On Seeing (a triptych)

'The question is the following: why, in which way, and how does the production of images take part in the destruction of human beings?' (Georges Didi-Huberman)

On Seeing is a triptych exploring a seemingly paratactic relation between the visible and the intelligible. The work began with a performance video, The Piano Tuners, originally made in 2008. This piece has a voiceover narrative drawn from Beckett’s novel Watt, which describes a state of mind as it perceives itself in the experience of seeing, trying to make this experience intelligible to itself. During 2009, I re-visited the visual edit of this filmed performance twice, using two quite different sound tracks, both of which further explore the intelligibility of the visible, reflecting on an ethics of 'seeing'. The first, Eye Lust, draws from an essay by Paul Virilio; and the second, I Was the Eyes of the ICRC, draws from the testimony of Maurice Rossel (interviewed by Claude Lanzmann), trying to make intelligible to others his experience as the Red Cross representative in Germany during the Second World War. The Beckett and Virilio commentaries “on seeing” are collaged together with fragments of music by György Kurtàg, and the third with popular dance music recorded in Geneva and in Prague on the dates referred to in Rossel’s testimony.