An Idiot’s Lantern: On the Video Works of Ian Bourn

TRANSMISSION

We see a grid of mottled patches, dark purple like the center of a bruise. The grid is covered with a greyish translucent gloss and is moving in increments of electric noise. Listening to the undertone (a low buzz), a rolling clink and chugging rhythm betrays the turning of reels. White hair-line flashes dart horizontally across the screen. Muttering voices and a garbled song is beginning somewhere, faintly. Metal objects are nosily set-out on a hard surface. Heavy breathing accompanies. The odd thing about this view is its peculiar light, the strange luminescence of a black television screen in an unlit room. It glows with failure - the failure of transmitted light to show its own absence. Light of the television used to represent darkness, its absence. What’s on the box? The mundane confusion of being alone in the dark.

A title card fades in. Its clear, centered lettering is dirty white and has a smudged trail. It is jumpy. The whole screen crackles. The title card reads: 'LENNY'S DOCUMENTARY' . Another one fades in, for a moment the previous title remains beneath in an off-black shadow; it announces the setting and time: '11 P.M., LEYTONSTONE...' . The disconnection of a microphone makes a pop. A scene is lit abruptly by a desk lamp. The sound of a flicked switch reaches us.

For the first time we see Lenny, the soul character, setting out his papers and arranging beer cans, whistling, fidgeting, lighting a cigarette, speaking to someone off-screen, neither speaking to us or despite us; speaking to no one, speaking to himself. Here is the titular character but he is barely a unity, barely a coherent voice. His room, cast in sickly grey, is flat and cluttered with knick-knacks. A poster showing a squat lighthouse and a ram's skull is visible on the wall. Lenny wears a heavy blazer and carries a dismal air. He is talking with an irritable brio. He is stuttering and coughing. His phrases are regular but frantic; like they are treading water. His reminiscing is fractious: 'jack the lad' and 'poor old’ inarticulate Frank, the kittens thrown on the railway tracks, the 'three identicals' at the bus stop, the girls with 'blind ignorant faces'. His delivery is made somehow more authentic by the contrived coughs, stumbles and tangents of the performer. His speech is clipped and distant like a news report. The title cards, which read '5 MINUETS', '2 MINUETS', '30 SECONDS', keep emerging, fracturing but also depicting Lenny’s anxious continuity – the jumpy passing of time in the incoherence of Lenny's world. He trails off into silence and the whirr of spools resumes.

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When we encounter Lenny's Documentary (1978) what is striking is the coarseness of its medium; the limitations of the technology of the time. But the grainy flashes of Bourn's most significant early video work soon pass by unquestioned. The flickers seem in-keeping with this series of uncertain portrayals of character. Lenny's Documentary incubates many of the ambiguities that typify the unsettling pull of Bourn's writing, directing and acting. Who is Lenny? Is he the subject? Is he the author? Is he both? Is he neither? Is Bourn Lenny? Is this a documentary? Is this a diary? Bourn is not producing rounded, realistic portraits, but portrayals of how a portrait might be broached; examples of how a portrait might fail; how representations – especially commonplace documentary representations such as those seen on television – might deform as well as form identities. How they might disfigure both the subject and the viewer alike.

What remains distinctive about Bourn's treatment of questions of identity is his undoing of the workings of analogy - the ‘conformity of words or language to a regular or consistent pattern’ . The various channels which operate in Bourn’s work (sound, picture, scene, character, artist and so on) serve to disturb the harmonies of the analogy, rather than create them. These channels of representation actually derange the correspondence of one thing to another. Preventing us from getting that comfortable feeling of a complete and consistent fictional world. The elements that make up his representations are not entirely detached from one another, but they tend to produce unsettling questions, opening gaps, rather than offering clarity through comparison. Bourn’s characterisations seem to suggest that meaning is and remains alienated. He is skeptical of the idea that meanings can be converted into other mediums at all. Highly skeptical of the idea that television and documentary can actually convey an identity in a clean and straightforward way. His characterisations attempt it, but they are intentionally false attempts, they poke fun at the idea that meaning can be made to correspond to another medium, without something being lost. The way his characters are communicated, in a terrain where viewer, actor, artists and spectator tend to shift and swap and disappear, ends up disturbing the familiar and consistent patterns of television. Fragments of paranoia, humor and isolation pierce the commonality and ubiquity of the televised form. It is as though Bourn’s work subjects artistic meaning; literary, autobiographical, communal or political, to the static that darkens the screen when no one is watching.

[Extract]