Prints in Concrete (1)- Dictio Pii

PRINTS IN CONCRETE – Dictio Pii

Looking at works of art and the profound effects it had on me. The analysis will not be geared intensely towards the works themselves, but why I feel I had such a deep response to it.

Markus Schinwald’s film exhibit- Dictio Pii

Date experienced: October 2005

Location: Tate Modern, UK

My second visit to the Tate Modern contained this experience: in one of the film rooms I was drawn in by a deeply haunting, repetitive piece of music, laced with a voiceover which kept the same text, but spoken by different people. This is a combination of several descriptions of what I experienced, trying to give a complete summary of a non-narrative:


Dictio pii (2001)
The mysterious and obsessive behavior of seven characters is portrayed in this enigmatic series of films by Austrian artist Markus Schinwald. Schinwald's highly choreographed films follow no logical narrative. Instead the artist weaves together fragmentary stories of disjointed emotions and longings, deliberately invoking narrative stereotypes and cultural clichés. This work, Dictio pii (2001), consists of five films, screened consecutively without any apparent break between them. The action takes place in a vacant hotel where seven characters in various forms of physical constraint move in and out of view with no discernible motivation. Doors open, strangely garbed figures enter through them only to vanish again in the next room. An old lift attendant incessantly brushes dust off his jacket. An aging diva in a white dress with a fetishistic prosthesis around her neck smokes one cigarette after another. A young man perpetuates his artificial smile by gripping a taut silver chain between his teeth. A girl's body inflates pulsatingly, and a man lets a woman bind his arms. The images are accompanied by a male voice, intoning a cryptic philosophical monologue. No individual film contains a cohesive story, although the same characters re-appear throughout the sequence. Schinwald has worked in sculpture, dance, fashion, film, and performance. Much of his work alludes to psychoanalysis, and a fascination with the power of gestures. In Dictio pii, the repeated, and more or less meaningless sequences of actions performed by the various characters, create the chilling and compelling mood of a dream or nightmare.

I know I tried my best to transcribe the repeated voiceover dialogue, seemingly coming from the minds of each inhabitant. Though my details weren’t exact, I have found the speech online:

We are the perfume of corridors
Unfamiliarised with isolated activity
Traitors of privacy.

We are Utopian craftsmen
Scope heeled diplomats, pretty beggars
Not the product of poverty
We don't take from anyone.

We are pillared by mild sadness and polymorphic history
Eternally skeptical,
But We Believe.

We are immortal volunteers
Living in the sensation of being everything
And the certitude of being nothing.

We are just an outline.

We disband prompted paths of movement
Extend our bodies,
Become abysmal dancers.

We are illiterate of perfection, following the curves of belief.

Interested only in the gestures of bending.
Scaffolded postures,obscene geometry.
Frozen irony.

We are deranged.

Run in a continuous loop, purposefully obscuring a beginning/ending, later I found this was its purpose:

If I were to make a movie, then it would probably tell a story. My films, however, especially Dictio Pii, do not have a beginning or an end. They only really consist of a middle part. It’s a kind of pseudo-narration in which certain acts are alluded to, but not carried out; it’s a kind of artificial ruins, as though one had removed the scenes from the script that were moving the plot forward, just taken them away and left the rest. -M.S.

And yet the hotel connects them all, even if emptied of purpose. Apt, considering how a hotel is a temporary resting ground where none call home.

I spent, I believe, a full hour in the exhibit. It could have been longer. I am not sure how many people walked in and out of the exhibit, though many stayed for a period coming close to mine.

Its immediate conscious attraction was absolutely its soundtrack. Two long strings of music that seem to carry off and echo until they are replaced by new variations of the same note… eerie, haunting, longing, melancholy. If the aftereffect of throwing a rock into a pond had its own sonic signature besides its surface sound, it could be this track. Slow, liquid, flowing, slowly dissipating.

The most recent comparison I can give it are the tracks contained in composer Mark Isham’s soundtrack for the 40’s set noir, The Public Eye..which are also full of longing, summarized by the feeling of walking down a long alley alone at night while a city sleeps. (Search itunes for “The Public Eye” and you’ll hear the comparison if comparing it to Pii.)

This was and is a favorite piece of music for me, connected to deeply emotional times in my life. Naturally there has been an unconscious reminder of these times.

This music/soundscape of Dictio Pii also suggested to me the consistent passing of days, watching the sun come up and descend as we rush through our lives(even though it also suggests such slowness and stillness). Often I can feel the world is passing me by, and moving on without me when I feel I'm not making progress in life. In a way, that perfectly ties into what Schinwald states above, that his films seem to inhabit a middle ground where the elements moving the plot forward had been removed. The character(s) in this film certainly feel like they were left there, and there's a shocking sense of emptiness in the broader shots of the hotel. The people, and their purposes, moved on. Only these characters/symbols remain.

Constriction, paralysis, and being trapped in an open space are themes the visuals immediately suggest. “Trapped” is another theme I’ve found myself to be obsessed with, in creative work and in life. Whether trapped financially, emotionally, mentally, I’ve experienced/observed it in various degrees as we all have. Characters/symbols in Dictio Pii are imprisoned in repetition; whether through gestures, phrases, or poses.

I realized it was the body language that really kept me in that room, though. Some time has gone by with me pondering just why.

After some research into the artist recently I stumbled upon a breakthrough of sorts; unfortunately it’s not as to why this particular instance haunts me, but what it is: Schinwald’s work touches on (while I believe it's not intended as a direct expression of) Freud’s theory of The Uncanny, which until this week I had not read a proper articulation of.

The concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

For myself, it’s much more of an opposing balance of rationalization and rejection. I was uncomfortable in that room and that’s also a reason I stayed.

Over the years, through articles I have written and films/stories I have kept returning to, is a deep-seated fascination and fear of this subject. A human figure doing anything but learned, ‘human’ behavior or movement patterns is something I have always found compelling and deeply disturbing. Filmmakers like David Lynch have repeatedly tapped into this; his symbolic doppelgangers in the third and final episodes of Twin Peaks could be the best visual depictions of this; though any time something that touches on The Uncanny has crossed my path, I’ve gravitated towards it. I studied books on the paranormal as a teen; often in ‘eyewitness reports’ of strange beings are reports of ‘humans’ moving in ways they shouldn’t, with no context, or communicating in a way that suggests an imitation of English, and not an articulation. The 2002 adaptation of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies hints at elements the novel depicts; characters that look human but are "wrong." Entities that repeat the same phrase for an hour.













Lynch and Schinwald both depict through their choreography, a world where otherwise banal situations come off as quite alien and disturbing. Both feel expert in their depiction of psychic or emotional states manifested in their physical equivalent. And yet Pii doesn't feel an homage or tribute to Lynch. Though it's the feelings of the Uncanny, combined with the haunting music, and its multilayered depictions of 'trapped' that have made me return to the memories of experiencing Dictio Pii again and again..

Brief interview with Markus Schinwald re: the uncanny and Dictio Pii

Short, small sized clip of Dictio Pii intended to highlight the soundtrack
(click on the middle white stripe, under 'projekte' click on Dictio Pii)

Larger, low resolution version of the same clip- direct access



-Adam