Xavier Ribas: untitled; courtesy Source magazine
Moira McIver: portraits based on
Isabelle Gunne, Orkney Islands, 1781;
Hanna-Snell, born Worcester, 1723;
Anne-Jane Thornton, born Donegal, 1819;
courtesy Golden Thread Gallery
One of my favourite books as a teenager was Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, now sadly out of print. This venerable work detailed the more salacious activities of buccaneers in the seventeenth century Caribbean and proved an enticing, if academic, history of piracy. Just as new historicism upturned the received myths of the organisation of social history and sexuality, so did this confound the imaginative faculties of a wayward, rural teen.
Moira McIver’s portraits in The Notice Day in this Factory is Thursday at the Golden Thread rewrite maritime history in a similar way. Three large photographs of women dressed as sailors sit apart from a video of an unidentified character sleeping. You can’t help but feel something between romance, awe and incredulity at the terse histories of cross-dressing sailors spelled out in placards beneath the large, framed prints. One shows Isabelle Gunn, who engages as a sailor in 1806 and returns to Scotland three years later, when her disguise is revealed as she gives birth to a son. Another follows her lover to America and sails the Mediterranean for 31 months. McIver uncovers the sticky hand of denial or accommodation at play in these histories. The bald information (babies, lovers) points to sexual activity which could hardly go unnoticed for long on deck, leading the viewer to two curious assumptions: firstly that there was a tacit acceptance of women in certain circumstances on deck–that is, in each instance her presence was acknowledged by at least one other, and, furthermore, that sexual intimacy between sailors was also acknowledged.
And what of the portraits? For one, there is an attitude, perhaps a reaction at the moment of discovery, like a crimial document or a private portrait, which slides between a pleading anxiety, triumph and defiance among the subjects. And then the representations look modern, colourful, staged. These work against the questions of authenticity so often rehearsed by traditional ‘reclaimings’ of historical strands, and they play into imaginative ambivalences of identity as a posture, and of the camera as an instrument of fiction and narrative, as much as a weighty documenter.
It’s the video of the sleeping figure which, counterintuitively, tells us most about McIver’s installation. The seasick, creaking soundtrack of the bowing deck surrounds a pigtailed, dormant figure turned away from us. Is the work siting us as the lover, about to while away a few cramped hours, or some authority arrived for confrontation? Here lies the indissolvable play of MacIver’s installation. By placing us at the moment of potential ‘discovery’ of a ‘truth’, the spectator is returned to the formal structure of the work–its status as an homage, a quotation. The viewer experiences identity as a mutable structure, signalled specifically, by the pose for the camera.
For Flügel the act of spectatorship undoes the viewer, so that, rather than imagining a stable, coherent subject who fetishises the (female) object, he proposes one that desires to become the object at the moment of viewing. This complex, and increasingly persuasive model is in keeping with McIver’s vision of identity. The desires and anxieties they portray could be those that we feel at the moment of becoming.
In The Notice Day... Mary McIntyre presents interiors of social institutions, possibly schools, where workmen are attending to, or undoing, the fabric of the building. There’s an epic weight to these vacated rooms, and it’s bizarre that void of a ‘cast’ and telling signifiers, it’s hard to place these familiar locations. They start to take on the mantle of a stage set. In her shot of a lecture theatre the raised platforms have only workmen’s debris of wrappers and cables. In a corridor shot, a coatrack takes on a pernicious, David Cronenbergian air. The minutes had gone into double figures before I settled on what it was. And even then, frustrated and confused in the face of a pedestrian object, I still had to ask someone what it was, still sought some kind of confirmation. Throughout the works there’s a heart-breaking and powerful analysis of instistutions as places we serve our time, which, structurally shape our behaviour, and yet emptied, seem alien, forlorn, unrecognisable.
The concerns of The Notice Day...–place, memory, identity–see themselves out in Dan Shipsides’s The Castle, a climbing structure made of scaffolding and wood which replicates a tortuous rock climb in Yorkshire from his youth, the model of which is marked from his scaling. In Susan MacWilliam’s Experiment M she turns her sights on hypnosis and the supernatural with an eloquent video installation. Peter Richards’ work is a large-scale pinhole photo which has become his signature. Like Hayley Newman, who recently exhibited a series of documents for performances which never happened, Richards foregrounds the document and process as intrinsic, mutable compounds in Performance Art. In Another Day Another History of Performance Art he asked participants to dress as some character or element from the illustrious road of Performance. The result is a large-scale, rough, vibrant work which wittily places the experimenter, the audeince, and the documenter as an unholy, primary triumvarate.
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Xavier Ribas’ series of small- and medium-scale photographic works of Spanish beaches, at the Old Museum, was the latest commission by Source magazine. Simon Frith, writing about the liminal nature of the beach, sees it as a particular, elemental place where land is washed away by sea, and where a special set of conventions are realised–activities, costume and social codes which would otherwise be unacceptable.
Ribas studied as an anthropologist and it shines through in the work. This isn’t Mario Testino at a regulated, ordered Miami beach with a bevy of Baywatch beauties. This is closer to the beaches we all might know, where hairy-backed middle-aged men read the news in coarse grass hills. These are the beaches where people play football using industrial pipes as goalposts and swim near effluent. And who’d have thought it of Barcelona!
Ribas’ training shows when his panoramas are of equidistant tents pitched in a barren, scorched landscape, and his portraits are of families having a picnic in the back of a lorry. As one who has often eaten a curling crab-paste sandwich, with tea from a flask, on a roasting day in the car, in an endless line of others, Ribas’ acute observations seemed to me filled with a desperate recognition, display, rather than a concern for the individual examination of behaviour. You may well ask what these people are doing here, before realising you do the same.
And these really are truly beautiful prints. Ribas has spent substantial lengths of time with his subjects, who by now disregard the camera, or are busy in the middle distance, and here the current concerns of a reflexive anthropolgy are sited within this camera/subject relationship. The high aesthetic of the prints and the presentation of pedestrian, habitual activity, the patterning and mapping of movement makes them work, curiously, as illustrative documents. It’s clear that Ribas, by valuing the texture of the print–colour surface, format, elevates the sometimes ‘unaesthetic’, that is, the largely ignored environment–urban beaches and the largely working classes who populate them.
The Notice Day In This Factory Is Thursday, Golden Thread Gallery, March/April 2000
Xavier Ribas, Old Museum Arts Centre, February/March 2000
Phil Collins is an artist and curator based in Belfast, and a member of Catalyst Arts.
Review reproduced from CIRCA 92, Summer 2000, pp. 44-45
