To show, rather than tell: William Raban’s Nautical Twilight

In 1974, critic Lawrence Alloway wrote in an essay that “Artists’ writings serve as self-characterization by providing an index of specific traits and aims, in opposition to the homogenization produced by stylistic or thematic grouping.”¹ Artists’ writings provide a robust platform for mapping the broad aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical horizon from which their art emerges or is in dialogue with; it is a verbalization of aims. Such expression of intentionality can challenge convenient historicization, daring curatorial projects, freestyle academic appropriation, and decontextualized theorizations. It is a practice that is in crisis, one barely comes across artist writers these days while artists’ editions and artists as curators are fitting in conveniently within the contemporary art market. Historically, it remains indispensable to the literature on arts in the 20th century.  

For a long time, filmmakers and artists were regarded as different species within the art parlance including experimental filmmakers whose aims were closer to the fine arts than those of industrial moviemaking. The emergence of “Artist-Filmmakers” is a recent trend that parallels the belated romance between moving images and galleries. Alloway, in the aforementioned essay, quotes visual artists but none of such filmmakers. Many of them wrote and published regularly. Over the years, consider the writings of Hollis Frampton, Birgit Hein, Peter Gidal, Morgan Fisher, Nicky Hamlyn, Claudine Eizykman, a few names in a much longer list. Taken together, this corpus not just provides an index of specific traits and aims, they map a broader context of their own filmmaking and of their peers, they span art and film theory to philosophy, criticism to cultural history. For these filmmakers, regular writing was of particular historical consequence, an existential necessity, since they had to bear the burden of defining the stakes in their works, the common cinema vocabulary proving highly inadequate for a useful engagement with their objectives, while the fine art market and by extension, art criticism, remained aloof from their medium at large. 

One notable parallel development to the waning of filmmaker-writers is a new found momentum in the publication of collected volumes of writings by filmmakers from the 1960s and the 1970s over the last two decades, publications on Tony Conrad, Babette Mangolte, Lis Rhodes, Paul Sharits, Gregory Markopoulos and republications of writings by Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton attest to this trend. These writings are mostly unparsed from unpublished notes, art magazines, out-of-print books, and extinct film journals. Though not really an assimilation of previously written texts, one might add William Raban’s Nautical Twilight to this growing corpus, the London based British experimental filmmaker’s reflection on a career spanning 54 years and counting. It is a reminder that critical writing on film by experimental film practitioners in Britain point to a singular intellectual history that in its scope is unmatched by experimental film cultures elsewhere, so much so that they themselves, rather than critics, remain the reference point in their field.

Nautical Twilight is distinct from the above-mentioned examples since it is written retrospectively by Raban, dealing largely with his own filmmaking in the form of a book, whereas the others pursued commentary and filmmaking more or less simultaneously – the writings scattered over time and place. Nautical Twilight is a deliberated assessment of over five decades of filmmaking, it is equal measure diaristic, descriptive, reflective, and critical in terms of Raban’s own practice. It’s a recent commentary on historical works rather than an assimilation of historical texts. It harkens back to a modernist form of critical discourse that feels slightly out of time as it serves up an antidote to the profound ignorance or obscuration of technical matters that define the usual writings on film in the present. Raban’s films are ascribed a centrality in the book evidenced by the fact that most of the fifteen chapters draw their names from one or more films. There are meticulous descriptions of the formal considerations, married to the wider social and theoretical backdrop of their making. The digressions by way of anecdotes are few, and even when presented, they are bound to a context. The first person narrative is modest, it acknowledges that the experience of the self as one of many, it avoids imposition, it’s not narcissistically confessional. 

In the introduction to the book, Raban allows the reader a peep into his personal world: his parents, his long walks on Lymington marshes, the allure of the sea, his fascination with landscape and nature, his penchant for sailing, and early encounter with art in the form of a pocket size paperback on Mondrian, his grandmother’s miniatures, the paintings by Richard Wilson, L.S. Lowry, Pissarro, and Paul Delvaux, a Peggy Guggenheim exhibition at Tate Gallery. Raban’s fondness for nautical twilight – the two periods during a day around sunrise and sunset when the gradient of light changes in the horizon is at its dramatic best – lends the book its title. This chapter lays the groundwork for his early pursuits as an artist and a filmmaker. 

The 1970s was a period of intense activity in experimental film everywhere. Already in 1969, P. Adams Sitney took note of certain emergent attitudes among filmmakers in the United States and tried to formulate what he referred to as “structural film.”² Peter Gidal, the pre-eminent theorist of British avant-garde film wrote Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film in 1974.³ The Systems Group was also active in Britain in the late 1960s who sought to structure their non-figurative art through concrete mathematical and geometrical models. All such developments are loosely relevant in contextualising Raban’s films in this period that can slide in and out of categorizations such as landscape, abstract, minimal, and conceptual film. Raban studied painting at St. Martin’s School of Art and completed an MA in Fine Art at Reading University. Prior to filmmaking, he made paintings such as Wave Prints and Tree Prints that were concrete material and temporal expressions of tidal and climatological phenomena interacting with oil paint and organic dyes: experiments in the materialist representation of nature without mimetic reproduction.

“Having harnessed natural sunlight and weathering process to inscribe the work, nature can be seen to have replaced the artist as the primary agent in the production. I realized that any framing of the living world must involve an ethical choice; what is included in the frame and what is to be left out” (p. 11).

The Landscape Films

A logical progression from these paintings – where nature is allowed to determine compositional choices – are his earliest films, which are analytical studies of the visual representation of landscapes under varying weather, seasonal, and light conditions, with a core interest in the indexical (a physical trace denoting a materialization of time) and precise temporal operations. In his first 16mm film View (1970), Raban filmed the tidal motion of the river Test, in Southampton, under rain and wind conditions during an eight hour daylight window using time-lapse – three frames every minute – intercut with a sequence of the same view at normal speed every time enough raindrops accumulated on the protective filter of the camera lens to obscure the view. Allowing meteorological conditions to determine where a normal speed sequence is to be inserted is Raban’s way of establishing syntactic constructional principles by relying on nature rather than being driven by semantic or pragmatic decisions. Raban quips, “I was influenced by the dictum from Thomas Aquinas that ‘art imitates nature’ not through mere appearance but in her manner operation’ and explored similar ideas expressed by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his book The Transformation of Nature in Art (1934)” (ibid). In the double-screen River Yar (1972), made with Chris Welsby, and among the best known works of either filmmakers, the river was shot from the window of a water mill on the Isle of Wight using a fixed camera position in two clusters of three weeks, one following the Autumn Equinox in 1971 and the other preceding the Spring Equinox in 1972. The autumn and spring scenes projected on two adjacent screens switch: from time-lapse (1 frame a minute leading to 21 mins over 21 days) to 24fps (14mins recorded after the sunset on the 21st day) on the left screen and normal speed (14mins before daylight breaks on the first day) to time-lapse (21 days similarly compressed into 21mins) on the right. The resulting 35-minute-long film is a remarkable study of tidal phenomena and the dramatics of otherwise imperceptible natural light changes – both determined by earth’s rotation around the sun, as is the structure of the film. These nitty-gritties of the film’s shape are laid out in the book in fine detail (pp. 13-14). 

River Yar

In the other landscape multi-screen films, Raban demonstrates a lasting interest in exploration of cubist space by various means to counter the expectations of perspectival space. In Angles of Incidence (1973), he framed an exterior scene through a window unit and the surrounding wall by directing the movement of the camera with a rope that attached it to the window, its arcuate positions roughly determined by Newton’s law of reflection (the equivalence of incidence and reflection angle), rendering a constant shift between rhomboid and rectangular shapes. For the second screen, Raban flipped the image over. In Thames Barrier (1978), he plays with variations and repetitions in filmed time and location across three adjacent frames that eventually collapse into one (the middle frame disappears first, the other two are then adjoined and eventually overlapped), the process emulating “the psycho physiological experience of binocular vision in order to create an analytic cubist rendition of three dimensional space” (p. 33). 

From the earliest landscape films to his more recent works, Raban has demonstrated a lasting preference for time-lapse – a programmatic recording of single frames in the camera at a much slower rate overriding its recording presets, which when projected, dramatizes time changes and enhances the plasticity of experienced time. Even though Raban himself does not deliberate a great deal on time-lapse in the book, its elaborate use in his films and its popularity among other British experimental filmmakers, old and new, merits some thought. Gidal had rallied for an expression of real-time in films that establishes a one-to-one relationship between the represented film-time and its viewing time, in contrast to its illusionary counterpart in narrative cinema – time sculpted through editing.⁴ The use of time-lapse seems like an affordable middle ground between reproduced and constructed temporalities, its mechanistic plasticity and retention of the order of recorded frames during projection might not preserve the one-to-one relation between shooting and reading time but in making its very plastic nature manifest, it salvages a reflexiveness that is not sublimated to the manipulatory demands of narrative. Raban certainly is not dictated by Gidal’s theorizations, even though he acknowledges that “Gidal’s understanding of structural materialist film provided an intellectual framework for much of the work being produced at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op through the 1970s” (p. 57). In Moonshine (1975), where Raban traced a series of moon ascents over roof tops in Hackney which he then structured and rhythmised via time-lapsing and frame duplication through optical printing, an illusion of continuity of the moon’s motion across the frame is simulated. “I think I was possibly consciously rebelling against the strictures of structural film”, Raban reveals (p. 32). 

The landscape films articulate a dialectical relationship between methodical precision and optical or mechanical accidents that manifest as sometimes unintended visual effects. This is one distinguishing feature of Raban’s and in general the British landscape films from the 1970s; another is, as Deke Dusinberre best put it, the establishment of a tension between the imagistic content of the film (the landscape) and the system that determines its shape (time-lapse, shutter speed…) leading to a reflexiveness of representation.⁵ Its American counterpart (exemplified by Larry Gottheim or Nathaniel Dorsky among others) instead drew from a romantic-poetic tradition. In discussing his landscape films, Raban frequently brings up the question of romanticism. He quotes from his interview with John du Cane from1972 where he played down the romantic elements in the films (p. 15).⁶ Referring to it in retrospect, Raban is all too aware that modernism’s umbilical ties to romanticism given their Kantian roots, cannot be severed so assuredly, he ventures 

I find my fervent denial of romanticism curious, though this was probably due to the desire to make work that was subject to systematic and quasi-scientific investigation. On reflection, there is an undoubted romantic element to River Yar in the way in which it dramatizes changing weather in the landscape both in the picture and the soundtrack (ibid).

In light of a much later film, Laki Haze (2020), Raban arrives at a conciliation between the analytic and the romantic within the purview of landscapes. The quote deserves being reproduced at length:

I had always thought romanticism a weakness or term of denigration that should be avoided and this was certainly a prevalent view when I studied at St. Martin’s. Perhaps this aversion is a dated idea that needs to be reconsidered. Laki Haze deliberately collides the analytical with the romantic, and I have since come to realise that romanticism can be embraced and hold its place providing it does not degenerate into solipsism or sentimentality (p. 180).  

The Non-Objective and Conceptual Films

Raban’s descriptions of his landscape films emphasize how all possibilities of the cinematic apparatus are carefully accounted for and exploited in the making of the films. In a number of films in the 1970s, Raban carried this forward by dispensing with representational imagery altogether in favour of those sourced from the basic cinematic apparatus, that in the intensity of their experience recall the cinema of Paul Sharits. Projector shutters, film frames, and gradations of film emulsion become the subject in films like Diagonal (1973), Surface Tension (1976), and Wave Formations (1977) – a degree zero of representation. Medium-specific is the term that best describes these works, a modernist pursuit where a medium turns to itself for its subject. Raban disputes the abstract label for these films “because they each take the very mechanism of cinema as primary image source” (p. 23). Contemporary moving image culture, within both the art and cinema contexts, remain true to their roots in financialized Capitalism in their dislike for sluggish materiality, resulting in near zero circulation or preservation of such works thus making it almost impossible to encounter them in the present. Putting that despondent thought aside for a moment, it’s striking how, unlike many filmmakers for whom multi-screen works were a logical progression from single-screen, Raban explored the spatial and temporal possibilities of such expanded set ups from very early on. Equally striking is the simultaneity of many interests within the prolific output in the 1970s, one such, in the sphere of Performance and Conceptual art. 

Wave Formations. © Bryony McIntyre, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), 2007.

In the influential essay titled Real Time/Space (1972), Malcolm Le Grice spoke in favour of a non-retrospective reality in cinema at the time of the projection event in opposition to a retrospective reality that distances the recorded space from the projection space.⁷ In Precarious Vision (1973), Annabel Nicolson set-up a film event as a performative exchange between the screen, audience, and the projectionist. In addition to the growing influence of Conceptual Art in Britain at the time, a loose quest for “site-specificity” was in the air. In Take Measure (1973), Raban performatively meters the length of the film to be projected by measuring the distance between the projector and the screen, thus inscribing the architecture of the screening room into the film that then reflexively engages the audience in their awareness of the space. Film-performances, multi-screens, and installations loosely define the attributes of the FilmAktion group comprising Le Grice, Nicholson, Raban, Gill Eatherly and David Crosswaite among others. In Raban’s 2’45’’ (1973), a camera placed next to the projector iteratively filmed an audience facing a projection on a roll of 16mm film, the projected film being the one recorded in the same space using the same set-up on the previous evening. “In planning 2’45’’, I was working with the proposition of making a work that brought together the time of production with time of exhibition within the space and time frame of the screening room”, Raban outlines (p. 45). The unification of the projection and shooting time-space is furthered in Pink Trousers (1975) and the notion of feedback that informs these works extends to Raban’s conceptual photography like Not to be Reproduced (1978). The network of associations of these works with developments in other artistic medium is naturally broad given the highly fecund period when they were conceived and realized, Raban picks out Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969), Tony Conrad’s Film Feedback (1974), and Stephen Partridge’s Monitor (1974) as outstanding examples (pp. 54-55). 

The London Filmmakers’ Co-op

The London Filmmakers’ Co-op (LFMC) was a utopic undertaking that brought together the material conditions of social, economic, and intellectual life of film under one roof. Much of the vaunted British experimental films from the 1960s and the 1970s were realised under its auspices. It’s one of the pioneering film co-operatives that set the template for similar such organizations instrumental in the mobilization of experimental film culture across western cities. Understandably then, LFMC was the hotbed of creativity and attracted the radical pioneers of its time, resulting in a treasury of fascinating anecdotes, many such and other ephemera from the Co-op’s first decade have been collected in the publication Shoot, Shoot, Shoot.⁸ 

In a chapter devoted exclusively to Co-op narratives in the book, Raban recalls many episodes from his time at the LFMC between 1972-1977, the period when he was active there as a workshop organizer (p. 59). He describes its layout – the offices, the screening and editing rooms – the climate of mutual learning, the participatory ethos, the screenings of in-progress works, the women filmmakers in its fold, and the overall fluidity between different activities in the space. As far as film co-ops from the 1970s go, LFMC certainly achieved more gender-parity than its counterparts in Europe and North America. “In retrospect, the London Filmmakers Co-op could almost be seen as the realization of a Marxist ideal, combining production, exhibition, and distribution within its three strands of being”, Raban adds (p. 63). LFMC thrived for a sovereignty from market forces, its formalist pursuits challenged spectatorial orthodoxies and expanded the possibilities that lay latent within the medium of film. It is in every sense a radical formation that staked its political claim not by relying on rhetorical films, but rather, in an Adornoian sense, by being fiercely autonomous while fait social,⁹ and by negating the dominant reactionary forms. Perhaps the greatest vindication of the Co-op’s political achievements came from Marc Karlin, the prime mover of political collectives in Britain such as Berwick Street Collective and Cinema Action, who, as Raban recalls, “spoke admiringly about the Co-op’s successful integration of workshop, cinema and distribution rueing with evident disappointment that the so called political workshops […] never achieved that to the same extent” (p. 63). 

The Feature-Length Films

Not all independent filmmaking in Britain in the 1970s can be classified as structural-materialist, less confrontational personal and other expressive forms co-existed as evidenced by the films of Anne Rees-Mogg, Margaret Tait, David Larcher, Susan Stein among several others. But by the end of the 1970s, the formalist juggernaut did run out of steam, in Britain just as in the United States and Germany. The full implication of the so-called “return to image” in the 1980s is difficult to express in all its complexity, but two commentators usefully track these changes: Nina Danino described it as a displacement of the signifier for a greater influence on the signified¹⁰ while Michael O’Pray framed it as a pluralization of film practice.¹¹ Raban doesn’t reflect too much on this in the book even though his films in the 1980s begin to accommodate narrative much more than in the previous decade. In the neo-romantic film Black and Silver (1981), William and Marilyn Raban take Velásquez’s painting Las meninas – which, as Foucault once noted, is marked by a matter of pure reciprocity that then embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints¹² – and Oscar Wilde’s short story The Birthday of the Infanta as its point of departure. The film is a costume drama staged in two parts – in bluish monochrome and colour respectively – that shifts its site from the beach to the inside of a studio, where the painting is staged as an eccentric play of mirrorings and doublings. The in-built reciprocity in the painting, where the painter within its frame, looking at the off-frame space that can easily be us – the spectator, is a pre-emption of the modernist trope of art making its audience aware of itself as a work of art, something that drew Raban to the painting when he saw it in Madrid. Black and Silver, as Raban describes “engages with narrative in playful ways that are more pantomimic than serving an illusionistic purpose” (p. 74) and somewhat more sceptically as a film that “had narrative elements of costume drama that were unsatisfactorily resolved” (p. 91). 

By 1982, Channel Four emerged as an audacious TV broadcaster in Britain, the two films Raban finished under its tutelage took an essayistic turn. The first of them, Thames Film (1986) is a portrait of the city of London seen from the river. Present day views of the dockyards, warehouses, and architecture on the banks and inner city are cut against archival footage from films commissioned by the Port of London Authority, animated maps and photographs of the Thames from 1937. Presented as a voice over, is Thomas Pennant’s Voyage from London to Dover. In the chapter devoted to the film, Raban does mention his intention to make a clear break from his previous work (ibid.). To what end is an open question. Having not seen and only read about Black and Silver, it’s hard to assess for me how much of a bridging role the intermediary film played, but the break in Thames Film does seem definitive. It’s not so much that the film deals with maritime themes and dabbles with Britain’s colonial past – to its credit it avoids being overtly rhetorical – but in its embrace of descriptive form that it comes across as an anomaly. The film suffers from the density of shots which are too many and too fleeting, compositionally, they vary widely, between striking and banal, but even though more striking than banal, the cuts intervene too soon for the shots to realize their visual potential. The film’s aim to bring historical time face to face with the present is easily established but is then overemphasized and literalized through itinerant cuts between the archival and recent footage, the conformity of the voice and the image rendering the former illustrative which is very unlike Raban’s use of sound that is otherwise never redundantly subservient. How much of this can be attributed to the demands of the framework of television is anybody’s guess but it probably was consequential. 

The other film in this period, From 60° North (1991) showcases the enthusiastic sailor in Raban. The gorgeously shot voyage-film referencing the Spanish Armada is a homage to the sea and landscapes, the adventure of sailing, of navigation, and the elemental force of water that, like nothing else, defines male patheticism and typifies colonial conquests. It nudges us to recall Christian Krohg’s seascapes, the stormy waters in Marcel Broodthaers’ found postcards that he turned into films, and Peter Hutton’s sea-portraits during sail. The voice over in the film again seems a bit of an impediment, the expressive diction feels confining. But the true joy in reading about the film in the book comes from Raban’s passionate narration of setting sail and its many determinants: 

My love for landscape had expanded to endless sea horizons where the absence of any feature rising above the horizontal plane, makes all the variation in colour of daylight more keenly felt. My sailing experience has helped me to rely on intuition and has sharpened my awareness of changing weather patterns, both of which can be usefully applied to filming outdoors. My way of making films is not dissimilar to my approach to sailing: I sometimes start a film with no clear sense of where I am trying to get to and reading through the sailing logs that I have kept for over 30 years; I am struck that some of my voyages started with only a vague plan (p. 103).

From 60° North

A Chronicler of London

In the 1990s, once Thatcher’s premiership of Britain came to a close, Raban made a series of films that chronicled London’s urban geography under the long legacy of Thatcherism – its increasing gentrification, the social and racial disparities on its streets, its economic expansion, and eventually Brexit. This distinctly political turn in Raban’s filmmaking didn’t thrust him towards didactic documentaries, on the contrary, his films were keenly observed, the shots carefully selected, frames and duration pondered, and their immediate interpretation, thanks to the absence of voiced descriptions, left to the audience. “To show rather than tell” – as he would often characterize his filmmaking – constituted “a political decision to empower the audience so they became active participants in the construction of meaning” (p. 112).  

The three films he made in the vicinity of the Canary Wharf Tower – Sundial (1992), A13 (1994), and Island Race (1996) – constitute a reckoning for Raban, who had been a resident of Isle of Dogs for two decades, of the tower’s imposing impact on its surrounding, and gradually, the transformations it instigated in adjacent neighbourhoods. The tower, which opened in 1991 marking the extension of London’s financial district and realization of Thatcherite policies, is framed centrally from nearly 70 different locations with varying foregrounds in Sundial, showcasing its imposing visual omnipresence for inhabitants in its vicinity. A13 focusses on the sharp contrast between capitalist infrastructural development and the widening social and economic disparities it forebears; the montage and the split-screens used near the end of the film signals an affinity to Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929). Island Fuse documents the rise of ultra-nationalism, its visual prominence in the racially diverse Tower Hamlets and the counter-racist demonstrations in its wake. The three films together referred to as the Under the Tower Trilogy anticipates his later films like MM (2002) and About Now MMX (2010).

Sundial

MM captures the construction of the Millennium Dome at the cusp of the new millennium from various vantage points in the city. It references the Canary Wharf Tower in its opening shots to hint at the continuity of urban vicissitude of London. Intercepted with archival material, it is a documentation of the dome’s coming into being through the wastelands of its construction sites that culminates with the fireworks on the New Year’s Eve at its inauguration. About Now MMX, filmed during the Great Recession in London from the 21st Floor of Balfron Tower, deploys a long lens, time-lapse cinematography in combination with pans and tilts to drive home the polarity of the crisis’ financial impact on the city’s skyline and its streets, the rich and the poor. A. L. Rees had rightly pointed out that unlike his LFMC peers, Raban expanded his work in a new direction by blending experimental film with documentary.¹³ The results from this fusion might not always yield exciting results, for example in About Now MMX where the camera’s vertical and horizontal motions are combined with time-lapsing, the two drivers of change within the frame cancel each other out, not allowing the time-lapse to register any striking visual phenomena except in one or two shots and even then, too briefly. The montage based dialectical meanings which drive the movements of the camera begin to seem arbitrary beyond a certain point, and not isolating them from the time-lapsing doesn’t allow for any spatial coherence to develop, the field of vision feels too fragmented. David Cunningham’s soundtrack imparts a sense of ominousness, and whether intended or not, it assigns the film a psychogeographic dimension. One misses the austerity of the time-lapse sequences in the landscape films where the balance between stasis and movement is worked out impeccably for time-lapsing to be able to work its magic. And yet, About Now MMX is creditably at odds with the vanity of a film like Isaac Julien’s Enigma from 2014 – a time-lapse of Dubai’s cityscape – and the depraved logic of the art world that enables its limited edition distribution model. About Now MMX is Raban’s last analogue film, shot on 35mm, prior to that, all his films were on 16mm. Film labs in Britain at the time stopped making prints from negatives. In his digital films like The Houseless Shadow (2011), Time and the Wave (2013), and London Republic (2016), Raban continued to push the frontiers of sound and image to critique right wing policies in Britain, without ever being reductionist or revelatory. Raban himself cares little if these films get bracketed as documentary or experimental. Positioning them within the history of documentary certainly problematizes a tendency to frame documentary as a counterpoint to postwar modernism – an opposition of critical importance for Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler in the late 1970s and the 1980s¹⁴ –  by snatching it out of the realm of formal politics, in film just as in documentary photography.

Experimental Film in the Gallery

Raban’s commentaries on his films are often appended by details of their exhibition. In many cases, the 1970s films were shown at galleries in the UK like the Gallery House and 291 Gallery in London, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, among other venues. This points to a minor yet significant prehistory of moving images being incorporated in contemporary art that is not often acknowledged. Experimental film and expanded cinema did find a place in avant-garde galleries just like Conceptual Art, Performance, and Land Art did. To demand this acknowledgement in discourse, practice, or historicism is not to say that everybody needs to pay their debt to high modernism, the levelling of the playing field between cultural and financial capital by neoliberalism has neatly ensured that no such need arises, but to sober up some of the pioneering claims of developments in the art market in the 1990s. One such gallery was Acme that also operated studios where artists found temporary but affordable housings from 1973, first at the East End of London and later in Hackney. Raban was one of its beneficiaries for three years. His film 1972-82 (2014) combines Acme’s archival footage with new audio interviews, conveying the history of artistic activities at the space in the first decade of the studio’s existence.

1972-82

Spectators and the Avant-Garde

At multiple times in the book, Raban mentions the audience coming to their own conclusion with regard to the implication of his films. Simulation for the spectator, affirmation for the artist – that was always the deal of avant-garde art. “The heroically creative artist – transcending, violating boundaries – needs the empathetic audience to bespeak his or her own sense of potential, as well as to counteract the sense of the alien audience, lurking in the wings of society, demanding that the artist acknowledge and conform to known boundaries. The avant-garde artist simultaneously imagines an accepting and a rejecting audience, both the reflections of the artist’s own narcissistic fear of the loss of creativity, and uncertain sense of potency”, wrote Donald Kuspit in 1982,¹⁵ bemoaning how the avant-garde artist wants to have his cake and eat it too. It is true that “perception” and “consciousness” that intellectually and in some cases, physically, demanded active engagement of the audience, became keywords for advocacy of formalist practices, and by the end of the 1970s, some of it rang hollow. Now that avant-gardism has been well and truly expunged, re-evaluations of the relationship between art and spectator might be in order. Neoliberalist economies love efficiency and immediacy and that demands art to confess its political aims at the expense of acknowledgement of its limits; dematerialization goes a long way in it. As opposed to the incompleteness of avant-garde practices that show but don’t tell, the closing of the gap between art and its political function, or political art that everyone seems to love and can’t get enough of, allows art to be conveniently integrated into the logic of capitalist extraction, neo-colonialism, and genocide, as an easy corrective and a balancing act, the dangling of the carrot with the stick. Showing or withholding the easy path to meaning permits an objective introspection on a wider array of social relations, telling is both an imposition of the author and a subjugation of the audience. 

William Raban, William Raban’s Nautical Twilight: Fifty Years an Artist Filmmaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Endnotes