Word reached us yesterday, via his collaborator Tom Sherman, that Andrew Lugg passed away last October.
Andrew Lugg was one of the leading contributors to a Canadian experimental cinema through the course of the 1970s, before stepping away from filmmaking and turning his attention to philosophy. His body of film work is relatively compact, but it belongs to a fertile period in Canadian experimental filmmaking when distinctions between cinema, performance, conceptual art, photography, and artists’ publishing were especially porous. Lugg’s films move easily among these fields. Some were made in direct collaboration, documenting performances by other artists, while others take as their subject the peculiar authority of photographs, postcards, and other forms of mass-produced imagery. Across these different approaches, Lugg returned repeatedly to the ways that images establish claims on the world, and to the ease with which those claims become suspect.
Many of Lugg’s films were collaborations, or grew from his encounters with the work of other artists. Trace records a performance by Tom Sherman, while Plow, Skid, Drag and Gemini Fire Extension document performances by John Orentlicher. The films do more than record and document, in that Lugg practices some intervention: in both Trace and Gemini Fire Extension, this comes in the form of a gradual leftward wipe that joins presumably separate performances, shot, in the case of Trace, from different angles. These works belong to a period when film had become a common means of preserving performance art. In Lugg's films, a performance built around the presence of a body in a particular place and time is altered when translated into another medium. Duration can be reorganized, space can be reframed, and an event made for one audience can circulate to another. The filmed performance becomes a second object with its own conditions. It preserves the event, but it also displaces it.
Lugg’s films return recurrently to the distance between an object and its representation, between a place and an image of that place, or between an event and the photographic evidence left behind. The image is rarely treated as a transparent record. Lugg is more interested in the point at which that transparency begins to break down. This is especially clear in the films he made around postcards and vernacular photography. The postcard makes a simple promise. It shows a place and appears to offer evidence of that place. It participates in the photographic fantasy of having been there, and can stand in for travel, memory, possession, or experience. It is also one of the most thoroughly manufactured forms of photography: reproduced en masse, selected according to familiar conventions, frequently enhanced, captioned, colour-corrected, and circulated independently of the circumstances under which the original image was made.
Lugg takes that contradiction as a starting point. He uses cinematographic means to interfere with the apparent stability of the still image. A postcard ordinarily sits still and asks us to accept the world contained within its borders. Lugg introduces movement, repetition, changes in scale, collage, and juxtaposition. The postcard begins to behave in ways that a postcard should not. Its claim to offer straightforward evidence becomes harder to sustain.
R. Bruce Elder has described this dimension of Lugg’s work in terms of the “lack of veracity” of the Image. Lugg’s films aren't jokes about tacky postcards or mass-market souvenirs. Their humour comes from the degree of trust routinely granted to photographic images. Whatever manipulation may have taken place before or after exposure, some residue of the thing photographed remains. The photograph says: this existed, this was there. Lugg begins with that commonplace faith and his operations sabotage and reveal an underlying fact.
Black Forest Trading Post, made in collaboration with Stuart Klein, offers the clearest and funniest example. The film takes as its consistent foreground the Black Forest Trading Post, a souvenir shop in Ulysses, Pennsylvania. Behind it, however, the world continually changes. Through collage, the same modest roadside building is placed against a succession of increasingly improbable backgrounds. The narrator supplies place names as the parade continues, and for a time there seems to be some natural relationship between what we hear and what we see. Gradually that relationship comes under strain. Branches become mighty trunks through distortions of scale. Night scenes appear behind a foreground plainly photographed in daylight. The Trading Post turns up against landscapes and landmarks whose relationship to Pennsylvania, or to the building itself, becomes progressively more ludicrous.
The joke depends partly on the inconsequence of the subject. This isn't the Liberty Bell or the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum making its way around the world. It's a souvenir shop. More precisely, it is a postcard image of a souvenir shop, a business devoted to selling the kinds of objects whose function the film is dismantling. The souvenir shop becomes its own souvenir. Once Lugg and Klein detach it from its original surroundings, it can apparently belong anywhere.
Each new background modifies the same basic proposition. The comedy also exposes the ease with which context can be manufactured. The building itself remains more or less unchanged. Everything around it tells us where we are supposed to think it is. The narrator reinforces that suggestion by naming places, lending the voice the conventional authority of documentary explanation. Yet the evidence of the image and the authority of the voice begin pulling apart. Eventually neither can be trusted very much.
Lugg is interested in the systems that tell us how to read them. A caption can locate an image. A narrator can explain what an image represents. A sequence can imply a relationship between one shot and another. These familiar conventions disappear into the experience of watching. Black Forest Trading Post brings them forward by making them fail. The narrator continues to assign locations even as the visual construction becomes increasingly absurd. The confidence of the voice remains intact long after the credibility of its proposition has collapsed. The pleasure comes from watching the system unravel.
This places Lugg at some distance from a more romantic tradition of experimental cinema built around private vision, personal symbolism, or lyrical observation. The image becomes a proposition that can be tested, contradicted, or made ridiculous. Even when dealing with photography, Lugg seems less interested in the photograph as a beautiful or expressive object than in the habits of belief attached to it.
Lugg eventually left filmmaking and pursued an academic career, teaching for roughly thirty years at the University of Ottawa, where he became Professor Emeritus in philosophy. His scholarly work ranged across the philosophy of science and the history of analytic philosophy, with a sustained interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among his books are Wittgenstein’s Investigations 1–133: A Guide and Interpretation and Wittgenstein on Colour, 1916–1950.
The films belong to the experimental and conceptual art cultures in which Lugg was working, and their methods arise from the materials of cinema, photography, collage, and performance. They anticipate the same kinds of problems that his philosophical interests would pursue. His films are fascinated by propositions in disguise as pictures. Again and again, they test the authority of photographs, captions, narration, and place. Lugg understood that the assumptions carried by photographic images can often be exposed through very small disturbances. What begins as a postcard becomes an absurd franchise, capable of appearing everywhere precisely because its attachment to any particular place has been severed.