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| J. Tobias Anderson: 879 & 879; colour, 2' 49" |
Peripheral visions consists of thirtynine works of Video Art presented over thirty-nine weeks at the Cork Film Centre with a two-day symposium in November.
The project is an initiative of the Cork Film Centre’s Director, Chris Hurley, and the work was selected by curators Nigel Rolfe and Cliodhna Shaffrey. Artists from Europe and the Middle East were selected alongside thirteen Irish artists, eleven of whom were presenting new pieces, mentored by Rolfe and utilising the resources of the Cork Film Centre.
Most pieces in the project are quite short and no work exceeds thirty minutes in length. The work was not presented in a gallery context and its modest presentation in a small, dedicated space is appropriate to the generally humble and often intimate aspirations of most of the work. Only three are animations, one a montage, one a construction and one utilises superimposition over a backdrop (very clumsily).
As one might expect of a show which emerges from the context of training and development, there are none of the cinematic qualities or grand gestures we associate with artists like Stan Douglas, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat or Bill Seaman, which is not to say that the magna opera of such artists don’t at times inflect the visions of these emergent practitioners. Video Art in a gallery context can be a very difficult form to display and to appreciate, unless the space is totally appropriated and specifically constructed as an environment in which the viewer is immersed in the (usually) large scale of the experience, visual and aural. That’s one kind of intimacy, like cinema, a sensory appropriation that is defined by its totality.
The difficulty of presenting smaller, singular ideas in video within a familiar gallery context, and often alongside other static work, is essentially that it is time-based and a dynamic experience. Its aural component is often reduced to presentation through headphones and often the work is poorly monitored. Works of longer than a few minutes duration are rarely accorded more than a minute or two of consideration and often not seen in their entirety. The sequential treatment of this project, as a programme, over a longer time span affords each its moment in a far more satisfactory manner than could have been achieved as a one-off experience within a gallery, if that were even possible.
Most of these works are centred on specifics and rely on the most rudimentary of methods. It could be argued that the simplicity of means (hand-held, minimal editing and raw video quality), is appropriate to small ideas and limited visions. At this point a conundrum arises. Is it fair to regard the small aspiration and achievement as inconsequential, or does it have the critical refuge of remaining at the level of a sketch? Some work within this series really just rambled along without doing anything, such as Martine Mullaney’s Killing time – Cork, montage. Nine boring shots together is just a boredom factor of nine, instead of one. Is the title meant to be disingenuous? If so, it doesn’t save the work. Harold Offeh’s Smile, at just three minutes, still manages to be longer than needed to make its point, tied as it is to the length of the song, and Aissa Lopez’ Antithesis, in which a beautiful girl wanders in the jungle attracting butterflies, is undercut by all the evidence of whatever sticky goo was applied to her to attract the butterflies, making it all seem rather contrived and pointless and anything but magical. Small ideas writ small, if a little long. Ciara Moore’s Bound was aesthetically competent but the hoop-skirt frame bespeaking the bondage of woman / spirit through the bird trapped within its ‘cage’ was conceptually clumsy and literalist. Nonetheless the range of work was very broad and sometimes small was certainly better, such as the odd green-lighted head reciting a kind of Estonian-inflected Uhr Sonata in Külli Kaats’ Avifauna, and Niamh Lawlor’s Blind man’s buff a well conceived image of futility in just over six minutes, in which a man in a blindfold attempts to bite an apple suspended in front of him to a background of subtle mocking voices. The simple, direct verité of Mathieu Copeland’s Burn the heretics was truly chilling, made more so by the choice of black and white. Among the non ‘point and shoot’ works, Rose Eken’s Inner speed presented a raw-constructed rock practice room which bristled with naïve charm, and J Tobias Anderson’s 879 was a very assured piece of animation, cramming a complete narrative into two minutes.
Such a cursory skim of the project does not reflect the diversity of cultural spaces explored and the distinct political usages of the medium shown by many artists. The intent of Peripheral visions was never to assume that these works were other than that of artists at various stages of emergence into a medium, representing a variety of approaches and voices. This it does admirably; its moments of lack of assurance and raw engagement are all the more honestly reflective of these visions forming and the voices emerging in what seems to be an inevitably still-growing (and expanding) mode of practice most appropriate to the tenor of our time.
Seán Kelly is an artist, writer
and arts administrator currently
employed as Programme
Coordinator at the National
Sculpture Factory in Cork.
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