C93 Reviews

Belfast

Ruth Jones: Rosa Lombardi d. 1920 , installation view; courtesy the artist

The Divine David, Catalyst Arts, May 5, 2000; courtesy Catalyst Arts

Jacob Kolding: Class Structure , 2000, courtesy the artist

While Germaine Greer was simultaneously on stage a few streets away, in Catalyst Arts The Divine David was citing Greer's observation that empathy with the female sex is not guaranteed through posturing in feminine apparel. A statuesque figure in vivid expressionistic make-up, which produced more of a distancing rather than a parodying effect , The Divine David mused variously on the fluid nature of sexuality and the much-maligned vagina; some of us have one, some don't but we are all "beautiful." The theme of distaste for female corporeality in drag cabaret came into its own satirically in the Bits 'n Bobs video which was played as part of the show. This video showed the similarly named duo (one of whom is The Divine David) in a ribald parodying drag performance of misogyny and misanthropic ignorance. Of course, as designated "white liberals," although nonetheless "beautiful," the audience's knowingness permitted its laughter.

One of the most intriguing aspects of The Divine David's performance was the skilfully ambiguous relationship maintained with the audience. There's worse things than being labelled a "white liberal," but The Divine David managed to bring this usually transparent subject to a crisis point. His account of wanking over television images of disaster-victims, for instance, could be knowingly humorously appreciated as satirical, but the license of white liberalism was exposed as a suspect and tenuous one. In a space "run by artists for artists," rendering us all "beautiful," The Divine David's electrifying marathon performance encompassed Bits' n Bobs , the throwing of several "abstract shapes," numerous songs, an enthralling combination of "contemporary dance," anti-capitalist wall painting and a generous call to a sense of personal responsibility.

From The Divine David's championing of identity as a fluid process, Ruth Jones's installation, Liminal , in the Proposition Gallery emphasised a threshold state, in the spirit of its title. In the downstairs floor of the space, a sea of poppy seeds smelt faintly stale and set the mood for the scene upstairs. There, a small super-8 projection showed a pair of hands repetitively sifting poppy seeds from dirt in a loop which emphasised the labour's rhythm but divulged little towards an overall conclusion. Without a discernible beginning or ending to this activity, the account of time that a narrative would provide was absent, suggesting the temporal nature of the threshold state as problematic. Beyond this projection a rich smell wafted from a small room, carpeted in a layer of soil and newly sprouting grass. Placed on the grass, a tiny video monitor showed the face of an ostensibly sleeping child. But the video's title, Rosa Lombardi d. 1920 , identified the girl as dead for eighty years, yet sufficiently well preserved to have avoided decomposition. In Jones's installation, the video image of the dead girl's face became emblematic of a surpassing of death; her body retained amongst the living as a stiff presence curiously excessive of death. It is Rosa's bodily state of material suspension which connected with the dormant seeds in the downstairs space and the inconclusive aspect to the sifting shown in the super-8 projection.

For the purposes of this limited review the only problem with Viva Scanland is that only a fraction of this show, organised by Catalyst Arts, of 23 Scandinavian artists works sited in nine different venues, can be covered. In the Ulster University Students' Union Johanna Billing's seamlessly looped video, Project For A Revolution , used Michelangelo Antonioni's remarks about his generation's uncertainty of the means to achieve freedom as a starting point. Billing set her film amongst a group of vaguely discontented, bored-looking students in contemporary Stockholm, who sit silently in a class room without a focus point. This is punctuated with footage of a young man's arrival to pick up a blank sheet of paper and leave again. As the loop repeats itself the sequence of events paradoxically becomes increasingly blurred and it is growing recognition of individual faces which provides the means of engagement, highlighting the privileging of the individual in the absence of a collective purpose.

Over in Catalyst Arts, Jakob Kolding showed four works on paper. Class Structure comprised two pages of identical text, listing 33 considerations for planning socially sensitive urban dwellings. What differs between both pages is the image at the top of each; one is of blocks of public-sector flats and the other is of spaciously laid-out private-sector housing. This reference to housing becomes one to house music in two adjacent collages. Composed of texts and images, both propose a highly referential view of urban space. The first, entitled

Changes in morphology and asset structure of the class fractions
Conceptions Of The Class Structure And Political Ideology
Some Observations On Attitudes In England And Sweden

is composed of these statements juxtaposed alongside images of footballers, modernist architecture and house music. This last pictorial reference to house music is deployed in a position counter to the words "dominant taste," and the collage provides a structural account based upon the mediating agency of cultural forms. The collages refer to earlier Situationist concerns with so-called unitary urbanism; which proposed the use of the arts to produce a milieu dynamically involved with experiments in behaviour. The second collage, Popular And State Discourses Of Power Dub Mix (8:11) , using more overt references to house music, further affirms the role of cultural forms in a collective response to structures of political economy.

The Divine David, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, May 5, 2000
Ruth Jones, Liminal , Proposition Gallery, Belfast, June, 2000
Viva Scanland , situated in nine different venues around Belfast city, June/July 2000

Suzanna Chan is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Ulster.

Review reproduced from CIRCA 93, Autumn 2000, pp. 55-56