you dare.”
Daniel Cockburn
Toronto, October 2003
Daniel Cockburn is Distribution Manager at Vtape and a member of the Pleasure Dome Programming Collective. He makes films and videos. Once he made something that may in fact have been an installation, but he still thinks it was a movie.
Manuel Saiz is a Spanish artist and curator based in the UK, and an organizing member of TheVideoArtFoundation. His most recent curatorial projects have been 25hrs (24hrs of Video Art, Barcelona, May 2003) and Xpert Scheme, a project for the Tokyo Designer’s Week Container Exhibition. www.saiz.co.uk