Corin Sworn: The Lens Prism A woman bends to look at a horse. The horse stands in a glass cage, its head tilted up and to the right. The woman folds her hands between her knees, elegant, intimate. She is with a man, also bent; one leg balanced, as if in a dance, behind the other. They are in a museum, the horse stuffed. Never in its life did it adopt that pose, but here it is, its skin remembering a moment which had not existed. The woman is, herself, nothing more than an animated memory; a face once glimpsed by the man, and placed at the centre of a fabricated past. This is a scene from La Jetée, Chris Marker’s seminal sci-fi film of 1962 about the fragmented memories – or imaginings – of a man sent back in time. The scene is recalled in Corin Sworn’s brand new film, The Lens Prism, currently showing at Tramway. The Canadian-born, Glasgow-based artist likes to mix up histories and stories, finding new correspondences between them, and at the same time exposing the subjective nature of history. She previously made a film in which images of a youth uprising were combined with an unrelated text from the same year about liberal education, linking them retrospectively, like the stuffed animal and remembered woman of La Jetée. Before you enter the darkened gallery where The Lens Prism plays on a continuous loop, there is an ante-room. In it, a drawing, The Lookers, is picked out by three theatrical spot-lights, red, green and blue. The lights combine on the surface of the drawing as pure white, bouncing off the glass and onto the floor as three separate colours once again. Several shallow apertures cut into the paper cast tiny shadows, in the individual colours of the lights. The effect is a subtle, but complex, dissection of space and light, signalling a similar approach in the film to come. In The Lens Prism, an eclectic clutch of sources is fragmented and reassembled as a continuous monologue, delivered with aplomb by accomplished actor David Allister. The whole thing was shot in Tramway’s cavernous theatre space, beautifully lit, beautifully directed, and flawlessly executed. References from La Jetée share the script with a formal description of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and with writing from experimental poet Raymond Roussel. Other texts sneak in there too, impossible to identify except by the artist herself, for whom these sources form a natural part of her memory, and of her world view. She is the prism through which these stories refract. A photograph is remembered in great detail: it was of hands fashioning a maquette. We are treated to a wonderful discussion of the sculpture, only for the actor to tell us later that he has found the photograph and the sculpture bears no resemblance to his memory of it. This comes as a blow; the memory had been so vivid, so convincing, so pleasing. While we are warned that reality and memory can stray far apart, we find ourselves embracing the more creative of the two. The film incorporates references to Roussel’s endlessly digressing epic of the 1920s, New Impressions Of Africa, loved by Dadaists for its ever-increasing use of brackets within brackets, and its deliberately irrelevant illustrations left trapped inside uncut pages. It demanded “an alert, fractured form of attention”, and so, too, does Sworn’s script, folding in on itself like origami. During one point in Allister’s monologue, the actor folds pieces of card and arranges them around each other. He describes the bewildering array of categories and subcategories in the Great Exhibition, of “strange misplaced examples” from every industry, as impossible to understand when taken as a whole. Sworn’s film is the kind that you want to watch more than once, as you try to unlock its strange, tangential logic. It’s easy to find yourself doing it, too, as no clear beginning or end is discernible. It seems strangely appropriate that at your feet, fragments of obsolete tram lines wind and cross through the floor, gaps here and there, stopping abruptly at the walls. That’s another memory of a fragment of a memory for the melting pot.
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