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| Ian Charlesworth: from The subjects; courtesy the artist |
In 1921 Luigi Pirendello gave us Six characters in search of an author, a meta-theatrical work demonstrating the fine line between reality and fiction. Six characters wander in from the street to a rehearsal of a play, usurping the fictionalised actors’ narrative and themselves becoming the subject of the work. Representation and its authenticity become central to the work, questioning agency by how we attempt to read these works. Ian Charlesworth in his latest show, The Subjects, highlights the complexity of rethinking representation/ documentation through the medium of the ‘Belfast hood’. Like Pirendello, Charlesworth seems to be giving us Six characters in search of an act (all the youths were chosen from an agency who employ these individuals for film and television work). Six large-scale photographic works dominate the gallery space, the individual characters staged in artificial poses, dressed in typical urban sportswear and adorned with an excess of gold jewellery. The lighting is soft-focus and somehow the characters just don’t seem tough enough. Charlesworth cleverly unsettles the spectator vis à vis what she/ he is looking at. Codification of material worn by the youths, the location – a night-time park – the uncertainty of the characters themselves, all add to the ambiguity of these contemporary portraits. In attempting to find the authentic in these works I found myself drawn to the gaze of the individuals; they ranged from suspicious to confused to the devoid, as if the authenticity of these works somehow lay in their staging.
In the same gallery space, a small television screen presents us with three video works in succession: John, Michael and Maurice. The characters stand on a dark spotlighted stage with an off camera director voicing scenarios from domestic abuse to sectarian violence. The characters are directed to enact a role reacting to these situations. What becomes unclear through these enactments is the origin of the character’s response. Phrases such as “Are you talking to me?” recall De Niro in Taxi driver, mirroring back a filmic portrayal of a character on the edge, or “I’ll kick yer bollocks in,” a phrase regularly voiced after kicking-out time from the local pub. The line between media reflection and personal experience becomes blurred in these acts. In Maurice the director probes with more personal questions and a conversation emerges on the Hunger Strikers. Maurice reveals a lack of knowledge of the events, having been born into the time but being too young to remember. Violent clashes with the police and the use of plastic bullets, though, are part of his personal experience and here briefly we have a moment of engagement with the character. Of interest is the artist’s position as passive: the author of the construction of the work, Charlesworth, has removed himself from the work, allowing the characters create themselves.
To the rear of the gallery are three lightboxes, From the dark passages of a public toilet, to the ethereal wonder of the industrial lightbox. The acronym for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) has been drawn repeatedly with a lighter, subtly undermining its potency while also separating the act and its signifier. This is the first time in the exhibition where the artist physically asserts his presence. The ‘gestures’ are replicas of marks made by youths in public toilets, thus bringing the private cultural act to the public space. The lightboxes themselves return us to the visual nature of the work, referring back to capital and the production of a work within it.
Siobhán Mullen is anartist and researcherbased in Belfast.
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