In The Dark 8 minutes, video, 2003
A meditation on birth, silence and the American cinema, sealed with a kiss. A single gesture into light.
”Mike Hoolboom’s In the Dark provided a contemplative break in the program. Most of the piece is a black screen, with the artist narrating a wry and thoughtful voice-over on cinema, Hollywood and silence. What does this desire to sit in the dark and watch flickering images mean, anyway? In the end we are rewarded with an onscreen kiss between a man and a woman – the kiss is long, the kiss is luscious. In the Dark simply cuts to the chase – after all, isn’t the kiss the moment we all wait for in a film?” LIFT Newsletter, Larissa Fan
“There are fortunately superb photographs of the Chauvet paintings. The cave has been closed up and no public visits will be allowed. This is a correct decision, for like this, the paintings can be preserved. The animals on the rocks are back in the darkness from which they came and in which they resided for so long. We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It’s the interior from which everything came.” The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger
“To speak is not to see. Speech frees thought from this optical requirement which has dominated our approach to things for thousands of years in the western tradition, and invited us to think under the guarantee of light or under the threat of the absence of light. I’ll let you catalogue the words in which there are suggestions that saying the truth has to be thinking according to he standard of the eyes.” L’Entretien infini by Maurice Blanchot
