- Venue
- Various
- Location
Glasgow International
Think about the things that really make life worth living – love, sex, creation, attraction, destruction, wild places – then think of golf. It's disgusting.
There was a TV above the windscreen that showed the view from a camera on the front of the coach. You could see the road to Stanstead being sucked from the bottom edge of the little square. It was very distracting and I couldn't help watching it, although I much prefer to look out the window and day dream. What was the point of it? It was showing me nothing that I couldn't already see. Maybe the appeal was in seeing the difference between what the camera's pointed at and what it looks like on the screen. Or it just glamourised the dual carriage way and made it look like we were going faster than we were.
Either way, a plane and a train later I was in Glasgow and heading into the Mitchell Library, where Calum Stirling's contribution to the festival was. Going in, the first thing I was aware of was the stately architecture and light flooding down from the glass roof. Then a big awning, for the shade, and under it, a screen with images moving. They were split horizontally, the two parts panning slowly and silently around what was clearly a scale model, of what looked like a gallery interior, then exterior. There were some blurred close-ups. Only after a while did I look round and see what took up the other half of the ground space: a series of wooden turntables with dioramas on and cameras pointing at them. All the apparatus, the wires and computer controls, was also revealed. Hornby houses, real photographs, an insect examination box, and tiny art works, things that looked like you were supposed to recognise them, made up the dioramas.
It was the coach problem again: of how alluring the image is in preference to the thing itself. With all the cinematic apparatus on display the viewer is constantly seduced into trying to fit themselves into the gap between presentation and representation. But as a self-governing system, it shuts them out, like the situation Paul Virillio describes in The Vision Machine: a closed loop of mediation to which we as subjects have only partial access. The gallery attendant let me print out a screen capture I‘d chosen, a kind act of pseudo-participation. Having initially thought that a relation to the grandiose environment in which it was installed – aside from a mirror angled to the ceiling and some photos of book shelves – was not developed, I realized at this point that, really, libraries are exactly where we go when we prefer descriptions of experience to real life, and things coalesced. They are, and this was, as Virillio would say, where one experiences the ascension of the “reality effect” over the “reality principal”.
On to the festival hub, The Centre for Contemporary Art, where Catherine Yass had her installation High Wire. I first went into an adjoining room where there were architectural plans, quotes from city planners and a slide show of archive photographs of the Red Road tower blocks. This was badly installed and dull, and thinking that was it, I started to leave in a huff when I saw the entrance to the exhibition proper. Here was a multi-screen projection of a tight-rope walker who had attempted to traverse a wire strung between the tower blocks. The projections showed him from various angles – including that from a head-mounted camera – psyche himself up, edge out along the wire, then … retrace his steps back off the wire after only a couple of meters. There were also lightboxes of various views of the towers, in negative, the line of the wire drawn on in white. In these, what ever the implied distance of the camera, the line was always the same thickness. As well as the phenomenological effect, the vertiginous one, there was – maybe it was the mood I was in – a sense of the discrepancy between event and its representation, between set up and pay off. And that view from the head…
Then, both in one block, was E-J Taylor's Try To Do Things We All Can Understand and above it, Melanie Gilligan in Transmission Gallery. It was interesting having them in connected spaces, as they both explored word-image relations but only the latter with any success. Taylor's presented works included a video installation of stills from popular films combined at random with dialogue excerpts and text from As I Lay Dying overlaid with images from Brownie annuals. There was an impressive amount of bumf – plan, press release, glossy essay – which seemed rather compensatory, because the thought put into the works seemed to have stopped half way. Randomizing the received connections of text to image does not a profound point make; mixing Faulkner's macho articulacy with Brownie innocence, contrary to the essay's claim, does not constitute "a demystifying reflection on the gender politics of youth movements". The knowledge that the artist "originally read and annotated this text at the age of seventeen, a time when she would periodically loose (sic) the ability to speak", only makes me think of a 17 year-old mind encountering those words and fitting them to her world; this pre-empts rather than provokes the interpretation.
With that in mind, I should not have found the work up the stairs at Transmission Gallery so affecting. Coming into the space, Gilligan was already intently holding forth to a single audience member, sat six foot in front of her. She was in character, talking volubly about perception. Around the room were suspended copies of renaissance perspectival drawings. When Gilligan stopped, Dan Berckenko started up on the other side of the room. He was talking to a cut-out figure in recline on a chaise long. I listened to him and looked out the window. He agonised over how to bridge the gulf between subject and object, I think. Essays were available to take away: Berckenko's relating Panofsky's thesis that "our images produce the space of relations that they represent" to Marx's alienation; and Gilligan's examining self-cannibalization in culture and the financialized economy, and in fact relating directly, and unflatteringly, to Major's strategies.
Pamphlet in hand I go out along the street and through a little door into a dim blue room and a slide projector projecting Simon Starling's Autoxyloprocycloboros. It showed two figures cruising around a lake in a steam boat, using sections of the boat to fuel the engine. The photographs were beautiful, well framed, rich images on medium format slides, by turns desolate, melancholy and humorous. Inevitably we see the bow disappear below the waves and the debris float off. It could have been a Harold Lloyd escapade, or a relative of a Roman Signer anthropomorphic auto-destruction. The press release then says it’s related to the locale: the water they are on is Loch Long, birthplace of the steam ship and home to the steam-powered Trident. Unlike Taylor’s, these extra factors blend into the meaning gestalt.
Over the road, still heading east, and I almost missed In Transit, a joint exhibition by Dani Marti and Katri Walker. I struggled through a curtain and into deep darkness, and a large screen directly in front of me, a close up of a homeless man falling asleep over his begging cup. It was arresting and uncomfortable – of course this is a gaze we habitually do our best to avoid. A small screen to the side showed a skinny, probably equally homeless dog in slow motion. These two were by Marti. Following a map around the cramped darkness I found Walker’s documentary on several screens about the Mexican Catalina, her family, her church, her marriage; and a split screen sequence on some Australian men, by Marti. Despite the claims in Lois Rowe's perceptive catalogue essay, that the multiple views are an attempt to compensate for an inherent failure in portrayal, that the formal splitting of screens defamiliarizes, I couldn't help the feeling that these were a distraction, and that the videos could have been edited temporally, rather than spatially, that “in multiplying proofs of reality, photography exhaust[s] it”[2], as was the case for Walker's account of Senor Celestino. The labyrinthine gloom, punctuated by these images, did give the sensation of being in a Cartesian "dark room of the mind" and being forced into doubt, to distrust the seductive lens.
Finally, going east again, we reach the Museum of Religious Life and Art. Here was t s Beall's twin screen projection showing flitting images of snow and woodland, often fading to white, like squinting into the sun. The accompanying music by Mary Bellamy rumbled and skittered. The intended experience – for the stereo images to play on one's peripheral vision – was unfortunately foregone by awkward installation: the necessary point of focus was a gap between the two screens. Suggestions of what is beyond vision, too far or too deep, were better made by T J Cooper's photographs of the Atlantic. Then I found a window that looked out on the Necropolis.
I took a solitary walk to the summit and sat down at the foot of the John Knox monument. There were bulbous black clouds to the north, draining themselves in streaks, bright sunlight here, picking out white birds against the slate, the city, distant industrial mist to the south. The scene was almost monochrome, like the contrast had been turned right up. I was pleasantly bullied by the breeze. This is authentic, I thought to myself, a primary engagement. Satisfied, I started down again, only to pass a man with a video camera filming the view I'd just been enjoying, the bastard, spoiling it for some one else.
[1] Jim Colquhoun, A State of Nature, 2008
[2] Paul Virillio, The Vision Machine, 1994
