C96 Review: London

Top: Dorothy Cross: Midges, 2000, DVD 9 min., edition of 4; courtesy Frith Street Gallery Bottom: Dorothy Cross: Endarken, 2000, DVD looped 1 min., edition of 4; courtesy Frith Street Gallery

The exquisite craftsmanship of Dorothy Cross's work usually alleviates the literal female sexuality that could arise from associations of images such as breasts, cows, domestic vessels, snakes, etc. By contrast, in this show, its as if Cross wanted to distance herself from the labor intensiveness of that previous work in favor of something more seemingly spontaneous - hence the emphasis on video. The result has thrown the baby out with the bath water so to speak.

Midges, a 9 minute DVD, is formally comprised of an unhappy mix of the signs of hand-held camera effects and the sophistication of a more filmic choreography. They do not sit well together. The camera's gaze focuses on the horizontal branch of a tree, then it pans twice 360 degrees to the left, during which time a naked female torso appears stretched out face downwards on said branch. A series of uneven zoom dissolves move us closer to the still body, which bears bikini-mark evidence of sunbathing. The camera then pans twice 360 degrees to the right, eventually returning to focus on the body. Suddenly the woman rises up like a lioness, rubbing her arms against her presumably itching breasts, before lying back down prostrate on the branch. Potentially, the spontaneity of this performative gesture contrasted nicely with the roving gaze of the camera, but its critical impact was lessened by the offbeat rhythm of the editing. The hesitant panning seemed like an arbitrary and badly constructed formalism.

Endarken also suffered from similar confusions with filmic language. In this 1minute DVD loop, an image of a stone cottage is quickly obliterated by a black dot that expands from the center of the image to the monitor's edges. Reminiscent of the fade-out in movies (in reverse) or the expanding circle that introduces a cartoon, Endarken's black dot superficially echoed some of Fiona Banner's work minus the clarity of its conceptual humor.

The relationship between the still and the moving image was also explored in the other works on show: a duratran laminated on glass of a naked woman turning her head; a black-and-white photograph of a burning candle held in the labial folds between a woman's open thighs; a large bronze tube, blackened on the inside, the imprint of female genitalia on its top; a film of an oculist at work - the latter interesting because of his skill rather than as a film in its own right. Visual associations between works abound but, in foregoing the allusiveness and attention to detail of previous work, they are all too literal and not a little shallow.

One could not accuse Jaki Irvine's Ivana's Answers of being literal. The film, shot on digital video, has incited critical comparison to a poem. This approach to Irvine's elliptical narratives tends to treat images and dialogue as equally linguistic rather than inherently cinematic. Ivana's Answers is perhaps clearer in its cinematic address than some of Irvine's previous work.

The film opens with a shot of a train departing at night, the station drenched in hues of red and brown. A shot of an arm encircling a station pillar follows the sequence of shifting perceptual sensations engendered by the moving train. The arm appears slightly doubled as if reflected in glass, suggesting another presence, or the absence of another presence. The main body of the film takes place in a room strewn with pads of preserved insects. Here one woman reads another woman's tealeaves, the interpretation referring obliquely to the previous scene: "The train isn't there. He isn't there," she tells the younger woman. However, the scene where the younger woman recounts her sense of not being fully present in her life encapsulates the cinematic address of the film installation. This metaphysical dilemma is voiced over a close-up of a park, empty except for an occasional passer-by in the distance and feathers floating like snow over its dense greenery. In this dramatic separation of sound and image tracks, the everydayness of the park as a place of casual traversal stands resolute in the face of the woman's metaphysical quest. This kind of overlay is what film installation borrows from cinema.

 

Jaki Irvine: Ivana's Answers, video; courtesy Delfina Project Space London

 

In Ivana's Answers the sublimity of ordinary things is attended to. During a shot of the woman peering into the falcon's enclosure in the park, church bells ring. She looks around expectant as if aroused by some portentous destiny. Nothing happens. She looks back to the cage. The camera focuses on some insects crawling in the interior - banal images with no significance beyond themselves. The falcons too, although caged, have a piercing integrity as they tug at their raw-flesh feed. Part of the film's strength lies in the way the nonmoral world of the birds, while acting as a foil to the woman's musings, is not fetishized as some wild nature that the woman has lost by being human. Instead, the crosscutting between the woman's gaze and these birds of prey opens up a space for the viewer to investigate their own desires and longings. In this emphasis on reconstructing emotion in time and space, Ivana's Answers seems related in sensibility to the cinema of Krzystof Kieslowski or Abbas Kiarostami. Something Kiarostami says about his films is applicable here: "We are never able to reconstruct truth as it is in the reality of our daily lives, and we are always witnessing things from far away while we are trying to depict them as close as we can to reality." Irvine's film distills a series of such layers of reality to reconstruct a sense of what it is like to be in a place and time with that person or persons. The viewer savors this concentrated essence in all its strangeness.

Dorothy Cross, Frith Street Gallery, January/February 2001
Jaki Irvine: Ivana's Answers, Delfina Project Space, January/February 2001

Maria Walsh is a writer and lectures in Art History and Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London.