“Listening to something is an act of surrender”
Brian Eno
Rick Goldsmith, from Catcher Media, is better known as a participatory film-maker, but the Listening #1 video installation showcases a different side of his film-making practice, one which is more personal. Rick was commissioned for the inaugural A Kind of Hush series of events, which were a celebration of listening in all of its forms. Rick’s video, which has no audio, still involves a participatory element as it invites friends, family and neighbours to explore the act of listening. Whether the person filmed is listening to a favourite piece of opera, pop, the news or indie rock, listening here is presented as an intensely individual and nuanced human activity. Rick would like to invite the viewer to take some time to simply watch human faces, listening.
“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face.”
Carl Theodor Dreyer
By filming these video portraits from a fixed camera position, these almost static images encourage the viewer not to seek a narrative thread. In this way, the installation has a clear kinship with Warhol’s series of ‘Screen Test’ films from 1964-66 (each lasting the length of a 100-foot roll of film, around 3 minutes, and shot with a stationary Bolex camera) and shares a conceptual space with Gillian Wearing’s Turner prize-winning work ‘Sixty Minutes Silence’ from 1996, in which she videos a large group of actors dressed as police officers and posing for a portrait. Bill Viola’s classical treatment of the human figure from devotional Renaissance paintings in his video work such as ‘Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)’ from 2016, remains an enduring inspiration.
