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  Marnix Carpentier Alting
The Book of Light
  Netherlands 1999
tape-slide presentation
Light never remains the same for a day or an hour, but how little we notice of this. You'd need to stand still more often and watch how the light goes about its work. During a lengthy stay in Ireland Marnix Carpentier Alting fell under the spell of the spectacular light on the Atlantic coast. In Ireland you are constantly made aware of variations of light. The air and water of the west coast are perfect light traps. There are also extensive areas free of all those objects that betoken the presence of human beings and that manipulate the scene to their own advantage. Only a little group of islands can sometimes create a delicate articulation. The light here has the place to itself. It was this that gave the artist the idea of making a series of recordings of this unique light from a fixed vantage point. Afterwards he realised that he had already done something like this before, though with no particular purpose in mind. For years he regularly visited a rural estate in France where, in the course of the seasons, he had assembled a bizarrely meticulous series of photographs consisting of endlessly repeated shots from a window of the same little bit of forest. Here too he had been engrossed by the effect of the light on the forest. Light for Alting is an unfathomable and mysterious phenomenon. You can't explain it, but you can record it. The visible part of 'The Book of Light' consists of a series of photographic projections that flow and fade into each other. They form a linked series of images of light in three places: a Carthusian monastery at Padula in southern Italy, a forest in the Dordogne and a group of islands off the west coast of Ireland. The shots were not taken at specific times. The artist was present on the spot for months on end, constantly on the alert. He also photographed at night, working by moonlight and occasionally by greenish flashes of lightning. These are three sources of painterly light, not just the light peculiar to the three locations. The Irish shots were made on the island of Dursey between September 1998 and May 1999. Alting spent ten months on this bleak island. The camera was mounted on a rock – on one occasion withstanding gusts of 120 mph– and pointed towards the north in order to capture the light as it entered the atmosphere and fell upon clouds and water. This was neutral light in all its purity: the light we see in the paintings of Turner. The pictures of the forest in the Dordogne extend over a period of a ten years, again from a fixed camera position. Neutral light was not the subject this time. Trees supply their own colour, in fact they change colour the whole year round. These images recall Cézanne and Monet, who painted the same objects repeatedly — only the light is different each time. In the pictures taken at the Carthusian monastery in Padula the camera moves about the inner court. Alting's concern here is light falling on human architecture. A theatrical light; the light you see in Renaissance paintings. There the setting is usually a building. Sometimes the daylight enters a palace through a strange aperture. This is the kind of light we see later rendered so beautifully in the paintings of Caravaggio. 'The Book of Light' consists of two hundred images which have been selected from thousands of shots. The images are projected in their original state. They have been exposed at a single standard setting, with no filtration and no subsequent manipulation of the images and colours. The original transparencies are used for the projection in order to prevent loss of quality through reproduction. This yields a picture quality that electronic imaging techniques are quite unable to match. There is no human presence in the images, but we sometimes hear a voice reading out a letter. The voice is astonished by the experience of light and wonders if other people also undergo such things. The words do not appear to be intended for the audience. The text is based on a letter by Alting in which he excitedly tells the story of his pursuit of light. The text we hear is spoken by Chrétien Breukers. The musical interventions have been written by two composers, the one using acoustic resources, the other electronic. Anton Havelaar has composed music for a string orchestra augmented by harp, percussion and celeste. Marc Verhoeven's music is electronic but uses a single human voice as its source material.: it is perhaps the sound singing in the head of the letter writer as he observes the light. In comparison with 'The Book of Light', Carpentier Alting's earlier work is more narrative in character. In 'Ley Lines' (1984) we watch man's development from cave dweller to space traveller in terms of his perception of the horizon, a development that runs parallel with the development of painting. 'Chittenden Hotel' (1988) concerns the misterious discovery of a dead woman in a hotel, and is based on a newspaper report. 'Minotaurus' (1989) draws on the Greek myth and 'Hermetic black' (1990) deals with the dilemmas of Galileo. 'Another End, Again' (1992) was inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett and features a woman in a drawn space. Alting's penultimate series 'Sonetto, Gravity, Radium' was completed in 1993 and is based on letters by Michelangelo, Newton and Marie Curie. These are all short series, each lasting two minutes. Marnix Carpentier is one of the last exponents of the technique known earlier as 'tape-slide' presentation: a series of images fading into each other coupled to a soundtrack.

– Carel Alphenaar
Music: Anton Havelaar, Marc Verhoeven
Production: Alessio Cavallaro

Marnix Carpentier Alting, 1957, The Hague (Netherlands)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands)

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