Gavin Murphy: Sketches for a light/ heavy
monument, Four
Gallery, November - December 2006
Gavin Murphy: Sketches for a light / heavy monument, 2006 courtesy the artist
Gavin
Murphy's recent solo exhibition
featured a photographic print and sculpture at Four on Burgh Quay,
accompanied
off-site by two video pieces shown at the National College of Ireland
and
Filmbase. Placed at
the entrance
to Four, the photo print presents a grid of small, apparently
moment-by-moment
shots capturing in Muybridge fashion the sun passing behind a tree.
Upstairs, a large
ziggurat-like
structure, made of folded and bound newspapers supporting several
fluorescent
lights, sits beneath a strobe light and a small hanging box depicting
the year
2006 in lit-up Roman numerals.
Gavin Murphy: Sketches for a light / heavy monument, 2006 courtesy the artist
The
sculpture is a replica of the unmarked
monument on Killiney Hill that commemorates the forgotten death of the
Duke of
Dorset after an accident on the hill.It seems to openly reference Dan Flavin's
'monument'
series, but its
shape also suggests in passing the Miss General Idea Pageant, and
perhaps
shares an interrogation of documentation as part of an enquiry into
what
contributes and constitutes an event.This sculpture is the most apparent 'heavy'
object,
referencing a
traditional sense of commemoration and construction involved in turning
a
chosen event into a memorial, its newspaper building blocks of
literally
everyday materials contributing towards something questionably more
lasting or
meaningful.
The
more ephemeral installations hover
around this ballast, manifesting Murphy's interest in the passing and
perceptual halting of time.One
video, shown for the duration of a day outside the National College,
shows in
slow motion a man eating a hamburger.He is being filmed in one take from outside
the
establishment where he
sits, slowly and unassumingly taking large bites.The other video, shown for a full day on a
window facing
Temple Bar Lane, shows a stop-motion scrap between two women, a loop of
their
pushes and hair-pulls on the quays of Bachelors Walk playing
incessantly.
Gavin Murphy: Sketches for a light / heavy monument, 2006 courtesy the artist
Though
Murphy's 'light/ heavy' binary pun
in the title sets up for an examination of the implications of both
words
physically (ie mass density, lightwaves) and philosophically
(consequentiality), the proposed co-lingering of these terms rightfully
draws
Nietzsche through Kundera's Unbearable lightness of being, but seems to limit the suggestions present in
the work
itself.On one
hand, the
exhibition seems to be calling forth everyday observations as a subject
equally
worthy of architectural monuments and artistic tributes, equally
ridiculous or
resonant as any other chosen moment in history to be attempted to be
cast into
an object.Having
said this, the
staged and melodramatic elements of the quarrel video seem out of place
alongside the more potent offhand and mundane contents of the other
installations.
Gavin Murphy: Sketches for a light / heavy monument, 2006 courtesy the artist
It
is, however, the manipulation and
deliberate reconstruction of these chosen moments that pose further
questions. His
temporal
manipulations call to mind what Walter Benjamin wrote on moments of
stasis in Illuminations and The
Arcades project regarding
the "dialectics at a standstill" allowing a "flash of
awakened consciousness." This
suggests the manipulation itself as an act of creating the meaningful
memory of
any given moment, the exhibition examining the monument simply as a
monument to
and in itself.
Chris Fite-Wassilak
is a writer and curator currently based in Dublin. He is the former
editor of collaborative comic This
Way Up (www.growgnome.com)
and is currently working towards the 'Lighthouse' caravan cinema as
part of the House Projects series of exhibitions.
