We begin in the air, a weightless gaze toward a mountained horizon. After some seconds, the camera descends, dropping beneath ground level, replacing the sky with a sheer face of pale earth. It settles, establishing a new ground. This movement is typical of Lucy Raven’s frequently drone-based camera throughout Ready Mix, the single-channel video which comprises the core of her presentation at the Dia Art Foundation’s newly renovated Chelsea location. Raven’s direction is rare in using a technology often relegated to establishing shots and information dumps to instead achieve an active, mobile frame composed at each moment with obvious intention, with care for harmonies of line and monochromatic shade, with an awareness of the signifying capacity of its ability to overcome gravity. These concerns are plain as the shot continues, its fixed frame taking in the activity of a frontloader as it digs into this wall of terrain, scoring streaks of deep eigengrau into the wide, ash-coloured expanse.
A cut returns the camera to its initial position, its gaze now rotated 90 degrees downward to view the same scene from above, occupying the vertical perspective famously theorized by Hito Steyerl as fundamental within an age marked by the twinned facts of groundlessness and surveillance, “a perfect metonymy for a more general verticalization of class relations in the context of an intensified class war from above.” Across the next 35 minutes, Raven will shuttle steadily between two dominant modes of composition: this view from above, and extreme close-ups. In both cases, disorientation is achieved through an imbalance of visual information: the ordering horizon remains absent both literally and, in keeping with Steyerl, epistemologically.
The tractor then delivers its load into an aperture torn through the ground, the entrance to a circuit of machines built grotesquely, sadistically, within the land they exist to transform. We are, as the video’s title betrays, on the site of a concrete production facility, and follows this process with didactic fidelity, station to station. Offering this clarifying point regarding the telos of what we are
