“Bruce McClure doesn’t make films, he performs them… Twirling knobs, flipping switches, and adjusting lenses, he coaxes a bank of whirring projectors into producing images impossible to record.” THE BROOKLYN RAIL.

Projector placements in theatrical space symbolically repudiate the camera’s claims on the picture plane by upsetting its hegemony of flattened evidence taken from the outside world. My performances, furthermore, continue to negotiate for real space and real objects on the projector’s side of the movie house in the presence of witnesses. Along the Via Dolorosa, I have erected eight stations commemorating film’s passion and the spirit of projective revisionism. Each of the passion narratives collected in PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINE (2008 – 2011),* illuminates a unique camera shot, an emulsive grisaille, excised from a documentary treatment of pelican life. I now petition you to recognize another station in construction along this secular pilgrimage. Re-awaken metathesis by walking in its sandals! Although incomplete and untitled, this stopping place is a meditation on “entrusting each to the other” and is celebrated by a song.

Film, redefined as an object of the projector’s discretion, is transfixed by projector headlights, the primary lamp and exciter bulb, and left by the wayside as road kill. Picturesquely martyred in this way gives rise to film as a liberating force rather than an intransigent and anachronous icon to be horded. At the station sprocket time converts matter into energy – a metaphor for consciousness – breaking a reign of filmic re-enactments and broadcasting energy into the vitality of perceptual activity. – BM

* St. Thomas Aquinas, “Lord Jesu, blessed Pelican.”

Bruce McClure graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1985 and worked for 23 years in small offices on residential projects. In 1994 he approached cinema by building simple devices using intervals of light to affect the perception of motion. Eventually the film projector was adopted as a primary tool to organize light and sound into “projector performances” that have been included in many festivals in the United States and abroad. By definition these performances are detached from the necessity of recording. His exploitation of the film projector as both a picture and sound device has enabled him to move from “cinema” to the music hall. In 2009 he was the closeding act for Throbbing Gristle in Brooklyn and Chicago. Challenging hypocrisy, “Vouchsafe Me More Soundpicture (Fain Make Glories),” is a vinyl recording available on Olde English Spelling Bee (#36) and was excerpted from a performance in 2009 at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.