Something wrenching seeps through the grain and digital artifact in the glacially controlled movements of images that appear Mike Hoolboom’s short work, Visiting Hours (2018).
A woman waiting in the pre-dawn hours at a bus stop. Inside a bus filled with a dozen more, their heads wrapped tightly and belongings pulled closely around them.
These faces bear the expression of a palpable anxiety and long weariness endured. Everything is curtailed about them; time, thought and movement. They seem scrutinized even by these images, these slow moving empathetic documents of their plight.
Visiting Hours starts in darkness to sounds of fractured spoken words above faint jazz-stringed notes roaming about below. The upper/lower contrasting arrangement establishes a vertical sonic space, a light clattering engine on a deep dark ocean. The words spoken are splintered apart, rearranged in a machine-punch pattern, drumming the ears in tiny staccatos, each instance gradually extending in duration so that sense is made at irregular mile markers in the seven minutes it takes for the voice to complete the statement.
There’s something about this forged sound shape, strident and hypnotic, stuttering forth to be instantly whipped back to the beginning, going forward again, a little bit further each time as though a diligent practice of scales on a piano. Or it could be a rehearsal of the argument the woman is preparing to make at the prison gate should she be refused entry. “I visit my husband every two weeks”
Heavily grained black and white image fragments glimmer into light along with lines of text in subtitles which, with exaggerated slowness, fade on and off – intermittent annotations, puzzling the impossible circumstances faced by figures shown.
These words in amplified screen silence wonder aloud at what becomes lost in a language under pressure, in bridled speech of the sanctioned and the disempowered.
A curious gesture some ways into the piece adjusts the luminance level of the image and in doing so seems to reenact the effect of the glare of harsh sunlight striking the faces in the picture. The sound heard is that of a heavy door opening. A woman squints against the sudden brightness, a brightness created by the manipulation of the film image. I’m reminded of the truism that the best editing in cinema is that way because it is invisible. Noticeable in being unnoticed. Everything in this work is tampered with but this particular gesture struck me as poignant somehow, maybe equating the constraints in the art of form with the curtailed movements of the women documented.
Visiting Hours, a contrapuntal duet of abstraction and tempo suffused with sorrow, treads at the same time with a coolness and detachment that I take to be the expression of the true realism of the image document; the digit and the algorithm, a system of systems, the faces, weary anxious and squinting, caught in it as though in a net.
Julie Murray 2024
