Belgian artist David Claerbout, renowned as a chronicler of time and architect of seeing, has spent four decades creating video works and installations that blur the boundaries between photography and film. In his latest exhibition "Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years" at the Konschthal Esch in Luxembourg, the artist explores how every image contains a lie yet holds a truth.
Time flows like wax in Claerbout's hands as he masterfully manipulates duration and change in his work. Speaking via Zoom from his studio in Antwerp, the artist points to a tablet displaying a drawing for his upcoming video work "The Forest and the Wood." Despite being under time pressure, he engages in a concentrated discussion about time spans, image technologies, the human brain, artificial intelligence, and a serene woodcarver who forgets the world around him with fatal consequences.
When asked about the concept of "suspension of disbelief" from fantastic literature, Claerbout acknowledges its importance in his work. "I work very hard to overcome disbelief. At the same time, I like to reveal the mechanics behind my narratives," he explains. "That's what's special about art – you're drawn into a fiction one moment and thrown out the next." He compares his works to the mirror phase in child development, where viewers should realize he's making a proposal rather than showing representative truth.
Regarding artificial intelligence's growing influence on image creation, Claerbout expresses cautious optimism. "I actually find it gratifying that AI can generate images. This development shouldn't surprise us," he notes. However, he observes that Europeans are less accustomed to AI integration than Americans and will likely resist it more. He believes people are becoming more suspicious, with conspiracy theories spreading as doubt grows about whether media and image technologies can still convey accurate information.
As an artist, Claerbout sees himself as facilitating a learning process about truth and perception. He sympathizes with Paul Cézanne, who was conscious of his era's upheavals – the industrial revolution and accompanying social, economic, and cultural changes – yet maintained memory of how the world looked before. "I try to do the same: reduce things to essentials, always return to a certain organic reality," he explains.
This understanding comes through practices like visualizing with closed eyes, something Claerbout has researched extensively. "Today I understand how little we see and how much we invent," he reflects. Though he began drawing at age 12 and initially studied painting, philosophical reflection on perception came later in life. For the past 10-15 years, he has grown increasingly curious about the relationship network between computer science, organic perception, and extra-ocular vision.
Claerbout's experience with AI in his studio workflow has been mixed. Supported by research funding from Brussels organization Gluon, most AI projects have failed miserably, he admits. However, AI was successfully integrated into his new film "The Woodcarver and the Forest," premiering at the Kunsthalle Esch. The film features a man carving spoons in a studio overlooking a forest through large windows – a meditative scene without drama or dopamine rushes.
The concept involves a woodcarver who, while peacefully producing spoons over years, slowly consumes the very forest visible through his windows. When fed this idea, AI produced images that were "sugar-sweet and very unbelievable," but provided a foundation for shooting original material with a real set and actor. The temporal aspect proved challenging in film, leading Claerbout to create seven black-and-white photographs showing the woodcarver 13 years older, displayed separately to avoid disrupting the real-time experience.
Time remains Claerbout's primary material, distinguishing him from photographers. "I have to work with time spans. And I am, as you say, an experimentalist. I always have to take everything apart," he states. His approach to new technologies involves treating them as if they were already old and redundant. "Don't fall in love with technology! Keep your distance!" he advises, even if viewers sometimes lack patience for his works.
As co-curator of the Luxembourg exhibition alongside Ory Dessau and Christian Moser, Claerbout designed the show so visitors would get lost on different floors and forget time. Works like "Olympia (The real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years)" from 2016 and the "Bordeaux Piece" from 2004 are distributed across floors, creating spatial disorientation. He acknowledges this experimental approach could fail.
His current work "The Forest and the Wood" involved four days of time-lapse photography in the Engadin valley where Friedrich Nietzsche spent seven summers, in the village of Sils-Maria. Claerbout dislikes how the region has become a retreat for the super-rich and a base for the culture industry, comparing it to the "Hollywoodization of art" where mega-galleries monopolize the art world and people's minds.
When locals asked what he was filming, Claerbout replied that he was capturing light and its changes. "I don't know exactly what light is, because light is like time. It has no substance, it's not a motif in itself," he explains. Like his woodcarver character, he sees himself as someone who loves the world's beauty while destroying it from within – a reflection of humanity's contradictory nature.
This contradiction extends to human perception itself. Claerbout notes that mammals have two eyes not for stereoscopic vision, but for signal-to-noise ratio – better vision in darkness by distinguishing retinal disturbances from actual sight. "One eye must constantly contradict the other. A coordination system like the brain must be contradictory," he observes. This phenomenon drives his exploration of the balance between organic realities and visualization technologies, positioning his work between the technical and organic realms where images exist in their contradictory nature.
