On the third floor of WIELS Lucy Raven is showing two video works. The first is a premiere, and is about explosions, the second travels from the newly restored Dia Chelsea in New York and is a slow-burning, materialist epic that follows the birth and life cycle of its main protagonist – concrete. Both films address the nexus of violence, fantasy and settler colonialism that shapes the legacy of the American West, by focusing on ongoing scenes of resource extraction and weapons testing at historically significant sites in the Pacific Northwest and Southwestern US, respectively. Together, they offer a stellar example of Raven’s technically layered, brazenly experimental style of filmmaking, in the case of the central work, Ready Mix (2021), raised to stunning poetic heights.
The show starts off with a bang. At least, that’s the first thing you’ll hear as you step out onto the third floor of WIELS. It’s the sound of artillery, a vicious crack and then a rumble, the floor-shaking soundtrack of Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022). Displayed on a towering, freestanding LED wall to one side of the cavernous first room, the work could be mistaken at first glance for a piece of generative digital art. Its wizardry is, in fact, primarily lens based. Using high-speed cameras and digital processing techniques, Demolition of a Wall exposes extreme fluctuations in air pressure created by the detonation of explosives at a ballistics range in New Mexico, fluctuations that would normally be invisible to the naked eye.
The film is made up of short sequences, each beginning with a kind of desert still life, 'empty' wilderness. Then, a flash and a bang: the scene is transformed into a pulsating mass of black and white pixels, as if by sudden eclipse. Vibrating clusters of light suggest objects and hills, while slowly, out of a corner, a cloud of orange particles expands across the landscape like a virus. The orange represents shockwaves from the blasts, whose supersonic travel has been slowed by Raven’s technological intervention to a mesmerizing creep. (Deantoni Parks, who produced the soundtracks for both films in WIELS, enhances the artifice with an arsenal of suspenseful ambient scores.) The viewer watches this process unfold from a set of aluminum bleachers, as if gazing at a fireworks display.
In 1886, the Lumière brothers also made a film titled Demolition of a Wall (Démolition d’un mur), one of their early, fascinating excursions into film editing. There, factory workers tear down a wall, only for it to be magically reassembled, an effect achieved by reversing the sequence of the film. In her version, Raven offers a different kind of magic, one suited to the status of the moving image in the 21st century, in which camera technology is regularly deployed in the service of humanitarian justice and state surveillance alike. Its domain is no longer that of illusion, but of revelation. This is reflected in the series of analogue shadowgrams on the fourth floor, which also seem to want to speak some kind of ‘truth’ about violence, in this case by way of a visual forensics of light and force. There, in a small, tiled room, framed bands of large-format photosensitive paper and negative film bear haunting, abstract images (and sometimes physical traces) of explosions set off in a ballistic sciences lab in New Mexico. They provide a static and almost tactile counterpart to the virtual destruction of the video work.
The real highlight of the exhibition is back downstairs, in a second room at the end of the floor. Ready Mix is thematically and geographically proximate to Demolition of a Wall, but far more ambitious. Its setting is not military, but industrial; the film was shot about 1000 miles further south-west, at a concrete plant in Bellevue, Idaho. In plain terms, it’s a black-and-white, dialogue-free film about concrete – and every minute is enthralling. For three quarters of an hour, we witness essentially the entire production process of that material, from the harvesting of sand and gravel to the casting of ready-for-use concrete blocks. There is hardly a human actor in sight. It is, as Roberta Smith aptly called it, ‘a tale of two instruments’, a materialist drama that unfolds between the complex of machines and sites of the plant, and the camera itself. The action, if you can call it that, is conveyed by a fetching cast of conveyor belts, earthmovers, bulldozers, chutes, mixers and pulverizers; the camerawork, a combination of aerial shots, tightly choreographed drone footage and visually stunning close-ups, gives the film a compelling dramatic structure.
Raven has playfully referred to Ready Mix as an example of ‘concrete cinema’ (as in musique concrète), which is both witty and accurate. Rhythm, fragmentation and montage are all important aspects of the work. They are also formal hallmarks of the early, avant-garde ‘documentaries’ of the 1920s and 30s, like Walther Ruttman’s Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) and Joris Iven’s De brug (1928), films which combined an experimental approach to form (often drawing from trends in the visual arts) with a poetics of mass industrial society. Their makers were innovators who took advantage of the set of opportunities offered by the unique historical juncture in which they found themselves: a rapidly changing society and a new means to document, reflect and investigate it. Ready Mix, somehow, has that same vital, creative energy. It’s nothing less than an avant-garde masterpiece – a symphony of concrete.
Yet Raven’s oeuvre remains firmly rooted in a post-nuclear, post-9/11 world. The specter of cultural and ecological violence haunts all three works on display in WIELS. Demolition was filmed 35 miles northwest from the site of the first ever detonation of a nuclear bomb, under auspices of the Manhattan Project. In Ready Mix, the violence is slow, implicit. Concrete, the most pervasive building material on earth, has a devastating ecological impact, depleting water supplies and warming the air. Ranked as a country, it would come third after China and the US in CO2 emissions.
Then there’s the myth of the West as empty, unclaimed wilderness that underpins the industrial and military ventures represented in both works, the very sine qua non of Western expansion and it's animating doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
The interwovenness of these forms of violence is rather brilliantly underscored by the setup of the exhibition. An open passageway allows sounds from the first room to bleed into the second, and vice versa. So was my viewing of Ready Mix punctuated by echoes of detonations from afar, like dispatches from the film’s unconscious, hinting at Idaho’s own complicated history of nuclear research. (The Idaho National Laboratory, not far from Bellevue, houses the largest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world; it’s also where the prototype reactor for the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine was developed.)
Is film complicit in these systems of violence? One shot keeps recurring to me from Ready Mix, a close-up of the inside of a mixer, whose abyssal maw at once suggests the insatiable, ruinous drive of capitalism and the lens of a camera. It comes across as an acknowledgement of film’s limits, both the visual regimes it imposes and its tendency to reduce everything to spectacle. The fact that these films are displayed at WIELS, itself a behemoth of reinforced concrete, lends this entanglement an air of inevitability.
In Raven’s sober vision, the power of film lies not in its didactic potential or documentary function. Unlike the Lumière brothers’ handy resurrection of the wall, it is incapable of directly ameliorating the violence it gestures towards, much less of reversing it. But it can make us look differently – and elsewhere. As Lucy Lippard has said apropos of Raven’s work: ‘If we were earnestly informed about the details of the processes Raven reveals so slowly, they would be less tantalizing, and far less interesting. We can turn to documentaries for facts and to Raven’s films for insights’. These kinds of insights are the prerogative of art. And that is what Raven is – a consummate artist.
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