Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. Double Fiction. 2008. Collection MFAH, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.
Installation view: Radvila Palace Museum of Art, exhibition Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky. 2023-2024.
"Double Fiction"(2008) by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky based at "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock. …“Two revelatory pieces taken from the classical narrative cinema, Spellbound (2009) and Birds (2008), rework canonical Alfred Hitchcock films employing the same technique used in Pink and White. In this case, the moving image is not found footage but a finely crafted example of the classical cinema, created by a director employing elaborately staged action, cinematography, a script, acting, lighting, composition, and sound. In the case of Spellbound, a three-minute loop superimposes a sequence from the film played forward with the same scenes played in reverse. The two sequences come together in the middle and then continue on to either the conclusion or beginning of the sequence. Narrative anticipation and the intense drama of the action reaches its climax as a single scene. Time folds upon itself as we watch, but also as we recall what we already know. This method is elaborated further in The Birds, in which the entire Hitchcock film is shown with sound, from beginning to end and over again in reverse, from the end to the beginning. (The credits have been removed.) At the mid-point, the film becomes one as the superimposed films line up and become a single film. A work of astonishing simplicity and originality, it takes the meta-cinematic work of such artists as Douglas Gordon and Stan Douglas and the treatment of language in Gary Hill’s videotapes into the complex terrain of narrative, storytelling, and perception. The anticipation and remembrance of time and events through the conventions of storytelling, as we see in the Birds, also becomes a means to provide new insight into that film’s apocryphal vision of nature and human relationships. Early scenes are joined with later scenes, and it is almost as if the film itself is dreaming its own narrative as it unfolds. Birds is a brilliant choice, since it heightens the dramatic intensity of the narrative cinema and the nuance of the performances in a deconstruction of the meanings of the original film. It also places the viewer before the screen as an active participant. In a sense, the film haunts itself, as the action that unfolds anticipates its own conclusion, and the relationships between the characters become tragically predicted and realized. The destruction that is foreshadowed actually appears in the film at its beginning. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky have created a dialectical process by integrating the point of view of the camera and the play of time. The viewer becomes engaged in active looking and creates meaning out of moving images through that cognitive process. These artists have created an aesthetic text that is haunted by memory, whether represented by found footage, by the chance recordings of plastic bags blowing along on the sidewalk or the movement of people on the street, or by the rediscovery of scenes from well-known movies. Time erases itself as scenes overlap and change, in the process refashioning the moving image into an aesthetic text of timeless fascination.”
Excerpt from: The Play of Time: The Art of Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky By John G. Hanhardt, (Senior Curator for Media Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Published in: "Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky". The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. 2023. Foreword: Arūnas Gelūnas. Texts by Michel Gauthier, John G. Hanhardt. Quotations from texts about Kopystiansky’s by Kai-Uwe Hemken, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anthony Spira, Adam D. Weinberg.(Lithuanian, English, French) ISBN 9786094261824
Published in: 2010 Kopystiansky. Double Fiction/Fiction Double. Musée d”Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne. Texts by John G. Hanhardt, Philippe-Alain Michaud. Les Presses du Réel
