Your videostripped me bare. It made me confront my fear of blindness and the priority given to vision. I felt as if I too was blind riding a motorbike to places I'd never imagined before, scrambling my senses in waves of emotion.
It snowed all night here. First snow of the year. I woke when it was still dark, filled a pot with hot water and walked outside naked with a towel, as is my wont. As I sluiced the water over me, the splashes of hot liquid formed a moving membrane. I could hear the river passing over the rapids close by. I did not feel cold but reactivated.
In retrospect that seemed a fate-induced prelude to your video, Tina, which as I first watched in the gathering light of dawn, drinking my coffee, recalled to me the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's account of his experience of the Israeli shelling of Beirut in 1982, told while he made his morning coffee and hung onto its smell and taste for survival. My thoughts then flipped to the Bread and Puppet Theatre in NYC you can't be serious without comedy, where they recreated the history in which Palestinian teenagers build a giant horse at the entrance to their camp only to have it destroyed years later by Israeli forces. Here in NYC the puppeteers reconstructed the horse from its fragments, piece by piece. Tina, you describe Mathew touching his motorbike intimately as if it were a horse, which brings to my mind your 2019 work, . Ridden by neurodiverse kids, these elderly horses become musical instruments as they walk and shake the bells on their heads, shaking loose our notions of horses and humans, music and old age too.
It is a spectacular feat for a blind person to ride a motorbike. How does he do it? That’s an obvious question but you turn the question around. What does it make us ask about sight? To wonder about blindness is to wonder about the tricks of seeing, the prerequisite of filmmaking. We see Mathew in a huge gravel pit. Lying flat, alone, he is vulnerable in its immensity as if in the womb of the world, the cosmos compressed into a rock-faced quarry.
‘Blind-seeing’ assumes corporeal sight sensitive to presence and atmosphere, like lying in a quarry alone, except for that soaring blackbird. Blind-seeing ocularizes the hand through touch, as Jacques Derrida makes much of in his 1993 Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins. As if it too is a hand, You Can’t See Speed offers us spurts of ‘glimpse-seeing’ such as the brightly striped fish gliding in a tank intently ‘watched’ over by Matthew, as if he too is in the water, immersed with fish-like beings guided by currents and a sixth sense. Cut to Matthew decked out in dirt-bike gear holding his stationary bike’s handlebars tight while rocking violently back and forth in frustrated desire and turmoil as light flashes in an all-enclosing darkness punctuated by bright concussive light.
The film’s spectator sees, then doesn’t see. Back and forth. What does it mean to see darkness or see in the dark? Is seeing darkness an act of seeing or is it something else? Is it the awareness of another world accessed by the wild pleasure of riding blind at speed?
Can we visionaries join with blind-seeing? Here music and language intervene. Tina, what you call ‘captions’ to the images are sung by choirs composed of your extended family, of your neighborhood, or of wheat-farming families in the Great Australian Bight with whom you have long-standing commitments. How do they sing? It reminds me of the Cantastoria, storytelling as in Italian street opera in which images arecomposed into songs thatare sung and spoken at one and the same time.
Like poems, the sung-spoken words of the captions in the video wrap around visual imagery like a skin. Seeing becomes vocal and verbal. Soundscapes of word-pictures float in the mind like their close cousins, the speech bubbles in cartoons and comic books. I also hear the rhythmic speaking/singing of the non-narrative ‘opera’ Einstein on the Beach composed by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, the repetitive rhythms of which can be traced in part to north Indian classical music.
Like in Einstein, some of the singers in your works are not trained professionals. Your overall aesthetic is mastery of non-mastery grounded in the drama of the everyday, pulsing on the edge of escape to worlds rarely contemplated. There is even the music/sound of the bikes themselves as voices. There is wonder in this communal singing-speaking as if painting meaning with words like the singers are seeing for the first time, taking us auditors with them. Could this be a resurrection of the chorus of ancient Greek theater, from the country where Tina’s grandparents came to work in Melbourne factories? Brecht also re-invented the chorus whose task was to step outside of the frame and point. Look! Look at this strange turn of events! Analyze it!
The captioning in this video transforms sound no less than it transforms the visual imagery being captioned. Now hearing-and-seeing create a new medium potentiated by our glimpse-seeing of blind-being. Voila! The fish-gazing man with the dirt bike — brrm, brrm — and the horsey lady with the camera have together invented a new sensorium challenging the ways we think we see (understand).