Niamh O'Malley, The dene, 'vignette'
at Visa for 13, PS1, New York, 24 April - 1 June 2004
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| Niamh O'Malley: The dene 'vignette'
(projection still), 2004, oil on canvas, DVD
projection; courtesy Green on Red Gallery |
Amid the glitz and
rock video allegories of Sam Taylor-Wood's last show at the
Mathew Marks Gallery (NYC), one work held my attention for longer
than I would like to admit. A digital image of a bowl of fruit
withered, and decayed, right in front of my 'very eyes'. Artfully
lit (think Chardin) in some corner of Sam's no doubt awesome
studio, the accelerated time-lapse photography seemed to evoke
a bygone era, when a camera could be adjusted to make magic.
It occurred to me that in this day of 'post chemical' imaging,
the entire category of the 'trick photograph' has been made
redundant. But doesn't every photograph mess with time and play
some kind of trick on us?
Niamh O'Malley's projected work The
dene, 'vignette', part of PS1's Visa for 13
exhibition, engaged me in much the way Taylor-Woods Fruit
bowl of Dorian Gray did, and without the blue-chip YBA guilt.
Modest in both scale and execution (in contrast to the ponderous
Doug Aitken down the hall), O'Malley pulls off the rarest of
feats in a New York debut; that is: something you've never seen
before. O'Malley constructs and animates a single image by projecting
a short (2 minute, 36 second) video loop of a stationary corner
of Central Park onto a canvas (244 x 137cm.) where the same
image has been painted to scale. As the two silent pictures
dissolve in and out of each other, and odd effect is produced,
a shifting between the rendered and the real. There is something
mildly irrational about the hold this work has over those who
encounter it. Perhaps some secret pictorial rule was broken
in allowing this fragment of cinema to operate in the space
of painting.
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| Niamh O'Malley: The dene 'vignette'
(projection still), 2004, oil on canvas, DVD
projection; courtesy Green on Red Gallery |
O'Malley's 'living picture' hybrid
has a slight whiff of the antiquated around it, with all the
associated mysteries and pleasures. Sixties 'underground' film
icon Jack Smith had this great word for describing the undefined,
mesmerizing quality that certain films conceal: 'pastiness'.
And The dene, 'vignette' is somehow awash in the stuff.
How? The selected corner of Central Park depicted is generic,
but not sentimental in any Hallmark Card kind of way.
Maybe it's the plumb-colored sunset and the 'hand painted' quality
of the brushwork, like something you'd find on a treasured ceramic
piece. Usually, when the 'hand' gets involved with the photograph,
busywork and excess ensues; take the Starn Twins, for example.
O'Malley's use of paint on canvas is, to my knowledge, unprecedented
in the crowded field of what is referred to as the 'cinema of
exhibition'. It is also the specificity of the situated
canvas that differentiates O'Malley from those who plunge costly
Chelsea real estate into darkness simply to show movies on the
walls.
It should be said that I am also a
sucker for any park image, ever since being caught in Blow
Up's lush sway that evening in 1966. If this 'movie'
has a star, it's the faux 'turn of the century' lamppost that
occupies the center of the frame, much like the Empire State
Building did in another epic of dislocation, Andy Warhol's Empire
of 1966.
But instead of sublime boredom, the
seamless continuum of this urban pastoral invites scrutiny.
Ghostly passers-by and other marginalia function as markers
in any attempt to measure how long we have spent looking.
I recall a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel who, having become
'unstuck in time', careens between nightmare and idyll.
With the projection as the only light source and with no curtains
to part in the doorway, the gallery's small space was unusually
welcoming and ambient; people who came in tended to stay and
interact.
 |
| Niamh O'Malley: The dene 'vignette'
(projection still), 2004, oil on canvas, DVD
projection; courtesy Green on Red Gallery |
Is it that lamppost that signals the
way back, to cinema's prehistory, for relevant precedents? The
camera obscura would be an obvious precursor [1] but a more
intriguing example is found in Victorian-era 'Magic Lantern'
shows. Audiences were both amused and mystified by images projected
from a kind of stone-age slide projector. Desired effects were
achieved by using retouched overlays (early 'mattes'), dissolves,
and even by jiggling the projector. Should we then add
O'Malley's name to the list of contemporary artists who employ
twenty-first-century technology to address nineteenth-century
concerns? Jeff Wall's moralizing duratran friezes, Mathew
Barney's DVD dream worlds, and Justine Kurland's group portraiture
comes immediately to mind. By taking us back to the flickering
origins of the motion picture, O'Malley relieves us from the
responsibility of finding a narrative drive in what we see.
Free of this burden, we are allowed to drift; minus that 'arrived
too early or too late' feeling that attends the majority of
gallery / cinema experiences. With The dene, vignette
the surface of a canvas unexpectedly plays host to both the
fact of the camera and the fiction of the hand. And as it did
for one swinging London photographer, it is a single image of
a park that holds us in thrall.
Tim Maul is
an artist who lives in New York City. He teaches at The School
of Visual Arts and contributes criticism to 'afterart' (Paris)
