Every video that I’ve ever put into a gallery is available freely on this website and my vimeo channel . Many more of my videos that have never been seen in a gallery are also available for you to watch online.
I really care about the spatial context that you can only get from installing these works in a gallery. I’d love do a show with lots of screens and a whole stack of my videos together in space along with my sound and drawing work. I currently couldn’t put on this a show myself and I am yet to receive an offer of the institutional support that I would need to make it happen. I am, however, more than able to share all of my video work freely with you. I would love to see more artists do the same.
Francis Alÿs
One artist who does this is Francis Alÿs. All of his video work is available on his website. It is one of the few truly great video art archives on the internet. I have watched a lot of Alÿs’ work online. I have also seen a significant number of these works installed together with Alÿs’ paintings, at the Museo Tamayo, in an exhibition of works created between 2000 and 2014.
Seeing these works at Museo Tamayo I was struck by how different the experience was to seeing the works online. The online viewing only heightened the impact of a carefully curated selection of these works thoughtfully installed across several spaces. The show was deeper for me because of my familiarity with the works. I could more fully appreciate what they were doing together in space and how they related to Alÿs’ paintings.
This is why I wish more artists would follow Francis Alÿs example and share more of their video work online. Installing work in space can add multiple dimensions to the experience. Making your work freely available online means many more people will be able to watch it.
I was prompted to write this reflection because I was recently reminded of the fact that there are people who deeply appreciate my work who have never seen it in a gallery. Maybe you are one of those people. I am thankful for the way that this site and my vimeo channel allows me to connect with you.
Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, then to Mexico
I first saw Francis Alÿs’ video Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing), in a gallery (the Joan Miró Foundation in 2001). Seeing this work put me on a path to Mexico. Only days before or after (I don’t remember the sequence of events), I conceived of The Chopstick Technique.
In 2002 I submitted an application for the Helen Lempriere Traveling Art Prize (now the NSW Visual Art Fellowship (Emerging)). My plan was to travel to Mexico City to work with Francis Alÿs. The Chopstick Technique was one of the works that I submitted in my application.
I won the prize and traveled to Mexico City 2003. I worked with a number of artists there. Francis Alÿs wasn’t one of them. I did meet him very briefly. More importantly, I met my wife on the day that I arrived in Mexico City, a meeting 20 years long and still going strong (apologies for the rhyme).
It was partly the way that Francis Alÿs’ work Paradox of Praxis 1 had changed the course of my life that led me to make the work Heat Death (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, Reprise) in mid 2012. This is my first work of homage. I wanted to make a smaller and more intimate response to the original work.
Re-watching
I noticed something new when re-watched this work recently. This is not documentation of an action in the way that Francis Alÿs’ work is. It is instead a work of fiction. A kind of poetic fiction that required me to suspend the disbelief that I had in the relationship between image and sound.
Félix Blume
I realised that I had been hearing the sounds of Heat Death, not as the sound of the shot, but as a recording that I selected from Félix Blume’s amazing freesound archive (at the time of this writing it contains 1885 beautifully recorded sounds). Be sure to check out more of Félix’s great work on his website.
I combined one of Félix’s recordings with another close recording of individual drips carefully synced to occur slightly after you see the drop fall from my fingers.
This work was shot in the hallway of a house that I rented with my wife in Leura. In my minds eye I can still see the lighting setup below my hand, how I jerry-rigged it to stop the light spilling onto the black backdrop.
Suspension
But if we put those production details aside and suspend our disbelief we can enter a moment of poetic fiction with this work.
A hand holds an ice-cube over the only light source in the deep dark space of an abandoned theater near Prypiat, close to Chernobyl, Ukraine. The ice melts drop by drop into a glass as rain falls in and around the crumbling building. Why is this hand is doing this action in this space? This is poetic fiction, made from a visual conceit and true, documentary sound.
Correspondence
After I included Félix’s field recording in my work back in 2012 I wrote him a message to thank him for sharing his sounds. The message is still there, one of the few in my freesound inbox.
Hi Felix,
I came across your sounds when I was looking for some extra audio for a short video work that references this piece by Francis AlÿsThis is the work that I made,
I didn’t realise until I was looking at your website later that you’ve done some work with Francis Alÿs, so that was a nice connection,
Thanks again for all your great sounds,
Best,
Ben
Hi Ben
Nice work… and nice connection, yes!
Coincidence doesn’t exist!
I’m working on the whole sound-part of the video from Francis Alys since 3 years now…Let me know if you need more sounds for your next projects!
All best
Félix
In making a video homage to Francis Alÿs I had unknowingly selected sounds recorded by a person who had been working with Francis Alÿs for the previous three years.
“Coincidence doesn’t exist!”
I agree with this sentiment but I would phrase it slightly differently. Coincidence is never just coincidence. Coincidence, (literally two things coinciding), can have all the significance that we ascribe to it. Anyone who works with sound and moving images understands that coinciding elements can have powerful effects. The phrase “just a coincidence” doesn’t do justice to the power of coincident elements.
Meeting (almost)
In late 2012 we traveled to Mexico. We stayed in Mexico City for a few days before heading to Chiapas to visit my wife’s family. I organised to meet Félix and Francis during our time in Mexico City. Unfortunately Montezuma’s revenge prevented this meeting from happening.
Meeting Félix, watching a Harun Farocki film
I finally met Félix in Mexico City in 2015. We went to a screening of Harun Farocki’s film War At a Distance. I love Harun Farocki’s work. I often tell my students about him. You can find some of Farocki’s works online, including War at a Distance, but it is only available in German. It would be great if Farocki’s films could be more freely available.
Later, during the same trip in 2015, Félix invited us to his place for dinner. He was living in a beautiful old apartment building in the Centro Historico (the building has since fallen prey to gentrification, it is now a boutique hotel).
As we ate the Chikungunya virus was making copies of itself in my blood. At around 2am, back at a friend’s house, I woke up, with fever and chills and the joint pain befitting a virus that was once called break-bone fever. My encounter with this virus, and its lingering effects, was among the things that led me to produce the work Treatment (Fleming Street) for Cementa 22.
In 2019 I traveled with my wife to Bolvia for a workshop called Sociology of the Image with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui where we met Mexican artist Daniel Godínez Nivón. During a trip to Tiwanaku Daniel and I started chatting.
At 3800 meters above sea level the clouds are closer and when they part the thinner atmosphere does less to protect you from the Sun’s UV rays. There were clouds and sun that day.
I asked Daniel where he lived. He told us that he lived in an apartment in the Centro Historico of Mexico City. I mentioned that we had a friend Félix Blume who lived in the same area. What followed was the moment at Tiwanaku that I found out, under the equatorial sun, that I had met Daniel Godínez Nivón, Félix Blume’s housemate, at a workshop called Sociology of the Image, in La Paz, Bolivia.
“Coincidence doesn’t exist!”
Art is often made through a combination of deliberate and chance-based coincidence. Deliberation can lead to powerful coincidence. When things are brought together through chance there exists the possibility of magic. When things coincide in ways that we deem significant, in art and in life, it is the significance that we give to these events that matters most.
I find it significant that artists who freely share their work online would be connected through the events that I describe here. This sharing of work helps to facilitate significant coincidence.
Avantwhatever, Stephen Cornford and the Harun Farocki Epilogue (more correspondence)
I wrote everything that you’ve read up until this point in March 2023. There were a few things that I wanted to add before hitting the ‘publish’ button. I got busy. It’s now the end of August.
I am currently in the process of organising a screening of Harun Farocki’s War at a Distance with Charles Barbour and other colleagues from Western Sydney University.
Farocki died in 2014. To get permission to screen Farocki’s work Charles sent a message to Antje Ehmann, who is listed as the contact on Farocki’s website. Antje has been very forthcoming and, while the details of the screening are still being finalised, securing the rights to screen Farocki’s film was much easier than I imagined it might be when I was writing this post back in March.
Shortly after I suggested the idea of screening Farocki’s work to Charles I received a message from my friend Sean O’Connell. He wrote:
masterful work – speaks so wonderfully about the politics of matter, and that weird recursiveness is so great…. i recommend!
He linked to Spectral Index by Stephen Cornford, commissioned by Avantwhatever. I started watching and wrote back
Yes this is damn good! Reminds me of Harun Farocki.
I watched to the end and wrote again
I misspoke. This is fucking amazing. So good! We are likely gonna do a
screening of Harun Farocki’s War at a Distance. That film and this one
together would be one hell of a double bill.
I wrote to Stephen Cornford
A few weeks a friend sent me the link to your work ‘Spectral Index’ on Avantwhatever. At the time I had just spoken to Charles Barbour regarding the possibility of organising a screening of Harun Farocki’s film War at a Distance. Do you know it? If you do, I’m sure that you’ve thought about the connections between Farocki’s work and your own. If not, I would really love for you to see Farocki’s work and hear what you think of it.
and later in the same message
There are some works of art that forever change your perspective on our world. ‘Spectral Index’ is one of those works for me. Congratulations. It is an amazing work.
Stephen wrote back
Thanks so much for getting in touch and for your kind words about the video.
As you say, Farocki was a big influence on this work, so your proposal for a double bill sounds wonderful. I haven’t seen War At A Distance (I forget now whether I have a copy but only in German, or if it’s one of the ones I’ve not managed to find) but I am very familiar with Eye/Machine and – perhaps my favourite – Images of the World and the Inscription of War.
A week or so later I wrote to Ben Byrne who commissioned Spectral Index for Avantwhatever. With the screening now taking shape I needed to ask Ben a question
We would like to acknowledge your role with Avantwhatever in commissioning this work [Spectral Index] and give Avantwhatever a plug as part of the screening. Please let me know if there is something specific in the way that you would like us to acknowledge your work with Avantwhatever.
It was Ben’s reply that lead back to this post that I started writing four months ago. I know you’ll see the connection here.
My focus is to encourage new approaches to the commissioning and publishing of work that eschew the logics of false scarcity that would have artworks shown only in galleries or other venues in favour of releasing work as freely and openly as possible online.
It’s my hope that rather than preventing other opportunities to present works this fosters interest in and in turn special presentations of works focused on providing good environments for experiencing and engaging with the works communally, as your screening demonstrates I think.