The Shaggy Dog in the River

Catalog Essay

Commissioned for catalog publication on Grace Weir
by
Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester UK

Fade in.

About six years ago I attended a conference at The Cooper Union in New York. The theme of the conference was Art and Science crossovers and in the dialectical spirit that supposedly marked the web’s then wonder years, speakers had been told that they may speak for a maximum of five minutes before questions were thrown open to the floor. My favourite speaker was Billy Kluver, who in the 1960’s had been the co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) with Rauschenberg et al, but was also an electrical engineer of some renown.

Needless to say, the combinations of an eventful life and his William Burroughs-like drawl, meant that after five minutes we were only up to 1966 in his rambling narrative, yet noone noticed, and Kluver continued his story of explosions, artificial rain clouds and fax machines for kids for a further half hour, before the flustered chair could call for questions. He held the delegates’ attention perfectly with a talk which moved through and beyond the time allotted, through a constantly eddying mix of the anecdotal and the technical, slipping back and forward through the years. Not exactly linear, but certainly progressive.

I think Grace Weir would have appreciated it. Much is made of the precise mathematical elegance of her films, and the scientific and philosophical concerns of her subject matter, but for me, there is also a fine understanding of the pace and potency of what we can call progressive narrative. And even more so of what an interruption to that flow can achieve within a tightly organised loop of film. 

This year she spoke at that same Cooper Union conference as Kluver had - posing the enigmatic question: “An artist, a scientist, some pencils and paper... can an artist and scientist collaborate on 'gedanken (thought) experiments' to illuminate art and science?” 

She spoke largely of her collaboration with astrophysicist Ian Elliott – with whom she had developed simple drawn and filmed attempts to externalise the eponymous gedanken experiments. An essential quirk (quark?) at the heart of most theoretical physics is that it resists attempts to leave the mind – language defeats it, to paraphrase a thinker from another field. One of the films on show in Cornerhouse shows the artists’ and scientists’ hands sketching out the principles of relativity – part said thought experiment, part Esher-esque closed visual loop, possibly even partly a delicate atonement from two disciplines for the Babel trauma of the Enlightenment. 

The work with Elliott is of course just the latest part of a rich investigative vein which runs through the body of work on show here. At the centre of it is a mutual frustration with the limits of language, both visual and spoken. In “The darkness and the light”, a film which Weir indeed calls a “frustration piece”, the camera follows Elliot as he meticulously prepares the telescope at Dunsink observatory and attempts to observe the sun – constantly thwarted by the scudding clouds moving across the observatory’s dome. The camera work and editing capture this act with a calm authority, mimicking the implicit didactic certainty of particular documentary film forms (it’s a technique Weir also uses in Distance AB, of which more shortly). And Elliot’s voiceover, when it arrives, also appears to be in a mimetic relationship to these forms, as he describes his own speculative version of string theory. But as he cuts the piece of paper in exponentially smaller divisions and describes the point at which such an action reaches an atomic level etc., the ineluctable logic implied thus far begins to reach crisis. Crisis at the point where what is physically demonstrable by the scientist reaches its limits, even as his speculative logic continues towards its theoretical conclusion - forces combining in a certain way to “tear a wormhole into a parallel world.”

At just the point where the useful limits of the quotidian material (paper) the scientist is using to illustrate his theory occur, he holds it to the telescope and sacrifices it to the focus of the sun. The paper burns as he reaches his conclusion; the limits of speculative languages and materials are reached; the film fades - as if in the “frustration” Weir has alluded to. Both she and Elliot reach the limits of what can be shown, even as they retain the optimism of what might just be known. It puts me in mind of Bas Jan Ader’s response when asked why he made so much work about falling: “Because gravity defeats me.”  “The darkness and the light” manages to be both deadly serious and deadpan. 

There’s a gentle humour in “Distance AB” as well, where a visual example used by Einstein to illustrate relativity (that of a man lying on his back in Potsdamer Platz, pointing at a cloud with a stick) is recreated as if in an educational film. But the impossibility of this vernacular example truly illustrating the intended principle emerges as the film unfolds. The voiceover intones the theoretical principles informing the film, even as we watch the cloud apparently refusing to play its part. Even Potsdamer Platz itself refuses to be a constant cipher. The film is shot amongst the cranes and clamour of post-unification reconstruction. 

These tensions, flaws and narrative blips are important in Weir’s work. The whimsically miraculous interruption in the flow of the tracking shot in “Dust defying gravity” can be read as being about narrative film’s dependence on a very singular understanding of the flow of time – our experience of the flow of the camera through the room as it tracks the dust motes creates the space for the sudden leap which startles us into another space, if only for a second. A glimpsed narrative wormhole to the sublime. In an earlier film, “Turning Point”, a tree suddenly spins on its axis after a carefully structured series of interior and exterior establishing shots in a Dublin suburb. They’re almost shaggy dog stories – if only in the way shaggy dog stories elongate the lead in time and structure of the standard joke or story in order to make the crispness of their irrelevant cut off point more pronounced. 

In “Déjà vu”, the artist further plays with complex ideas around time, in a film which nods to Einstein’s description of time as a river with rivulets which can break up and return to the body of the river. A woman driving a car happens to glimpse a man on a shore, before the momentum of her vehicle takes her past a built structure behind him - thus obscuring her view of him skimming a stone, then turning to watch her car pass the end of the structure. When for some reason she reverses back to the position just before the structure and sees him standing again, between throws, her renewed forward momentum seems to trigger off a repeat of the sequence. She misses the bounce of the stones, he sees her pass the same point twice. This is the ostensible narrative, but the principle being illustrated in the film permeates right the way through each of its structural levels – each pan, cut and visual composition seems to create a heightened awareness of time and of the forces of the natural world slipping and pulling every which way. The partial linear experiences of the two protagonists in the film, mixes with our own partial experience of the events outlined within Weir’s structure. Our own subjective rivers of thought flow in and out of the work.

The impossibly elegant play on perspective of “Around Now” also places us in a partial position within the work – even to the extent of physically implicating us in structuring our subjective experience. Two large screens face each other – one showing the view of a cloud as filmed from a helicopter describing a perfect circle around it, the other showing an equally perfect circular view of the landscape as seen from the clouds position looking out. The work alludes to Deleuzian critique of linear perspective – and creates myriad ways of experiencing the installation. Wherever we sit, stand or even lie within or even outside the work’s ostensible physical space, we are all too aware of all of the other subjective possibilities one might have for experiencing it. It’s a complex work and actually one I almost find physically uncomfortable to experience. When I first saw it in the Venice Biennale, I become acutely aware of the aporia that is the idea of a single perspective and aware of the myriad visual choices and perspectives I had not experienced in time. 

Shaggy dog story

Jumping from Venice back to the Cooper Union. Three years and half a sentence apart. A written tone shifting. Billy Kluver addressing a question on intellectual property and what to do if someone takes your idea. “Have an-oth-er one”. Forward six years to the same hall and Grace Weir and Ian Elliot sketching out the principles of relativity. In the intervening time the elevator outside the main hall rises and falls down a lift shaft actually built in anticipation of Otis’s invention. The lift rising a floor. A man at a word processor hesitating every time he types a friend’s surname when describing her work for a catalogue essay. Conventions and principles govern these moments. Grace Weir understands this.

Rivers flowing, cameras fading.

Forced
Entertainment

Magazine Feature

Art Monthly

The king looks disgruntled. He has just been interrupted while telling a story about another king with three beautiful daughters (of varying loyalty). The interruption has come from yet another king who is now telling their own story, suspiciously like the first. The first king stalks off, cardboard crown askew and cloak (blanket) thrown imperiously over his crumpled shirt and jeans. The remaining six kings await their turn in a row, in varying degrees of enthrallment and conspicuous boredom.

It’s a chaotic scene somewhere between Old Testament allegory and infant school play and a typical Forced Entertainment moment. Forced Entertainment is an ensemble of six artists (Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells, Richard Lowdon, Terry O’ Connor, Claire Marshall and Cathy Naden) and has spent the last 20 years producing spiky, intelligent performance, video, installation and text from a defiantly provincial base in Sheffield. They have just completed their first tour of major US venues – taking in the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis and PS122 in New York.

The work has developed and progressed through the years via a love/hate relationship with theatre and its codes of presence (on the part of both performer and audience). At times this has manifested itself in a headlong rush towards the absurdities of theatricality (props deployed with the relish of voodoo or fetish, rhetorical excess, straining the suspension of disbelief beyond the credible). At other times the codes of whatever art form they’re working in are deployed in such an apparently desultory fashion, they barely seem capable of supporting the conceit of the work. Amidst all such formal and tonal shifts though, the constant has been the collaborative nature of the practice, a rep-like cycle of devising and delivery and the consideration of a very particular urban and media landscape in order to evoke larger questions of power, language and desire.

In exploring this landscape, Forced Entertainment and in particular Tim Etchells, who writes much of the text the group use in its work, has developed a complex language that moves between trashy pop cultural argot and an intuitive high theory. Short story heroines bathe in Diet Lilt, presided over by Gods called Zeus, Tesco and Mr Stretchy; the cultural logic of a technology is unpacked and extended with an equivalent Adorno-like logic. Language repeatedly looses its moorings and signifiers slip or lose constancy, but somehow the powerlessness of contemporary British urban life this suggests, is always transmuted into some tiny political kernel of defiance, if not always optimism.

When I think of their British peers I think less of the tabloid friendly vernacular of the yBas and more perhaps of Mark E Smith and The Fall. The erratic Mr Smith has been chronicling his own experience of a provincial landscape since the late 70s and has pursued a willful outsider’s role (when it has suited him) in contemporary British music. Like Etchells, there’s a sense of his rolling language around the tongue, a love of the sounds of words – even when those words are second-hand and passed to him through the channels of power. Smith though is openly insolent with his refashioning of those words and his own experiences of bungling cops, wide boys, cloying nostalgia and the idiotic vagaries of fashion washing up in his native Salford. Insolent – and insular, perhaps. At certain points in The Fall’s prodigious output there’s been a sense of them turning in on themselves – shoring themselves up. The musical forms may remain as consistently inventive and relevant as ever, but there’s sometimes an existential decision being taken to deny the world through art, if not admit defeat to it. This is militia logic.

I once watched a Fall gig in Manchester which Tim Etchells also attended. Smith was on typical form – hectoring the audience and the latest incarnation of his band alike (The Fall’s turnover of personnel is legendary). He prowled the stage, hands in pockets, ranting and pursuing some private inventory of injustice. Etchells was shaking his head and smiling while watching it, and one of us muttered something about Smith behaving more like a foreman than a frontman. It crystallised something for me about respective working dynamics. Despite the inevitable stresses of sustained collaborative practice over two decades, and some of the focus that writers have placed on Etchells’ contribution to Forced Entertainment, the core of the cooperative has remained remarkably stable and the emphasis on a collective responsibility for creative decisions remained undiminished. That has coloured the group’s ambitions within the world at a personal political level and inevitably coloured any comparisons one might wish to make with other artists.

It is easy, for example, to imagine the same characters drifting through the cities or TV screens of Forced Entertainment and Smith – the ‘Terry Waites’, ‘Gretchen Franklins’ and ‘Bills’. Both The Fall and Forced Entertainment have a habit of placing very over-defined or familiar characters alongside the most cursory of ciphers – a pointed description of a named person one moment; a fleeting allusion to an unspecified “Tracey” or “Bill” the next. It’s a linguistic form of depth of field and a clue to a type of visual thinking. 

At times the tone and pace of their respective outputs could easily cross over too. In a 1992 Forced Entertainment work, Emmanuelle Enchanted, five performers would dash about a flimsy proscenium stage pulling on makeshift Oxfam costumes from clothes rails at the side of the set. One of a pile of cardboard signs and some haplessly bad mime acting would complete their contribution to the improvised milieu: ‘A Stewardess forgetting her divorce’; ‘A young white racist electrical engineer’; ‘A terrorist in hiding’; ‘Miss Deaf America’. Amidst this chaos, one of their number would be running on the spot, in some grotesque parody of an MTV video character sprinting through a city, whilst an insistent guitar riff blared through the PA. It was a slice of generic heavy metal produced by long-time Forced Entertainment collaborator, John Avery, but one could equally imagine The Fall’s snarling rockabilly in its place. This is their terrain, too, and they could soundtrack it effortlessly.

Yet the urge in a Forced Entertainment work tends always towards the social experience[“ - the shared experience of barely adequate cultural forms” GP]. The stage, or the computer or video screen, or the page is often the site of an uneasy truce in the battles over representation. The work continually accepts the inadequacies of its form, yet celebrates the communal will to make the attempt at all. The ‘Try again, fail again’ of Beckett, compared to the stubborn nobility/insanity of The Fall’s ‘Repetition, repetition.’

It was hard not to make comparisons of form watching Etchells in Forced Entertainment’s Instructions for forgetting, 2001, at the Theatre for the New City in New York. The artist was sitting at a table with a microphone, weaving links between stories and videos his friends had sent in from around the world (an impassive assistant at the back of the stage would be marshalling clips from the latter on video monitors). So it was impossible in that city, that week, to avoid some sort of comparison with Spalding Gray, the monologist and long-time Wooster Group member, who had gone missing a few days earlier (the later confirmation of his death saddened but did not surprise those intimate with his long struggle with depression). Both used a similar form with a similar forensic focus on the minutiae of the everyday, but where the obituaries would later wheel out the clichés of Gray only finding refuge on stage, Etchells tended to look anything but comfortable at times.

If some kind of private reverie underpinned Gray’s considered stage musings on his subject matter (his mother’s suicide, his own depression), Etchells’ stage persona reminded me of the text of a neon sign, at the back of a cluttered stage set in an earlier Forced Entertainment work, Marina and Lee, 1991: ‘LOOK NO FURTHER THIS IS IT.’ Awkwardly turning his mobile phone off as the audience came in, squinting at the lights, peering round at the monitors – he looked a little like someone who has been unexpectedly asked to speak at a memorial and, unsure whether gravitas or celebration is in order (and knowing the audience shares that uncertainty), has opted for both. The work is so deceptively slight, so open about its sources and its mechanics that you almost fear for it in the world – something one never feels watching the Wooster Group, whose deconstructive take on classic theatrical texts has long been a point of comparison with Forced Entertainment for British academics and critics of live art, but who always seem to offer a newly determined architecture for the audience’s temporal experience of the work. Forced Entertainment’s later work has tended towards the bare bones of existing forms – from the desultory magic circle of light bulbs, in which two casually dressed figures in rudimentary clown make up ask each other questions (‘Where do tomatoes come from?’ ‘Why were you up so very late last night?’) for hours on end (Quizoola!,1996), to the doomed wish list or audition tape that is the video work Kent Beeson is a classic and an absolutely new thing, 2001.

In the latter work, the eponymous Kent Beeson is shown in repeated failed takes at remembering a script about an aspirational lifestyle. Filmed on an American building site, with off camera noise and occasional trucks rolling in front of camera, the video shows Beeson outlining the things he will acquire (a basement ‘romper’ room, German shepherd dogs, a business for his brother, an inner peace, news reports with all mentions of death edited out etc) when he is a successful pop star turned actor. Aside from the environmental failings and disparity between fantasy and application of the protagonist, there is a further level of failure in the work as Beeson the actor continually forgets his lines, beats his forehead in frustration and continually curses his own inadequacies between takes – so that by the end, the initial aspirational project is forgotten and we’re just willing him across the finishing line of the monologue. Ambition moderated and shared.

Failure looms large in Forced Entertainment’s work. Etchells runs an ongoing website and public speaking project with Matthew Goulish Of Chicago’s Goat Island, called The Institute of Failure, 2001, which documents, analyses and celebrates numerous examples of falling short and being thwarted, or just the shared experience of human folly. The theatre work shown on the recent US tour, First Night, 2001, is a ghastly vaudeville of over made-up failed actors – dreading the boards and offering craven rhetorical caveats for the ever-postponed spectacle:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen. Whilst you’re with us tonight, we’d like to ask you to try and forget about the outside world completely. Try not to think about anything outside of this room. Anything at all. Try to forget about cars, and meetings, cigarettes, and road accidents. Try to forget about births and deaths and funerals. And bereavements. Try not to think about dustbins, and litter on the street …’

Its hapless, would-be seductive deployment of a theatrical convention reminds me of Vito Acconci’s Theme Song, 1972 – the viewer there is being blatantly seduced on camera, but the viewing dynamic of being implicated in a failing ploy on the part of the artist (or at least of their projected avatar) is the same – attraction and repulsion being described with exactly the same words.

Acconci has often returned to such failures as a theme in his work – whether directly addressing it as a subject for consideration in his notes on failure, or as a recurring motive within his artistic restlessness as poet; performer; installation artist; architect. One writer has described him in a review as ‘the loneliest artist’ and there’s a reading of some of his artistic output as forays from a defensive position that might tally with that.

And given the comparison I drew between the respective aspirations of The Fall and Forced Entertainment, it is probably worth documenting Acconci’s admiration for The Fall. Ultimately though, it’s probably more rewarding to ally the general spirit and trajectory of Acconci’s social and political practice with that of Forced Entertainment’s difficult collective responsibility (hearing him speak recently, it was interesting for me to note Acconci’s slight regret that the studio group of young architects and designers he works with bears his name alone).

Forced Entertainment return repeatedly to the core group ‘line up’ as a performative tactic – whether it be the confessions from behind a brightly lit table of Speak Bitterness, 1994, or the exiled kings of And on the thousandth night…, 2000. Always in some shared ritual of confession with no guarantee of absolution, or even empathy. Yet optimistic nonetheless, through constantly seeking the social action and the collective moment, even at that moment of private despair or failure.

A coda then – or a faint reprise. In Rock my Religion, Dan Graham uses two Manchester figures as touchstones. One is Mark E Smith, the other is Ann Lee, the ecstatically possessed founder of the Shaker movement (‘Lost in Music,’ as one unlikely Fall cover version might have it). In his filmic essay, Graham segues these icons into imagery of Patti Smith and the ‘cleansing’ spirit of the mosh pit: Rock as ritual, repeated ritual as religion, repetition, repetition – a forced entertainment indeed.

Room Tone

Art review

Neil Goldberg
Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York

Missed trains. Salad bars. Breathing.

Neil Goldberg is an archivist of the mundane. An insistent champion of small moments and incidents we routinely let fall through us. In "Room Tone" (a phrase used by audio technicians to describe the definite acoustic qualities of apparently silent spaces), he uses video and photography to unflinchingly capture quotidien moments in our day. The moments we barely notice, let alone bless with a name.

In doing this Goldberg finds ways to implicate himself in the work and his subjects in ways that are complex and openly empathic, rather than affecting a claim of forensic objectivity. In the close up video footage of uncertain faces scanning an unseen shop display to make their choices (Salad Bar), or the tightly framed giclee prints of faces captured in the moment of disappointment in the series Missing the Train, there's a sense of something being confirmed – the camera is not abandoned to find what it may, but is a device for the constantly present artist to witness and connect through.

Developing that relationship, in an ongoing body of work, Goldberg films his father engaged in various simple tasks – with the formal structure of the task and the presence of the camera permitting a stillness and direct gaze we rarely allow ourselves with our families. My Father is a lifesize projection of a head and shoulders shot of his father outdoors, holding a piece of glass under his nose and breathing – the glass misting and demisting; the tape rolling and rolling; the father and son silently showing and telling each other that they are still alive. It's slight and stubborn and lovely.

On the opposite wall from this piece, a much larger projection shows a close up of a flower on a lilac bush in Brooklyn Botanical garden - oscillating gently in the ambient breeze and in the displaced air of semi-indifferent passersby. The two works seem to load a butterfly effect of import to the choices about to be made by the salad bar customers on the third wall, or the choice to look or not look being made by the breathing viewer.

In the most technically complex work in the show, a four-way split screen shows the flamenco dancer Pilar Rioja dancing in Goldberg's Lower East Side studio, filmed by the artist himself, along with filmmakers Eva Vives and Peter Sollett. One quadrant of the screen is blank, whilst the other three quarters show the subjective camera view of the three filmmakers - each of their presences spilling into the vision of the others as they try to hold focus on the mesmeric dancer in the tiny space. One dance begets three more – dances of stealth and focus and gentle failure,  with echoes of a child's belief that concentrating hard enough can make you invisible.

I saw the show amid the clamor of doing the gallery rounds – trudging through the gaudy claims of the Chelsea mall, with little room for pause, and little sense that my presence activated anything. This was the one show that made me check my pace and I was grateful for that and for the methodical, insistent poetry of Goldberg's work. It stayed with me, even as the mean tempo of the city resumed around me.