C99 Article: Columns

Visual Arts North
Visual Arts South
Film and Television
Slave to the Machine

Visual Arts North

Brian Kennedy

Giving the camcorder the boot

You know what it's like. There you are at a performance and some prat thinks the fact that they are carrying a video camera gives them the god-given right to stand right in front of you. They may be recording the work for posterity on behalf of the gallery; they might even be doing it on behalf of the artist. It's irrelevant; you are the audience and it is you who should be experiencing the work first hand.

Going to a performance event is getting a bit like walking the streets here in Rome. Everyone is experiencing life through a lens. The video that is looked at after the event conveys little of what would have been experienced if the person had simply opened their eyes and enjoyed the event directly. Over the last twenty years or so a lot has been written about the photographic record of a work of art, particularly in its relationship to live and ephemeral works. Andy Goldsworthy is often criticized for exhibiting beautiful photographs of his work. At least in his case the artist is making the decisions. Land art in general never really solved the problem of how to show work to a wider audience. Robert Smithson was critical of museums but in the end showed in them. Fragments of old performance works get exhibited. Artists who have died get misrepresented.

My worry is that as we move into the twenty-first century things are getting worse. We tend to think of a video as being a record of a performance, a photograph as being a record of an installation. There is the beginning of a tendency to reinvent the left-overs from old works as the original work. This is done without regard to context or site.

This is not a criticism of museums, galleries, artists or writers. It is just that I think we are in danger of losing a means of seeing influential work from the late twentieth century in the way it was meant to be seen. The problem is enormous. It ranges from questions I have raised about the photographic image to how you preserve works that could be made in materials as different as chewing gum and black plastic. Artists and curators from this time and working in this way tend to think that they are still at the cutting edge. They are not; Smithson, Beuys, Broodthaers and many more are no longer with us. Performance art, live art, installations, etc., are now all part of the mainstream. It is time to grow old gracefully and leave a body of work behind that can be exhibited in a coherent intelligent way.

I was in Padua recently to look at the Giotto frescos. No, I am not going off on one of my tangents, read on. They are currently being restored. I was able to climb around on the scaffolding and get right up to even the highest works. It was the most amazing art experience of my life. It would have been even better if it had been possible to make a detailed photographic record of the work just after Giotto created it. Then I could have seen the original colours and would have been able to use it plus the live experience to get a better idea of the artist's original intent.

Restoration of ancient works of art has developed amazingly. My worry is that the restoration of works of twentieth century in the twenty-first century will be similar to the abrasive methods used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on ancient works. These methods almost destroyed forever many fine works. We have the technologies and the opportunity to preserve these newer works. They will no longer be original but they could be presented in a way that would allow viewers a good idea of what the artist originally intended. It will not however be preserved by some idiot with a camcorder standing in front of me at a performance event. That person is still in danger of getting the kick up the arse so richly deserved.

 

Film and Television

Stephanie McBride

Something rotten in the State

Irish politician Michael Noonan recently voiced concern about RTÉ's television drama No Tears, which tells how the Irish State poisoned several hundred of its citizens. He suggested that the transmission was "legally risky." What exactly did he mean? That somehow politicians should determine when television drama can be scheduled?

Ever since the BBC first screened Cathy Come Home in 1966, drama-documentary has been a vexed issue. The anxieties tend to coalesce around its hybrid status, the blurred generic boundaries and an underestimation of the audience's intelligence.

No Tears (LittleBird/RTÉ) relied on intense emotional drama to engage viewers with a narrative of public concern - a story of how several hundred Irish women became infected with a contaminated blood product, followed by attempted cover-ups and political wrangling, as the State abandoned them to their fears and frustration. Despite some sluggishness in the telling, the power of this feminist tale is in ventilating the issues in a wider public forum. Its opening montage - of different news reports piling up in a visual glut of reporters and newscasters, with a parallel sonic sludge - points up the danger of information overload. Drama can bypass the media fatigue that news reporting can induce. It takes the unsifted realities and shapes them into a narrative that illuminates issues which news genres can't fully explore.

With the transmission of Bloody Sunday (ITV) and Sunday (Channel 4), the politics of drama and docudrama were again centre-stage. Coming thirty years after the turbulent events, the issue of their timing was also a matter of debate while the Savile enquiry continues.

Bloody Sunday used hand-held cameras and diffuse sound, adopting the conventions of TV journalism to create credible chaos and compelling visual velocity. A series of parallels set up the opposing sides as they prepared for the march, constructing a middle-ground through James Nesbitt's character in tune with a grassroots community. In contrast, the visual impact of a standing army was shown as hugely inappropriate to the urban streets. The mode of address invited the viewer into the horror of the unfolding tragedy, the visual style suggesting unmediated access to those events.

Much of the debate about the dramatic representation of such events centres on the appeal to the emotional and an absence of 'balance' - as though the writing of history itself was somehow without position or argument. Clearly the freight of dramas such as No Tears and Bloody Sunday is the emphasis on empathy, but caught up in this are well-worn arguments about the emotional impact diminishing our critical responses.

However, when conventional routes to justice are thwarted, then drama can challenge as well as entertain. Arguments about the timing of its transmission as "legally risky" - because it coincides with an ongoing inquiry or tribunal or election campaign - should equally challenge and unsettle us. Art should not undergo some form of intellectual and cultural quarantine to make it somehow safe and palatable for public consumption.

 

Slave to the machine

Michael Cunningham

Smashing times in the language lab

Around the same time as chemistry sets went out of fashion, another childhood pleasure began to disappear: mucking about inside machines. Previously you could still keep in touch with machines - literally. They were tactile and understandable, you could peer in and follow their tubes or pipes, there were wires to tug and switches to toggle.

But, thanks to transistors and silicon chips, the insides of today's machines are so complex that even grown-ups can't take them apart. A standard family car contains more electronics than an Apollo space mission. Many gadgets and gizmos have been distilled down into one or two ready-made chips, self-sealed units with nothing left to get your hands dirty on, apart from that sticker warning not to peek inside: "Do Not Open - Warranty Blah Blah Blah..."

Or take radio sets. James Gleick, in his biography of physicist Richard Feynman, writes of how "eventually the art went out of radio tinkering. Children forgot the pleasures of opening the cabinets and eviscerating their parents' old Kadettes and Clubs." Solid blocks of boring featureless microchips replaced the valve radio's 'messy innards'.

In the everyday science of mucking about, machines used to be 'things to play with'. Now they are 'to play things on'. Instead of having our hands inside a physical machine space, we have 'hands-on' experience of (external) input devices and cyberspace.

Even so, another kind of tinkering is going on on the Net. Just as scientists at CERN have built gigantic caverns to smash together subatomic particles, the Web has huge engines for smashing together words and texts, and to observe what strange fragments and energies are unleashed. In this modern language lab we take it for granted that you can conduct experiments in seconds that would have taken decades with physical documents.

The Web is rife with these popular experiments, games and general mucking about with bits of language. Take 'googlewhacking'. This absurdist craze swept the Net in early February. To 'googlewhack' is to find a combination of just one or two search terms, a combination so rare and elusive that it returns a single result on Google.com. Just one page in the entire Web contains the terms somewhere within it (though not necessarily as a phrase). The terms have to exist in Dictionary.com, and pages consisting merely of word-lists don't count.

Here are a few alleged googlewhack examples: "metronome dewpoint," "plectrum irradiation," "gorgonzola quintuplet," "comparative unicyclist."

But what happens if "gorgonzola quintuplet" then appears in this article on CIRCA's website, and is 'seen' by Google? "Gorgonzola quintuplet" won't be a googlewhack any more. There'll be an extra hit for it.

So there's another term: 'Heisenwhack'. It's what a googlewhack turns into once Google harvests another site which has reported the whack. It's a loose variant of the computing term 'Heisenbug', as in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. A heisenwhack is where the observer of a googlewhack alters the reality being observed, and the googlewhack is a googlewhack no more...

 

Visual Arts South

Aidan Dunne

A horse that neighed

 When Ivan Massow, the now ex-chairman of London's ICA, recently dismissed Brit Art's galaxy of conceptual stars as bereft of technical skills and their art as more or less a con, the art world reacted with a cogent, convincingly argued case for the quality and worth of contemporary conceptual art. Well no, actually, it didn't. The reaction was more incredulity that someone from within a cultural bastion would sound off like that, and also something suspiciously like panic. Calls for Massow's resignation had a subtext of "For God's sake, shut him up" to them.

Understandable, you might say. It was certainly inappropriate for the chairman of an institution committed to innovative art to attack some of its foremost practitioners. So it was reasonable for artists and commentators to call for his resignation. There is a sizeable body of conservative opinion ready and waiting to grasp any opportunity of denigrating contemporary art, and Massow made the mistake of offering up a customised, deluxe, gold-plated opportunity. The enemies of the new were able to look smug and say: "See, we told you so. All this modern art stuff is rubbish and now you have it from the horse's mouth."

Yet there is something odd about the status of the avant garde being validated and protected by institutional diktat, as though it is too delicate a bloom to survive outside the hothouse climate of the cultural establishment. The harsh truth is that the contemporary art world is to an extraordinary extent insulated and protected by insider consensus. Most criticism within this preserve is anodyne, unthinkingly positive and not especially meaningful, designed to bolster the overall framework of values. Some writers, like Julian Stallabrass, have pointed out the lamentable dearth of actual critical writing about British art of the 1990s. Much published writing sits happily within various spuriously specialist nomenclatures. Within this context, art can be credited with the most extraordinary levels of ambition and achievement, can come across as positively dazzling and world-changing - and yet leave the outside world curiously untouched.

The problem with Massow isn't that he criticised and dismissed contemporary art and artists, but that he was considered as one of us, an insider, and he suddenly flipped over to being an outsider, one of them. It was almost as if he had forsaken a vocational position, lost his faith, rejected his religion, like the Church of Ireland clergyman who a while ago pointed out that he didn't actually believe in the deity as enshrined in doctrine. It is Massow's professed lack of faith that shocked Art and art practitioners should be more than able to take a bit of verbal abuse. There is a lot of bad Brit Art.

There has to be. That's the way things work. Personally it seemed to me that Martin Creed's Turner Prize-winning effort last year was lamentable, a conceptualist afterthought dressed up with vainglorious rhetoric, and left both Prize and the contemporary art world - that, like it or not, it represents - glaringly vulnerable to onslaughts like Massow's. The fact is that there have been more than enough outstanding works and projects produced by British artists over the last decade to make Massow's claims ring hollow. But the craven response was indicative of a lack of confidence and conviction. His outburst and the responses to it suggested a fragility at the heart of Brit Art. It was as though if the tacit consensus was broken, the whole thing might evaporate in a puff of smoke, a state of affairs that is at least partly attributable to a failure of critical commentary.