The following text is taken from a review posted during November 2010 on a previous site. It was part of a collection of reviews that assisted me in contextualising my art practice within the parameters of (visual) anthropology. Presented in its originally form, I have edited the text to reflect the correct tense; the content remains ostensibly unaltered.
While attempting to find a Southwark
street, I ventured into the Jerwood
Visual Arts centre (Jerwood Space) and visited the superseding exhibition
to the Jerwood Drawing Prize viewed a
fortnight earlier. This Must be The Place
was staged as part of the Jerwood
Encounters exhibition and was curated by David Campany (writer, artist, curator
and lecturer) and featured the work of seven artists including Campany himself.
The main thrust of the exhibition focused on uses of photography as a research
tool and displayed images ranging from Dresden to Shanghai. Of anthropological
interest was a sequence of thirty three black and white images of a site
Barcelona photographed by Xavier Ribas.
Entitled Nomads, the installation was
a response to the plight of around sixty gypsy families who were removed from
an empty industrial plot where they had settled. By 2004 the families had been
initially intimidated and finally expelled from the land by the arrival of
diggers that destroyed the area, thus making it uninhabitable. There is a
degree of detachment and no authoritative assessment of the situation, which
allows the audience space for subjective interpretation of the narrative.
Two of the exhibits that particularly
resonated with me were a collection of limited edition hand-made books and
video installation. Dresden I-IX is a
maquette for a suite of books made by Lillian
Wilkie. Having never visited Dresden, but being aware of the destruction of
the city during the bombings of 1945, I have a vague understanding of the
geography and (historical) location through archived images and the anti-war
literature of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five. The images employed in the book compilation were geometrically
constructed compositions that allowed audience interpolation through the device
of neutral design and terse lines of text that underscored the imagery. The
viewer could, to a degree, create their own meaning from the neutrality of the
sparse cityscapes.
The digital video installation by David Campany, One Way Street in
China, caught my attention by means of the subject matter and the
juxtaposition of projected still and moving images. Described as being “(…a)
collection of aphorisms and observations on city life published in 1928”, the
title of Campany’s installation is derived from a text by Walter Benjamin
entitled One Way Street. I am
personally interested both in South East Asian culture and the phenomenon of
experiencing things that are mundane as possessing an almost mystical aspect
when witnessed in a new environment. An example of this could be seen in the
work of the artist Camille Fallet
(also one of the featured artists in the exhibition). When visiting London for
the first time, Fallet took a substantial number of photographs “as if he knew
(that) his judgment would be most acute before he became too familiar with it”.
Campany consciously made a small piece of work each day during his seventy day
visit to Xiamen and Shanghai. This method of work alluded, to a certain point,
to Walter Benjamin’s (supposed) manner of writing the above text. A further
reason for my interest in One Way Street
in China lies in the mode of production and photojournalistic attributes
possessed by the installation. A still image is ‘animated’ by placing and
removing a variety of objects (a wok, an ornament, a book & c) on a table
in front of a reclining woman. Persistence of vision confounded spectator
perception of the still and moving imagery. ‘Low tech’ split screen footage is
interwoven between monochromes that become polychrome saturated images.
D van Eden
D van Eden
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