- Venue
- New Media Scotland
- Location
- Scotland
According the dramatic treatment for Alex Hetherington’s new three-channel video and performance work A Million Lies Once and Only Revealed After Death, the action follows a wildly complex narrative including the sea shanty Shallow Brown, who was called shallow because “he was shallow in his heart” written by HE Piggott and Percy Grainger to the life story of eccentric American gun heiress Sarah Winchester who built a sprawling family home based entirely on superstition and a belief she was haunted by the spirits of the gun that made her fortune; an email scam to share in a fortune of twenty dollars following the death of a wealthy engineer based in Nigeria; a job email scam to join the crew of a ship that will sail the ocean on the whims of a wealthy client and the story of American industrialist James Deering and his ornate Miami estate Vizcaya which contained his vast film collection from the Pathéscope archive on now defunct 28mm film stock and the story of a criminal John Deering, who in a bizarre experiment allowed his heart to be monitored during his execution by firing squad. The action moves, in a humorous re-enactment of one of Sarah Winchester’s daily séances, on board Moonbase Alpha from the 1970s TV series Space 1999 where a crew member hallucinating due to extended confinement on the satellite adrift in the universe uses psychic powers to find a habitable planet, he performs the séance in defiance of the base’s Captain who prevents the crew member from using technology to scan for this new ‘home world’. Realizing he has been hallucinating all along the crew member relinquishes his desires. Finally an extract from Jayson Blair’s biography is read; Blair was a disgraced New York Times journalist who was found to have falsified his news reports and features, particularly stories from the first Gulf War. The extract reveals the moment that his employers confront him with his deceptions.
Surrounding this work, and crucial to its reading is Hetherington’s deployment of two film works by the American artist Catherine Sullivan, The Chittendens and Triangle of Need. Hetherington wrote reviews of these works at screenings and installations in Glasgow, Scotland and New York and underlying this treatment of view to review, review to view, from page to screen is an analysis of identity and its theft and corresponding analysis to Nicolas Bourriaud’s thesis on ‘Postproduction’ tactics, which ‘frames contemporary art within the operation of discjockeys’. Hetherington becomes synthetic DJ, remixing Sullivan’s work making it into an element in a play list, where identity, the identity of his broad range of characters, both real and fictional and of Sullivan herself become material to inhabit and dismantle in this exacting screenplay that finally surmises the weakness of identity and its values from external and internal sources: in the email scams temptations or the wealthy industrialist confined to view the world via film stock, the fortunes desired are the same desires that will oppress, that superstition and skewed belief systems will not liberate but confine, the hallucinating crew member disfigured by his desire for escape or Jayson Blair’s news stories desiring reward, fame and recognition before truth and transparency. Hetherington orchestrates inside this work statements about resources and means and in particular to the art world itself. He compares his shooting schedule for his production alongside a brief analysis of Sullivan’s works.
I enjoyed Hetherington’s use of the three screens in the work that orchestrates a series of sequences where he brought together a cast of actors in different period costume to play out multiple roles in white studios and opulent stately homes, to his use of accents, pre-recorded voices and a vocoder to read out the email scams, making them all the more weird and uncomfortable. Equally I enjoyed the running use of Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life, edited by the emerging Scottish artist Lewis Holleran. Capra’s film used the line: As though he never existed and this sentiment runs neatly through the work as characters from myth, cinema, theatre, art and melodrama appear and disappear almost simultaneously. The use of the ‘zombie’ physical motif is most pertinent on occasion: the dead from email scams brought to life in tragic circumstances, but who never existed in the first place used as traps to steal the identity of the living. The works speaks of gullibility, vulnerability and fallibility; his screens speak about surface, gesture and empathy and the intention of drama.
As with most of Hetherington’s recent output complexity, a vigour of research and intensity and sensitivity toward synchronizing and colliding disparate materials are key elements to his widening practice, particularly in live art, and in accompanying blog web sites and short run publications, which on the night included a handout A3 print, Sarah Winchester Made Me Hardcore, which lists celebrities with fake names, including ridiculous sounding gay porn stars, stars from rap music, ventriloquists and individuals famed for their duplicity.
These are rewarding experiences, acutely beautiful, intense, and sometimes totally impenetrable.
