Dubin:
Outside Visual Arts
During July and August
Outside Visual Arts presented films by British artist
Richard Billingham and American artist Matthew Barney in Meeting
House Square, Temple Bar, as part of a summer-long outdoor
cultural festival. Without knowing the rationale behind the
juxtaposition of Billingham's Fishtank (1998) and Barney's
5-film Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), this shared context
prompted a comparative exploration of the two sets of work
despite the contingency of their relationship.
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Richard
Billingham: Fishtank, 1998, video still;
courtesy Temple Bar Properties
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Matthew
Barney: Cremaster 3d 2002, production photograph;
photo Chris Winget; this image is held here.
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Billingham's 47-minute
film treats his family home as a 'fishtank', subjecting the
cluttered flat and his family to a fragmented but intensely
intimate gaze, unflinching in its distopian focus. In contrast,
Barney's Cremaster films are lavish theatrical productions
with fantastical characters and wilfully convoluted plots
loosely centred on anatomical allusions to the embryonic process
of sexual differentiation. Thus while both artists' works
are described as films and the languages of video and film
have become increasingly conflated, Fishtank and Cremaster
Cycle occupy quite distinct locations along the video-film
spectrum. If 'video' is associated with revealing something
of the immediate, present-time environment and implies that
the subject presented does exist and is roughly as it is presented;
and if 'film' is associated with a sense of distance or detachment
from the present reality and the subject it presents may or
may not exist and, if it does exist, may not be as it is presented;
then Billingham's film, while it was recorded over an extended
period of time and is edited down from over forty hours of
footage, remains closer to the language of video, while Barney's
work is closer to the language of cinematic film.
On the other hand,
while Billingham's Fishtank lacks 'any evident narrative
thrust' – its time is vague and there is no resolution to
its repetitive conflicts – it does offer a cinematic, if transgressive,
relationship to the viewer. Fishtank on the big screen
offers us an imaginary identity for the duration of the film,
albeit one that we may not wish to occupy and one that makes
our very discomfort the subject of the work. Most of Barney's
Cremaster films (with the exception of Cremaster
5) explicitly resist our desire for such projective identification.
Their ambiguous characters and abrupt transitions between
what seem to be largely disconnected scenes offer a bewildering
array of possibilities but no clear alternative identity.
Indeed, the play of
possibility in negotiating male identity is central to Barney's
Cremaster Cycle, as is indicated by 'cremaster', the
name of the muscle by which the testicles can be raised. It
seems that for Barney, while potential identities are played
out between the characters it is, ultimately, something forged
by the individual; transcendence may be possible. Billingham
seems less confident of the possibility of transcendence.
In Fishtank identity is something that emerges in the
embattled give and take between people without being an individual
achievement; it is not quite inevitable but neither is it
promisingly malleable. Interestingly, whereas Barney is highly
visible within his films, sometimes playing several characters,
Billingham is invisible in Fishtank, he looks on with
minimal recognition of his presence on the part of his subjects.
Returning to the anchor
of this review, the notion of a video-film spectrum, the impact
of the cinematic presentation of these works is significant.
The conditions of viewing associated with either end of this
spectrum are very different. Video is typically presented
on a monitor within a gallery space so that the apparatus
of viewing is visible, while cinema aims to immerse the viewer
completely within a virtual universe. While the former recognises
the space outside the screen and thus bears sculptural analogy,
the latter does not. In relation to Billingham's Fishtank
this has quite a positive effect in that the uneasy intimacy
of the film is forced upon the viewer in a way that a previous
encounter with the film in a gallery allowed me to avoid.
Curiously, I found the opposite to be true of Barney's Cremaster
Cycle. Although his films toy with the conventions of
cinema, their esoteric fusion of diverse narrative strands
requires repeated viewing; as Barney suggests, the films do
"what I think sculpture does: it moves slowly and requires
that one move around it to understand it," a possibility denied
by the singular encounter of cinema.
Siún Hanrahan
is an artist and writer.
Outside Visual Arts, organised
by Temple Bar Properties; Billingham and Barney presentations
in July/August 2002
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 101, Autumn 2002,
pp. 76-78.
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