C92 Reviews
Clare Langan: Floodlight , 2000; film still;
courtesy Irish Museum of Modern art
Hal Foster identifies montage as one of the strategies of appropriation which is central to postmodern art practice, but he also poses the question "when does montage recode, let alone redeem, the splintering of the commodity-sign, and when does it replicate it, even reinforce it cynically?" ‘Do you really want it that much?’—‘More!’ is an ongoing project, presented at Arthouse, which "documents, via mainstream cinema and TV, the representation of art criticism, the acting out of sexual fantasies in art spaces… and the spectacularisation of the private view amongst other scenarios." The exhibition includes a publication with text and photo-based contributions from a total of sixteen contributors, video works by Roland Rust and Jonathan Faiers and a slide presentation by Volker Eichelmann.
Eichelmann’s Interiors1997-2000 is an extensive collection of collages based on images of celebrities’ homes. The paintings, furnishings, and other signifiers of taste or wealth in each interior have been ‘interpreted’ and these interpretations have been affixed to the images as a series of captions. This captioning quickly results in an overload of pop semiosis, as the slide carousel only pauses for seconds before advancing to the next image.
This excess of signification is also a feature of Roland Rust’s video installation Do you really want it that much? This work is a collection of representations of the museum and gallery from popular film and TV (examples include Batman , The Simpsons , Mistral’s Daughter ). The clips are presented as two parallel projection sequences, perhaps mirroring the experience of flipping between channels. One sequence is silent and features only scenes of ‘private views’; the other is a more rapid montage of dramatic dénouements, robberies, seductions and acts of vandalism. At least one film ( The Eyes of Laura Mars ) appears in both sequences.
Jonathan Faiers’ Tulip Time (1999), a single-screen video work, is perhaps the only assemblage of material in the exhibition which considers a history of signification. The clips, mainly excerpts from costume dramas such as La Reine Margot , are interspersed with illustrations and paintings. This collection of material relates to the stated theme of Huguenot migration. However, a variety of competing histories are suggested through the emphasis on pattern in period costuming and furnishings and by the repeated voicing of French words which have acquired currency in the English language. Tulip Time is perhaps the most reflexive work in the project, presenting appropriation as a process through its emphasis on translation and on the contingency of meaning.
Strategies of appropriation can also be identified in the practices of artists nominated for this year’s Glen Dimplex Artists Award . For the current show the Irish Museum of Modern Art duo David Phillips and Paul Rowley have reworked previous pieces, Kimpo (1999) and Esther (1999), and produced a new work, Carbon-12 . All of these works incorporate fragments of action which are either found, observed or staged. Minor incidents, such as the elderly woman attempting to rise from a hospital bed in Esther or the child listening to headphones in Kimpo , are extended and re-presented. Carbon-12 , the most coherent work in terms of its installation design, features footage of telephone and computer operation, shown on six linked monitors. These monitors face out from the centre of a darkened room, suggesting either a surveillance control room or a ‘futuristic’ mainframe computer. Through their incorporation into this oppressive system these banal images are transformed from emblems of efficiency and progress into signifiers of alienation and dislocation.
Clare Langan’s Floodlight , a new film installation produced for the exhibition at IMMA, offers an interesting contrast to the work of Phillips and Rowley. This piece plays with pictorial and narrative conventions rather than engaging in appropriation or commodity critique. Floodlight is filmed underwater and features figures swimming in the sea silhouette d against a bright light. The film is projected onto a mirror that is coated with a film of rippling liquid and when the image reflected onto the ceiling above these, ripples add to the illusion of depth. Paradoxically the ripples also disrupt the illusion of depth, redirecting attention to the mirror and the two-dimensionality of the image.
Carter Potter’s work, shown at the Kerlin Gallery, incorporates a similar concern with the formal properties of film. His practice involves the transformation of leader strips of processed film, primarily 70mm IMAX stock obtained from distributors, into objects which can be displayed as canvases. These ‘canvases’ are assembled from the fragments that remain–the ‘head’ and ‘foot’ which carry production details such as the name and number of the reel. This process may incorporate a rejection of spectacle but it is still an embrace, rather than an appropriation, of the commodity-sign. However, in the process of translation from one form of signification to another, contradictions emerge. The exhibition catalogue identifies only the height and width of these works, locating them firmly within the domain of painting. Yet these are undeniably three-dimensional objects; the filmstrips continue over the edges of the wooden stretchers. It is on the edges (the missing third dimension) of these ‘canvases’ that the traces of missing narratives are found.
Maeve Connolly is an artist and lecturer.
