Screen and screen again

Martin McCabe and Michael Wilson have argued that any attempt to historicise time-based practices in Ireland cannot simply name names¹ and cite works but should account for "cultural policy, cultural practice and cultural change."² This essay charts a few moments and trajectories in the history of the audio-visual, multimedia and digital arts in Ireland, in relation to critiques presented in CIRCA. It explores several factors - media status, institutional orientation, performance, collaboration and ideological expectations - that bear upon the material and conceptual conditions of this field. McCabe nominates video as the "ur-electronic art medium"³ meaning, presumably, the defining medium that lays the ground for subsequent discourses and developments in the technological realm. Video practices and video as a mode of presentation dominate the representation of artists' engagement with technology in CIRCA's twenty-one years. The video screen and projection are frequently the surface of audience encounter for works engaged in other forms. The comments on video are written with this in mind.

A moment of silence

In the late eighties, I heard, as a student, Alanna O'Kelly describe making Chant Down Greenham, an audio work for Sound Moves, which was an event consisting of women artists' sound works heard by telephone. The event illustrates several then current assumptions: that women artists' use of time-based media was politically inflected; that to work in sound might be to subvert the phallic logic of visual culture; that technological means of dissemination might access new spaces and audiences; and that the most pressing concerns were around cultural identity and position, language and privilege, personal and public space. In the editing of Chant Down... there was some difficulty with the silent passages, which contrasted with the ululating voices, helicopters and hubbub of the Greenham location recordings and acted as a foil for O'Kelly's extraordinary keening. The passages were never silent enough, always too hissy. We were impressed at the amazing solution, proffered by audio technicians: digital silence - gloriously empty, noiseless silence, the stuff of myth. Indeed it seemed magical because it sounded like a commodity that might be acquired by the yard as it were and deployed anywhere, to cloak tape hiss perhaps or the buzz of a phone line. Whatever my misapprehension, it invoked all the mythic promise of the new technology: the idea that the medium is transparent materially and ideologically; that it supersedes and occludes its antecedents; that it is perfect, whole and universal in application. The rumour of exquisite silence came at a significant time. Silence was a hotly debated feminist strategy of radical resistance to phallogocentrism, and in 1988 the Criminal Evidence Order removed the centuries-enshrined right to silence within Northern Irish judicial procedure and the British Broadcasting Ban attempted to silence representatives of proscribed organisations by banning the broadcast of their speech. The anxiety around technological apparatus demonstrated by the Broadcasting Ban created a powerful sense that Irish artists exploring these forms had a stake and role in a wider cultural and political arena.

Policy and plaudits

In a 1991 review Joan Fowler comments, "It seems that video has become a primary form, not only for recording time-based work, but also as the concept and aim."⁴ The question of whether video be considered a 'primary form' - like painting or sculpture - was partly art-historical and aesthetic and partly an issue of funding, production and exhibition support. During the eighties both Arts Councils laboured over the status and legitimacy of lens-based forms. There were unresolved territorial issues between the British Film Institute and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), the ups and downs of the Irish Film Board, and there was caution about film, video and photography as credible art media, as 'primary forms.' In 1988 Martin McLoone noted that ACNI policy allowed for support of film and video if promoting the arts rather than functioning as the art^;5 in 1993 Desmond Bell castigated both Arts Councils for treating film and video as popularising rather than aesthetic media;⁶ and as late as 1994 Paul Seawright queried the separation of photography and other technological media from contemporary fine art in ACNI policy documents.⁷

These reservations are the more surprising given the astonishing lens-based emphasis in the roster of Irish accolades in the last decade. The majority of Glen Dimplex Artists Awards have gone to those exhibiting photographic and video work: Alanna O'Kelly (1994), Willie Doherty (1995), Janine Antoni (1996), Paul Seawright (1997), Catherine Yass (1999), David Phillips and Paul Rowley (2000) and Matthew Barney (2001). Venice Biennali indicate a similar bias: Doherty in 1993, Jaki Irvine's Another Difficult Sunset in 1997, Anna Tallentire's Instances in 1999 and in 2001 the combined forces of Grace Weir's installation of DVD projections around now and Siobhan Hapaska's film Mayday. Recent São Paulo Bienal representatives include O'Kelly (1998) and Clare Langan(2002). In 1997 the CIRCA editorial commented that Seawright's award "confirm[ed] the important role of lens-based work in contemporary practice"⁸ but by 2002 one might be excused for thinking that Ireland seems to have something to prove, something about modernity, its new economic electronic flush, its 'cultural sophistication.'⁹

Whilst equity of status is crucial in funding contexts, Fowler's speculation also highlights the uneasy critical position of video (or any technological process) as an autonomous medium. There are art-historical problems in pressing video into equivalence with painting or sculpture, as if it could be defined by a specific aesthetic history rather than by reference, at that time, to the multiplicity of cinematic, televisual, home ciné, photographic, advertising, military, surveillance practices and early computer and arcade games (the gamut of visual culture that became the new context and remit of CIRCA in 1989 under the editorship of Mark Robinson). Later any notional autonomy is dissolved in the digital domain amidst the panoply of sonic, graphic, textual dimensions and the new structures and spaces of the network, virtual reality, internet archive and broadcast.

Performance and projects

Fowler's connection between video and time-based work recalls that moving-image art practices in Ireland have consistently been strongly marked by performance. The impact of Alastair MacLennan and Nigel Rolfe, who as performance practitioners fostered educational contexts for technological art production, is widely recognised; early opportunities for works incorporating film, video, slide and audio were created in Artists Research Exchange and Irish Exhibition of Living Art performance events; the exploration of the performer in James Coleman's slide-tape and video has long exerted a shadowy influence; artists' initiatives like Available Resources, Exchange Resources, Catalyst Arts, Random/Critical Access and Real Art Project and live-art festivals such as Intermedia, Fix, Flux and Infusion continue to support and locate technology in relation to performance.

CIRCA 13, pp. 4-5, 1983

An equally major context for technological arts practice has been the idea of the 'project', which began to be incorporated into funding and curatorial structures in Ireland and UK in the late eighties. The term is nebulous and widely deployed but tends to imply an identity related to methodology. Influenced by performance discourses, the 'project' foregrounds process, material, social and political contexts, and reciprocal contact with an audience. It suggests resources, negotiations and collaborations beyond the conventional studio and an art encounter beyond traditional operations of the gallery or market. Rather than making this, that or the other work, artists are instead engaged in 'projects'. 'Projects' are described in terms of research, collaboration and experimentation - language reminiscent of the laboratory. Explicitly named examples include: Diaspora Project, TV Project, Real Art Project, Projects UK.

22-23 December 1992: Collaboration

Blue Funk installed the effectively eponymous show, A State of Great Terror, in the Douglas Hyde for two days, two days before Christmas. It was their first show to be presented as an absolute collaboration - a large-scale installation of audio-recordings, texts, video, slide and light projections: images of rats knotted by their tails, a circular saw, Robert Emmet, pin-pricks of light and enigmatic articulations of millennial and prophetic fantasy. Three years previously Blue Funk had launched, intent on founding a new studio resource for audio-visual and multimedia practices. Their ambition was to address the lack of technical facilities available to artists in Dublin, more poorly supported than the north of Ireland which benefited from the legacy of the Channel 4 independent video workshops in Derry and Belfast. Blue Funk couched their aims within the broader ideological agenda of relationships between art production, institutions, and political and theoretical discourses. They refer to the potential of time-based work to be issue-based and site-specific and they extol the experimental, the contextual and the discursive as necessary dimensions of the endeavour. By 1992 the possibility of such a material and ideological power base in Blue Funk hands was long gone in the wake of the development of Arthouse with its state support and strategic focus on the digital. Whilst Arthouse was consolidating its permanent space in Temple Bar, Blue Funk were slipping into the Douglas Hyde and mounting the most temporary of installations in borrowed space, on borrowed time, in between the 'real' shows. Large-scale multimedia installations which now appear, if not common, then at least familiar, were then rare and a major collaborative piece was unusual. Blue Funk's collaboration recalls the forms and semiotic challenges of Happenings; the strategies of guerrilla, agit-prop, and interventionist art (even though use of Douglas Hyde was sanctioned); and it anticipated the kind of multi-authoring currently explored in internet texts and events. Of all art forms, the artists' collaboration is most strikingly manifest within the technological. Whether this is due to the history of precedents in performance and activist activities, the challenges to subjectivity of contemporary digital domains, or the patterns of production in mainstream film and video culture, examples are plentiful and diverse: the laughing video body-mouths (Sounding the Depths, 1992) of Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh; the neon texts (For Dublin, 1997) and luminous nocturnal market hall projection (Overnight Sensation, 2001) of Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones; the cacophony of news sellers (Evening Echoes, 1994) of John Carson and Connor Kelly; the Morse code (Time is Time was Time is Past, 1997) and radio broadcasts (AART 1994-1998) of Garrett Phelan and Mark McLoughlin; the randomly determined sites, improvised actions, recordings, and screening assignations (Trailer, 1998 and Dispersal, 2000) of work-seth/tallentire; and the multiple reminiscence (How It Was, 2001) of Willie Doherty and Dave Duggan.

During the past decade the Blue Funk agenda has been pursued by its members as individuals and occasional collaborators in artworks, writings, project and curatorial activities: Valerie Connor's curation of Project Art Centre's Off-Site programme of CD-Rom and audio projects, site-specific projections, web events, performance and video hybrids; Jaki Irvine's curation of Somewhere Near Vada; Brian Hand's multimedia historiographic drive-in exhibition The Car called the Manager; the 147 initiative.

Video matures?

In 1994 Willie Doherty was nominated for the Turner Prize on the strength of a video installation. The Only Good One is a Dead One was the first video work to be exhibited in a Turner Prize show. In the same year Alanna O'Kelly was awarded the first Glen Dimplex prize for an installation that centred on a three-monitor video piece, No Colouring Can Deepen the Darkness of Truth. Writing in 1995 Charles Esche observed a shift in the culture and ideological trappings of video use in art production. He cites Doherty as an artist whose work exemplifies an international trend, "the maturing of video art," in which the recorded image is used "without ever letting the contemporariness of the technology become the defining criterion."¹⁰ Artists such as Doherty, he implies, can take video as an aesthetic medium for granted and use it to explore whatever historical, social, aesthetic concerns they choose without being hostage to a specific identity or discourse of video art. Esche situates such work as "essentially...within the conceptual art tradition of appropriation and representation."¹¹

Whilst the works by Doherty and O'Kelly both explore specifically Irish cultural histories, they also loosely demonstrate the respective characteristics of two very different cultures and sensibilities of video as art, and as such they set the stage for wider changes in the status of technology in art practice. The static street and moving country road projections of The Only Good One... are unedited, looped single images with the grain and expediency of camcorder material. A male voice describes a journey in terms of the tension of anticipating being attacker and attacked. The elements are spare and literal; the means to read the material is narrative, fictive even, via the psychology of the voice-over persona. The work evokes popular culture forms: the thriller, news footage, video diaries. O'Kelly's piece, in contrast, is a highly edited and complex composition on three synchronised screens. A breast emitting milk, a famine mound and other images of body and landscape are abstracted and recomposed into highly coloured and textured sequences and surfaces. The sound is a rich and layered track of vocal, visceral and environmental elements. The purposeful banality and casual bareness of Doherty's images contrasts with the premeditated and elaborate construction, lighting, and rendering of O'Kelly's.

Both engage with the discourse of the video image but whilst O'Kelly explores what that might be and how far she can take a visual erotics of video, Doherty appropriates the familiar tropes of surveillance and documentary, a this-is-how-it-was, first-or-only-take quality. The explosion and ubiquity of video work of recent years, whilst extremely varied, is best understood in terms of the characteristics evident in Doherty's work and the attitude ascribed to him by Esche. Video rapidly became simultaneously domesticated - easily available, no longer technically specialist nor prohibitively expensive - and assimilated within mainstream international art practices. In a specifically Irish context this also marks a shift from the dominant tendency identified by Luke Gibbons in 1989. He proposed that "An installation or art that uses electronic media, is invariably an exploration of time and narrative in some shape or form and thus it is poised to engage with the dilemmas of our culture" and that "the Irish artists who are engaged with Post-modern cultural forms are usually those who are attempting some kind of exploration of Irish culture."¹² Doherty and O'Kelly do so but this is no longer the collective characteristic it once was. In a 1996 CIRCA article that provoked a flurry of debate David Brett, not unsympathetic to technological practices per se, sought to dispense with any residual expectation of such ideological inflection: "The idea that 'issues' can be aired and positions challenged through the critical and 'subversive' deployment of the modern visual communication media is about as plausible as supposing that a tick can challenge a rhinoceros on which it depends."¹³

Taking a position: inter-cities and interstices

When Alannah Hopkin reports of the 2001 Crawford Open, "The other videos lost my attention within seconds. It is an unforgiving medium; nobody has time to waste"¹⁴ - she indicates an impatience that, whatever the merits or failings of the work she encountered, firmly places video in a commodity and entertainment culture in which we expect a certain speedy return for our investment of time. In an equally rhetorical, and interesting, flourish Daniel Jewesbury, in his discussion of the promises and myths of the internet, suggests that the dead link might be "the most appropriate 'presence' for artists in cyberspace."¹⁵ He advocates a strategic resistance to the supposed plenitude, but also a deliberate gesture of cluttering, of attenuation, of making difficult, a means of challenging the expectation of consumption. This kind of Russian Formalist approach is identifiable in the activities of work-seth/tallentire, a notably sustained artists' collaboration, which focus on procedures and methodologies, using public and gallery spaces and diverse technological processes and sites with deliberated understatement. work-seth/tallentire undertake a sort of material-philosophic project, steering between the comforting ports of explanatory narrative and seductive image. work-seth/tallentire invite the audience to work and to waste time.

Anne Tallentire's mid-nineties exploration of digital transmission between London and Dublin and Derry in Inscribe I & II indicated new terrains of exchange between performance and the technological. Fittingly Inscribe was partly conducted under the aegis of Living Arts Projects' Diaspora Project which specifically commissioned emigrant artists. For the migrant, processes in which large-scale works can be stored on a handful of discs or tapes or on-line are very appealing - so much less to carry. The practices of Tallentire, John Carson, Frances Hegarty, Connor Kelly, Nick Stewart, Jaki Irvine suggest that the choice is methodological and critical as well as pragmatic. The miniaturisation and economic viability of all manner of production, playback and communications equipment, and the phenomena of the net, make us all potential or conceptual nomads and allow for investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new technologies across the economic strata of art structures and within still important interstices and institutional blindspots.

Snapshots

In CIRCA 99 Brian Kennedy describes how the fabric of the contemporary performance event is criss-crossed by the camcorder and comments that this obscures both his view - "some idiot with a camcorder standing in front of me" - in the live moment and the historical view - the assumption that the video is a viable record.¹⁶ In CIRCA 99 James Elkins reports on the art-history melodrama excited by David Hockney's thesis on the widespread use of optical technologies in Western painting since the fifteenth century.¹⁷ In CIRCA 99 several advertisements make a feature of the analogue: Ormeau Baths Gallery pencils its text and logos; David Blamey and Paul O'Neill's essay publicity looks like an old typewriter's courier font on lined jotter paper; Scóip 2002 uses an ultrasound image of a foetus; and Garret Phelan's CIRCA-sponsored web work friendlyghosts is flagged with a scribbly pencil drawing of horse and rider. Tanya Kiang's project, outlined in CIRCA 96,¹⁸ to build a camera obscura on top of the Gallery of Photography, promises an architectural and aesthetic folly, a partner for the Meeting House Square projection screen and an unashamed revel in the analogue. The camera obscura, in antithesis to the architecture of the digital, is a singular technology, focused on doing one thing only and endlessly. It offers the charm of the optical, the live diorama, the image simply of its own rays, and silence. The silence of the moving image without medium, noise-free; the silence of an image abstracted from the racket of the street; the silence of the delay between image and distant sound. It also suggests a gorgeous performance-transmission opportunity: to slip one's-uninvited-self, like a little hopeful silent tick, into the fabric of the image in the gallery. It may mean nothing or it may mean anything.¹⁹

Shirley MacWiliam

¹See page 49 of this issue
²McCabe and Wilson in CIRCA 69, pp. 18-23
³McCabe in CIRCA 84, p. 37
⁴Fowler in CIRCA 56, p. 38
⁵McLoone in CIRCA 39, p. 19
⁶Bell in CIRCA 63, p. 19
⁷Seawright in CIRCA 69, p. 52
⁸ CIRCA 81, p. 9
⁹McCabe and Wilson make a similar observation in CIRCA 69, p. 22
¹⁰Esche in Knight, Judith (eds.), 1996, Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, London: Arts Council of England/University of Luton Press, p. 201
¹¹op. cit., p. 201
¹²Gibbons in CIRCA 44, p. 28
¹³Brett in CIRCA 76, p. 20
¹⁴Hopkin in CIRCA 99, p. 46
¹⁵Jewesbury in CIRCA 84, p. 27
¹⁶Kennedy in CIRCA 99, p. 13
¹⁷Elkins in CIRCA 99, pp.3 8-39
¹⁸Kiang in CIRCA 96, pp. 22-24
¹⁹In a parliamentary discussion of the 1924 Dublin Police Bill, regarding the difficulty of legislating for secret societies it was said: "Ten men can come together and say: 'We will form ourselves into the Blue Funk Club' and it may mean nothing or it may mean anything." ww.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie/D.0007.192406040009.html.