Category: Media Installation

Dimensions: 100 x 100cm.

This photo installation used photocopy sheets of an essay by Jean Fitton and some comments by myself, collaged together with some found graphical material. It was in response to an invitation from Robert Short, a curator specialising in surrealist art, to submit some work for a show at the Campden Arts Centre in London. I had no idea why he had contacted me as though I had a deep interest in surrealism, in particular the surrealist films of Luis Bunuel, I had not exhibited in that context previously.

Just before receiving the invitation, I had been asked to mark Jean Fitton’s short essay on the films of Luis Bunuel. Essays were not part of studio practice at the time, but I agreed to help out the history department, who a little later nonetheless ticked me off for scrawling over her work. She readily admitted to copying most of the essay from Raymond Durgnat’s terrible book on the filmmaker and she later submitted a rewrite following suggestions I had made in my comments.

Ever the opportunist, I suggested to Jean that we submit a work to the exhibition, SURREALISM UNLIMITED, based on the documents we had both produced, to which she eagerly agreed. For a final visual flourish, I added some colour; cutting out some paint colour-chart rectangles and in summoning the gods of surrealist chance, dropped the cutouts from a height of several feet, onto the work below. Where they fell was where they were glued in place.

I didn’t for a moment think that a discussion held on paper would ever breech the walls of the surrealist establishment in London. But it did….. such company we had stumbled into!

Shattered by the fact the work did not sell, it was later shoved into storage and forgotten.

Some years later when it was being shifted during another house move, I discovered many of the coloured rectangles were missing…… ‘Oh yes, your son did that when he was of crawling age – he carefully peeled them off’. What remains is but a shadow of the artwork’s former vibrant presences.

We celebrate the presence of celebrities in the world, and our presence with them. The glitz, the glamour and the tragedy of their work and lives we share with them as the minutia of their daily round is revealed to us. From the supermodel to the artist, fame is an acknowledgement of the perfection of the moments they inhabit.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No.2’ was a distinguishing moment in 1902 when art was redefined, again. Contributing to the early 20th Century’s surge into the modern era, the painting affirmed within a single image a representation and presence of a figure in the spatial setting of a staircase, as a temporal entity. Informed by photography and the kinomatographic motion picture, the painting and other works from the period encouraged the art-going public to move away from ‘retinal’ art and through the deconstruction of motion, to begin the process of embracing the conceptual underpinnings of art-making.

‘Model Descending a Staircase No. 2’ perversely reflects on the moving image itself as a temporal entity, locked into the suspension of a timelessly and seamlessly repeated image, that of a celebrated supermodel as she steps down onto the catwalk. The retinal ‘eye-candy’ of the contemporary celebrity, encountered in countless public and private architectural settings, are presented to us on myriad rectangular screens of dimensions that vary from mobile phone to stadium in size. In the proposed installation, the interpolation of image and scale recall the medieval altarpieces with depictions of celebrants and supplicants. Utilising mass-produced television screens, the isolated images of movers and gazers rotate through their routines of spectacle, a contemporary version of represented space/time interceding in the daily round of a public space.

Sample of installation, variable dimensions – main centre screen with two smaller peripheral screens.

The video Chile Lucha was part of the exhibition, Artists for Democracy, held at the Royal College of Art, London in 1974.

In 2014, under the same title, the archive of Cecilia Vicuña concerned with the London exhibition was held in Santiago, Chile, at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (the Museum of Memory and Human Rights) and at the Museo Nacional Bellas Artes (the National Museum of Fine Arts). The original tape had been archived by the University of Dundee (2005) and with the approval of the curator Paulina Varas, a second Spanish language version was prepared for the exhibition in Santiago – these two versions were shown as part of an installation designed and built by Carolina Zuñiga. The videos are now a part of the Museums permanent collection.

The dual-language catalogue also included ‘testamonials’ from artists who had taken part in the exhibition in 1974 – my responses can be accessed as a PDF at top left of this page. This video link is to a 2015 documentation of the exhibition.

The installation was for EXPERIMENTA, Australia’s First National Exhibition of Art, Film and Video, presented by Modern Image Makers (MIMA) in November 1988.
A significant survey of the work of moving image artists at the time, it was staged across several venues in the city, included a series of live performances as well as screenings and was accompanied by an impressive catalogue that included essays by Adrian Martin, Fiona Mackie, Arthur Cantrill, Ross Gibson, Kris Hemensley and George Alexander, contributing to re-dressing the minor standing this group of artists had at the time within the national art scene.
The Tales Gates installation combinedan earlier photographic work of the same name with a video and sound installation facing the work, which was hinged to the wall. The video was based on the photographs seen in the panels, intercut with red, green and blue field colours, and a soundtrack made of some stories told by my neighbour at the time the photographs were made.

The installation was made following a period of collaborative work with the playwright John Downie. The mechanics of light production explored aspects of the innovative life of the 19th Century English civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The production of Brunel’s Dream was directed by Downie with a company of final year students from the Drama Department of the University of Bristol. In the main installation, a roll of 16mm film threaded progressively through a line of six synchronised projectors rigged behind a screen suspended above the performance area. Commencing to the left of the stage, the images of countryside passing, as if from a train window, increased in apparent speed; after 8-mins the images on the film faded from view to the right of the stage. Other projections included a matrix of slide back-projected images on the lower screen of the steel plating sides of the Great Britain steamship, then undergoing restoration in a Bristol drydock, following retrieval from the Falkland Isles; a slide projection of the image of a white circle on black, enabled the re-creation of Anthony McCalls ‘Line Describing a Cone’ using smoke to make the beam visible and into which the action continued.