Summer 2005 - London: Mairéad McClean at University of Greenwich
CIRCA 112 review  | | Mairead McClean: State of Mind , 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist | Mairéad McClean's State of Mind was installed, somewhat prosaically, in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery of the University of Greenwich, and rather more enigmatically, and to greater effect, in a crypt in another part of that institution's buildings. In the Lawrence Gallery an intelligent arrangement of two screens at right angles, one back-projected, the other thrown onto the screen, showed a young woman sitting in a rocking chair, humming again and again the same bars of a half-familiar tune that one nonetheless couldn't place. The rocking movement of the chair was mirrored in a clever editing pattern so that the two screens were sometimes synchronised, at others working in contradiction. What was being remembered was unclear, perhaps childhood memories evoked by the inclusion of fragments of Super-8 footage, or an absence pointed to by the girl's continual looking out of the window. To see the other film one had to make special arrangements with the gallery's curator, who unlocked the gate to a space beneath the imposing architecture of the former Royal Naval College. This crypt - with a wonderful vaulted roof - is one of the original Tudor structures from the site, mostly demolished or built over, and seemed almost to be a secret enclosure within the college. The curator was also required to turn on the 16mm projector which showed its film against the uneven, stained walls. One watched a flickering figure emerge from darkness, a young woman playing an accordion, walking down a dark, tree-lined lane. With the camera's constant movement and the crepuscular tone of both film and milieu, one was reminded of some of Stan Brakhage's 1950s work, especially Anticipation of the night . McClean's films clearly dwelt upon ideas of memory and reverie, but the 'secrecy' and locked-away character of the one in the crypt suggested to me a particular approach to the subject, one rooted in ideas of psychoanalysis. Having to wait upon a curator - it was a requirement of the college that the crypt was always otherwise kept locked - to grant special access to the work recalled a project by the German artist Angela Grauerholz in the early 1990s. Grauerholz's photographs - like McClean's films connected to memory and to Freudian thought - were kept wrapped in tissue, locked in a specially made steel cabinet, and could only be accessed at certain times of the week, when a white-gloved 'expert' would open these secret memories and 'explain' them in a parody of analytic interpretation.  | | Mairead McClean: State of Mind , 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist | State of Mind was altogether more down and dirty than that, both in its use of a cranky, obsolete technology (16mm film) and a damp, dark, obsolete space that even the college authorities seemed to have forgotten. Screened onto its walls State of Mind #2 suggested the running in, or projection onto, the unconscious of a memory one didn't know one had, or recollect what its source was. This necessarily invoked the theories of 'cryptology' arrived at by the French analysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to account for those anamnesiac traces in the unconscious of experiences the subject didn't have, or in which the subject built 'crypts' to contain the unutterable trauma that was the point of analysis. That encryption is achieved both by encoding and entombing, as Jacques Derrida points out in his introduction to Abraham and Torok's masterly retrospective analysis of Freud's texts on 'the Wolf Man', and it surfaces in forms of poesis . You got a similar sense of finding 'poetic' ways to utter the unutterable in McClean's films: the film unwinding on the projector's spools, the mottled surface of projection. Something vital was coming to the surface, emerging for interpretation, but neither the work, as analysand, nor we, as its analysts, could be wholly certain of its meaning. Chris Townsend is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London.
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