On the tip of your Tongue / Abigail Conway / Forest Fringe, Edinburgh Festival 2008

On Sunday 10th August, it was discovered that Forest Fringe, a performance venue operating during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had been broken into. Money, laptops and other valuables had been stolen. One untouched item was a sealed empty jar. From one perspective this is hardly surprising. However, if you surveyed the audience who participated in “On the tip of your tongue” they might have voted this jar the most valuable item in the building. The jar contained proclamations of hopes, dreams, desires, fears and fantasies.

On the 9th August the participants entered the large space upstairs in single file. Slight adjustments such as the clearing the space of extraneous furniture - allowing the architecture and original décor to breathe and the replacement of electric lights with candles - brought the building’s original function as a church to life. This immediately transformed our interaction with the space: we intuitively responded by speaking in hushed tones, moving at a slower pace and becoming receptive to a contemplative mode of thought.

On entry we were handed a small plastic bag by the artist, Abigail Conway (it was the sort drugs are traded in). Inside the bag was a finely folded envelope and writing sheet, both made of rice paper (no larger in surface area than a box of matches). Also in the bag were typographically playful instructions as to how to use the bag’s contents.

On a table in front of a screen were ‘edible-ink’ pens . Here you were encouraged to write whatever you felt on your paper and seal it in the envelope. The next step was to ascend a stairway to another platform (it might have formerly been an altar). On this table were two jars. In one you placed your envelope, dropping it into a jar full of other envelopes. From this jar you also removed a stranger’s envelope. After reading the stranger’s note and eating it, you spoke the words aloud into a second jar, then descended the staircase, free to leave or consort with others.

The experience literally asks of us to ‘eat our words’, as a phrase it is negative, ‘to eat one’s words’ is an act of defeat, or revision, but in these circumstances there is a warmth to the act. It is a symbolic means of keeping something treasured by enmeshing it within you. The logic that consumption is a means of achieving greater proximity to an idea or concept is most explicit in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, again our attention is returned to the history of the site.

Thus we are partake in a conceptual game exercising our capacity to ‘make-believe‘. We are bound by an essentially ‘intra-audience’ experience – the strength of the work lying in what he have communally experienced. The emphasis lies in what has happened between us, this is valued over what might be extrapolated from the outside by from those who weren’t there. Our capacity to believe is enhanced by the delicacy of the envelopes and other rice-paper made paraphernalia; their aesthetic harks back to literary descriptions of woodland fairytales: objects from other worlds left in ours by chance or good fortune.

Any assumptions of speech as ‘writing made permanent’ are overturned. The act of eating the words is a destruction of this permanence, in doing so a substitution of one permanence for another occurs. The eating is part of a relay that begins in thought and culminates in speech – the act of speaking into the jar is both symbolic and physical; yet we are given the space to imagine that it could be more than this, that there might be, somehow, a means beyond science of containing these voiced thoughts. The achievement of “On the tip of your tongue” lies in its allowance and encouragement of this possibility… that if we were to put the jar to our ear and listen hard enough and long enough we might hear what was whispered.

Dice / Emma Hart (video, 2006)

"Sea.. six... four...three...Emma wins, Emma's go", so goes the artist's commentary on her game of dice with the sea. We never see her, we hear her voice, we catch sight of her hand, her shadow can sometimes be spotted in the wet sand and in other shots her footprints. Likewise we never the see the sea, when the tide comes we catch the water rolling the dice, we hear it continuously as though it surrounds us entirely, but there is no panning shot across its expanse. The focal point of the work is the contact between artist and water, the encounter, the point of meeting. The dice is emblematic of the dialogue between the two. The interplay of human and sea is playful and delicate. The simple act of engaging with the sea in the mode of a game usually played between people, whimsically anthropormophizes the sea. The tone of this engagement with the natural world is quite opposite to the typical representation of nature and especially the sea, as an unruly threatening force, to be dominated or feared. The representation of chance is similarly toyed with: Hart takes an illustrative and cliched symbol of chance in the form of a dice, and then subjects that object to an unpredictable system. The 1 in 6 probabilities of the cube come face to face with the complex dynamic of turbulent water. Perhaps predictably and even prophetically, natural force wins this little duel, the last frame Sea chucks a double six, you can’t get better than that.

G5 / Gemma Holt / Limoncello /28.08.08 - 27.09.08

This text was originally written on Microsoft Works Word Processor, then printed on to A4 paper and copied on to the paper you have your in hand. The paper has the casualness of the ‘readymade’ but is not so. The paper is called G5, (H23.3 x W16.6cm) this is ever so slightly larger than A5 (H21 x W14.8). The ‘G’ is most likely for Gemma, as in Gemma Holt, the paper is her artwork. It is photocopy paper - 80grams/m2 - and has been used where possible for Limoncello gallery’s correspondence, loan forms, invoices etc.

As far as I know there are not yet purpose made envelopes to accompany G5, according to an intern at the gallery this can pose a problem, but points to the moment where Holt’s construction rubs against a pre-existent system with regard to its functionality and slippage into the world around it; highlighting the ‘life-support’ necessary for certain constructions to sustain themselves in the world - it would take the backing of a big business manufacturer to strong arm all that was necessary for G5 to become the functional commodity it has the potential to be, not just envelopes, but photocopiers, extra selection choices on printer options and so on. A one-woman self-initiated standardization scheme is bound to be of slight impact in this regard, but that is not to say it feigns dissent or is insincere, more that it will stay in the realm of the symbolic and was always meant to.

I use the word 'dissent', thinking of a quiet tension generated by G5 between the standards we have always known and what is new, thereby calling into question more fundamental units of quantification: be they of time, physical distance or weight. G5 isn’t rhetorically propositional, but it does ask us to look at the act of standardization, to consider who can call for things to be standardized. It invites us to reflect upon assumed fixities that we might follow blindly, either conceived arbitrarily or whose rationale may have once been historically important but no longer so. Significantly neither of these charges can be aimed at the international paper sizes, of which A5 and A4 are part. Quite the opposite, their beauty lies in their width to length ratios, approximately 1:1.4142, if a sheet with this ratio is divided into two equal halves parallel to its shortest side, then this ratio is maintained, hence the ease of scaling up or down A0, A1, A2 etc. G5, could therefore be considered a malfunction of sorts, a disrupter of the elegance of the mathematics possessed by its rational cousin, A5. Through its deviancy (and one might say failure) it asserts its individuality.

As advertisers and marketing strategists in their self-protective cunning have increasingly come to understand (or more likely, always understood but now need to recognise), there is conflict between the message of their pitches: promoting their product as a sign and reinforcement of our ’uniqueness’ and ’individuality’ and what they are pitching: something not unique, something mass produced… Their evolution has been toward the mass produced item which can be ‘personalized’…Online networking sites, mobile phones, digital TV viewing packages pride themselves and make a focal part of their ’package’ the potential for users to customize their products.

Holt makes murky our sense of customization: she hasn’t altered what’s been given, but begun from scratch. She wittily makes something to her own specification that mimics the produce of a production line. It is an act of taking power for oneself, but concurrently affirms her sense of the power of standardization. Perhaps the difference being asked of us is that we recognise alternatives alongside the mainstream choice offered by the nearest stationary store.

This focus so far on functionality, which to me seems secondary to the idea of the artwork as a model of how things could be, risks obscuring another quality of the work: its self-interrogation as to the nature of an artwork. It is not an artwork designed to be mechanically reproduced, but rather by its nature is multiple; if the few sheets of paper before you were the only ones of its kind it would be an aura-possessed work pretending to be otherwise. It makes no cult of itself, it’s not singular and its differences are hardly noticeable without attention being drawn to it. Although emerging from a gallery and an art-world context it operates virally, intravenously dripped into everyday life. Ultimately it is beyond the gallery where G5 can create its ‘little jolts’. Drawing you up sharp when you find it not quite fitting your file, or the discovery of an unusually broad margin when you print or photocopy. By creating this ‘glitch in the matrix’ a portal is opened for further investigation. Although the virtues of standardization are numerous: as regulator of health and safety standards, as a means of regulation of resources (potentially benefiting consumers or those less powerful in society), as a means of optimizing resources and most importantly - easing communication; its flipside is that it is an enforcer of dominant norms and restricts and contains ‘the marginal’. This is particularly apparent with the spell-check facility of Microsoft Works Word Processor; regulating not just types of spelling but words themselves, thereby circumscribing expression of ideas. Disturbingly for me while it recognises curator and curatorial, 'curating' apparently does not exist.

Seizure / Roger Hiorns/ 3.10.08 - 2.11.08

On Harper Rd off the New Kent Rd, near Elephant and Castle, in an abandoned housing estate, there is an installation. It is not visible from the exterior which is entirely undewhelming . However you walk inside to be enveloped by a shimmering field of blue: different shades compete for your eye as light reflects and refracts. The lower floor of the house has been crystallized. The space, once the living room and a small bathroom are encrusted from floor to ceiling in copper sulphate.

It reminds me of graphic and cinematic depictions of Superman’s refuge from the world, The Fortress of Solitude. This allusion to an epic sci-fi film set is partly neutralized by the domestic context of the project. The allure of the work lies in its transformation of the everyday - proportions, shapes, forms and spatial relationships we are so familiar with made superficially alien.

Beyond its own presence the work does not seem to engage with the politics of its location, like fireworks without sound, it feels mute to me. Nonetheless it demonstrates a fruitful fusion of the knowledge of science with that of contemporary art practice and its traditions; in doing so suggesting that wells of inspiration lie for artists not so much in unrecognised or ignored visual practice from other cultures (or populist culture) - but other intellectual disciplines altogether.

Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games

During the BBC commentary of the Closing Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, they quoted Zhang Yimou, its director as having said, “No other country in the world can do mass choreography like China. Except North Korea”. In doing so Zhang Yimou brought to the fore the uneasy links between state oppression, large-scale group organization, spectacle and ‘mass choreography‘. Zhang Yimou, is famed for his direction of Wuxia films, Hero and House of Flying Daggers; which are notable for their epic battle scenes and colour co-ordinated landscapes. The Closing Ceremony saw hundreds of performers moving in clockwork -like unison. There is something simultaneously impressive as well as fearsome about such a large group operating like this. Within the context of a ceremony it is entertaining - when the same techniques and visual bravado are transposed to the armies of an ancient mystical dynasty (as in Yimou’s films) it makes for riveting cinema.

However we need only consider the ‘Mass Games’ (see below) of North Korea to feel a certain unease. These occur as celebratory events on days of national holiday or the birthdays of past and present rulers such as Kim Jong-il. These ‘games’ emphasize themes of political propaganda, military might, discipline, unity and youth; and their roots lie in 19th century nationalist movements.

Dissolution of individuality necessary lies at the root of this kind of choreography, it is the group pattern that is emphasized and prized - though born out of individual action. It is possible to participate without having an awareness of the overarching visual effect. This leads to ethical concerns about participation in systems in which you are blind as to their purpose or consequence.

There is a moment in the ceremony when the performers clamber up a steel frame tower, the scale and distance of the camera shot reminds me of ants scurrying up an ice-cream cone. The synchronized movement of a sea of limbs creates a whirring visual effect that seems impossible without the aid computer manipulation. It is an enviable master class in the co-ordination of performers. The figures on this bare structure call to mind a number of recent paintings by British artist Tim Parr, who recently exhibited works in a show called ‘Man and Space’ at the Keith Talent Gallery (May 15 - June 22, 2008).

In particular a painting titled Construction (2007, oil on linen 40 by 35cm, see above); naked men are building something - it seems like a tower, but not enough of the structure is represented to make any confident guesses. No one is in discernable communication with the other, but each seemingly knows what do; despite the abundance of flesh and their proximity to each other there is little touching. They seem no more liberated than flies on a web. At the same time the press release observes, “figures reach, climb, and contort, building towards the indefinite”. This spotlights an aspirational element to the enterprise, it is troubling because there is no indicator as to what they strive for. The painting is also reminiscent of news documentary footage of Chinese construction workers erecting stadia with frightening speed, reminding the world of the advantages of a cheap and gargantuan labour force. Quoting again from the press release: “Parr’s figures organically fold into one another using their forms to generate architecture and patterning in each painting ever blending artifice and reality.” The figures’ service to the larger schema of the visual structure of the painting is equivalent to the individual in society whose personal needs or desires are subordinate to a more dominant power structure. Parr’s use of computer-graphic-modelling programs as part of the drawing stage of his paintings - perhaps more evident in an untitled work which depicts office workers in various states of tumultuous undress - hurtling in a void - to and from the viewer - compliments our sense of sprawling bureaucratic systems underpinning so much of human activity - taunting notions of ‘free will’ in the process.

These restraints of the individual dovetail into mass choreography as enforcer of discipline. This is especially apparent with one of the most popular Youtube postings of all time: "Thriller" as performed by inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. Here we can witness several hundred inmates, head to toe in regulation orange uniform re-enacting Michael Jackson’s music video - with music blasted from the tannoy into the prison’s central courtyard. A documentary made about this Youtube clip features the governor of the prison boasting the decline of crime since his enforcement of these dance routines. In the re-enactment they are all in orange - there is no one playing Michael Jackson, none of the prisoners are authorized to be the star - ‘the individual‘, yes there is a prisoner at the apex of the triangle but he is not differentiated in the way a front singer normally is from his or her dance troupe. The video has clearly being filmed from a balcony above the courtyard - it is from this angle that the prisoners would usually be surveyed and kept in order. It is from above that choreography becomes coherent, and those occupying this second level are the wardens. It is painfully apt that for all the skill and energy the prisoners’ bring to their roles, their characters are zombies, the lumbering, lifeless undead. It is worth restating the popularity of this posting, it has had nearly 18milliosn hits to date.

These figure in part attests to the popularity of a great dance routine full stop. There has been a boom in the popularity of collective social activity with strangers, be this in the proliferation of flashmobs, or the spread of Line Dancing nights. It is important to point out that there is often a great satisfaction to be found in ‘getting the steps right’ within a group, being part of a massive ensemble. British Military Fitness, is a work-out service with ex-army personnel who model their regimes on how they would engage with troops, their classes take place on Clapham Common with growing attendance. The attraction to such environments is possibly a correlative (and corrective) to the ever increasing physical isolation of the individual and ‘soloness‘ in our cities.

There is a character in the science-fiction series, Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, called Odo, he is a shape-shifter, his natural form is a gelatinous state, he can take any form and is usually humanoid. However for a period of time every day he must slop in a bucket or becomes a puddle, at this moment he collapses without restraint into formlessness; it’s a biological demand like sleep that cannot be bypassed. Odo is a tortured character, who knows nothing of his origins, he was discovered floating through space as a non-descript blob. For much of the series he yearns for knowledge of his origins. Eventually he comes to discover, he is one of an entire race like himself, shape-shifters, who live on a planet on the outskirts of the solar system. He makes his way to this planet, surprised not to find cities, roads, any signs of civilization as he expects it to be. He finally comes across a shimmering silver lake; intuitively he takes liquid form and pours himself in to it. This lake is in fact ‘The Great Link’, Odo’s entire race reside in this lake (see below), indivisible from each other, their bodies are borderless, thoughts are shared as one, for his race this is the most pleasurable and harmonious place to be, it is here that Odo’s anxieties are quelled, that he finds the sense of home long searched for. We can imagine ourselves like Odo, periodically compelled to give up shape…Although we prize our uniqueness and individual mobility, it seems that there are also parallel desires, conflicting even, to dissipate into a crowd, a mob, a gig, a great link; that will soothe the pain, challenges, anxiety and vulnerability of individuation. It is not the desire itself that we should be weary of, but the manipulation of it, here lies our trap.

Ghost (2008)/ Rostan Tavasiev

On a white plinth lies a multicoloured toy bear; body depressed, sunken and eyeless, from its torn side emerges white stuffing shaped like a released gas or cartoon-genii when first emerging from a lamp. The ‘ghost’ possesses the eyes the stuffed toy no longer has. The eyes are the evidence of sentience and vitality. Given the bombast of a plinth, the toy parodies the state monuments of oppressive regimes - drawing stark comparisons between what is celebrated, what is ignored and what is sanctioned as subject for heartless ridicule.

One cannot extract this work - Ghost (2008) by Rostan Tavasiev, from its context: part of a group show at Paradise Row, London, curated by Maria Baibakova, called Laughterlife, featuring new art from Russia, which in the words of the press release "exemplify the vein of absurdity and black humour that has been an enduring characteristic of Russian culture, from the early 19th century literary works of Gogol, to absurdists writings and theatre of the OBERIU group".

It is through the lens of Russian life and history that the work comes demands reading:

Writer and curator, Andrey Erofeev, in a text about Tavasiev’s practice observes: “Cheap toys were the only things that were never in shortage in the Soviet Union.” He goes on to note “Along with imagery of the communist propaganda industry, toys became the brunt of sarcasm and parody in Russian pop art. But Rostan is far from condemning the lowbrow aesthetics of Chinese consumer goods. His plush heroes do not spoil the world's grace with their ugly shape. On the contrary, it is the world that continually threatens his beloved toys.”

Significantly, Tavasiev depicts the moment of expiration, the ‘spirit’ leaving the body. It is as though this instant had been captured in the moment and frozen in time. A documentary-realist-photographic methodology has been applied to a work that is materially metaphoric. Perhaps this speaks of the quietly political ambitions of the work. It is hard not read the mass produced factory toys as substitutes for the humble, powerless and defenceless in society. These toys are a dominant and recurring motif in his work. From whose point of view are the people presented so? Could it be the oppressors’? People as throwaway consumer products. Or are we viewing how the people, himself included, might tragically have come to see themselves?

Erofeev, writes of ‘the world that continually threatens his beloved toys’ in doing so, he gives the toys an independent existence of their own. Not symbolic of the economically disadvantaged Russian underclass but a parallel existence to our own. As though our world might do damage to his. It suggests Tavasiev has created a mythology of his own, as children do with their toys - a universe away from the one we share with which might echo our own without being a simple 1-to-1 correlative.

Below is an image of a similar, earlier work, Towards Light (2005, fur, sintypon, marble 50 x 20 x 20 cm). The fictive ghost of the toy billows toward the electric light which actually shines, it is not a model of a light bulb (which it could have been), but a functioning real-world one. This speaks of the relationship between the two; Tavasiev’s mythic community of toys and that of ours, of human beings: The bulb, of the real world, illuminates the Tavasiev’s one, and in illuminating this fiction, the light bulb itself is imbued with symbolism, it becomes part of the image as a whole and the artwork, no longer soley a functional object, but truly switched on.

The Face Game & The First Time / Edward Rapley / 8th - 10th August 2008 / (Forest Fringe) Edinburgh Festival 2008

1) “The Face Game: We will have just one minute together, if you like, you can play the game of trying to see my face. Would you like to play that game?”

My friend had preceded me, she came out of breath, hair ruffled, clothes dishelleved, smiling but unsuccessful.

I enter the room a tall, spindly man stands in the far corner, his back is to me, dark trousers, white shirt, dark waistcoat, he invites me to play a game - to try and see his face. He will avoid being seen - I have one minute. I recall tales of desperate strategies I have heard attempted in this scenario: the Indiana Jones roll beneath his legs, the leapfrog on to his back, the relaxed waiting game followed by a sudden dash, wrestling him to the ground and trying to pry his fingers from his face, and most memorably the person who brought a mirror and caught his face in a reflection. The last strategy seems mythic, like Perseus defeating Medusa with the aid of his shield. His bobbing and weaving makes me feel like a child trying to seize a friendly ghost. I catch a glimpse of his face - in record time - the quickest of the festival so far and one of a handful ever to see the sphinx-like-man . I won’t tell you how…

2) “The First Thing: You will come into the room, there will be a chair for you, I will have my eyes closed. Once you are seated I will open my eyes and say the first thing that comes into my head. Then you can leave.”

I enter a narrow corridor. Edward Rapley is sat on a chair, eyes closed. Hearing me, he gestures for me to take the empty seat, the chair is arranged so as to face him. He opens his eyes, he doesn’t have words, instead he makes a rising gesture with his left arm like a vertical wave moment, exponential graph or swoosh. I say thank you and leave.

I am in a queue so I am asked what was said to me, as I have asked others what was said to him. In this particular presentation of the work the comparison of responses becomes a secondary but vital aspect of the experience.

The artistry of the pieces lie in their elegant simplicity. They are the slightest of works; they threaten themselves with disappearing all together. They have the charm of kindergarten playground games; a sharp reminder of how little is needed to engage an audience - for art to be: no electric lamps, soundtracks, objects, props - just him just you.

The encounter is the artwork. By this I mean the art is not to be found beyond the situation of meeting, its anticipation or memory. In both cases these encounters have been consciously constructed and engineered; human engagement and its mechanisms is the ’material’, the equivalent of the Renaissance sculptor’s marble. As with a marble sculpture hammer the chisel wrongly and the entire work will crack, the slightest alterations, removals, angles make the all difference. The qualities that make such a work a successful are shared with those that make any meeting between people powerful.I don’t think this is ultimately different from any artwork, the material, the concept, the positioning, the structure - all collectively combine to create the artwork which affects us accordingly, it is possible to imagine different works creating the same effect, the same experience of encountering, if a conversation (as an artwork) can create the same effect as a painting how much do they differ? This moves the emphasis away from how the work has come to be or made to the mark it makes on us. Edward Rapley doesn’t dress the encounter or present it as the by-product of an object, the encounter is all.

'The Other', could be identified as the route concern of these pieces, however they explore this theme with very different logics, masked by similar aesthetics. With The First Time, we are invited to see ourselves from the point of view of an outside eye. To most Edward Rapley will be a stranger. We are bombarded with statistics as to how much a first impression can work in our favour (or against us). Many psychological studies reveal how our first encounter with someone dominates how he we are subsequently perceived. This work is a portrait of sorts, and we sit opposite the artist much as we might for someone sketching our face, hoping some kind of insight will be revealed to us that we cannot find looking into the mirror. The work cannily exploits our curiosity as to how we are seen by others and the impression we make on the world. We are excluded from huge swathes of ourselves simply because we are in the way of our self, we cannot extract our self from our self. Perhaps in compensation we have our own interiority, a different kind of proximity to ourselves. The duration of the work is Edward Rapley’s response and mental processing - it is not a communal time system. He opens his eyes and speaks, (or in my case gestures) the time he takes to do this dictates the length of the work, his body functions as the chronological system mirroring the playful absurdity of learning more about ourselves (if only what his first response is) through him. With The Face Game someone sits in the corner with a stop-watch, it is more overtly a game and a challenge - with a clearly articulated objective. You and Edward are on a level playing field. The curiosity is now with The Other, what does he look like, will he be disturbing? How will he appear to me? Why might he want his face hidden? I seek him, I seek knowing him. That the game demands I seek his face divorced of explanation chimes with the desire to know what is alien, beyond all rationality. Imagining ourselves as the Other, as Edward Rapley, what is his experience? In The First Thing, there is the unenviable challenge of genuinely mouthing one’s thoughts, at the risk of saying the ridiculous or the deeply offensive and in doing so revealing yourself; your unedited thought processes and assumptions. In The Face Game perhaps Rapley enjoys the physical and mental challenge of staying unseen, of outwitting an opponent? Or does he enjoy being sought after, being leapt upon, tugged, pulled, prised open? - Only Edward Rapley knows. For a while now I have imagined two impossible situations: in The First Thing, Edward would open his eyes to see himself sat opposite, expectantly waiting words, judgement even, he would remain speechless. In The Face Game Edward would be wrestled to the floor, a man would prise away the cover of Edward’s fingers, in doing so each simultaneously recognising they are identical… there would follow a pause followed by a scream in each others faces.

'Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders; if only for a night.'

There is an abstract, purist, absurdity to competitive athletics, wherein lies a significant portion of its beauty and appeal. Take the 100m dash for example, it can be reduced to getting from point A to point B as fast as one can on foot. The running is not one aspect of a set of skills for a game - like football, where you might sprint past the opponent to get the ball. The act of running is the focus itself. Likewise, the high jump or the long jump, the discus or javelin - they are the simplest of aims taken to an extreme. The blunt simplicity of the objectives, throw an object as far as possible - jump as high as possible, allows the greatest potential for metaphor and symbolism; notably commitment for the sake of commitment, and the yearning to outdo one’s self and fellow competitors, but far more beyond this. It is easy to see how these activities in times gone by were the basis of a community’s survival: to outrun a wild animal, to be able to throw a spear to get food, each of these activities can be overlaid upon a prehistoric survival situation or a militaristic one. A modern sporting event takes these contexts away; the physical activities are now presented in an abstracted, sponsored, televised, aestheticized void. It is an equivalent of presenting the ‘readymade’ as artwork.

Yet we resist these removals. No sooner one context is removed another emerges in its place. It is not by chance that so much of the Olympic sports coverage and commentary seeks to find the ‘story’ for each athletic achievement - conscious of our watching organized, bloodless, regulated conflict and the unnaturalness of this (as opposed to the conflict of war, or hunting, or even the original Olympic games involvement of sacrifice to Zeus) the athlete’s story is constantly searched for, a replacement for the campfire report of ‘x’ who hunted the boar across the landscape until it collapsed in exhaustion.

Sports commentator, Simon Barnes, writes of the Beijing Olympic Weightlifting champion: “Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders if only for a night”. Barnes’ allusion to Atlas here, the Titan condemned to support the cosmos on his shoulders, is an apt one. Steiner expressed a frenetic joy immediately after his victory. (Which has caught the imagination of Youtube montagists) However, on the medal podium he received his gold holding a picture of his recently dead wife, who died in a car accident last year. It was she to whom the medal was dedicated. It was the sorrow of her memory that Barnes intuits had been momentarily lifted. Above we have a photograph of a man holding a photograph. It creates a ‘twisty-turny-pully effect’: He is himself, the woman is represented through a 2-d image - she, we know, is dead, he is alive. Photography and death appear in constant tango. Of course since they are both in the photo - they are reduced to the same dimensions. He holds the photo the way many athletes hold their medals for photo opportunities - he holds it at a similar height, in the same front facing way a medal is usually held, so that it is parallel to the eventual photograph and readable. The actual medal shares a hand with the obligatory bunch of flowers, it is not given the ‘platform’ of the her photo. So her image becomes a symbolic substitute, or displacement, for the medal. Something as light as a photography in the place of a metal medal is fixating. One imagines the photo bearing as much emotional ‘weight’ as the dumbbells bore physical weight. It is seductive to imagine her gently aiding him in the lift, bracing his trembling knees, like a caryatid, sharing the weight with him for the obligatory two seconds before he let it fall. In sound-tracking otherwise standard sports footage of this lift with romantic ballads the Youtube video makers seem to have been seduced likewise.

Scene Unseen: Undressing without triggering a security light / Kianoosh Motallebi (2008)

Undressing without triggering a security light, is a work by MA Slade graduate Kianoosh Motallebi (b.1982) it is presented as a 56 minute video projection.

The artist, Kianoosh Motallebi, has set up a game between himself and a security light. The word ‘game’ could be substituted for ‘challenge’: The artist, Motallebi, has set up a challenge between himself and a security light. But perhaps that doesn’t read as well as: The artist, Motallebi, has initiated a challenge between himself and the security light. Or, starting again: The artist, Motallebi, has set himself the challenge of undressing without triggering a security light. For the duration of the 56 minute video we see Motallebi, trying to undress without triggering this light. If the light goes on during an attempt he goes back to the beginning: puts back on what had been removed and tries again, much in the same way as not finding a satisfactory opening sentence I re-write it. Over the course of the video and his many attempts success eludes him. The framing of his figure in this wide shot: it being night-time, the anonymous grey car and black gate in the background, him standing there oddly vulnerable but at the same time defiant, upright but looked down upon by the tilting security light - as though awaiting interrogation, calls to mind Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr, particularly the scene later re-enacted by Steve McQueen in Deadpan. Perhaps out of shot, hovering over the scene is the spectre of Samuel Beckett, he who wrote: “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Challenge, test, game, duel: these words are not totally interchangeable in describing the relationship between the security light and the man; but all float around its articulation. There is the sense of a man challenging an automated system, human cunning pitted against the machine. There is also the self-challenge of the activity: “My dexterity and endurance are put to the test against a security lamp. By moving very slowly I attempt to undress, without being caught by the motion sensor. My endeavour is hindered by the cold, passers by and the relentless attention of the security lamp.” The opposition of the two: the light with its aim to illuminate potential intruders and the artist to move beyond its detection, stresses the dualistic/duelistic nature of the situation. The word ‘game‘, for me, contains the others as a subset: it does not ignore the playfulness of the set up, the low stakes, physical, psychological and legal (that’s not to say there are not games with high stakes), but keeps in mind this oppositional quality (which is also spatial) and the self-challenge, finding the discipline not to rush, the upholding of his concentration and so on.

So we are witness to a game of sorts, a constructed-situation designed to elicit results within parameters but not completely foreseeable. There is a curious logic to it: the light is not one of his own making, it is as on ‘off-the shelf’ security light. A pre-designed system, used for his own purposes, beyond those it was intended - serving him by functioning as it was designed. The man aims to undress without triggering the light, if he is successful he will be naked but unseen, if he fails he will be clothed but illuminated, clearly visible. Two types of revelation (one of flesh via clothing the other of environment via light) are proposed - but within the structure of the game they cannot be simultaneously present. So we might conclude revelation is always accompanied by concealment. ‘Conclusion’ itself is being toyed with here; the ending of a situation is classically a climax of sorts… a revelatory summing up or cathartic release. The ‘ending’ often comes with fanfare, a platform in which its finitude is spot-lit. Here, for the protagonist to fulfil his quest there can be no recognition of it having occurred, beyond our extrapolation that it has occurred through a prolonged darkness – but even then we cannot know. It maybe he has stopped midway undressing, if it is dark – we cannot know. Knowing becomes entwined with seeing, but to interchange the two is a trap.

There are four watchers: there is the artist, monitoring his own movements as he gingerly undresses, there is the sensor of the security light, there is the camera recording the scene and there is us. This web of watchers all perceive differently, three also share a time-zone. We are in our own time-zone, we were not present when these activates were recorded. The camera like us, witnesses, but is not part of the activity. However it was there at the time the event took place. The events are documented through its lens, what we can see is curtailed by the sensitivity of what it had the capacity and sensitivity to record. Motallebi, has the same human eyes as we do, he processes light, brightness, colour with the biological system that we do. Lastly there is the security light, which processes movement with a motion sensor. The security lights posses a mechanized constancy in contrast to Motallebi’s organic irregularity. But his human brain is able to exploit its limitations: for it to recognize movement - an object, person, fox - movement across its field must occur at a particular speed – anything less and there is no recognition of presence.

When Motallebi has slipped beneath the sensor’s threshold of perception. It goes dark. But just as ‘presence’ is revealed to be relative, dependent on the machine’s perception. When it goes dark and Motallebi ‘disappears’ the darkness takes us to the threshold of our visual perception. Yet we know there are creatures that would be able to see Motallebi, if they were passing him on the night he was making this video. The Snowy Owl for example, has eyes that are tubular rather than round, giving a relatively large cornea in proportion to the overall size of the eye and enabling more light to enter the eye. The pupil can be opened so wide that no iris is visible, this is large and convex, causing the image to be focused nearer to the lens hence retaining maximum brightness, the light gathering properties are enhanced by a reflective layer behind the retina, which reflects back onto the rods any light that may have passed through the retina without hitting it the first time. Specialists say the eyes of the Snowy Owl is are least 100 times more sensitive than ours in low light levels. Significantly though the sensor cannot recognise Motallebi when he moves slowly enough, Motallebi if he had the mind to could creep right up to the wire powering the light and cut it, kill it, with the light never having recognised his presence at all. That ‘something’ or ‘someone’ is beyond the threshold of our perception offers no safeguard against being affected by its presence.