Many commentators writing about Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage think of it in terms of the early history of cinema, related to abstract film, and think of it in terms of the modernist avant-garde’s experiments with film, and perhaps the Tate’s own film version, made in 1974, contributes to that. But in fact we maybe need to think of Grant’s project as something that’s inherently domestic.
Grant was very familiar with making domestic objects: he and his partner Vanessa Bell made a number of curtains, carpets and other designs for Roger Fry at the Omega, and this project examines the Scroll in that context, and not as part of the history of film [music begins to play], but rather as an amazing, prototypical form of television.
Grant left behind drawings of a winding device which would never have carried the Scroll as it survives in the Tate. But the Scroll would have destroyed itself: the collage would have thrown off, the paint would have fragmented. Grant knew that to make the Scroll into something that worked, it had to be light, it had to be small, it had to be able to be illumined by a weak light bulb positioned behind it.
What we’re looking at is Bloomsbury’s version of television. Furthermore, Grant said in 1970 that he’d intended for it to be accompanied by gramophone records. In 1914 there was no electrical amplification, so in fact, to hear anything on a gramophone, you had to be quite up close to it. Again, we’re in an intimate domestic environment, and we’re perhaps in an environment where the Scroll isn’t even powered, but is hand-wound.
We’ve experimented throughout this project using only 1914 technologies, to see the kind of problems that Grant would have faced in turning the Scroll into something that was a replicable, usable device. And there are real issues, when you start to play around, that you discover: for example, that if Grant had used a clockwork winding mechanism, the noise from that clockwork mechanism reverberating in the case would have completely overpowered anything available from a gramophone.
