Summer 2005 - Carlow: The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure at Institute of Technology
CIRCA 112 review  | | Brendan Earley: Roundabout , 2005, installation shot (detail); courtesy Visualise, Carlow | Failure is an interesting concept with which to grapple in today's success-obsessed society. As if it were a disease, there is the nagging anxiety that it is a condition, which might well be contagious. Set in oppositional terms: success is attractive and exciting, carrying with it the aura of wealth, fame, love and happiness; failure on the other hand is grubby, lonely, mean, something to be hidden away from view. How then to judge the success of an exhibition about failure? Curating The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure , Nathalie Weadick selected four interesting (and successful) artists to contribute work. She also wrote an equally interesting curator's statement / press release (rendered almost unreadable by some bizarrely pretentious graphic design). One of the ways in which relative success or failure can be judged is by placing something in relation to the standards or goals it sets for itself. Here, the lack of congruity between what the curator had written about the exhibition and the work itself was the first intimation that the exhibition might explore failure in ways it had probably not anticipated. There is an increasing, and irritating, tendency in the visual arts (and also in theatre) for curators and publicists to be taken with an idea and to develop it in a press release or curatorial statement, which will often bear little relation to the work being exhibited or performed. This is not a question of saying something is brilliant when it isn't (which of course takes place from time to time), it is rather the curator and the work running on parallel lines. In a sort of Hollywood 'high concept' move, over-arching ideas are constructed, fleshed out with references to philosophers, critical theorists and to the work of other, generally more famous, artists [1] , and the art in the exhibition itself seems only an excuse for the writing about it. Communism at Project (January 2005) was an example of this. Curator Grant Watson wrote an introduction to ideas, which fascinated, but which weren't entirely manifest in the exhibition itself.  | | Niamh McCann, from The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure , 2005, installation shot (detail); courtesy Visualise, Carlow | With Art and Failure , the role of the works themselves seemed to be as hooks on which to hang the curator's (very interesting) ideas about success and failure, a strategy which left some individually strong pieces struggling for their own identity. In Brendan Earley's Roundabout , a trestle table held a model for yet another future road system, half finished as if abandoned in a forgotten planner's office. Four tiny monitors were set around a roundabout at one end, and an anonymous black car circled the roundabout, disappearing from one monitor to reappear in the next, all the while accompanied by the soothing swishing sound of tyres on tarmac. The tension between the technological sophistication of the monitor and sound system, and the rough raw materials of the table and model was finely held. Ideas of inevitability, repetition, progress and stasis all hovered around the work, and with Earley's characteristic lightness of touch, lingered as haunting thoughts, leaving one wondering whether such inevitability is reassuring or unsettling. The piece itself was somewhat lost in its placement, in the middle of an empty space between the main concourse of the Carlow Institute of Technology and the library. Placing works in this busy space was always going to give rise to problems, but Earley's work seems just to have been abandoned here. In terms of placement, Liam O'Callaghan's microscopic slide-show of the minute detritus of life (skin scrapings, scraps of food, hair, fluff and dust), did much better. The delving beyond the surfaces of the everyday which goes on in a library made it the ideal site for O'Callaghan's jewel-like trove of moments of discovery. Twelve slide viewers were placed around the bookshelves at various heights and sites, calling for a hide-and-seek approach to viewing which was entirely apt to the space, where students search into books for nuggets of knowledge, sometimes finding the deliciously unexpected along the way. The slides demonstrated perfectly that sense of the wonder which is to be found below the surface, and the unexpected beauty which can lurk in things seldom seen or acknowledged. One couldn't help wondering (which is probably unfair). However, how much better the installation would have looked in one of those glorious old wooden libraries full of leather tomes, illuminated by dusty shafts of light from ancient windows... Here, the curator's statement suggests that the element of failure lies in O'Callaghan's rejection of eighty-eight slides in the selection of his final twelve, a process of selection which is common to most artists, and certainly to all photographers. Most in tune with the curatorial agenda, John Gerrard's Slow fall takes a figure from the computer game Unreal tournament , and extends his death-fall from its original duration (approximately two seconds) to twenty-two days (or the duration of the exhibition where the piece is sited). Twenty-two days is also the period from the declaration of war on Iraq to the fall of Baghdad, when the war was officially declared over. The drawn-out death of the character has a poignancy which is at odds with the medium and form of the piece. An endlessly dying soldier from a shoot-em-up game clad in futuristic armour, which has failed to protect him, is presented in the sanitised space of the computer monitor where viewers can manipulate the figure, to watch him die from different angles. The failure of a war aimed at promoting peace, and the relationship of the individual death to the duration of the initial period of fighting makes a profound statement. Gerrard also made a poster of the piece, which was sold in the students' shop for a euro each. This cleverly acknowledged the specificity of the site, although how it referenced "contemporary art's failure in communicating effectively with its audience" (from the Curator's statement), I'm not certain. Finally, facing you at the entrance to the concourse, Niamh McCann's re-presentation of the sign from the old Classic cinema at Harold's Cross, Dublin, failed mainly because the wall of the building was finished with the wrong sort of plasterwork. It had been painted by McCann to be reflective, to show you the viewer looking back at yourself, as if on a cinema screen, with the abandoned sign from an old cinema behind you on the ground. Failure at your feet, so to speak. But the combination of plaster and paint didn't come off, and "the high reflective surface [which] refers to her concern with self-examination," wasn't. The curatorial statement goes onto explain that the piece is "referencing discussions" by Isamu Noguchi and R. Buckminster Fuller, but I, for one, failed to find them here. Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture, based in Dublin. She is editor of Contexts and of Space: Architecture for Art . The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure , Institute of Technology, Carlow, February 2005
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