Moon 1969

Moon 1969 explores the sensory limits of the viewer: the beginning moves slowly from complete blackness and blankness to glaring white, with aerial footage of an airport runway at night slowly washing in and out. It proceeds through a series of tempo changes until it reaches stroboscope intensity in the final minutes, and then caps everything with a long shot of the sun reflected in the sand at the edge of a beach. Moon 1969 broke new ground, challenging then-existing preconceptions about videotape filmmaking and about humanist perception thresholds. Bartlett, in these films, seems to be asking “how much can the eye assimilate and the brain still understand”? Seen today, Moon 1969 remains a remarkable achievement because it bypasses the mind and goes straight to the eye. “As soon as it admits the existence of the point, the mind is an eye” (Bataille, 1118; original emphasis); in his resolutely non-linear, excessively spectacular kinesthetic works, Bartlett seeks to integrate the spectator-subject into the fabric of the visual construct being presented. —Wheeler Winston Dixon