Live@8, Occupy Space, Limerick
5th May 2011
Review by Alicia Lydon
The inaugural date of Live@8's tour allowed the multidisciplinary, contemporary art evening to reach beyond its scope bringing the event to new audiences. The transposition of the event from busy bar to gallery-space allowed for a greater breadth of work, unhindered by the restrictions of viewing art within a bustling, commercial setting.
A sizable section of the main space was given over to Cecilia Danell and Majella Dowdican's collaborative mixed media installation Re-fabrication. It is certainly a beneficiary of a bigger venue, comprising of several sculptural and drawing works. Posing the problem of viewing the object as a thing-in-itself, this work can only exist as part of a wider discourse; on the copy, the relationship between object, representation and language and the problem of seeing. Placing an emphasis on material and a certain meticulous, hand-crafted attention to detail, organic forms are subject to interventions with non-organic materials; a 'tree' is constructed from duct-taped twigs, two slabs of grass-covered earth are linked by a zipper, a ‘nest’ is bound by string and sewing pins.
Concerned with the nature of fabrication in their individual and collaborative practice, the pair engaged with the dual meaning of the word, both the process of making art by skill or labor and that of invention or counterfeit. The installation contains layers of reference, utilizing both verbal and visual quotation. Foucault is foot-noted in a work after German sculptor, Thomas Demand. Citation and reference provide some pathway into this installation, yet there is a sense, re-enforced by the title, that the complete picture is deliberately obscured. The artists assertion that the work is grounded in modernist thought is perhaps deliberately ambiguous, as the full scope of this remains unclear., Re-fabrication's doubles and subterfuge both engage and frustrate the viewer as he is always left wanting to know more.
The disruption of normal modes of communication leading to seclusion and estrangement is explored by two performance based works. Redress 2010 consists of an intimately-sized video projection of performance artist Áine Phillips struggling with a dress that can never fit. Caught between states of dress and undress, the garment begins to conceal sections of the artist's body, forming strange sculptural silhouettes. As she turns in slow revolutions an overall form becomes gradually apparent, an archaic gown is revealed, strenuously fashioned to her figure. The viewer is remains outside of this solitary ritual, acting as both spectator and witness to a public screening commemorating private trauma. Phillips maneuvers through her weighty subject matter sensitively, carefully picking apart the fabric of societal and legal structures which have and continue to contribute to the endemic silence on this issue.
In the back room amid bright, semi-spherical plastic shapes, Ann-Maria Healy's SpeakEER deals with the private politics of alienation and uncertainty. The artist isolates herself from her audience, largely confining herself to crouch underneath one of her foam constructions. Often the only clue to her presence is a solitary paint-coated hand or foot escaping the boundaries of her refuge within the strange landscape she has created. A tension arises as the viewer becomes aware that he is not alone, that this is indeed a performance work, the realization of the artist's presence makes us uncomfortable as we remain unacknowledged and inhibited from communicating with her. Healy's performance speaks of the inability to do so freely, there is a tone of hesitance and anxiety as she hints at a restrictive fear which drives the work, as her medium becomes a comment on the symptoms of a break-down of human connection and interaction.
Interventionist in nature, Knee-Jerk's What Is this Job Like? addresses the space between production and consumption as members of the collective engage in exchanges with audience members from catering to clothing alterations. Setting up shop directly outside the slick glass exterior of the gallery-front, some of the performances took on the appearance of casual street-trading, with the performers themselves animatedly hawking their services much to the bemusement of passing tourists. The role of currency is replaced by tokens, a certain number of which are provided, ideally fostering the desire for more. An exchange is bought within the established parameters of the performance's economics; tokens are swiftly spent, though more may be obtained if you know where to look and whom to ask. Knee-Jerks underlying concerns with labour practices within the art world become somewhat lost within the boisterousness of their performances.
In Dave Callan's three-channel video installation Untitled, looped footage repeats as members of family act Crystal Swing, are caught in the moment of walking on stage or endlessly answering the same question. The dated, kitsch Late, Late Show stage and the questionable Vegas-Elvis outfit of one of the interviewees point to an appropriation of a pop culture which couldn't seem further away from current yet strangely is.
The scope of the programme was, at times, somewhat overwhelming, several of the longer performances overlap with an ambitious screening schedule. A degree of viewer fatigue inevitably sets in as over an hour's worth of video work was shown, however the sheer variety of work screened makes it worthwhile for the viewer to stay for the duration. Anthony Kelly and David Stalling's collaborative Treehouse combines audio and visual elements as a lush soundtrack plays to the softly focused, cropped footage of still feet at water's edge, the tide leisurely breaking over them.
Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen’s Predator's In the Aviary is a harsh indictment of the amorality of Wall St traders, a post-recessionary backlash structured in a pastiche of the nature documentary format. The video montage functions as a field guide analyzing the component parts of the financial ecosystem. Grainy treetop footage is accompanied by subtitles identifying habitats (from trading floor to killing field), species (black-hearted day-trader, golden mortgage catcher) in a work which voices dissent capturing an international dissatisfaction with power structures and those who run them. Exploiting the communicative power of their medium, Millner and Larsen culturally intervene in political debate. Subtlety gives way to clarity of purpose which leaves the viewer a little cold, as the work expresses an explicit agenda and almost becomes a promotional tool, underscoring the excesses at the holy grail of fast-dealing and insatiable greed.
Louise Manifold's Phantom draws on myth and quasi-spiritual storytelling, exploring supernatural recollections of hauntings on lonely country roads. The video uses inverted footage, overlaid with atmospheric audio; ghostly horses strain at the bit, a long, empty road rushes toward us as the sound of clattering hooves grows louder, dark trees whip past. The accompanying subtitles narrate an account in which traditional elements of the ghost-story are present; inexplicable interventions into ordinary lives, a chilling feeling, the frisson of encountering the dead. Phantom explores a tradition of finding presence in absence, looking at one facet of cultural attitudes to death and the phenomenon of the uncanny.
The night exhibited a multifarious panorama of a diverse range of practices, typical to non-thematic group shows. The emphasis was on largely on performance and video work, though this varied wildly in aesthetics and frame of reference. No unifying vision is apparent, leaving the event to attempt to act as a representative cross-section of a specific contemporary art scene, offering a platform to emergent artists alongside their more established counterparts in a continuing commitment to showcasing a restless visual culture.
Experimental Conversations Issue 1: Summer 2008
Live @ 8 (Galway)
June 2008
Review by Phillina Sun
The high turnout for Live @ 8 made it resoundingly clear that Galway needs a free, monthly arts-centered night. It premiered on the night of Wednesday, April 30th, at Bar No. 8 on the Docks. Video, performances and installation featured on the programme organised by No-Wave film pioneer Vivienne Dick, performance artist Áine Phillips and curator Maeve Mulrennan.
In Sarah Pucill's stop-animation You Be Mother, images of eyes and lids are projected onto teapots and cups, which weep, attempt to speak, and commit mutiny. The cramped hallucinatory space is reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer's Alice, where the use of ‘innocent' domestic objects conveys deep meanings of power to quietly electrifying effect.
In Vivienne Dick's Staten Island, a silver-clad androgynous creature inhabits a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with heaps of inexplicable industrial rubbish. This world is post-culture, post-civilisation, even post-hope, where the solitary post-human sucks on an electric-blue Mr. Freeze pop, that quintessential post-food invention, with the grimy glamour and deeply melancholic manner of a Ziggy Stardust.
In Aideen Barry's Experiments in Splitting, three white-gowned women whip long black hair asynchronically on the edge of a cliff on Arann Mor while a turgid beat drums on. As evident from her other work, Barry is interested in the lone Gothic figure surrounded by a vast, impersonal natural space. That this figure has been split only amplifies the kind of rural solitude that could drive a person to madness.
In Different Shine, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling have fused a pulsating soundtrack to a flickering apartment intercom monitor. Colour becomes the protagonist, the beat its narrative; hypnotic fields of colour morph as time and space seems to collapse.
Tom Flanagan's piece Eye/Needle is equally as mesmerizing, albeit in a wholly uncomfortable way. An eye is confronted by the close proximity of a needlepoint, which is reflected in the eye. A throbbing soundtrack amplifies the tension. Flanagan calls on the viewers to be brave, as they oscillate between wanting to look and wanting to not look.
We can't help but look at Moira Tierney's American Dreams #3, which begins with scenes of a blue sky blotted by smoke. There is no commentary to let us know what has happened; we only know that something has happened. Images collect powerfully: people walking across a bridge; more smoke; a distant, vaguely familiar skyline; more smoke; warships converging, a green, miniscule Statue of Liberty in the background; and more smoke, ever unfurling from the city's ruined economic center. A rare hush falls as the audience becomes absorbed by these familiar images, now liberated from the relentless commentary that had accompanied them on 9/11. With echoes of YouTube, this film is an unexpectedly contemplative counterpoint to the perfectly framed (and cropped) representations of NYC in postcards and movies.
Viewer fatigue sets in by the end of an exhaustively multimedia night. The one criticism is that too many works are shown in a full house. The viewer is unable to give the attention needed. If it weren't for the pungent smell of compost lingering after Marton Rochford's physically demanding, surprisingly semi-erotic performance, it could have gone unnoticed. Videos on monitors set in different parts of the space are almost lost, obstructed unintentionally by a body or pillar. This is unfortunate. In Orla Clogher's eerie video Untitled, a ghostly white female body floats over a body of water, her face completely submerged, as she seems to struggle with or enter the water. Aoife Cassidy's video, El Preso, shows a hand performing to Joan Baez's version of an emotive Spanish song, to beautifully comic effect.
One of the most striking elements of the event was a live performance by Anna McLaughlin. Without introduction, a young woman starts to dance, back to audience and IPod in hand, before a full-length mirror propped next to the big screen. She dances for an hour, sometimes singing, sometimes with eyes closed, bra straps falling down in abandon; she is the typical teenager, or amateur dancer, perhaps both. Enthusiasm is the force that drives her, so that no one-not even the disinterested girl who walks between her and the mirror-can interrupt this almost meditative act. As with dancing, art is not just for the experts. Live @ 8 doesn't just include established professionals but an intriguingly diverse range of people, and was met with a standing room-only crowd.
- Phillina Sun
http://www.experimentalconversations.com/reviews/147/live-8-galway/
