.
In 2009, I ran to the cinema for the first night of My Bloody Valentine 3D. It was little more than a sequence of set pieces in which people were killed using a miner’s pickaxe. Each instance was different—where it happened; how it happened; where the axe went into the body, at what angle, where it came out; etcetera. The filmmakers concocted novel solutions to a basic problem. However, it struck me as oddly bloodless—a formalist exercise, a physics experiment. I was reminded of the abstract painter Gordon Walters, whose work also unpacked the endless possibilities offered by ‘a deliberately limited range of forms’. As Walters explained: ‘dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements’.
•