I rocked up to the private view of the ICA’s Freeze offering last night to check out what I would call a ‘mixed’ bag of work. Both the painterly and sculptural pieces on offer (by Jacob Kassay and Franz West) carried the dull whiff of the commercial art world, perhaps not surprising given that Gregor Muir former director of Hauser and Wirth is now at the helm.
Thankfully the work of a third artist Frances Stark, tucked away in what used to be the ICA’s theatre space turned out to be a compelling and thought provoking film installation about the intricacies of intimacy in online dating. My Best Thing (named after a slang term one character uses for his genitals) is a single channel animated video that tracks the online relationship between the artist and two men. It veers entertainingly between masturbation and sometimes self conscious intellectual debate. Both the artist and her lovers are represented on screen by avatars that have computerised voices. The male characters also have subtitled speech. While the avatars remain motionless during masturbation (thank goodness) the subtitles and robotic vocals offer staccato representations of relationships that feel intimate despite their remoteness. As the characters interact more frequently over time, the couplings begin to involve many complications, with each partner obviously revealing heavily edited versions of their offline existence. As the ICA’s free sheet points out
“Through the medium of animation, Stark raises questions about the difference between therapeutic confession and performance”
Obviously this duality between cathartic online confessional and partial self revelation reflects the kind of concerns that are central to my research. I’ve talked frequently both on here and in my MRes pitch about the increasing practice of online psychotherapy and the general insinuation made in a recent addition of Journal for Clinical Psychology that sometimes patients reveal more in depth personal information when talking to a therapist via a computer. How much of the identities revealed in My Best Thing are based on truth to life is impossible to tell, but as a viewer attempting to join the dots is fascinating.
I’ve become super interested in the evolution of the ICA as a public space since I wrote this article for the Guardian. I’m hoping that I will be well positioned to track their future progress, given that they are part of the consortia that runs the MRes I’m currently sitting. I really hope that their new director continues to show this kind of compelling video work and goes for a little less of the whiffy commercial painting!
