AND_04-2020

In: Place #3, Janvier/ January 2021, D’UNE PLACE L’AUTRE / CHANGING PLACES https://www.place-plateforme.com/place3/peter-downsbrough-and.html AND_04.2020 opens with a black screen and the sound of a man’s voice rising over the noise of traffic. His words are hard to distinguish, but their tones and cadence indicate they might be Chinese. Seven seconds in, the screen receives a visual overlay of five basic English words, a Word String as Peter Downsbrough called them, arranged in two lines and oddly spaced: THE, THEN, ABOUT, AS, UNTIL. Although the words are common, their grouping here is no more intelligible to most of us than the words of the man speaking on a noisy street. What is it about, then?

Partly, it is a provocation. The artist wants to lure you in, and he uses language as his primary means of doing so. After the initial verbal conundrum cited above, a rapid succession of words—they appear, with one exception, on black screens, either in isolation or in groups—provides a preface to the video’s main visual narrative, which is propelled by a mix of moving images and black-and-white stills. (The former kick in at the 33-second mark.) The one exception in the word sequence, TIME, is flopped and overlaid on one of the work’s most memorable images: a video still showing a bicycle rider who, as she passes in front of the camera, is half-hidden behind a flat, gray wall. The wall fills nearly half the frame and reads as a void rather than solid, giving the still the appearance of a half-image. It is on this part of the image that TIME is found. The same still is repeated near the end of the work, where it carries the more elaborate phrase IN TIME PLACE / THE] SHIFT, discussed below. It also provides the first visual clues to where the film was shot. Distinctive street furniture and car license plates visible in the middle ground and background make China a good bet.

Peter Downsbrough visited Beijing just once, and briefly, in 2015. AND_4.2020 is his distillation of that experience, which concentrated his interest in taking the pulse of the place and testing its reflexes, operations best done, in Downsbrough’s view, in the city’s streets and public spaces. Starting with the ring road, the camera, always stationary, is positioned on a narrow median between multiple lanes of cars advancing at uniform speed, bumper to bumper, in opposite directions. Motorbikes zoom past them in the outside lanes, making a racket and, on less smoggy days, possibly eliciting the envy of people trapped in their cars.

It would be hard not to view AND_4.2020 through the lens of recent history. Reminders of life before China’s economic boom—pushcarts, bicycles—crop up occasionally in the work, but the capital’s dominant aspects come across as thoroughly modern and controlled. In a series of split-screen views of crosswalks located at busy intersections, one huddle of pedestrians crosses obediently; another hustles to make the light; and two individuals impatient with waiting, one on a bicycle, the other on a motorbike, swerve around oncoming cars on a near collision course with one another. The curves they cut through space are a joy to see. On the opposite screen, it’s almost elating to spot a man on a busy road cheerfully walking in a lane intended for cars rather than on the sidewalk— clearly a dangerous decision, but for the sake of a fleeting moment’s enjoyment, we’re on his side. The phrase found in the second occurrence of the still image that first locates this film in China, IN TIME PLACE, THE] SHIFT, relates both to the tectonic shifts in China’s economy and standing in the world and to the artist’s own shift in time and place to witness it first-hand. Twelve different words are used in AND_4.2020, and they occur a total of 29 times. The ones most often repeated are THE (seven times), TIME (four), AS (four), and RESET (three times).

The final cluster of words is actually a word scatter on a black screen. The preferred order of THE UNTIL RESET SET THERE is undetermined. One possible sequence, SET THERE UNTIL THE RESET (with SET a synonym for laid), implies that things are the way they are for now, but that change is bound to come. The film’s very title, AND_4.2020, suggests that the work is not the final say but part of a larger conversation, the part that was realized in April 2020.

written by Sarah McFadden