C96
Column: Film and Television
TV
Set Dancing
Kevin Atherton's recent show, Three decades; three works
at Arthouse in Dublin, is a neat insight into how he has developed
across the decades and into his on-going preoccupations with different
media, especially TV and video, and more recently VR technology.
In Two Minds shows the artist interviewing himself in a series
of video loops in the late 1970s. Television Interview from
1984 consists of two TV monitors facing each other with Atherton
on one screen interrogating an episode of Coronation Street
on the other. Television Interview hints at the dissatisfaction
with television of the time, the powerlessness of the audience,
and ideas about how artists might use or take over TV - particularly
with the limited potential offered by the then-new Channel 4.
The works are rooted in their time and context. Yet there is also
a sense of a continuum - in the way he is constantly interrogating
his own practice - rethinking, modifying, experimenting and extending
the ideas across different frames and different media.
Here are ten tell-tale signs of the Kevin Atherton experience.
1. You interview TV sets - old episodes of Coronation Street
when Ivy Tilsley was still shopsteward at Balwin's Casuals.
2. You begin to develop visual feedback loops.
3. You devise cameo roles as a doppelgänger, a curator, a tour
guide.
4. You experience the ability to be in two minds.
5. You develop an ability to be in two places at once.
6. You see blank television screens that talk back.
7. You detect parallels between TV audiences and the viewers in
the gallery or in the museum.
8. You begin to talk back to your TV.
9. You want to interrupt the virtual voice-over in your gallery
tour guide.
10. You talk back to art.
The timelessness of his work comes through his own performance in
and around it. Rather than leaving the works static on show in the
gallery space, he continues to perform and intervene in them - reinventing
them, redrawing the parameters of their reception, even drawing
out the incongruities and contradictions between his past and present
self. This openness to change in the reception and interpretation
(usually instigated by his own questioning) reveals a resistance
to the museum/gallery corral.
It suggests a need for an on-going engagement not facilitated by
many mainstream 'virtual museums'. This is central to the third
piece, Four Rooms and a Toilet, which moves away from the
TV world into the virtual gallery tour. In a carefully constructed
series of parodies and pastiches, Atherton sustains his refreshing
sceptical edge.
Stephanie
McBride
