Still/ A Novel

Still/A Novel was a two part-project that paid homage to the 100th anniversary of cinema. Tracing the origins and influences of cinema and photography in art, it was director Chris Dercon’s last exhibition at Witte de With as well as a documentary on the future of the cinema that he directed for Dutch television (VPRO).

The exhibition presented works by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and Jan Dibbets (1941) as well as homage’s to Muybridge by Carl Andre (1935) and Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976).

The exhibition’s point of departure was the interest that artists such as Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Sol Lewitt had in Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion. In the late sixties, these artists renewed interest in Muybridge by making works inspired by his motion studies and publishing articles about his work. The serial structure of Muybridge’s photographic project was essential to these artists.

At Witte de With the exhibition confronted 100 collotypes from Animal Locomotion with 400 contact sheets made by Dibbets between 1967 and 1995 as the basis of his photographic work. In terms of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of image and movement and image and time, used to analyze the structure of cinema, the photographic sequences of these two artists employ the basic elements of film. The exhibition also included STILL/ A NOVEL, a set of 98 poems by Carl Andre, which imitates the sequential structure of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion in a series of phrases from Muybridge's biography. The viewer had to reconstruct the narrative from the cryptic phrases, just as he had to reconstruct time and movement from the stills in Muybridge’sAnimal Locomotion or Dibbets’s contact sheets. The exhibition also included humorous drawings by Broodthaers that referred to the cartoons provoked by the original publication of Animal Locomotion.

The documentary dealt with questions about the future of cinema, the increasing use of film by artists, and the current tendency of presenting film in the context of the art museum. It featured, among others: Chantal Ackerman, Matthew Barney, Raymond Bellour, Kerry Brougher, Hartmut Bitomsky, Catherine David, Craigie Horsfield, Rem Koolhaas, James Lingwood. Bruce Mau, Susan Meseilas, Marco Müller, Bruce Nauman, Stephen Prina, Charles Ray, Harald Szeeman, Jeff Wall and Christopher Williams.