Talking Heads 19.02 to 28.03 2010
Taking its title from the filmic convention common to docu-journalism and webcam exhibitionism, Talking Heads is an exhibition of contemporary artworks that explore the people and faces that populate the mediascape. The eye-witness testimonial, the confessional, the report, the expert discussion; each of these techniques lends authority and credence to the speaking subject. And yet, film is not simply an objective witness to an interviewee, but a creative framework open to directorial manipulation and interpretive control. In this way, the artists brought together in Talking Heads explore the multiple positions of the subject under the gaze of the camera.
Peter Weibel has commented that today’s media savvy generation share a library of visual experiences fed by the mass media from blockbuster films to advertising billboards. This media competency is expressed through an appreciation for editing techniques, camera work, narrative structures and production values. It would appear that the mechanics of media are so familiar to a generation that grew up with VCR’s and digital cameras that film has become a sort of visual Esperanto that an increasing number of people can ‘speak’. For Jorg Heiser, the pleasure of watching a film is now derived precisely from a recognition of its finer structure, from identifying not just with its characters but also with its directors. Today, almost everyone can speak critically about the way a TV programme or film is put together and, furthermore, the reach of these films defines the meaning of community in the television age.
Talking Heads features works by Omer Fast and Oraib Toukan previously unseen in Dublin, a special 16mm screening of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as recent works by Stephen Sutcliffe, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Curated by
Claire Feeley
Opening reception: Friday 19th February 6 - 9 pm
Open to the public from Friday to Sunday from 12:00pm to 5:00pm
Omer Fast: CNN Concatenated
For CNN Concatenated, Omer Fast recorded hundreds of hours of TV reporters speaking directly to camera. From this cache of words, he pieced together an 18-minute monologue, allowing his own script to be channeled through the mouths of TV’s most recognizable anchor men and women. Unlike the spit and polish of classic TV reportage, Fast’s tirade of words quickly slips into open confessionalism; alternatively seducing the viewer (…get near to me…) or exploiting their fears and anxieties (Look, I know you are scared…). The conventional apparatus of news broadcasting is revealed as a vast game of cat and mouse in which both broadcaster and audience are complicit in a complex web of needs and desires. By addressing the on-screen reporter as a figure of influence, Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated lends insight into the constituents of the mass-media machine. Here the viewer is accustomed to identifying with the speaking figure as a conveyor of public information yet it also makes plain the compromises of the present mediascape in which this relation of trust is taken as given.
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard: Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches)
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are artists with a genuine ken for video culture. With their reenactments of pivotal moments from art and music history, they tacitly admit the manner in which popular culture fosters and feeds off the sense of nostalgia and recognition in their audiences. Although referencing our recent art historical past has become an increasingly familiar trope in contemporary art practice, Iain and Jane never lose site of the specificity of video. The ‘aura’ of the past is resurrected here in such a way that acknowledges that video is a medium that is constantly referring back on itself and reappropriating its earlier forms. Not surprising then, that for Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches) the artists chose to reenact a performance by one of the great trend setters in video art: Vito Acconci. In the 1973 original, Walk Over, we see a loan figure approach and recede from a fixed camera, perhaps in a hallway, perhaps outside someone’s apartment, alternatively obsessing over a failed relationship and humming a short refrain. Whereas the grainy tape of Acconci’s original locates it back in the adolescent mists of video art, Iain and Jane’s update is firmly in the present; rescripted by London MC Plan B and given the slick veneer of a contemporary urban music promo.
Stephen Sutcliffe: We’ll Let You Know
Stephen Sutcliffe is likewise a master of the shared visual library we call culture. He collects video and audio clips like another might collect newspaper clippings in order to keep tabs on the fleeting moments of zeitgeist as they ebb and flow through collective memory. The overarching emotional drive behind these collages of found video and audio seems not to critique or unmask the machinations of the culture industry, but rather to inhabit them, to adopt their strategies and make use of the gems that are distilled from their depths. In We’ll Let You Know, we see a young Ian McKellen address an audience on aspects of his method and technique. The mise-en-scene shifts gear when the audio track kicks in and we hear an offscreen voice heckle over his monologue (Begin as soon as you like, would you...) transporting us to the site of an audition in which the young actor is clearly doing little to impress (Oh God…get him out of here…). In Sutcliffe’s hands, the camera plays the part of a judge, carefully observing and picking apart the performance in front of it. The audition is a familiar situation for the 21st century flexible worker to find himself in, where he must constantly present and represent himself to clients and coworkers in ‘that post-Fordist job interview we still call conversation’. In such a climate, the space of the audition is no longer restricted to the interview room or the theatre; today every face to face encounter is a performance.
Oraib Toukan: Talking Heads
Major broadcasters have been quick to pick up on this generation’s near bottomless appetite for information, and artists too are learning to embrace the ‘journalistic turn’ in contemporary visual art. Taking the sale of the Middle East as its subject, Oraib Toukan’s Talking Heads parodies the desirability of a ‘hot story’ as well as the ways in which representations of her homeland have become the basis of an insatiable opinion industry. As the title suggests, Talking Heads is a tongue in cheek pastiche of the documentary genre, with its high-ish production values and clean infinity backdrops. We watch well heeled PR spokespeople and financial gurus advise the artist on how to buy a country, revealing their collusion in a scandalous real estate venture. The work reveals something far more powerful about how all issues of global importance are assimilated, formatted and distributed through the conventions and vocabularies of the media machine. In this way, Toukan’s Talking Heads recalls and updates Richard Serra’s prophetic ‘New Media State’ in which ‘control over broadcasting is an exercise in control over society’.
Andy Warhol: Screen Tests
How much does an interview count as a portrait, in so far as a person thus ‘taken from the raw’ can be more real than their own self-presented selves? Andy Warhol always referred to his Screen Tests as film portraits, although his earliest co-authored ventures in to this format were more akin to interviews than anything else. Screen Test #1 was shot on 23rd of July, 1965 at the factory; the subject was Philip Fagan, a good looking ‘Black Irish’ boy according to Roland Tavel, the script writer for many of Warhol’s early films. Andy asked Tavel to ask Philip questions, questions that would lead him to perform in some way before the camera. Warhol was disinterested in the responses the boy offered to his off-screen examiner, preferring instead to observe the slightest movement of his lips, the merest flicker of an eyelid with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera. Screen Test #2 and #3 (suicide) are similarly concerned with seeing the body under the conditions of film technology. During the same period between ‘66 and ‘68, Warhol was making more paired back Screen Tests, simply asking casual frequenters of the factory to look into the lens as the camera rolled through 100ft of film stock. Subjects included Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, Baby Jane Holzer & Susan Sonntag; a representative parade of friends, intellectuals, models and actors. To watch a series of Screen Tests in a row is to be struck by the pull these faces can exert over a viewer, to admire how much room for manoeuvre there is within such a fixed format. For Warhol, an artist so terminally infatuated with surface, there could be no greater fascination than a human face, and no greater project for art than to explore what it truly means to look upon one.