Circa 114: Review

Perspective 2005

 

Ayako Yoshimura, Places - the city, 2005, DVD still courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery

Perspective is the Ormeau Baths Gallery's annual open exhibition, now in its eighth year. Terry Atkinson and Ariella Azoulay made this year's selection. The limited space available in this review demands that a further selection must take place.

The first work to trouble expectations is J. Meredith Warner's video, Knitting (found). Taking the cinematic representation of the ostensibly tame practice of knitting as her point of departure, Warner composes 'found' film clips into a rich 'galaxy of signifiers'. In cinema, knitting has been used as either a metaphor of or complement to scheming and manipulation, charged restraint, the intricacies of human relationships, and the casting of spells. In short, knitting is tactical. Warner's subtle and precise editing allows her to reclaim the symbolic complexity of this neglected and pacified practice, whilst also exposing her audience to some of its rather mesmeric allure.

Simon Morse's witticisms provide a welcome foil to the political gravitas found elsewhere. A wall is covered with propaganda posters for the 'campagne belfastique' of the secretive Atelier Populaire des Magiciens Marxistes; a campaign that seeks to provoke revolution through a heady combination of cheap drink and industrialised magic. The forecast is for "flashes of MAGIC followed by widespread outbreaks of SOCIALISM": through sustained distractions and the occasional sleight of hand, 'hey presto!' - maximum political impact isassured. An unlikely combination, certainly, but deceptively direct, nonetheless. A bit of mischief and a few belly laughs just might violate some recurrent habits, such as capitalism, but the Magiciens' rather affected optimism also suggests that the 'pick 'n' mix' radicalism of some (though not all) interventionist art might come up with nothing more than the occasional white elephant. In this case, the 'invisible insurrection' seems just a bit too...invisible. More importantly, as the Magiciens attempt to tackle Belfast's problems from a secret location in Soho, they also pass a wry comment on the "historical exercise of remote power" which compounds these problems, and the rather awkward nature of "artistic intervention in other communities outside one's own' (Morse); interventions which often seem untroubled by their 'ethnographic turn." Playing on the historical evidence that revolutionary politics has tended to eliminate art except in propagandist and agitational terms, the Magiciens, with a coordinated flick of the wrist, reenchant these terms without being reactionary. They also give wouldbe revolutionary art a muchneeded stiff drink.

Some might say that it would be impossible to make something uninteresting out of a subject such as the Palestinian intifada, but in Ya'ni intifada, Richard Mosse handles his subject judiciously. He refrains from imposing too much of his authorship upon the piece, allowing the words of the documentary's participants to resonate of their own accord. As these participants go through their definitions of the Arabic word 'intifada' - offering a range of meanings as diverse as a flood, throwing something out, a mother's sudden concern for her children, a violent reaction to expropriation, and an invocation rising from death rattle, to name a few - the complexity of the word and the corresponding complexity of the Palestinian situation are articulated with profound economy. In between the interviews, the view from a car window shows us an unremarkable landscape, overlaid by a soundtrack that could be wind or gunfire. As a companion to the video, a lightbox image shows in stark white capitals the word 'intifada' above an impoverished West Bank landscape. This is a film of the most sober and considered kind and, given the subject, it is all the more compelling for it.

Upstairs, Ursula Burke's The pictorial dimensions of Irish Catholicism series 1: the famine concerns itself with the socio-economic conditions behind the 'devotional revolution' in nineteenthcentury Ireland. Her manipulated, expressionistic photographic prints show a child of Erin experiencing what appears to be a series of conversions under the combined weight of poverty and a rudimentary iconography that reads as both pagan and Catholic. Not least, some rather unfavourable comparison seems to be made between the enchantments of Catholicism and the fraudulent faerie photographs to which Burke's own bear more than a passing resemblance.

Ayako Yoshimura's panoramic cityscape composes one unbroken tracking shot from countless photographs of major urban skylines, from which distinct landmarks are then removed. Yoshimura exposes the fragility of architectural idiosyncrasies within an increasingly homogeneous urban sprawl. Her panorama becomes a phantasmagoria: an inert, spectral landscape that could be anywhere, disturbingly seen from nowhere in particular by many eyes striving to work as one. Perhaps here Yoshimura's artifice leads us a little too close to the truth: exposing the fiction and the dangerous suffocation of that strictly utopian position (which the urban planner shares with the voyeur and God) to which detached, allencompassing knowledge is wont to aspire.

In the last room, Ellie Rees enacts the premise of an unwritten, semi-autobiographical story by Sylvia Plath, which follows a dissatisfied young woman's attempt to forestall the decision between divorce and suicide by obsessively baking cakes. One day she bakes a cake an hour for twenty-four hours. Filmed in real time and presented simultaneously in three diptychs, the artist measures, mixes, creams and sprinkles her way from Battenburg to Lemon Drizzle. The suggestion is that baking and other domestic activities displace intellectual activity and the presumably uncomfortable decisions that come with it. This is true, to a degree, but there is also not a little 'cleverness' to baking, which would question any strict dichotomy between the active and the intellectual life. Although Rees does not fully mine the metaphorical depths of baking as J. Meredith Warner does with knitting, still she dramatises the darker undercurrents of Plath's story and presents baking as an unlikely endurance test. This is laudable, not least when cooking seems to have infiltrated art as an unquestionably celebratory and communal affair.

With eighteen artists selected, things might have been crowded, but the exhibition was astutely displayed, each work being allowed to command its own share of the space but not at the expense of continuity. Having said this, much of the work used a broadly similar format (video or photography) and a more challenging situation for both audience and coordinators might have been developed had a greater range of media been selected.

Tim Scott is an art critic based in Dublin.

Belfast - Perspective 2005 - Ormeau Baths Gallery - September, October 2005.

top left: Ellis Rees, The day of the twenty four cakes, 2005,DVD still courtesy Ormeau Bath Gallery top right: Richard Moss, Ya'ni Intifada, 2005, DVD still courtesy Ormeau Bath Gallery bottom left and right: J. Meredith Warner, Knitting (found), 2005, DVD still courtesy Ormeau Bath Gallery

 

 

Reprinted from Circa 114, Season 2005, pp. 94 - 95