Michael Nicholson 1916-2017

Michael NicholsoN Born United Kingdom 1916. Michael Nicholson abandoned a irst career with the English military in 1937 to enter, instead, upon a new career in the Fine Arts. As it turned out, this new career was soon to be interrupted by the outbreak of World War 2, for the duration of which he returned to his irst vocation as an oficer in the British Armed Forces. Back at art school after the war he worked with members of the Euston Road Group who formed the faculty of the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, graduating in 1948. He funded the development of a painting practice with teaching posts at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts. Emigrating to New Zealand in 1953 he joined the staff of the Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland where he lectured until 1960. During this time he showed work with the Peter Webb Gallery, participated in the inluential exhibition Object and Image (1954) and in the 8 New Zealand Painters series. Whilst in collaboration with staff of the Auckland University School of Architecture, he established the Department of Design at Elam. In 1960 Nicholson left New Zealand to live and work in Sydney where he executed sculpture commissions for corporate clients, exhibited regularly in shows such as the Mildura Sculpture Triennials, the Sydney Biennale of 1976, The Michael NicholsoN Visual Music Project: stage 3. op.s 1–4 2008 and at Watters Gallery, whilst sponsoring various “audience participatory” sculpture events under the Rational Hyphen Absurd rubric of his studio. In Sydney Nicholson paid his way with jobs at the NSW University School of Architecture, the Power Institute and Sydney Yellow Cabs. In 1986 he re-etablished ties with New Zealand and in 1988 returned to live and work in Wellington in the company of his new partner Dame Janet Paul. His engagement with the electronic media has been opportunistic. Whilst working as artist-in-residence at an up-country College for Advanced Education in Australia in 1977 he had the good fortune to ind a Scanimate Video Synthetiser interfaced with a computer installed. Working with its crew he was able to produce the raw material for what was eventually to become “Visual Music Stages 2 & 3”. It was not until shortly after my return to New Zealand in 1988 that I got my hands on video facilities again, thanks to the good ofices of Janet’s daughter Jane (Paul) in her role at the Film Archive, which has provided amongst other things, the person and technical expertise of Diane McAllen to edit and assemble the two recent works. I am most grateful for their assistance with this project. —michael nicholson, 2008 Visual Noise Vs Visual Music? OR, SOME TECHNICAL BACKGROUND TO THE CREATION OF VISUAL MUSIC PROJECT STAGE 3… Diane McAllen The Michael NicholsoN Visual Music Project: stage 3. op.s 1–4 2008 By Martin Rumsby “as a kid i was always curious about something called ‘The Future’. still am. But no matter how fast i move the future seems always to be just that one step ahead. The other thing of course is the risk that if one doesn’t keep moving, one’s past may catch up with one.” — michael nicholson Seeing himself as a composer of images, the artist Michael Nicholson conceived of these four short, non-igurative, video works as a visual music akin to classical music. Based on video synthesis projects that Nicholson undertook with video engineers in Australia in the early 1970s, earlier forms of this project were exhibited in both Australia and Japan from the mid- to late-1970s. This footage, created on three-quarter inch U Matic video format, has been subsequently cleaned up and re-edited by Diane McAllen, as directed by Nicholson, at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington. Drawing on precedents from ilm, music and art, Nicholson fashions selfreferential video structures that exist parallel to – rather than as representations of – external reality. Although probably unintended since Nicholson aspires to classical form, the bright and garish colours of the forms speak almost of a latter day, non-igurative Pop aesthetic, or of that of the Chicago Imagists. Accompanying electronic soundtracks create a sense of spatiality around the visuals. This is a double form of spatiality: one which extends aurally in three dimensions into the viewing space, creating a depth around the visuals; and the other, a sense of universal space ‘out there’, somewhere else, both beyond and within us. A space in which, if we look deeply enough, we may be able to comprehend an aural and visual perceptual consciousness. The four movements begin tentatively, like a fragmented interplanetary transmission of optical vibrations. Vibrations that range from stark black and white through to primary video colours, merging in and out of one another in a tenuous stability that evokes the very interior of a technological vision. The arrival of this work signals a coming to the fore of a genre that has, until now, been latent in New Zealand art. This being an optically printed or ‘special effects’ model that posits cinema as a visual and aural medium capable of carrying a formal language, primarily in shape and colour, which may in some way accord with music. Nicholson’s luminescent opus bears correspondence not only as an electronic variation on Len Lye’s dancing cinematic forms but also to Nova Paul’s recent three-colour separation studies, as well as Janine Randerson’s convergences of art, science, and technology in her intermedia work. Randerson herself drawing, to some extent, on precedents established by the composer Alexander Scriabin’s attempts to correlate music and colour in his symphony Prometheus, The Poem of Fire (1910), and ilmmaker Jordan Belson’s collaboration with the composer Henry Jacobs on a series of concerts incorporating abstract imagery and electronic sound, in the late 1950s. Unlike Lye’s work, however, Nicholson’s visual music cannot be so easily mistaken for a music video – which, ironically, it is. It is just that Nicholson’s concept of music and video is different from the popular conception. The difference for Nicholson being between orchestral music with visuals, and visual music with or without sounds as an independent medium within its own right. Expressing an antipathy toward both post-modernism and the business model of art Nicholson worked collaboratively with specialists in video synthesising, composing, and editing. A drawing would be created, then put into a video synthesiser to see what could be done with it in terms of colouring, distortion, movement, and rhythm. The result is beautifully orchestrated and choreographed, non-igurative compositions of electronic biomorphic forms that evoke an elemental creative principle. In this they may express Nicholson’s sense of wonder at a universe that he believes was created by a magical ‘big bang’ emerging out of nowhere. Indeed it may be that, on the evidence of this opus, Nicholson is a magician himself. This sense is conveyed by a selfreferential use of electronic feedback, the medium becoming its own source and, like the biomorphic forms in Len Lye’s Tusalava (1928), consuming itself as a transformative and reproductive act. The technology creates itself out of itself, doing so by as simple an act as pointing a video camera at an active television monitor and recording it. The ragged edges and bleeding colour of some of the forms, which one would associate with video degeneration, speaks – again ironically – of an organic quality in the technology. The organic of the electronic image-producing machine coming to life. The process is, then, transformational; as forms and patterns emerge, proceed, and morph into one another, sometimes in zigs and zags, at others like electrical arcs and oscilloscope patterns, dancing lines and globular shapes, becoming in and through process a story of things sensed and felt. Just as the artist and his collaborators have entered into a creative process, aiming to maintain an equilibrium within a process, so the role of the viewer is to similarly enter into the process as creative seeing, thinking and feeling beings. The story is, as Nicholson puts it, “Absolute colour video is structure and a process within the structure, an episode within the process, activity within episode, event within activity,” From the history of visual art Nicholson cites the inluence of Australian aboriginal rock drawings, along with painters such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Miro, who all created work through which the spirit speaks with particular directness. By shaping such inluences in electronic media Nicholson, himself a painter and sculptor since the 1950s, seeks to make colour and light speak as eloquently as steel may do for sculpture. Whereas an eye moves around a painting or photograph, and the eye and body around a sculpture, the eye and the brain read moving images in time – creating what Nicholson calls a ‘timeprint’, imprints from a different, slower and more contemplative era. Embedded in such timeprints may be the very movement of consciousness within the artist, the work, the technology, and the viewer. What may such processes of visual consciousness be? And how may they igure in art? “Events subject to unidirectional time have a past, a present state and a future outcome. An event is embedded in a process. For a process to proceed, the forces tending to chaos and the forces tending to order within it must be held in equilibrium. If one or the other dominates, the process will either atrophy or implode.” Alternately, as Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in Circles, “…this incessant movement and progression of which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of ixture or stability in the soul”. The energy, or forces, that Nicholson marshals create pattern as a stable enduring integrity, shaped in a choreography of light, electronic colour, shape and movement. In producing such work Nicholson may be asking, ‘How can the precedents of Twentieth Century painting and music be restated in the electronic moving images of our era. Can contemporary media technologies be used to express that which may be known or felt, but rarely seen?’ and, ‘Can a non-igurative visual language be developed from New Media technologies?’ and, ‘Can art be created from within technology?’ I irst met Michael Nicholson in 2006 during his creation of a short autobiographical documentary about his artistic career, entitled Visual Language Games. After seeing just a glimpse of the work that he did in the 1970s using analog video technologies, I told him if he ever wanted assistance on a video project in the future I would be keen to help. Almost a year later contacted me with the outline of what he wanted to do with the Visual Music Project, Stage 3. This involved “cannibalising” his works Green and Red Tapes for Two Banks of Monitors, and Primary Structures, deposited at the Film Archive 10 years previously, as source material for four new video works. The original U-matic tapes had suffered from the usual degradation of image to be expected of tapes nearly 30 years old, particularly drop-outs or white lecks across the image, colour shifts and edge bleeding. The Film Archive conservation team cleaned and transferred the tapes to a more stable analog video format then digitised the content ready for computer desktop editing. The original works were generated using an early analog computer animation system called the Scanimate. There were only about 12 machines ever made worldwide. The original images were hand-drawn on cells, placed on a light box and scanned in tones of grey into the Scanimate. During subsequent colourising and animation the manipulation of movement and speed were manually controlled by the operator, Brian Hicks. Layering of background and foreground images was achieved by repeated ilming and duplication, potentially resulting in quality loss at each subsequent generation. Using this system effects could be produced in real time and was used on numerous television programmes from the 1970s and 1980s including Sesame Street, The Electric Company and the irst Star Wars movie. When the time came to carry out the editing work at the Film Archive, Michael brought to the early sessions a visual story board, much like a musical score, carefully timed to a visually cued tempo. For a non-musician, it was at times dificult to follow the nuances of the original material: “are we going forward or backwards?” I would sometimes have to ask. Michael would quietly recite poetry to himself during the inevitable technical hiccups. To some extent, the interplay between analog and digital video has helped create this new work, beyond a re-edit, into one which challenges the boundaries of both media. Analog video interprets and transmits images as horizontal lines and interlaced frames, whereas digital video transmits images as square pixels that can either be interlaced frames or not. The process of digitising the original tapes and subsequent compression resulted in an extra layer of visual noise. At irst there were concerns that the end product would not be true to the original analog format or conversely that it wouldn’t meet the standard set by today’s digitally generated animation. In the context of Michael’s portfolio, however, particularly his paintings and photographs, it became clear that this layering effect over time, and use of available resources, was consistent with his body of artistic work. Diane McAllen worked on the assembly of Visual Music Project Stage 3 for Michael Nicholson. She has a background in low-budget and experimental video making and has worked for the Film Archive for nearly 10 years facilitating access to the collections through regional video access sites. Through the course of her job she has used her editing experience for various public screenings and the compression of video content for the Archive website.