C106
columns
Visual Arts/North
Visual Arts/South
Film and Television
Slave to the Machine
Fifth column
VISUAL
ARTS SOUTH
Aidan
Dunne
Irony versus
reality
Writing about
his biography of Goya in The Guardian, Robert Hughes
noted that we would have difficulty apprehending Goya's
work if it was made today, in "our ironised culture."
When I met him in London to talk about the book, I brought
up this point. Did he mean, I asked him, that our perceptions
were at this stage inevitably distorted, that a veneer
of irony came between us and any form of cultural expression...
"It's not a veneer," he interrupted forcefully (he's a
forceful, vehement, enthusiastic talker). "It's the whole
physical structure, right down to the skeleton. There
is nothing else there, that's it."
A couple
of weeks later, seeing the Chapmans' controversial Turner
Prize show, including the latest manifestations of their
continuing obsession with Goya, I had to agree that he
had a point. And the Saatchi Gallery is well on the way
to being a monument to irony. While other Turner shortlisted
artists, Grayson Perry and Anya Gallacio, addressed troubling
aspects of the real in their work, it too is unmistakably
framed in oddly distanced, ironic terms. The honourable
exception in the Turner has to be Willy Doherty, who by
virtue of geographical, historical and personal factors
has dealt consistently with the urgently intractable nature
of a local, and de facto universal, reality.
While the
concept of a profoundly ironised culture is widely recognisable
in various forms - music, cinema, television, literature
- does it apply to the visual arts generally in Ireland,
or is Willie Doherty an exception here as well? To some
extent it certainly does, but there are other insulating
mechanisms that may be more relevant here. Hughes has
written eloquently and contentiously in The Culture
of Complaint of how the American left, bizarrely,
he argues, reflecting the values and methods of the far
right, effectively neutralised and disenfranchised itself
by becoming mired in issues of political correctness and
cultural theory in the 1980s and early 1990s. Symbolic
victories on notional battlefields were won at the expense
of negotiating a role in real politics. Rhetoric replaced
reality rather than addressing it. Currently, the populist
commentator Michael Moore wows audiences with tales of
the culpable stupidity of the American far right. But,
to put it crudely, if they're so stupid and he, and the
left in general, are so smart, how come we're in the state
we're in?
Closer to
home, we have a government that is unprecedentedly, aggressively
conservative in terms of its economic and social policies.
Politically, the arts have been significantly downgraded.
As we can see, the implementation of economic policy has
a direct bearing on the circumstances and quality of cultural
life, and the quality of cultural life is integral to
the nature of society as a whole. Yet we've arrived at
this point against a background of cultural production
in the visual arts that has been, surely, more than ever
aware of and engaged with historical, social and political
ambitions; one would have to say that art is still a minority
activity and, more, one that is largely tangential or,
more optimistically, parallel to the realities of social
and political life in Ireland. It's one thing to buy into
a self-congratulatory rhetoric, à la Michael Moore,
of remarkable feats of cultural revelation and transformation,
it's another to effect change in people's perceptions
of the real, as opposed to the art, world. Perhaps it
is just a paradoxical effect of the richness of the theoretical
context of contemporary art, that the sum of its insights
is a kind of stasis or torpor.
VISUAL ARTS NORTH
Brian
Kennedy
Give
that booty the boot
I was wandering
around Rome last week with nothing to do as Irish artists
laboured away in a nearby gallery. After once again enjoying
the space inside the Pantheon I walked the short distance
to Bernini's statue of the little elephant with an obelisk
on its back. The elephant, an ancient symbol of wisdom
and piety, had been appropriated by the Christians. But
what about the obelisk? Well...it had been taken from
Egypt by the Romans. In fact there are thirteen obelisks
in Rome compared to only five in Egypt. The Romans were
fond of taking artifacts from the Greeks and Egyptians
and if they could not get their hands on the actual objects
then they copied them. This particular obelisk had hung
around, forgotten in the nearby Temple of Isis, before
being rediscovered and put to its current use in 1667.
Looking at
all the Greek and Egyptian artefacts in Rome made me think
of how those two civilizations were pillaged again in
more recent times. Serious questions are currently being
asked about whether the Elgin marbles, the Rosetta stone,
and other important artifacts should be returned to the
countries they were stolen from. Britain, as usual, is
taking its traditional stance as the country least likely
to return anything or to show any sympathy to the cultures
it pillaged. Neil MacGregor, that great myopic visionary
at the head of the British Museum, insists on holding
onto an out-dated, imperial way of thinking. This is in
stark contrast to the current art world where at last
there is a real willingness to return artworks looted
from Jews in the last war to their rightful owners.
After leaving
Rome I went to Turin, where I was able to go to their
Egyptian museum, second only to London in importance.
There I was able to see a copy of the Rosetta stone. The
fact that it is a copy did not diminish my enjoyment of
my museum experience. While in Turin I also visited the
museum of Modern Art to see the important exhibition Africa,
Masterpieces of a Continent. This showed exquisite
objects that Westerners often describe as primitive. The
exhibition also included the work of twentieth-century
artists who had been 'influenced' by African art. Influence
my arse, direct copies would be more truthful. Picasso,
Matisse, Giacometti and the boys (and boys they usually
were), bereft of ideas, copied the African art and then
sold the copies for more than the originals were getting.
It also says something about Western values that the copies
are still sold for more than the originals. Amusingly
there are no British or Irish artists amongst the copyists.
This is because the prudish values of the time would not
allow such sensual imagery to influence their artists
or appear in their museums and galleries. They are now
paying large sums of money trying to put right these gaps
in their collections.
The Egyptian
archaeologist Dr Zahi Hawass is currently campaigning
for the return of important artefacts. For years the Greeks
have asked for the Elgin marbles to be returned. They
even got a promise of their return but the present right-wing
government has reneged on that promise. Perhaps there
is some hope with the recent return of the mummy Ramses
I from The Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta.
Surely the
reason for museums and galleries to exist is to educate
about the past. The value of the Rosetta Stone is not
in the object. It is in the way the writing on the object
allowed us to decipher hieroglyphs. When Jean-François
Champollion deciphered the writing he also used his knowledge
of the Coptic language to show that hieroglyphs had a
phonetic value, proving that as well as its symbolic value
it was a spoken language.
In the Ulster
museum an Egyptian mummy is still used to give ghoulish
thrills to young children. It is time for museums to pay
more attention to education and scholarship and less to
ownership of objects looted in a shameful imperial past.
Important artefacts must be returned to their countries
of origin so that they can be seen and studied in context.
An interactive site of the Elgin marbles back in Greece,
how the hieroglyphs were translated or the process of
embalming could all be presented without artefacts. The
nabobs that run our museums need to have a more enlightened
approach.
SLAVE TO THE MACHINE
Michael
Cunningham
Take two new
media
'New media'
may be new, but there's such a range of it nowadays, and
such a flood of definitions and ways of working, that
sometimes a comparative exercise is in order. A head-to-head
between different examples of new digital media - not
as a crude beauty contest, but in order to tease out their
main similarities and differences. For example, take...
Project (a)
Spam Radio;
Project (b)
John Gerrard: New Work in New Media.
What's
its exhibition space?
(a) On the
Web via London; (b) An installation in the Gallery of
Photography in Dublin.
What is
it?
(a) Spamradio.com
turns the real e-mail spam it receives into internet radio
broadcasts; (b) Gerrard exhibited three types of computer-generated
work: first, some quite photorealistic Magritte-like blue
skies with fluffy clouds, still horizons (hung as 'windows'
looking out of the gallery), and barren 2D fractal landscapes.
Second, some 2D portraits of slightly androgynous heads
and shoulders. Third, 3D human heads. Thanks to motion
sensors these can follow your movements. Or, using touchscreens,
you can tweak their eyelids or lips. In Saddening Portrait,
you can't manipulate the face but it's programmed to become
gradually more sorrowful over one hundred years, minute
by minute, nanosecond by nanosecond from the day of the
show's opening.
What the
artists say:
(a) "Mass-marketing
junk e-mail is the bane of the Internet. But it thinks
very highly of itself... Anything this important deserves
its own radio show." (b) "These developments are creating
a new art medium - 'sculptural photography', or 'physical
cinema' - which offers extraordinary opportunities and
challenges for the artist and the viewing public."
Is it
a commodity?
(a) No -
it's 'non-profit making'; (b) Yes - with lots of red dots
on the works.
What's
the level of 'hands-on' type interactivity with the audience?
(a) None;
(b) None (the 2D pictures) and a fair bit (the 3D models).
This interaction feels crude compared with a standard
Playstation RPG. One model senses your movement and responds
in simple swivels. Other models allow you to change a
limited range of gestures.
Is it
technologically sophisticated?
(a) Not really.
Using standard processes, it strips the spam of extraneous
characters and feeds it through a text-to-speech engine.
The synthesised speech is mixed with background music
(soothing electronic grooves, mostly by Monotonik), encoded
in MP3s and output as a streaming Internet radio station.
(b) A much more crafted work, with high production values.
Does it
conceal or foreground its digital nature?
(a) It betrays
it a lot. As an e-mail user, you're constantly aware of
the spam's Net origins, and the voice synth is robotic.
Yet for all that, there's a certain eerie immersiveness.
(b) The 2D landscapes and still portraits are smooth,
hi-res, almost too idealised due to their content, composition
and lack of clutter. The 3D models are flawless, but their
movements seem 'unconvincing', with the joins more on
show than in the 2D work.
What earlier
media does it address?
(a) Radio,
letterwriting, e-mail, Stephen Hawking's voice. (b) Photography,
cinema, landscape/portrait painting, holography, console
games, sculpture, automaton dolls.
How ethereal
is it?
(a) About
as ethereal as any radio broadcast. (b) In the case of
Saddening Portrait, it's supposed to last for one
hundred years. Think of the service contracts, the headaches
of migrating it to new hardware platforms and operating
systems in years to come...
How does
it portray humans?
(a) The disembodied
near-nonsense text becomes something that, well, Stephen
Hawking impersonators would be proud of. It's more disembodied
than 'human' radio, yet you still get the feeling of a
ghostly presence. (b) The 3D heads are not so much humans,
more like semi-activated cyborgs, or frozen virtual creatures
in fishtanks. Since the swivelling monitors are thinner
than you'd expect their heads to be, there's also a strange
optical illusion. Touchscreening their faces into different
gestures is a strange sensation, as you smear and peck
at them in a rough, slightly distanced fashion. It feels
sculptural, almost as if you are bruising them into a
new shape.
File under:
(a) Simple,
neat, witty, subverting, ghostly. (b) Pioneering, more
complex, intriguing, ghostly too.
FILM
AND TELEVISION
Stephanie
McBride
Narrative
closure?
At
the time of writing, there is uncertainty as to whether
Section 481 (one of the Irish Republic's tax incentive
schemes for investment in film) will survive in the Budget
to be announced on 3 December. It is no small irony that
in a CIRCA issue which is focused on art and film,
the serious threat to the future of Irish film-making
has fuelled discussions in awards ceremonies as well as
Oireachtas Committees during the writing of this edition.
Unlike more traditional art practices, film has always
had to fight its way for inclusion at the (high-) cultural
table, having been admitted rather late to the Arts Council's
remit in 1973. But following the past decade, which saw
the consolidation of the Irish Film Board and its expansion
into diverse areas of production (including a successful
short-film scheme, Irish-language film initiatives, creative
documentary and animation), the future growth of the sector
seemed possible if not assured. Now, with this threat
looming, it's difficult not to recall Oscar Wilde's remarks
about someone who "knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing," because, despite its commercial aspect,
film's more potent and enduring value is its ability to
reach and revitalise a sense of place, space, memory and
metaphor. Value - not always in terms of market forces
or tax exemption, but value in another sense, that of
cultural ballast.
But it's not simply a matter of a catalogue or stream
of images - however engaging and compelling - or images
to be trafficked at international markets.
A year ago, the Republic's Arts Minister reasserted the
Government's support for indigenous film production. One
year on, as Budget Day approaches, that commitment has
probably been watered down again.
But film is an art. It's a highly charged narrative artform.
It tells stories. It charts the histories we are living
through and excavates hidden histories. It's supposed
to confront and interrogate, reflect and refract the transitions
in our society.
This is what film should be about, rather than the ebb
and flow, the expanding and contracting just to suit the
latest vagaries of either (a) the market or (b) government
balance sheets. Have we forgotten the real value of film,
as it slips between the Excel spreadsheets, the Powerpoint
presentations and the civil service footnotes?
FIFTH COLUMN
Mike
Fitzpatrick
The Istanbul
Biennial kicked off in mid-September without the heat,
humidity or the hot air of its hugely inflated long-standing
cousin in Venice. The format for Istanbul is that of a
single curator, who in this instance selected eighty-five
artists from forty-two countries. On this occasion, an
increasingly youthful-looking Dan Cameron was the chosen
one. Cameron is chief curator of the New Museum in New
York. It somehow seemed oddly fitting that an American
(obviously a liberal being from the art world) should
be the ringmaster at this event at the gateway city between
east/west, Europe/Asia, Muslim and Christian for this
particular juncture in our history. This thought was also
perhaps foremost in Cameron's mind as the show was entitled
Poetic Justice. He began his catalogue essay with
the question "what is justice..." What indeed?!
I don't know
if this question is addressed by the exhibition as a whole,
though several artists themselves ask interesting questions
in the quiet way that most contemporary art operates,
not with a sense of agency but rather a reflective looking
process that is deeply questioning through the accuracy
of its perceptions and viewpoints. The overall show was
much more intimate because of its scale, and Istanbul,
a city of more than fifteen million people, is a stunning
backdrop to any event. The cab ride into the city summoned
up a great faith in God within the writer, who presumed
the driver was an equally strong believer who felt it
was possible to drive so and still survive!
Joining a group
of artists late on the first night of what was the press
preview, I was greeted by tales of work delayed in customs
and equipment that did not arrive, the eternal wait for
technical assistance, etc. However, early the next day
everything appeared to come together, as always with these
things, in plenty of time for the official opening that
night.
I spent the
afternoon having two very distinctly different experiences
in the main exhibition space, Antrepo 4 Exhibition Hall
a 4,000-square-metre former warehouse on the shore of
the Bosphoros, which housed sixty-two of the artists in
the show. The first floor was a dark, dimly lit, gigantic
space, which was almost entirely devoted to video work.
The architect that Cameron had worked with for the project
had decided to create a series of circular forms within
this building, made from some type of heavy fabric, to
house the many installations and create the correct nonlighting
conditions. This circular motif was apparently a nod to
the Islamic architectural tradition. As both the circulation
space and the interior showing space were both particularly
dark, and as finding the entrances to these structures
was achieved by circumnavigating the spaces, the gloomy
atmosphere led to a distinct feeling of disorientation
and was counter-productive to experiencing the work. The
most memorable work on the first floor was that of an
artist intervention in the space in the form of a stairway
entitled Stairway to hell. It worked for me in
reverse, as to emerge into the light of the first floor
was a wonderfully liberating and heavenly experience.
There were
two Irish artists in the exhibition, both located at Antrepo
4 Exhibition Hall, Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty. Gerard's
piece, New sexual lifestyles, is a video work where
Irish actors re-enact a panel discussion on sexual lifestyles
in America, taken from a Playboy article in 1973.
The combination of the video and his large-scale architectural
photographs, accompanying the video, looked wonderful
in a light-filled space looking onto the Bospherous River.
Willie Doherty, the current Turner Prize nominee, showed
Re-run 2002 in a conventional black-box space on
the ground floor. While all the better for not being sited
in one of the 'circular' spaces, it was still slightly
disruptive to have this work displayed in such a zoo of
video work.
Although
few works were housed in the other venues, it was wonderful
to have the opportunity to visit them, especially the
Haghia Sophia Museum, one of the greatest architectural
landmarks of the world. Some of the work seemed secondary
to this stunning ³nvironment, but others survived very
well, especially those by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand),
whose work I had previously seen in St. Mary's Cathedral,
Limerick, as part of ev+a 2002.
The Yerebatan Cistern, built by Justinian in 532 to store
water for the Great Palace during Byzantine Empire, was
an amazing location and its murky, watery atmosphere was
used to great effect for some video installations.
Emily Jacir
is an artist from Palestine and her project Where we
are from was one of the most confrontational
works on show. She interrogated thirty people from Palestine
who are not allowed to travel to their homeland because
of regulations by the Israeli government. Her work reflected
an engagement with the politics of the situation but in
a manner that was personal, evocative and poetic.
My memory of
the Biennial is very much tied up with the exotic nature
of the city and an increasing awareness that I am living
in a world where the noble gesture that is suggested by
the title Poetic Justice is in itself a very contested
and complex notion.
