We thought that the cinema would allow the modern man to become the actor of his own life. Its liberating capacity, linked to movement and the film process, suggested imaginative expressions and new worlds, a universe of possibles, unstable certainly, but always in transformation. The cinema had to reinvent the world, to explore it. It was turning life around like a satellite.

Connor Linskey told me the story of the Maelstrom, the descent into the heart of the whirlpool illustrated splendidly by E.A. Poe in his short story of 1841. The terror, the true one in Poe, takes the shape of the vortex of the voracious and destructive tornado of the Maelstrom on the Norwegian coast. Its colour is copper, it turns, gobbles up and regurgitates with a horrifying velocity. And nevertheless, it is not the difference between dismay mortified and aesthetic dismay, brought in epigraph by Poe, which holds the attention of the artist, but much more a question of geometry ? Let us say a point on an axis inside the whirlpool just like the hero inside the tornado. And this could represent, as Connor Linskey explained to me, the position of the artist.

We could imagine the artist in the heart of the storm, in the world, carried away by events and by the history. However here, it is much more a question of considering the principle of rotation as the condition of artistic activity, because the movement of the world can be caught only by a body in movement. It would then be an illusion to believe that it is sufficient to stand outside to look at the life. The recording cannot content itself any more with observation, nor with invention: it is highly participative. The artist, here with a camera, follows the rotary movement of an object he chooses for its aesthetic qualities, its colour, its shape, its mise-en-scene (in the crossing of the vulgar with the sculptural). The movement of the world, which he follows and in which he participates, inevitably carries him away, towards a new position, a new point of view; and, himself in movement, he follows the movement of the world while deploying its complex and elusive reality. We are speaking about structure. It is a question of "the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight" defined by Slavoj Zizek in The Parallax View (2006). The looked thing demonstrates, appearing, the impossibility of a direct access to what it is, of reality. The difference is not only subjective, not simply phenomenological. It is much more about mediation, because the gap of the point of view produces, in its running, an ontology of the change in the object. The real, says to us Zizek, is purely parallaxic, and has no substance in itself. It is the distance between the looked thing and the thing itself, perceptible here, all the more, in the movement which inhabit and lead the thing (the car on the podium) that the multitudes of the appearances, the symbolic fictions and the virtual appear by means of the film recording.

Connor Linksey was born in 1980 in Belfast, he lives and works in London.

Programme
I looked as pleased by this (2011)
Vidéo, 45?, col, son