thursday afternoon

mistaken memories of mediaeval manhattan

brian eno 14 video paintings

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I see TV as a picture mediumrather than a narrative medium. Video for meis a way of configuring light, just as paintingis a way of configuring paint. What you seeis simply light patterned in various ways. Foran artist, video is the best light organ thatanyone has ever invented. 1

“”

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S E T T I N G T H E S C E N E

“I started working with video in the late 70s … as a way of makingpaintings. Rather than as a way of making dramas or stories or all thethings that are usually connected with video, because of its backgroundand its connections with theatre and film and so on, I wanted to connectvideo with pictures and with picture-making, and I’d begun by makingpieces that were very long, slow, slowly changing examinations of, forinstance, a landscape – or in my case the skyscape of Manhattan, whereI was living at the time.

“It was a very interesting view of New York because New York at streetlevel is a very, very, very busy city, but at sky level it’s one of the mostbeautiful, grandest and loveliest cities in the world, and it’s actually a veryslow city at sky level. It has a very big skyline and you see these hugeCumulus clouds drifting across very slowly.” 2

T H E M E D I A E V A L I S T

“As soon as you acknowledge the possibility of a certain type of being ora certain type of environment, you create that environment, because youtend to select and nourish those facets of that environment … Withhuman beings, what patterns our world is our perception of it. I had avery clear instance of this. I've always had a problem with New Yorkbecause it's such a menagerie of craziness. My answer to that has beena tendency to retreat into high places - most of my apartments have beenat the top of buildings …

“I was out for a walk in Chinatown on the first sunny Saturday this year,and there was someone burning kebabs on the corner. There was thesmell of burnt meat in the air. They were sort of dwarfs: one or two of thegrotesque-looking people you get in New York. I don't mean grotesquein a nasty way. There were people selling things on the street, and Isuddenly thought, ‘This is the Dark Ages’. I suddenly had the feeling ofbeing in a great mediaeval city, a thriving, dangerous, mixed-up andstrange mediaeval city. Now, from the moment I had that thought, ithasn't left me. And I've enjoyed New York tremendously since then. I likethis idea of being in the Dark Ages.” 3

B r i a n E n o 1 4 Vi d e o Pa i n t i n g s

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“I more and more feel America as being a thrilling, vibrant, mediaevalculture. Mediaeval for me means somewhere where things are beingworked out, where cultures have crossed and are crashing together, andhybrids are constantly being thrown up.” 4

C A N V A S S I N G O P I N I O N

“I resisted video for a long time because I really didn’t like video art at all,and I’ve never been much of a television watcher. And anyway just thenature of the material was kind of ugly to me: it looked coarse. But Idiscovered that it looked coarse because people were always trying tomake it do something that it didn’t want to do, it doesn’t want to be likefilm. As soon as you accept … it has a texture, and it has a grain, that’sfine, it’s like saying that a canvas is not the same as a glossy photograph,so you then work with that texture. But generally people hadn’t donethat.” 5

C A M E R A A N G L E

“I was working with Talking Heads on the second album I did with them,which was their third album, and a roadie from the band Foreigner whowere working next door … sort of shuffled into the studio, looking shiftilylike this, and he said [out of corner of mouth] ‘Does anybody want to buyour video camera?’ and I said ‘Yeah, okay’. I didn’t have one at the time,so I bought from him this old – well actually it was quite new at the time– it was a Panasonic industrial colour video camera. It was a verypeculiar object, and I still have it ... And what was particularly good aboutit was that at that time they didn’t have any automatic controls on thesethings, so you had to set them all, and the controls had really wideranges, you could do absolutely mad things with this camera, in fact itwas very hard to do anything realistic with it.” 6

“It was quite as idiosyncratic as any of the tape recorders I’d workedwith. It was a beautiful camera … and then I made the brilliant decisionof pointing it at the sky for four days which completely wrecked the tube,and ever after that it produced the most magical results: it responded tolight and colour in a way that no other camera I’ve ever seen can do. SoI had a unique paintbrush really and I worked with that for a long time.” 5

“I could set it at a level of light sensitivity where very slight changes in theamount of light, the brightness of the light, translated into very powerfulcolour changes. So what the picture became was a way of amplifying

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little differences in the light of the day, which was why they were quiteinteresting to watch … in music it would be called an expander, itexpanded the range of the light events that were happening anyway.” 6

S T R A I G H T U P

The vertical format came about because the video was literally mis-taken:

“I took this thing home. I was living at the time on West 8th Street, nearFifth Avenue, and I didn’t have a tripod – hadn’t thought to get one … Idesperately wanted to play with my camera, so I laid it on its side on thewindow-sill looking out, which of course meant I had to turn the TV ontoits side as well. And this was an absolute breakthrough for me, becauseit didn’t look like television any longer, it looked like painting.

“I would just sit and watch this TV, which was just showing what wasgoing on outside on the rooftops on my window, and I wouldoccasionally piddle around with the colour a bit. I’ve always said that themost important control on your TV is the colour control: it’s a muchbigger difference than changing the channel really. I’d get a painting that

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I liked, and then I would just let the painting record itself. And it was veryinteresting – I would notice when people would come over they’d sit andlook at the TV as well, and we’d all be sitting there looking at nothingmuch going on. And I thought, ‘This is very interesting, it’s a new kind ofpainting really’.

“After that I never turned the TV the other way round, because – twothings about turning a television on its side. One is that you lose thereference to theatre and cinema that the television has, you know, whenyou’re in the proscenium arch shape you sort of expect narrative, youexpect things to happen – that’s what that shape comes from, it’s ashape designed for action between a number of people. As soon as youturn it on its side, what they call portrait format, you don’t actually expectanything to happen, you expect it to stay still. And the other thing Irealised many years later, when I tried to do the same thing with digitaltelevisions, was that the distortion of the television, the lines, whenthey’re vertical they actually are very natural somehow, it’s like rain, itlooks like very light rain falling all the time. And so somehow it becomesquite acceptable as part of the picture; it doesn’t look like a disturbance.

“I was quite fascinated by these things, and I would just sit watchingthem, it was a lonely life really [laughs]. I didn’t have many friends, andone day a guy from The Kitchen who I’d met – Tom his name was, verynice chap – came over and said ‘Hey, you should show those at TheKitchen’, and it was only about four weeks after I’d got my camera, so Isaid ‘Oh, really?’, he said ‘Yeah, they’re great’, and I thought, ‘Oh gosh’,and so suddenly within about a month of getting a camera I was a videoartist [laughs].” 6

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P O I N T S O F D E P A R T U R E

Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan was filmed in New Yorkduring 1980 and 1981, and developed the approach of earlier videoslike 2 Fifth Avenue and White Fence.

“The first piece that I did at The Kitchen … was called 2 Fifth Avenue, itwas all pictures of the building across the road from where I lived. It wasa very geometrical white brick building, with very Mondrian typewindows, black framed windows, and what was beautiful about it wasbecause of the time of year I was doing it, sometimes curtains would flyout and flap a little bit, so I had four screens … always taken at angles,of these very graphic white brick and sharp edged windows, but withoccasionally a bright curtain blowing in the wind. 2 Fifth Avenue had fourscreens showing out of sync different parts of this, and then I did anotherone called White Fence, which was the same kind of idea, it was a fence… somewhere in Little Italy.” 6

2 Fifth Avenue was exhibited in several locations across America,including the Marine Air Terminal of New York's La Guardia Airport;White Fence was also briefly shown in Grand Central Station, New York7. These video installations “were designed for transit spaces (such asairports and train stations) and arose from the question[s], ‘How can onedeal with the limitation of the TV screen which focuses a point of viewand a level of sensory attention in a way which music doesn’t?’ [and]‘What type of image would not presuppose the time and attentioncharacteristically accorded a narrative structure?’” 8

Similar thinking at this time drove Brian’s continuing experiments withinstrumental music that had no narrative structure. His first “Ambient”album Music For Airports had been launched in 1978 with an essayoutlining the concept of music that created an atmosphere or tint in theenvironment and was “able to accommodate many levels of listeningattention without enforcing one in particular”, being “as ignorable as it isinteresting.” 9

For the soundtrack of Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan Brianchose tracks from Music for Airports and the recordings that would laterbe released as On Land. “This pretty much from the beginning had someof the On Land music with it … a lot of it was originally made for thesepieces.” 6

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M I S T A K E N M E M O R I E S O FM E D I A E V A L M A N H A T T A N

“All of the video pieces that I have shown to date have been filmed fromthe windows of various apartments I have lived in, and all but one of themuse a vertical screen format. The pieces in Mistaken Memories ofMediaeval Manhattan are long continuous shots of the Manhattanskyline, and what movement there is in them is not under my control:drifting clouds, rain, smoke, fleeting light and shadows, birds, aircraft.The shortest of these pieces is three minutes long and the longest isnearly thirteen minutes. Like the music that accompanies them, the filmsarise from a mixture of nostalgia and hope, and from the desire to makea quiet place for myself. They evoke in me a sense of 'what could havebeen' and hence generate a nostalgia for a different future. It is as thoughI am extracting from this reality (the one the camera is pointed at) theseeds of another; creating a shift of emphasis. My assumption is that bygiving it attention it will be nourished and will thus be seen to exist: thatwhich is recognized has a reality.” 10

“[Towers] is when I lived in Broom Street. I lived quite high up, and thisparticular day was a very rainy day, there were sheets of rain movingacross, and because of this strange sensitivity thing of the camera, thesewater towers appeared and disappeared out of this cloud of rain.” 6

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T H U R S D A Y A F T E R N O O N

In April 1984 Brian filmed Thursday Afternoon, seven videos of themodel Christine Alicino. His previous works had involved littleintervention from the artist – “I used to watch and choose a continuoussection that I liked, but I never edited within those sections” 2. However,Thursday Afternoon was carefully constructed with the aim of exploringthe idea of impressionistic video painting, with the video films subjectedto speed alterations, distortions and other effects processing. Brianwrote:

“These pieces represent a response to what is presently the mostinteresting challenge of video: how does one make something that canbe seen again and again in the way that a gramophone record can belistened to repeatedly? I feel that video makers have generally addressedthis issue with very little success: their work has been conceived withinthe aesthetic frame of cinema and television (an aesthetic thatpresupposes a very limited number of viewings) but then packaged andpresented in a format that clearly intends multiple viewings, the tape ordisc …

“Unfortunately, the cinematicheritage seems inimical to theidea of multiple-view video tapesor discs. It relies heavily for itsimpact on a dramatic momentumwhich is sustained by frequentscene changes, fast editing andthe narrative development of theplot. As a result, being in someway a function of surprise, thisimpact is eroded by repeatedviewings. The usual response tothis problem has been to load thevideo with more scene-changes,faster edits, stranger cameraangles and more exotic specialeffects, in short, more surprises -presumably, in the hope ofdelaying the inevitable decline ininterest in the work as it becomesmore familiar. This is the conditionof pop-video, and it has almostnowhere left to go in thisdirection.

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“So long as video is regarded only as an extension of film or television,increasing hysteria and exoticism is its most likely future. Ourbackground as television viewers has conditioned us to expect thatthings on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporalsequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship betweenviewer and screen - you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type ofwork which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a moresteady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk awayfrom as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.” 11

A 62-minute version of the soundtrack – a different mix from that usedon the video – was released in 1985. C.S.J. Bofop, a close personalfriend of Brian, described it as “perhaps the first recording preparedspecifically for compact disc”. 12

Thursday Afternoon was Brian’s final “pure” video/television-based work,although he continued to use television monitors as coloured lightsources for installation light sculptures and nurtured an interest ingenerative computer art with the Stained Glass module of BerkeleySystems’ After Dark screensaver and Imaja’s Bliss Paint software.

R e f e r e n c e s

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Brian Eno in conversation with Peter Nasmyth, 1980sBrian Eno in conversation with Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs,BBC Radio 4, broadcast 27th January 1991Brian Eno in conversation with Gene Kalbacher, published inModern Recording & Music, October 1982.Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes, Mystic Fire Video, 1989Brian Eno in conversation with Michael Oliver, Kaleidoscope Extra,BBC Radio 4, 1985Brian Eno, interviewed at Music & Media, 7th October 2004Ambient Lightworks by Kevin Eden, Fourth Door ReviewBrian Eno, quoted by David Ross, programme notes for MistakenMemories of Medieval New York/White Fences/Motion Study,University Art Museum, Matrix/Berkeley 44, June-July 198Brian Eno,Music for Airports liner essay, 1978Brian Eno, cover of Mistaken Memories, dated 1991 but presumablyearlier than thatBrian Eno, essay from booklet accompanying the original release ofthe Thursday Afternoon CD, dated 1984; an edited versionappeared on the cover of the videoC.S.J. Bofop, Ibid, dated 1985

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mistaken memories of

mediaeval manhattan

Dawn Menace Towers Lights

Empire Appearance

Lafayette

Running time 47 minutes

Filmed by Brian Eno in NewYork, 1980-81.

Originally treated and assembledin New York and Toronto

by Brian Eno.

Re-assembled by Brian Eno,London, September 1987.

Assistance Michael Brook.

thursday afternoonSeven video paintings of Christine Alicino

Running time 82 minutes

Filmed in San Francisco, April 1984.Treated and assembled at SonyCorporation, Tokyo.

Recorded at Daniel Lanois’ GrantAvenue Studios, Canada andproduced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois

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All music by Brian Eno, published by Opal Music(PRS), except in North America by Upala Music Inc(BMI).

With special thanks to Sony Japan, Rolf M Engel atAtelier Markgraph, Frankfurt, and Anita O'Donnelland Andrew Hyde at The Garden, London.

Video re-mastered by Norton Utilities, sound enhanced by The Garden, London

Authored at The Garden, London

Region 2 PAL

Art Direction, photography & Design by Wordsaladwww.wordsalad.co.ukVideo Portraits by Deborah Feingold

Booklet text by Tom Boon and Brian Eno withthanks to Lin Barkass and Kevin Eden.

www.allsaintsrecords.com www.rykodisc.co.uk

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