C108
Review
Belfast:
Dan Shipsides at Golden Thread
 |
|
Dan Shipsides: Beta
installation shot, 2004; courtesy the artist
|
Dublin audiences saw Dan Shipsides'
Pioneers.1
From that series four visually stunning Lambda prints,
with headphones and climber's routes drawn in white ink,
were installed in Belfast. The artist makes three claims2
about them:
1. Climbing a mountain is a creation
of a 'new landscape', as a physical engagement with nature
that is not necessary; such an engagement was facilitated
by a new co-existence of economic and leisure conditions.
2. A 'route' is analogous to art:
both create something out of nothing, both are intentionally
made by an author and named, both may be read in terms
of individual style, technique, context and vision and
can claim their place in cultural history. A route is
said to have skill, passion and expression.
3. These climbers' landscapes
"echo aspects of the modernist ideal but here they do
so with a different poetic, one which is gentle, witty
and reflective."
The meticulous precision
of Pioneers is supported by a fascinating co-existence
of light, colour and scale.
Beta (meaning: information
about a route) further includes eight clips from videos
of works made during 1997 - 2002, two of outdoors, the
rest of indoors climbing, as if a prehistory to the main
part, the Rochers à Fontainebleau.3
Consisting of photographs, animated drawings, video and
sculpture, Rochers à Fontainebleau explores
further the analogy between boulder climbing and art.
The drawings, by Paul Huet and Theodore Caruelle d'Aligny,
are animated as an approximation of a 'route'. A particular
rock, Close contact, is the subject of a
photograph and of a sculpture made from plywood and scaffolding
- Un artiste passant dans un chaos de rochers - sharing
the title of a drawing by J.B.C. Corot (1796 - 1875).
So far it looks as if climbing needed
justification as art. Within the framework of performance
art, it is not a problem. Beta, however, reaches
into a difficult, often misunderstood connection between
seeing something as art and something being made as art.
In turn, the problem enters Heidegger's circle: "the artist
is the origin of the work - the work is the origin of
the artist - what art is should be inferable from the
work."4 Merleau-Ponty5
proposed that the work of art is the artist's manner of
existing. Like Plato's Demiurge6,
the wall-size video projection establishes the sameness
and differences between the climbers and Cézanne addressing
Gasquet: e.g., "...if the slightest thing distracts me,
if I falter for a moment...bang!" has a parallel in Duel
(the name of both a climbing problem and a video clip)
climbed by Jo Montchausse who keeps falling off.
By identifying the parts that are
not mystery, Beta focuses my attention on those
that are.
Slavka Sverakova is a freelance
writer on art.
Dan Shipsides: Beta,
Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, January / February 2004
