Visual Arts/North
Visual Arts/South
Film and Television
Slave to the Machine
Fifth column

slave to the machine

During the Cold War, at least things seemed relatively straightforward and black-and-white. The impending apocalypse involved metaphors of chess and deadly endgames; one side or the other would press the button first, ending the delicate balance of the arms race, and Mutually Assured Destruction would begin.

In today's post-millennial era, though, the apocalyptic meltdown is less ultimate and far more messy. It's complex and nonlinear. It could come from any one of a series of interwoven systems on the verge of collapse. I'm not just talking about the ozone layer either, or that Y2K bug that came and went: those systems could be biological, social, military, economic, yet we have major problems in visualising them, particularly as they interlock and they slide - or wobble - out of control.

Instead of concentrating on these systems' chronic, endemic and seriously escalating problems, we tend to prefer the one-off glitch, the occasional accident or the big spectacle. It looks better on the front page and the Sky News video wall, it suits the attention span of a news blip.

And our collective consciousness may seem to have grasped one or two famous metaphors from Chaos Theory, but that's just about it. Skip all the other bits, because the butterfly effect means...just one lorry drives across a border, from one farm to another...It carries cattle with the foot and mouth...Farms are cordoned off, then the whole county, then the entire country. Then everywhere. And this causes a huge storm in Tokyo. Or something.

Sorry, let's start again. Someone sneezes in a lift in Hong Kong (say), and, thanks to a combination of our hospital systems and international airline systems, within days this causes a major health alert in Toronto. And before you know it, people on the street are wearing masks there too. Eventually the surgical mask becomes the global icon of the year. It is a popular, semi-personal, tangible way to visualise this international threat: a picture of a mask rather than a microbe.

And we will have more of an idea of how people are decorating and customising these masks than questions such as: do disease organisms really exist independently of each other in human populations, or do they form a shifting and complex equilibrium with each other, in systems that last thousands and thousands of years?

The natural and social worlds interact in so many misunderstood ways, with bizarre chains of cause and effect. If the systems are tightly interlocking, they can have unpredictable consequences. Yet, like poor Victor Frankenstein, our optimism rarely lets us see beyond the sum of the parts we have tried to cobble together, to grasp how these parts interact in unexpected, unstable and unforeseen ways.

To complicate things even further, some of these systems come packaged in promises and dreams. New technologies offer ultimate freedom and mobility. They're portrayed as neutral or utopian, but in reality they chain us more than ever to the office, and blur the boundaries between work and nonwork spaces beyond recognition.

Similarly, manufacturers portray cars as somehow Outside the System - freewheeling in free space. Yet they are tied very firmly to road networks, to the clogged up systems that become even more choked for every new unit that is added to them. And our planners still don't seem to grasp that new roads lead to bigger traffic jams.

ATM machines, too, have their own form of rush hours and gridlock, when the lines are longer than those at the counter of the bank ever used to be (before they closed my branch down anyway). And despite all our mobiles and pagers and PDAs, and 'home offices' with ever more sophisticated software and computing power and bandwidth, our gizmos have to operate within a messy social context, not despite or outside it. And don't get me talking about computer viruses or spam...

visual arts north

The area between the Tigris and the Euphrates has long been acknowledged as one of the first parts of the world where cities emerged, with thousands of people living together. This development started about eight thousand years ago. This area, known as Mesopotamia or modern-day Iraq, would adopt agriculture. Mathematics, medicine, astronomy and codified law would evolve. Around 3,200 BC, people would learn to communicate not only through speech but also through writing. Clocks and compasses would be divided up into units of sixty, aiding exploration of other parts of the world where new knowledge could be accessed and trade links established.

The recent Gulf wars have been fought on this ancient land. Bombs and looting have destroyed irreplaceable artifacts. Clay tablets containing yet - to-be-deciphered cuneiform writing have been smashed and their mysteries will now never be known. Thousands of objects have been stolen and will soon appear on the black market in the West.

Since the first Gulf War in 1991 there has been a well-worn path for artifacts out of Iraq, via Israel and Switzerland to the West. The problem of looted antiques is immense. According to Koichiro Matsura, UNESCO director general, the world market in stolen antiques amounts to $5 billion a year, second only to drugs.

But there is a history to this looting. It used to be done openly: the great museums of London, Berlin and Paris are full of Mesopotamian treasures. Originally everything found by foreign archaeologists went to European museums. In the late 1870s the Ottoman rulers limited what could be taken out of the country to half of that discovered. It was not until the 1970s that the exporting of all artifacts was banned. Even with this difficult history, the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad had amassed a world-renowned collection. This was no trophy-cabinet museum but rather a place which everyone whose history started in that part of the world could visit. The "unfortunate," as Donald Rumsfeld put it, looting of the National Museum and other museums across the country is a tragedy for all of us. This sadly shows the priorities of the coalition countries.

One's skepticism is reinforced by Mr. Rumsfeld, when he went on television in America, insinuating that it was the same man stealing the same vase 120 times that viewers were watching on their televisions. He told reporters, "Is it possible that there are that many vases in the whole country?" The country he referred to may have been the birthplace of mathematics, but the US Department of Defense office obviously finds simple addition difficult once it has run out of fingers and toes. The danger of looting existed before the first soldier set foot in Iraq. The American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), a coalition of antiquities collectors and art lawyers, had already met with the Defence and State Departments. They are in favour of relaxing Iraq's current tight restrictions. The ACCP's Treasurer, William Pearlstein, called the laws "retentionist."

Perhaps it is just as well for the coalition that the US did not sign and the UK did not ratify the Hague convention of 1954 which required protection of cultural and religious cities during hostilities. There is some evidence that current world outrage at how the looting was allowed to take place is having an effect. Perhaps some of the looted antiquities can be found and returned. We do, however, know well where some looted material is located. It would be a wonderful gesture if the world's great museums would give back some of the works looted in a previous age.

visual arts south

Shark soup

Is Charles Saatchi the bête noire of Sir Nicholas Serota? It seems unlikely. The latter still rules the British art empire, as embodied in the network of Tate Galleries. He has also maintained the Turner Prize which, whatever its sins, delivers challenging contemporary art to a wide audience, often by virtue of the controversies it generates. In the past Saatchi has, though, certainly been a thorn in the side of such official manifestations of contemporary British art.

It took the Turner several years to catch up with Damien Hirst, and more to not quite catch up with Tracey Emin. Its sporadic efforts to initiate anything along the lines of a new Brit Art dynasty, chiefly in the form of the selection of artists for the Turner shortlist, have come to naught. But then, though frequently delivered, announcements of the Next Big Thing have more often than not functioned as the kiss of death to their subjects. Recently the ICA's Philip Dodd poured scorn on the inauguration of the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall in London, claiming that younger artists have moved beyond the object-filled museum to more dynamic areas and processes, all within the fabric of non-gallery social and technological spaces. The reality, as embodied in the Young Contemporaries, was rather less dynamic that the hype, and not really that much of a break with anything previously done.

Saatchi himself, who, more than any other individual apart from Hirst, can claim to have been instrumental in generating the phenomenon of the YBAs, has had a few goes at launching a second wave of Brit artists, with at best limited success. Dodd does have a point, though, about the new Saatchi Gallery. While on paper it looks like a strategically brilliant and provocative move on Saatchi's part to locate the most famous collection of 1990s British art between the two Tates, Modern and Britain, both of which signally lack a comparable collection, in reality there are problems.

The former County Hall is a fairly heavy-handed, listed Edwardian municipal building, coming down with oak panelling and elaborate architectural detail. Across the bridge from Westminster, it is smack bang in the middle of one of London's main tourist thoroughfares and hence ideally positioned to attract a vast potential audience of those curious to see the pickled shark in the flesh.

One problem is that the interior of the building is an uncompromising and unforgiving environment in relation to the work that has been placed within it. I've seen favourable responses in print to the interior of the gallery and find them hard to believe. In fact it's not too much to say that, with some exceptions, the building actively militates against the qualities of the artwork.

Perhaps part of the problem here is just how quickly a lot of that work has come to seem tired and tatty. Amazingly enough, this includes a lot of Hirst's pieces, particularly the dissected and preserved animals, which are heavy on the logistics of preservation and presentation and sad but not at all profound in terms of anything else. Nor is it encouraging that the logic of his more recent sculptural pieces seems to be that if you make something big or expensive enough it's bound to be impressive. Prior to his current show in the Saatchi Gallery, a loose retrospective, I'd thought that he had attained a position of convincing strength in the context of recent art history. But this new showcase makes all that look distinctly shaky and ephemeral, something that happens in relation to other Saatchi artists as well.

The weakness in Dodd's argument is the lack of a convincing alternative to the YBAs, that particular nonaffiliated group of artists who someone managed to capture the public imagination. He would probably be better off not proposing one. There are of course practising alternatives, many of them, but none with the specific kind of charisma and wide appeal displayed by Hirst and Co. Oddly enough, the Saatchi Gallery, while elevating them to a new level of popularity and fame, rather than rejuvenating them may merely confirm the end of their heyday and the profound limitations of their work.

film and television

Exquisite Corpses

"You're not very smart, are you? I like that in a man." Bodyheat (1981)

A public figure with a private secret, a world-weary cop with an old grudge, a luckless antihero with a body to dispose of and a smart and innocent-looking female - all the potent indicators of a noir landscape. The familiar repertoire of noir narratives, characters and visual style is highly charged in Dead Bodies, the recent release directed by Robert Quinn from Distinguished Features, here located to Dublin but avoiding the fading gloss of Temple Bar.

Shot on Hi-Def and transferred to film for theatrical release, Dead Bodies looks good. It's not simply that (as many have noted) it escapes the muddiness associated with previous efforts in digital transfer. Its visual texture becomes integral to the story's texture.

Pacy and energetic, its high-velocity camera dazzles as it slices lemons, or whips through the smears and strobes of the night-time city's traffic lights. This frenetic style is punctuated by another visual strand - that of surveillance-camera images.

Tommy, at the centre of the thriller, is caught on various monitors as well as caught up with dead bodies. We are shown him smoking nervously during interrogation on garda cameras. Later his pranks and stunts at work are captured on the supermarket's cameras. These grungy black-and-white images give a colour contrast, enhancing the visual range as well as reinforcing the story's themes.

At the core of the story is the scrutiny of Tommy's behaviour and psychological responses. A local cop, Whelan, probes Tommy's mental state in his attempts to secure a result. Tommy's latest girlfriend, Viv, is also keen to survey his behaviour. Her apparently clumsy use of Rorschach blot tests turns out to be a more sinister kind of research project.

As with the classics of the genre, nothing is as it seems. Although Tommy makes some headway in covering his tracks, he is not smart enough for Viv. Curiously, it is not the visual surveillance that turns out to be dangerous. Instead, it's Viv's invisible audio recordings which finally topple Tommy's makeshift world.

Embodying the traditional femme-fatale role, Viv's duplicity is deployed in her greed for college success. She is powerful because she knows more about the death of Tommy's ex-girlfriend than he does, and she seizes her chance to get a real insight into his behaviour. Recalling the opportunistic logic of Neil Labute's Evelyn in The Shape of Things, Viv demonstrates the treachery, focus and ruthlessness of the fatal woman - using all current technology from mobile to dictaphone in her quest.

Recalling Blood Simple and Hitchcock, silhouetted and shadow figures play out the visual cues of the generic field. With this most tenacious of genres, Dead Bodies shows the acclimatisation of its global style for a Dublin noir.

fifth column

Flatley on our backs

Globalisation is one of the most abused buzzwords in today's political, economic and media vocabulary. Typically what globalisation refers to is the emergence of trans-national capitalism across new borderless societies, the expansion of information and broadcasting technologies and the recognition of global solutions to issues like the environment, debt and poverty. The images of globalisation are typically represented by skyscrapers in Malaysia, Microsoft product launches, call centres in Brazil or riots in Seattle. The bombing of the World Trade Centre was almost in perfect symmetry between the presence of the towers as virtual centres of ever circulating transnational trade and de-territorialised speculation and their physical obliteration by media-conscious airborne terrorists martyring themselves in a split second. The destruction of the WTC has become the image of a seemingly invulnerable USA falling in a terrifying 'liveness'. The repercussions of the bombing have tempered the enthusiasm of many neo-liberals for a deregulated borderless world; not only is the flow of information and capital increasing but also the flow of counter-globalisation ideas and at their most extreme range religious fundamentalism. It is clear that George Bush Jnr's administration is now cast as a backlash against globalisation; returning to our vocabulary are the words insularity, national interest, and unilateralism. The wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were old imperial affairs; they were not a celebration of technology and multilateralism like the first Gulf War. The UN and EU Council of Ministers, both prototypes of transnational governance, have been fatally weakened in the short-term selfish agenda of Bush's administration. The question to be asked is, does Bush really want to stop globalisation? And if so, can he?

The question has local relevance because the Republic of Ireland is, according to a Washington research agency, the most globalised country in a list of 82 countries. The index is measured through data like the amount of foreign investment, rates of corporation tax, the level of international communications, the tourist economy and the amount of embassies and participation in the UN. The globalisation survey acknowledges that such indicators only scratch the surface of global integration forces. For example, culture as a force of globalisation is not measured in the survey. The reason given that insufficient data about trade exists to determine what a country's ranking might be. For instance, statistics on trade flows in music or books might show a country's comparative advantages in manufacturing these products, such as CDs and technical manuals, but would not reveal whether the goods reflect the ideas and culture of the exporting nation. It is obvious, however, that culture is deeply influenced by the economic shift of globalisation. Ireland, precariously high on the waves of globalisation, offers itself as a particularly sensitive model in which to try and assess the direct effects of globalisation on cultural communities. As Antonio Negri and Arjun Appadurai in their respective writings have shown, the genealogy of globalisation is not one origin and its emergence is marked by different speeds, varied relationships and points of disjuncture and termination. In the end the idea of a top-100 list is possibly anachronistic to the logic of globalisation, because of its complexity and boundary-blurring effects in taxonomy and classification systems.

However, as curator of Critical Voices, I am attempting to define some of the impact of globalisation on the arts in Ireland in 2003/4. In my research around the country I found a broad reception to the question of globalisation; many artists and organisations are embracing globalisation as an opportunity to think outside of the confines of national identity and or internationalism. There is also a recognition of the commercialisation of culture and for many a recognition of their distance from this commercialism. Structurally, the reordering of the Department of Culture to include sport and tourism emphasises the blurring of boundaries, as culture no longer seems essential to the development of the nation state. It is interesting to wonder to what extent arts audiences today are primarily tourists from other countries. It is something of a paradox, then, because the old credo of art, made in the era of the nation state and small tourist audiences, was that great art must achieve disinterested universality. Today some of the most successful art commodities for the international tourist audience are marketed as specifically Irish, like Riverdance, Enya, The Cripple of Inishmann, and Gangs of New York. As Susan Bennett recently outlined in her Critical Voices lecture in Dundalk, the tourists' disposition is to seek the comfort zone of cultural engagement. Servicing their experience aims not at education or critique but pleasure. As the tag line of a new Las Vegas hotel goes..."because you can't sleep at the Louvre." The international modernist Guggenheim chain has just failed in Las Vegas; somehow I don't think the same fate will befall Michael Flatley.

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