zero focus

A 16mm film projector with no film in it throws light onto a paper screen. A performer cuts a rectangular hole in the very center of the screen, then widens the hole gradually, cutting the screen away in strips, so that a space of the light grows behind the screen in accordance with the gradual enlargement of the rectangular hole.

-- Takehisa Kosugi, “Film & Film #4″ (1965)

Tehching Hsieh jumped from the second floor window of his house, recording his leap on Super 8 film and through a series of photographs. Hsieh dropped approximately fifteen feet onto a concrete floor, breaking both of his ankles. He subsequently destroyed the film of this singular, unrepeatable act, but its serial photographs remain. At the time, Hsieh was unaware of Bas Jan Ader’s now widely known Fall performances (1970-1971) and Yves Klein’s infamous photomontage Leap into the Void (1960). Klein’s manipulated photograph was a theatrical evocation of momentary freedom. In contrast, Hsieh’s fall is not imbued with the ecstatic possibilities of flight or transcendence, but traumatically resonates – through his life and ours – with the brutal facts of gravity, concrete and splintered bones.

In Sanja Iveković’s Triangle (Trokut, 1979), four black-and-white photographs and written text capture an eighteen-minute performance from May 10, 1979. On that date, a motorcade carrying Josip Broz Tito, then president of Yugoslavia, drove through the streets of downtown Zagreb. As the President’s limousine passed beneath her apartment, Ivokevic began simulating masturbation on her balcony. Although she could not be seen from the street, she knew that the surveillance teams on the roofs of neighboring buildings would detect her presence. Within minutes, a policeman appeared at her door ordered her inside. Not only did Ivekovic's action expose government repression and call attention to the rights of women, it also called attention to the relationship of gender to power, and to the particular experience of political dissidence under communist rule in Eastern Europe. 

“Beuys turns up the bottom left corner of the felt, revealing a glimpse of the faulty TV picture. The voice of a TV reporter, who is talking about current milk and meat prices, is still audible. Beuys declares he has ‘undertaken a gradual elimination’ by ‘filtering away’ the picture first while leaving the sound, 'but when the picture has gone, the sound becomes absurd.'”