C105 columns

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

film and television

Stephanie McBride

The play's the thing

Cinema, right from its origins a century ago, has been bound up with the spectacular, the pleasure of the spectacle, mounting what film historians describe as an "aesthetic of attractions." Its popular legacy among other spectacles distinguished it from more literary artforms - so much so that the theatre saw cinema (and later television) as an enemy, as a direct competitor for audiences. Yet theatre and cinema differ fundamentally in how they seduce the viewer. Theatre conventionally sustains a fixed point of entry into the fictional space, while cinema offers a mobile framing of the storyworld. By the end of the twentieth century, however, previously discrete media began to collide and converge, particularly as the drive to mimic older modes of visual representation took hold within various computer sectors.

Recent theatre productions also indicate a relish in co-opting and integrating visual media into the overall theatrical texture. For example, Michael Caven's production of Neil la Bute's The shape of things for the Gate Theatre in Dublin last year presented a highly visual dynamic, using images from western art as a form of data expansion. The action on stage was elaborated in several striking juxtapositions, especially the eerily appropriate Magritte's blindfolded Duo (1928).

An Irish production of Antigone earlier this year deployed a series of striking images derived from various sources (predominantly photojournalism) as another mode of storytelling. Instead of a backdrop in itself, the repetition of images of a wounded eye - or is it a Cyclops? - delivers its punch with visual intensity, rendering the ancient Greek tragedy powerfully contemporary.

The current London production of David Mamet's Sexual perversity in Chicago goes further, exploiting multimedia influences to stage the sexual to-ing and fro-ing of the characters. Using sliding panels, we are presented with windows on worlds that recall the desktop interface. The production deliberately foregrounds its use of multimedia textures with the simulation of screenshots.

Cinema itself came centre stage in this summer's production of Hitchcock blonde in London. A huge clapperboard sets up the black-and-white stage, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's score for strings. The play shuttles back and forth between 1999, 1959 and 1919, hinging on a mid-life crisis of fortysomething Alex, a media-studies lecturer in search of a lost Hitchcock and in a lustful relationship with his protégée, Nicola. Dovetailing Alex's story is a series of imagined encounters between Hitchcock and a mysterious blonde. William Dudley's dazzling 3D computer-generated projections energise this production. In one scene, echoing Star Trek's transporter room, Alex sees his fantasy made flesh and showering on stage, only to have her evaporate and dematerialise in his arms.

Mind you, amid all these very special effects, nothing can quite match the impact of watching William Hootkins as Hitch deboning a Dover sole on stage in real time.

"One is required to remove the entire skeleton in a single gesture. To hurry courts disaster. One's appetite must not mar one's discipline."

Theatre's overt reliance on media special effects and visual display might be seen as a cynical gesture to the computer/media era we're now in, but it also reveals the power of the theatre in conjuring these latest spectacles - new combinations of words, sound and images in real time.

slave to the machine

Michael Cunningham

Gotcha

On 31 July the Irish Independent ran a page-one story about how Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wanted to "take back" Caravaggio's Taking of Christ from the National Gallery in Dublin. But it was a hoax, the latest originating from the satirical website P45.net (and I must declare an interest: I set up the site over four years ago). P45's other successful media pranks this year range from a network of mysterious tunnels of the Knights Templar - discovered during the excavation of the Dublin Port Tunnel - to "Liam Lawlor: The Movie," starring Liam Neeson.

The most successful media pranks dreamt up on P45's discussion boards have a life of their own. They undergo several mutations before they are full-blown media viruses. They have to get past the initial hurdle of acceptance/rejection by fellow members, then they are elaborated and cleaned up. Then if they 'have legs' they will soon begin to romp about in the outside world. The story will be forwarded as an e-mail from office to office, reproducing itself in the general information soup, eventually getting picked up by news websites, newspapers and radio stations.

Understandably, some journalists prickle defensively about these hoaxes; others gloat because a competitor has been caught out. But the hoaxes are treated as a one-off problem, just as that New York Times reporter who faked his stories was the One Bad Apple in the Big Apple. But hoaxes pale into insignificance compared with far more intrinsic, widespread, profoundly system-entrenched and subconscious problems within the media in Ireland today. Here are just half a dozen of them...

1. A cut-and-paste mentality. Deadlines are tight, it's easier than ever to copy and paste a paragraph or two, and god help the traditional idea of checking all them pesky facts.

2. The IT knowledge deficit. Despite learning how to copy and paste, many journalists still have a poor grasp of the net and of IT tools and techniques. Have they progressed beyond the simplest of search techniques in Google? Have they ever used whois? Do they know what an IP number is or how to trace the real origins of an e-mail?

3. Spin city. PR people and spinmasters know that you design a 'good' media release to be digested quickly and easily by busy hacks, and reproduced in as unmediated a fashion as possible.

4. The 'media-will-eat-itself' problem. Once a hoax appears in one media source, other media players are increasingly likely to bite too. So much of what the media report today isn't stuff they've actually gone out and found out - it's rehashed, recycled and rewritten from their nearest rivals. Hyperjournalism.

5. A growing 'buffer zone' between journalists and the rest of civil society, so that their mistakes don't come back to haunt them so directly. In the 1970s a key route to a job in a national newspaper was the provincial press - journalism degrees didn't exist. It was in a provincial paper that reporters would learn the basics of taking accurate notes in the district court, and getting people's names right at the local agricultural show. If you didn't get them right, they'd let you know about it in no uncertain terms. And if you wrote an opinionated piece about them, you'd have to live with it - because you'd be living in the same town. The provincial press gave a good grounding in slogging away at the facts, in checking facts, in taking care not to opinionate too much and knowing exactly where and when you could let those opinions loose.

6. The blinkered insularity of journalists when it comes to their own ethics and standards. One of the biggest surprises of P45's media pranks over the past year wasn't that they were trying to hoodwink the media, or even that the media were taken in. It was that in some stories - such as the Irish-language speakers arrested by the FBI in Illinois - tabloid reporters then fabricated loads of extra quotes from our completely fictitious characters. Now that's what I call a scandal.

visual arts south

Aidan Dunne

To the waters and the wild

Bavarian sculptor Nils-Udo's project for the Galway Arts Festival encapsulates some of the virtues, problems and contradictions implicit in making art that is ecologically sound and attentive to the fabric of the natural environment. There were two parts to the project. For the first, the artist spent three extremely wet weeks in Connemara with a team of helpers, making a series of sculptural interventions in the landscape, either carved into the walls of bog cuttings or built in the open. All were temporary. Spare wooden pieces were disassembled and the turf from the bog cutting sites has, apparently, since been harvested.

The work was, pretty much without exception, beautiful. It exists now in photographic form. It seems fair to say that this is not just a matter of documentation. The photographs, displayed in the form of large-scale colour prints, are carefully made works in their own right, to which the artist devoted a great deal of time, attention and skill. In his Drawing the weather series a spare scaffolding of hazel rods formed a schematic representation of a living room, complete with curtained window, built against a spectacular shoreline setting. The sculpture, and the photographs of it, are a commentary on how we domesticate and view nature, about how we categorise 'landscape' within nature. But behind our categorisations and representations the natural world proceeds, and perhaps evades us.

Nils-Udo's artistic and philosophical trajectory has seen him move from being a maker of durable objects that stood apart from nature to being someone who works with and, as much as possible within, nature. This transition was prompted in part by his growing awareness of the destructive impact of human activity on the environment. Time and again in interviews and statements, he addresses the question of what he is trying to do in his work. This seems to boil down to approaching something like an essence of natural place, grasping and imparting a truth about temporality, natural processes and materials, all in ways that impact minimally on places and processes.

He is aware of the paradox attendant on his ambitions. Humans have proved to be consistently destructive of self- regulating natural systems. Rather like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which implies that the intervention of the observer colours the outcome of the experiment, the odds are stacked against an artist who aspires to intervene in natural processes yet leave no trace. Human activity, including ecologically sensitive art activity, consumes energy greedily. I don't know for certain if it is the case, but it is a fair bet that Nils-Udo travels by air, is dependent on many components of consumer culture and even now makes durable objects that must be actively preserved and displayed. We cannot, as he puts it himself "escape the inherent fatality of our existence. It harms what it touches..."

The difference between Nils-Udo (and like-minded artists) and other artists, is that he is alert to the issues involved, and to the environmental and philosophical implications. A great deal of the international artworld maintains a blithe indifference to such questions. Art fairs routinely feature vast installations, dependent on huge logistical operations and massive consumption of resources with equally high levels of waste. There is a clear monumentalist trend that is based on nothing more than the availability of material resources and a kind of runaway competitiveness, a little like those expensive display races that occur in certain species in the course of natural selection.

Many artists work on an industrial scale to produce monumental objects that thenceforth demand high levels of conservation and maintenance. Within the marketplace, art has the status of a luxury product, exclusive and expensive to view, acquire and preserve. To a large extent all of this is so irrespective of the concerns or philosophical stance notionally exemplified by the artwork itself. An artist such as Anselm Kiefer proceeds as if we desperately need bigger and bigger works that demand more and more resources and daunting logistical support. Nils-Udo's concerns emerge from an ecological consciousness that developed in the 1960s and '70s. Within the artworld, they may have been largely swept aside by the rampant materialism of the succeeding decades, but there are signs of a growing awareness that they are more pertinent than ever.

visual arts north

Brian Kennedy

The value of criticism

Is art becoming a lifestyle, a fad, something to be seen out with? Pretty to look at but brain-dead? I was flicking through the pages of certain art magazines recently when that thought came to me. The more I flicked, the more the sad answer seemed to be 'yes'. There between ads for Prada clothes and Porsche cars were articles about museums, curators and collectors. So-called art critics had their meandering reviews printed between quarter page ads for shows that might get reviewed in the next issue and full-page ads for shows that would definitely get reviewed and good reviews at that. In fact, most of the critics did not criticize. They confined their writing to descriptions of the work, some information about the artists and on occasion they would give a context for the work.

The critic as informer and educator seems at first sight a good, democratic way for them to do their job. The great general public now has someone to help them enter the beautiful world of lifestyle art. The critics can write positive reviews that will keep the advertising coming in. They will exercise little critical skill which, for most of them, is just as well. The new art world can tread the path of artist, curator, catalogue advertisement, product, exhibition, review, sale and collection. This path leads to the product becoming a collected item and the artist becoming a promotable product. The art world can expand into the great blue yonder, happy in its role as a player in speculative investment.

The tragedy is that we are at a point in time when we really need good art criticism. We need more than information and education. If people want education they can sign up for a night class. What is needed are critics who are willing to be critical, who are unafraid to compare one artist to another and to have an independent voice.

Critics should be able to make an informed argument about the merits of art. They should be capable of making judgments about art rather than, in some condescending way, interpret it for a lazy audience. Criticism should be positive when the art is good but it must also be capable of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Art today is more diverse than ever before. It is impossible to see art in the same cosy way it use to be written about, where one art movement conveniently gave way to the next. Cultures and countries whose voices went for so long unheard are at last starting to make a mark. Gender imbalance is to some extent being addressed. We have retro, revisionist or just plain copies of previous art movements. This complex and expanding art world needs some clear critical writing to make sense of it. InsteaÐ we get education, information and mindlessness. Contemporary art is fast becoming an ever-expanding blancmange of mediocrity. No one can or is willing to say what is good and, heaven forbid, what is bad.

The problem is, how do we get a historical perspective on the blancmange? In years to come it will not be possible to go to past newspapers and magazines to look up well-thought-out arguments about movements, trends or individual artists. Perhaps art history will be written from a perspective of speculative investment. The best art is that which increased the most in value in a speculative market. The clever investors will be the only individuals to stand out. The new heroes of the art world.

The only way to stop the speculative collectors of the world becoming the historical figures of our time is to have good writing. The critic has a critical role in all senses of the word in the ongoing history of art.

fifth column

Janet Naclia

Video frights

I am excited - too excited, in fact, for my own good. For those of you who dare to tiptoe on the dark side, you too would be aware of the imminent debut of the promisingly diabolical movie, Freddy vs. Jason. Pitting demonic Freddy Krueger, from Nightmare on Elm Street fame, and his razor talons in a battle against Friday the 13th's slasher star Jason, Freddy vs. Jason is a brilliant concept than can promise nothing less than pure hack-and-slash action at its gruesome yet cheesy best. In terms of crossover ideas, I am desperately disappointed that I didn't come up with it myself. And what does this have to do with art, you ask? I am honestly getting to that.

I have recently been given the opportunity to reflect on my time working in the arts in Ireland. On top of all the amazing experiences I have had, the one idiosyncratic thing that will clearly stand out in my mind is the dedication that galleries seem to have to exhibiting sadly mediocre video- or film-based work - especially when they should have clearly known better. And I am not referring to bad film - like, dare I mention Freddy vs. Jason - that is, well, 'bad' in any sort of comprehensively good way. Ireland, or perhaps I should be fair and expand this to encompass the world at large, seems to be blinded by the race to embrace new technology at the expense of honest-to-goodness artistic fundamentals.

Following the opening of the last ev+a, I attended a talk the curator Virginia Perez-Ratton gave regarding the criteria she used when selecting the work for the 2003 exhibition. One of the most interesting points I thought she made was in relation to film-based work. On this specific point she emphasized that she was extremely deliberate when she selected these pieces because of both an abundance of film and video and, more importantly, to make the point that this medium of work must also be answerable to as strict criteria as painting and sculpture.

There will be no more video for token video sake. It is time to pay the piper.

Now please, don't get me wrong. I will be the first to admit that there is exceptionally good video- and film-based work out there. As facilities to make such work become more and more available - take for example the new Digital Studios at the Queen Street Studios in Belfast - it only makes sense that artists experiment with new forms of artistic production. The problem lies in the fact that the line separating video from successful video is still so undefined that the mediocre is winning out to the detriment of some very powerful video works.

So whose job is it to be the quality police? I dare say that it needs to be taken on board by each and every one of us. From the curators who exhibit the work, to the art colleges whose job it is to teach fundamental art-making principles, to the artists themselves. It is time to look around you and take a step to stop the rise of bad video art now! Just because something is a film or a video does not exempt it from the fact that it still needs to have a point, show an understanding of basic art theory and/or art history, and even express a tiny bit of technical finesse.

And so, going back to Freddy vs. Jason, there might be many who are surprised by my unabashed enthusiasm over what will most likely be nothing but pure pulpy kitsch. Yet, I believe the integrity behind a concept that pits two arch villains against each other in a battle to their supernatural re-deaths is that, at even the most intrinsic level, it doesn't attempt to pass itself off as something it most obviously isn't. And if ever you do come across Freddy vs. Jason, out of focus and in a continuous loop at a gallery near you, then please give me a heads up because, quite obviously, the nightmare has managed to break its way free from Elm Street and we all better be prepared.

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