Roll

Dan Graham

Roll, 1970

Artwork text

One filming camera is an inert object, detached (although within the performer’s visual field), while the other camera, attached to his eye, is both subject and object. The objective camera is placed with its base on the ground. After looking through its viewfinder to determine the left and right extremities which will frame its image, the performer positions his body and the second camera’s front frame directly facing the inert camera’s view and at the line of its left framing edge. With both cameras filming, the performer with camera to his eye rolls slowly toward the right framing edge of the other camera’s view, with the aim of continuously orienting his eye/camera’s view to center on the other camera’s position (and image). The performer’s legs and frontal body trunk protrude at the bottom of the held camera’s/eye’s frame through which the performer must observe his shifting postural placement as the feedback needed to achieve his orientation (and his image’s). The spectator sees (from within) the body’s kinesthetic sensations. From his eye view inside the feedback loop he observes the body’s shifts as it changes position in space in relation to the position of the aim (the fixed camera). The brain must correct the muscles to cause a skeletal alignment; this affects the camera’s aim; it must be re-aligned by the hands to keep open the visual feedback between the two cameras’ images (upon which the perception of the piece depends). The two films’ images are projected for simultaneous viewing at eyelevel on distant, opposite, parallel walls. Observing the view from the body feedback loop, a continuously rotating image, the body appears unweighted. The view from the second “objective-black box-camera” shows the body from outside as an object orienting with respect to universal gravity opposing a stationary, parallel force and pressing the body’s muscular/skeletal frame toward the horizontal. (Dan Graham)