MIXED MEDIA MOVING IMAGES
WALTER BENJAMIN describes the vanishing point of history
as being always in the present moment rather than in some
distant past. This notion is key to Matthew Buckingham’s
practice of confronting history as a construction. But his is
no simple, predictable act of deconstruction that becomes
clever-clever with its unearthed archival facts. Instead
Buckingham uses a meditative, poetic detaching of image In 1978 a German lesbian activist group invited
and text until both the past and present are undone. Wolff to return to Berlin for the first time. Buckingham’s film
Influenced by installation techniques of the 1960s and Everything I Need (2007) is set in a preserved Caravelle jet
70s that made visible the means of mechanical reproduction, of the type that may have carried Wolff back to London and
Buckingham likes, for example, to have the projector on show triggered what was to become her 1980 memoir, Hindsight.
or to mimic the pinkish look of degraded 16mm footage. In In an unpredictable move typical of Buckingham, the flight
Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a Name (2003) he filmed attendant’s voice that conveys Wolff’s ideas is read by
the Hudson River from the air and, in a leisurely, erudite actor Ingrid Metz, the ‘voice of the Berlin U-Bahn’, Berlin’s
voice, explains how Henry Hudson’s colonising trip began underground system. In a strategy that echoes Wolff’s
on 11 September 1609. Already the altered, just visible, resistance to categorisation, no images of Wolff appear. The
Manhattan skyline is re-situated by Buckingham’s damning audience will be left with their own picture of her.
chronology. Using a beautifully associative approach to “Who does the naming when the unknown is falsely
storytelling, Buckingham’s digressions always dovetail into assumed not to exist?” asks Buckingham in Muhheakantuck,
multiple meanings that you can’t anticipate – in the case of when he discovers that Hudson’s crew called the Native
Muhheakantuck, from Chinese toy dragonflies to the use of Americans ‘the people of the country’. Similarly, in the new
helicopters in Vietnam to the dream of selling vertical real work The Spirit and the Letter (2007), he explores the question
estate in US airspace. In a style that recalls W.G. Sebald’s of how Mary Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking Vindication
fascinating blend of autobiography, fact and fiction, the of the Rights of Women (1792) could exist when feminism
narrator draws the listener in with the intimacy of radio. “I don’t wasn’t supposed to have been imagined yet. Wollstonecraft
think of it so much as a voiceover as a voice, whether it’s mine once wrote, ‘I do not wish [women] to have power over
or someone else’s,” he says. “I’m intrigued by circumstances men, but over themselves.’ By resetting her writing in the
where a voice is put over a system – in a train station or present tense, separating it from her infamous biography,
aeroplane – and there is that split attention. Then you have Buckingham tries to dismantle the idea of post-feminism
to keep track of the visual in a real space or in an image. I open and examine what conditions could provoke another
up that gap between image and text in critical ways.” Wollstonecraft. Buckingham asks how her public life can be
In his current project, Buckingham brings his historical re-received without the contentions around her private life,
imaginings to the work of two women: Charlotte Wolff and which overshadowed her work. Rather than situate her as a
Mary Wollstonecraft. Wolff was a Jewish doctor who worked visionary, ahead of her time, Buckingham draws on feminist
in a family planning clinic in Weimar Germany and lived in theorists like Cora Kaplan to place the writer as someone
an open lesbian relationship. After being arrested by the expressing their time, and in that, expressing ours too. “I
Gestapo for impersonating a man, she fled to Paris in 1933 think it’s impossible to be ahead of your time,” Buckingham
and later to London. Forbidden to practise medicine, she says. “Wollstonecraft wasn’t a totally unique person but
took up chirology (hand-reading) and wrote books about was connected to other women writers. I try to invoke a
same-sex relationships. Buckingham is interested in the sense community of voices, rather than a single voice.”
of identification as a German that blinded Wolff to what was In the nineteenth century, women who stepped out
happening around her before she was arrested and, for others, of line socially, intellectually or sexually were often named
enabled the Nazi persecution. As Buckingham explains: “The ‘inverts’, for what was seen as their ‘inverted’ femininity.
question of vigilance is central to Wolff. She ties that vigilance The Spirit and the Letter anticipates this term by turning an
to all forms of progressive thought – that such forms are eighteenth-century drawing room upside down to capture
never completely safe, that they’ve never been fully achieved. the effect of Wollstonecraft’s radical rethinking of identity by
I’ve tried to let that echo in the present.” showing her miraculously walking on the ceiling. , 2007, video installation. © the artist
Matthew Buckingham’s new films, including the site-specific
installation Specularia, are at Camden Arts Centre, London,
until 1 July
Everything I Need
one.linzero.linnine.lin ARTREVIEW
p108-109 Film AR May07.indd 109 3/4/07 04:01:01
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