C108
columns
Slave to the machine
Visual Arts North
Visual Arts South
Film and Television
Fifth Column
SLAVE TO THE MACHINE
Michael Cunningham
I read the colour bars today, oh
boy
Once upon a time, newspapers were black
ink on dead trees - rectangles that fold together into a self-contained
entity with clear boundaries, called 'an edition'. Today,
as newspapers go hypertextual, they have very different ways
of organising themselves and visualising their news. One of
the first things to be eroded is the notion of a discrete
edition, with a finite number of pages / stories. Online news
archives are at least as important for their readers as their
latest edition. 'The news' becomes a constantly revised archive,
with fresh news merely the quickly freezing tip of the iceberg.
Individual news stories also take on
a life of their own. They may originate in one particular
title or source, but then they join much larger rivers of
information. Take Google News, an offshoot of the search engine
Google. Its news pages are constructed by machines and algorithms,
not human editors. They trawl more than 4,500 news sources,
and group the related headlines and photos automatically "to
present the most relevant news first." The impression is of
a doorway into a meta-newspaper, or a huge clippings library.
But it's still all very text-based.
Newsmap goes a stage further, aiming
"to demonstrate visually the relationships between data and
the unseen patterns in news media." It adds a visual 'skin'
to Google's newsfeed, presenting it as a constantly changing
visual landscape. Dynamic 'treemaps' divide the stories into
colour-coded horizontal bands. Larger font sizes also indicate
the 'size' of these soups of story-collections.
The pioneer of treemaps, Ben Shneiderman,
recalls his research at the University of Maryland in the
early 1990s: "In response to the common problem of a filled
hard disk, I became obsessed with the idea of producing a
compact visualisation of directory tree structures." The disk
was shared by fourteen users, so it was difficult to determine
how and where space was used. He played with tree structures,
diagrams of node-links, but they were too large and cumbersome.
So he tried to show a tree in a space-constrained layout,
with file size reflected in colour-coded shapes. "While puzzling
about this in the faculty lounge, I had the Aha! experience
of splitting the screen into rectangles in alternating horizontal
and vertical directions as you traverse down the levels."
Today treemaps visualise not only news
stories but everything from stock-exchange data to satellite
management systems and tennis matches -Êand even clusters
of power in society. Newsmap is simple and elegant, though
as rolling visual representation of news streams it's not
exactly an animated heat-map that you can fly through with
a joystick. Yet.
Or how about 'Amazoning The News'? A
speculative white paper by that very title asks: what if news
websites told their stories the way Amazon sells books? What
appears on the page would be determined by sets of reader
preferences. Stories would have reader reviews, and show that
"Readers who read this story also readÉthese pieces in the
Belfast Telegraph and the Donegal Democrat" and so on. A story's
ranking would show whether it is popular with conservative
Irish males aged 25 -Ê34, and you'd be rewarded with 'points'
for reading it (and more points for e-mailing it to a friend).
The points, of course, would then be redeemable for other
products on the site.
The Amazon metaphor might not be quite
right. But it is a far cry from most online newspapers today.
Amazon and Newsmap suggest very compelling new ways of structuring
your 'stories', drawing upon the visual vocabulary of the
web.
Links
Google News: news.google.com
or news.goole.co.uk
Newsmap: marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/index.cfm;
Smartmoney (treemaps showing stock market information):
smartmoney.com/marketmap; Ben Shneiderman on treemaps:
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history; Amazon:
amazon.com or amazon.co.uk;
Amazoning the news by Ellen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman, Chris
Willis: hypergene.net/ideas/amazon.html
VISUAL ARTS NORTH
Brian Kennedy
Getting on with
the twenty-first century
Over the past month
I have been to both the Auckland Triennial and the Whitney
Biennial. This has allowed me to look at developing trends
in the visual arts outside this country and to perhaps draw
some conclusions. Public/Private, the second
Auckland Triennial, was curated by Ngahiraka Mason and Ewen
McDonald and brought together thirty-nine artists. Like certain
Irish exhibitions, the work of some internationally known
artists was mixed in with lesser-known local artists. In this
case artists like Laurie Anderson and Jenny Holzer showed
their signature pieces alongside artists whose work was new
to me.
The main question
the triennial posed was “what purpose does privacy serve?”
To try and answer their own question the curators broke the
artists into six different categories or groups with the subheadings:
Identity and Hybridity; Love Joy Despair; Private
Desires; Public/Private Surveillance; Social
Structure and The Divided Self. Although I think
the curators could have looked more deeply at certain overlaps
between the subheadings, the titles do give a clear indication
of the various concerns and interests of the participating
artists.
The Whitney Biennial
is a much bigger and more established exhibition. It concentrates
on contemporary American art and is intended to give an overview
of current practice. Often the overview is not very interesting
and so it gets a lot of flak. This seems to me a case of shooting
the messenger. This year the curators Chrissie Iles, Debra
Singer and Shamim Momin have selected 108 artists who are
represented by over 300 works. Things have gone well for them
and there seems to be some new and interesting work coming
from America.
It is often difficult
to try to identify new trends in art but this time certain
things really do stand out from both exhibitions. There seems
to be a lot of craft. Artists are labouring away in their
studios on works that actually require time and skill to make.
It is not the slick, perfectly finished objects of the '90s
they are making. Instead there seems to be a return to an
almost cottage-industry type of work. Artists have become
skeptical of the Utopia once promised by new technologies.
There is a new modesty of approach and a return to low-tech
materials.
Both abstract
and figurative painting were in evidence. Drawing and sculpture
were to be seen, as were lens-based work, installations, performances
and sound works. Artists seemed to be more confident in using
the media that were best suited what they wanted to say.
Some issues kept
cropping up. Several artists were trying to make sense of
the visual saturation that we all experience. They would strip
away and simplify until they produced what could only be described
as a 'minimal media' work. Myth in all its forms was in evidence.
Often the myth would use an actual historical moment for its
starting point. At other times it would draw on anxieties
of contemporary life, fairytales or different cultures. Computers,
which so recently were seen as part of the new digital age,
were confined to history. In Auckland they were seen as old
gray objects from another time. In the Whitney it was their
ageing software that was on show. It was quite nostalgic to
hear the sounds of the Super Mario Bros. and to see the images
pared down to only the clouds moving across the screen.
Nostalgia also
came in the form of '60s and '70s protest culture, archeological
museum displays and the Gothic in various forms.
Both exhibitions
had an interesting layered feel to them. Probably the Whitney
was more successful in this respect. However, comparing them
to the never-ending exhibitions of YBAs that have dominated
for so long, these exhibitions seemed wonderfully complex.
It was possible to see various types of art in various contexts.
Artists from different generations were all shown together.
Of course there were lots of work that will get weeded out
over the coming years. To the credit to all the curators,
they decided against playing God and doing the weeding themselves.
They put the work out there for all to see. I felt that it
was a new beginning that will slowly get worked through. Perhaps
the twenty-first century has started at last.
VISUAL ARTS SOUTH
Aidan Dunne
The price of freedom...
There is a distinctive, close-to-nostalgic
quality to this year's ev+a. It has to do, I
think, with the slightly anachronistic feeling of the exhibition.
How can that be? ev+a is, self-evidently, an up-to-the-minute
show of contemporary art. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac
has described how she set out to organise the selection around
issues relating to the visualisation of place, referring to
the comparably marginal position of Slovenia and Ireland.
As Director of Slovenia's national gallery of modern art she
is attuned to developments in the international art world.
While pretty much everything in ev+a
was, at least ostensibly, almost combatively engaged with
the present, there were some notable exceptions. For one thing
she drafted in an elaborate installation by the Kabakovs that
does have a distinctly retrospective cast to it. Then, among
the most interesting works were a series of pieces by the
Slovene artists' group IRWIN, who set about rewinding the
last few decades to recreate under-documented actions by pioneering
performance artists. This sense of recovering a lost era was
a surprisingly strong undercurrent to the show.
The art historian Steven Mansbach, writing
in the catalogue of the National Gallery of Ireland's New
Frontiers exhibition, featuring works from the national
collections of the ten newly accessioned EU states, argues
that, from the advent of nationalism late in the nineteenth
century until the fateful intervention of Nazi Germany in
the late 1930s, and the subsequent role of the USSR, the countries
of Eastern Europe and the Balkans engaged in a dialogue of
equals with the Parisian avant-garde. It is perhaps an overly
positive reading of the state of affairs, but he certainly
has a point.
Artistic flowering was associated with
political freedom and, thenceforth, artist progressiveness
was associated with criticism, dissent and rebellion, and
something of this comes across in Badovinac's ev+a,
which aspires to provoke critical engagement with a range
of issues. In the meantime, the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and the subsequent redrawing of the map of Eastern Europe
has created a situation which broadly recalls that pertaining
during Mansbach's golden age of the Eastern European avant
garde. Yet there is a sense of lost time, perhaps of catching
up.
It's not on a par with Chinese art which,
newly beloved of Western collectors, seems to be fast-forwarding
through the history of the various twentieth-century Western
avant-gardes. But there is an odd feeling of slippage, of
being slightly out of time. This is not to say that it's a
bad or unproductive thing. Who knows, perhaps this idealistic
impetus will galvanise the more ironised sections of the contemporary
Western art world.
There were suggestions that Dublin was
ill-prepared for the radical havoc likely to be wrought by
another art group, NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), over the
May accession weekend. Word was that there were some pretty
outrageous things in store. Establishment feathers would be
ruffled by the issue of passports for a fictitious super-state.
Would the audacious artists prove too politically provocative
for the massed security forces of the watchful bureaucrats?
Would they draw on themselves the might of borrowed water
cannon? In the event, no, not really.
Though as it happens the ever vigilant
forces of law and order did see fit to silence at least one
potentially dissident artistic voice on the day. On Saturday
April 30, when we'd all been instructed to celebrate accession,
generally by staying away, keeping to ourselves and not causing
anything that might be construed as trouble, the same forces
descended on a commercial city-centre gallery, a gallery showing
not edgy agit-prop but an exhibition of pastoral easel paintings,
and told the proprietors that they would have to close their
doors. They may not know much about art, but they knew they
didn't like it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
FILM AND TELEVISION
Stephanie McBride
Joyce Cuts
In Ciarán
Carson's novel Shamrock Tea, the narrator and his cousin
Berenice, under the potent influence of shamrock tea, enter
the frame of the 1434 Arnolfini portrait of the merchant and
his wife, becoming the second couple, whose reflection appears
in the painting's mirror. Carson's prose joyfully embraces
the sumptuous quality of the painting – all the objects and
surfaces are explored for their visual pleasure as well as
suggesting narrative potential. And narrative departures.
The oranges, the single lit candle, the ermine trim, the discarded
shoes become portals to other worlds, other characters, to
time and space travel. Carson shuttles the reader to and fro
in a dizzying intertextuality – the fifteenth-century painting
transporting us and reconfiguring the painting's address across
the centuries to the twentieth.
In similar vein
to the mosaic of stories across space and time generated in
Carson's prose, Peter Greenaway's latest project, The Tulse
Luper suitcase (recently screened as part of the reinvigorated
Dublin International Film Festival), creates multiple worlds,
characters and stories across time and space zones. Part of
a wider project which will involve television, DVDs, publications
and a website, it bristles with characteristic Greenaway visual
excess – multiple frames, split-screen, superimposed text
and script on screen. Starting with Luper's childhood in south
Wales, through his encounters and mishaps in Moab, Utah, taking
in other incidents in a railway station in Antwerp and spanning
decades from 1928 to 1989, the film (combining parts 1 and
2) pulls the audiences into an exhausting foray. Luper's 92
missing suitcases are strewn across continents, their contents
generating the stories and encounters in Tulse Luper's life.
Greenaway asserts that the suitcase is the key metaphor for
mobility in these decades either side of the millennium, given
the large-scale movement of peoples (whether voluntarily or
otherwise) across continents. Luper's suitcase contains various
objects – coal, photographs, perfumes and bills – resonating
with memories and other personal narrative baggage.
Tulse Luper's
wanderings across space and time calls up another wanderer
who continues to exert influence although his wanderings are
confined to one day in Dublin a century ago. Just as Carson
and Greenaway revel in the texture and tissue of allusions
in real and fictional spaces, Joyce in Ulysses creates
for us the inner clutter of Bloom's mind and Stephen's intellectual
concerns, while Molly rummages in her own memory bank – desire
jostling with the price of tea cakes, her girlhood in Gibraltar
melding into a proposal on Howth head. Numerous scholars have
pointed to the cinematic qualities of Joyce's writing, and
yet attempts to bring Joyce's work to the screen, including
the latest ambitious but limited Bloom, raise the problematic
issue of a classic text and its film adaptation. Joyce in
the earlier decades of the last century clearly relished new
ways of marking perception, breaking apart old pieties and
exploding the conventions of the novel form. In this year
when Ulysses is at the centre of diverse cultural activities
and themed productions, one wonders how Greenaway's cut-and-paste
visual virtuosity might address Bloom's terrain for twenty-first-century
media audiences?
FIFTH COLUMN
Gemma Tipton
Art and Gardening
Words words words
It's an interesting paradox that
'legalese', which can be incredibly hard to follow, uses its
seemingly convoluted phrases to ensure that there is no room
for ambiguity, that each sentence can mean one thing, and
one thing only. But art writing isn't a court or tribunal,
and part of the wonder of words is that you can let them mean
many different things, that you can let other senses come
through, other understandings - a bit like art itself really.
But you do have to be careful with words.
Root Systems
Sometimes they can say as much
about you as about what you're trying to describe. A sort
of fifth column in fact. Take Arc for instance. Arc has been
a fun and interesting series of community-based art projects
tracing the line of a wastewater treatment system for Dublin,
and which resulted recently in Tatsurou Bashi's Moonrider
café, hoisted up on a crane in Finglas. Then in the Curator's
Statement they tell you that the system is rhizomatic1,
and there they lose me. Not, I hasten to add, that I have
any problems with rhizomes themselves - a large chunk of the
plant world would itself be lost itself without them, but
there's a time and a place for everything. On the other hand,
I do have to say that using an underground root system, whose
buds shoot up and flower on the surface as a metaphor for
a sewage pipe is a little disturbing.
Zenithal Illumination
Here's another one I came across
when I was reading about Tate Modern (although in truth you
don't have to do much searching to find them pretty much anywhere),
Perimeter strips of normative gallery space, parallel to
the Thames and turbine hall have zenithal illumination...2
There's really no need for that kind of thing. Ever. When
you use words to exclude people, to make the clear and interesting
difficult and intimidating, you are demeaning the art or architecture
that you are attempting to describe, and deserve to have your
words read out to you over and over and over again. And while
it may be true that some of that art which is slight and trite
can be given a veneer of seeming-depth and meaning with a
few well-chosen convoluted phrases, overall we are all the
long-term losers.
Rhizomes pop up a lot in discussions
of new media art, hypertext languages, and Deleuze and Guattari
are very keen on them too. There's a place for professional
'jargon' in discussion, you just have to be careful when it
spills over into, say, a website for a community-based art
project. Actually, rhizomes seem to be the art world's Word
of the Moment right now. Matthew Collings has been having
a go at them too in his art diary in the Spring issue of Modern
Painters. Collings' Diary is often worth buying
the whole magazine for, but right now I'm off to get Gardener's
World, to see what I can discover about Fluxus.
