Banks Violette/ Maureen Paley, London / September 2008

Entering the gallery one is struck by the overwhelming sound, a thunderous groan; it is not immediately possible to discern its origin. Pulling back a black curtain on the ground floor of Maureen Paley Gallery (London), one is confronted not only by the source of this sound - but by an image of a galloping horse. The image is projected onto water vapour channelled by a number of vents. This is the source of the sound. The ghostly image of the horse, shimmering like a mirage, continually threatens to disappear despite the constancy of the technical apparatus that ensure its presence. The image is about a third of life size, it hovers in the air. To choose water-vapour as ‘the screen’ on which to project, cannot help to undermine the ’notion of screen’: the surface on which the image appears, destabilizing our casual sense of constancy in the things we see. This is reinforced by the looping of the image, edited in such a way, that it is bluntly noticeable when the galloping sequence ends and restarts. This self-conscious ‘skip’, acts like a Brechtian device drawing our attention to the artifice, which otherwise would lie much closer to Victorian magic stage devices, or David Copperfield technological trickery. So while undeniably spectacular, unlike say fireworks, it is a spectacle aware of its impact, and upsets it. Does this make it less of a spectacle?

In the press release we are told the image itself is sourced from TriStar Pictures opening animation “in which a white horse gallops across a black background and then, like Pegasus, grows wings and flies away”. So in Violette’s cropping we are denied the more phantastical stage of the image, it perpetually runs because it has been denied wings.

The artist, Banks Violette, (Born 1973, New York, USA) in his own words says: “I have used the image of the horse repeatedly, it’s an image that falls into that category of images that are void-exhausted and over-determined and drained of life through overuse. This idea of a void image is a constant throughout my work; the idea of an image seemingly unable to exceed the weight of its own overuse, yet somehow, once in a while, capable of reanimation.”

Along these lines of thought the work can be seen in the tradition of Pop Art’s appropriation of the visual culture of populist entertainment. Like Roy Liechtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963) the image has not been simply enlarged in scale, the composition has been altered not to mention its re-representation in a different media - that of acrylic and oil. The cultural conations of these media make claim for the work within a lineage of Western Classical art history it might otherwise have been denied. By drawing the horse animation from the cinema to the art gallery, again re-presenting the image in a different media - that of projected video on vapour - a new lineage (or path) is found for the animated clip. This transfusion of imagery offers a cultural gravitas that the works did not have previously. They are endowed with an aura of uniqueness and so become prized. However whereas the disposable comic has been transformed into the much more endurable medium of oil. The horse has been removed from the mechanized constancy of celluloid to a digitised image on ephemeral droplets of water… an ephemeral monumentalisation.