CIRCA 113 review

Dublin: Finola Jones at Temple Bar Gallery

Above left and righ: Finola Jones: from Artificially Reconstructed Habitats, 2005, DVD still; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Finola Jones' show presents a menagerie wherein one might observe some peculiarities of animal and human behaviour. Each of numerous monitors or projection screens forms an enclosure displaying specimens of various fauna, some of them voluntarily captive, some not. Capturing behaviour is decisive in interpreting its meaning, as one moment amongst countless others is held up for scrutiny. But this critical decision is not only the artist's to make: these moments must also make an indirect appeal to the authority of their surroundings, thereby reproducing the rudimentary ordering schemes found there.

A menagerie must, of course, be ordered. Here, Jones uses mostly a taxonomic order based on her authorship and certain correspondences in subject matter between images. But as these fragments are clustered together they accrue meaning over and above their initial, specific content or their taxonomic position, and such slippage pushes them towards allegory.

Other orders are present but obscured. There is something in the background, structuring the processes between images. It would be misleading, then, to focus too strongly on what is actually happening in each of these moments; instead, it is more the potential of these events that is disclosed across the installation as a whole. Bearing this in mind, Jones is at her most interesting when she does not settle for straightforward reportage, however fascinating it might be to watch. When the narrative of an event is not disclosed definitively but remains suspended somewhere between possible contents it also remains, to some degree, unintelligible to its audience. This might momentarily deter the audience's compulsion to describe and appropriate what it is looking at. Similarly, this lack of common ground between things might begin to break up "all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things" (Michel Foucault).

But simple proximity can tame this 'wild profusion', offering common ground between disparate events. Jones emphasises this formally: at intervals a screen will switch to monochrome, like curtains drawn after a performance or at the end of viewing hours, so that in turn different images provide a pivot around which the others move. A momentary eclipse sets off the activities occurring on other channels, acting as a percussive rhythm marking time for the themes that overlay it. This musical metaphor is not misplaced. Ambient noise within the gallery verges on music; its bass notes the deep breathing of docile captives, its melodies drawn out of their recurrent habits.

Jones' quasi-zoological display taps into the "contradictory appeal of the zoo as a site of both education and entertainment" (Maeve Connolly). But where the zoo is a public display, the pattern of Jones' installation derives from the decline of the public sphere, as social behaviours become privatised and individuated; where people, even where they are massed together as before, are now 'divided by invisible walls' (Richard Sennett). The recreational consumption of others' behaviour is increased through the dissipative techniques of mass media, which then reconfigure an imaginary social fabric that lacks tangible and direct relations - a fabric upon which Jones stitches her images. Whether this stitching is remedial or further wears at the seams is unclear.

One can trace the development of this spectacular display by comparing the clips of the audience from the 1952 'technicolour extravaganza' The Greatest Show on Earth to the more sober observation of a sleeping contestant from Big Brother. Both clips were in the exhibition. The former shows the crowd, as it becomes a visual spectacle for itself. This 'doubling' is the core ideological function of such films, making the object of consumption and its attendant dream image (the excited, awestruck crowd) a more tangible reality than one's immediate, material surroundings. Ultimately, the crowd only exists as a spectacular image. But whatever the hackneyed demographics, alarming nervous ticks and sugar-frenzied docility of the audience it is still, to some extent, a group.

Finola Jones: from Artificially Reconstructed Habitats, 2005, DVD still; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

With Big Brother, however, the separation of both performer and audience is perfected. To be watched is to be singled out or set apart, perhaps as an example, and thus it is to be named rather than to remain anonymous. In extremis it is to be venerated, and to be venerated one must be already dead. How fitting it is then that the sleeper from Big Brother should resemble a figure lying in state. And how fitting that the sleeper is on screen, since, after all, "flatness is the friend of death" (Dick Hebdige). Likewise to watch is to differentiate oneself, to play the game of attraction and repulsion with the object under observation but all the while to say, "I am not that; I am ..." But it is also to feel that one's actual presence is immaterial - it is enough to watch.

When participants are separated and individuated, they are bound together only by their relation to a 'magical' centre, which then addresses them individually, thus perpetuating their separation. Ostensibly, Jones' authority derives from her role as an 'artist-ethnographer' making clandestine observations of social behaviour and collecting specimens for display; but she is also a 'magician', mediating and taking possession of what is deemed worthy of attention. It is a shame that this authority is assumed rather than addressed directly, as this facilitates something of an indulgence in romantic notions of subjectivity and authorship, and cuts short any development upon the model of truth maintained by empirical science as it comes into contact with romantic aesthetics.

So, finally, it is suggested that the 'thing in the background', that mysterious 'ordering principle', is little more than the artist herself. Again, one feels that the contradictions inherent to this principle could also have been scrutinised, not least because something monstrous happens when the site for propinquity between things (in this case, the artist) disappears, or otherwise offers no locus. Something is required that courts this monstrosity rather than glosses over it; something therefore much more adequate as a description of our world, or as an assessment of our abilities to order it.

Tim Stott is a critic based in Dublin.

Finola Jones: Artificially Reconstructed Habitats, Temple Bar Gallery, April - June 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 113, Autumn 2005, pp. 106-107
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