Like American artist Sherrie Levine did in the Lead Checks game-board works she began in the mid-1980s, Hackney has sought a fresh, conceptually-driven, yet personal approach to grid painting. While Levine’s works suggest the general universe of gameboard / grids, Hackney has chosen to inexorably fuse the process of painting with the playing of chess via his grid/board canvases. He has done so by following the chess notation of specific games played by Duchamp against a variety of opponents to determine the painting sequence and the value and/or color of each grid square.

 
In his debut exhibition at Francis Naumann Fine Arts in New York, Hackney presented eighteen of these square 8 x 8 grid format works on stretched linen. The 32 x 32 cm and 42 x 42 cm format pieces relate directly to the sizes of standard chess boards, while the 66 x 66 cm pieces mimic the standard wall-hung chess demonstration boards readily found at any chess club, or seen on the wall in photos of Duchamp’s studios.

 
Thirteen canvases have been executed with layers of black and white gesso while the other five works were done with layers of translucent oil paint. Duchamp would certainly approve of the economy of means and materials with which they have been produced.

 
In works where black opposes white, Hackney has painted in sequence from first to last moves. Each square becomes one shade darker if occupied by a black piece and one tint lighter if subsequently occupied by a white piece. Building up individual layers, each as delicate as a passage in a late Ad Reinhardt or Agnes Martin work, Hackney arrived at works as bold and graphically dynamic as a Franz Kline canvas.

 
In his colour works, Hackney has used the colourcode system of Duchamp’s unrealized 1920 Chromatic Chess Set. Opposing Kings and pawns are white and black; Queens are light or dark green; Bishops light or dark yellow; Knights light or dark red; Rooks light or dark blue. The artist found that in these canvases the richest results were arrived at by playing/painting the games from last move backwards to the first move. This reversal is a gesture of combative collaboration with Duchamp who held that ‘there is a mental end implied when you look at the transformation of the visual aspect to the grey matter … [It is] what always happens in chess and what should happen in art’ (A Discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s Views on the Nature of Reality and Their Relation to the Course of His Artistic Career [1958], p.8).

 
For Duchamp, an artist who wanted to ‘eliminate the retinal’, and transform ‘…the visual aspect to the grey matter’, Hackney has generated paintings that also function like composited black and white X-rays or colour digital brain scans. Built up layers of chromatic topography, they have precisely mapped the moment by moment calculations and decisions made not by one, but by two brains, those of the opposing players. As such, they are compellingly intimate mental portraits of Duchamp at moments of his most highly focused creative interaction with others. Hackney’s paintings operate as a group of conceptual, thematic ‘bookends’ to Duchamp’s numerous 1911 studies for Portrait of Chess Players, one of which, Pour une partie d’échecs (For a Game of Chess), literally has the contours of the two players’ heads overlapping and entangled with each other and filled with chess pieces and the gestures of moves. As in these drawings by Duchamp, Hackney’s mappings of players engaged in combative chess collaborations result in vibrant works of art.

 
Hackney entitled his exhibition Corresponding Squares: Painting the Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp, alluding to the scholarly, esoteric endgame book Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled that Duchamp produced in 1932 in collaboration with Grandmaster Vitaly Halberstadt. In this book, ‘sister’ or ‘corresponding’ squares must be equally mirrored to be reconciled in endgames. In his exhibition, Tom Hackney has achieved a rare creative balance by which painting exactly corresponds to or mirrors chess. Each is reconciled with the other as seldom before. In these works, Tom Hackney succeeds in uniting the disciplines of painting and chess as co-equal partners in their creation.

 
Corresponding Squares was on view at Francis Naumann Fine Art, New York 18 March – 29 April. With the addition of four more related canvases, the exhibition moved to the World Chess Hall of Fame, Saint Louis, Missouri, where it was on view 19 May – 11 September 2016.

 
For all the musing on social construction, Wallinger never loses sight of individual perspective: everyone, every one person, gets to be individually located. In other words, Wallinger remembers that any abstract ‘subject’ is one specific individual, and so he addresses these questions from a consciously displayed selfpresence. Wallinger has always put himself inside his work, the artist occupying the work directly, explicitly. From his early breakthrough in the mid-1990s through works such as State Britain (2007, a reconstruction of anti-war protestor Brian Haw’s poster/banner protest outside Britain’s Houses of Parliament), he has filtered his own social obsessions through a resolutely critical political position and engagement. Moving away from his references to classical and religious work (as seen, for example, in Ecce Homo, 1999, a meek-looking Christ sculpture on the empty plinth of Trafalgar Square), this current show ranges over many media and multiple types of visual content and ideas. Underpinning the whole is an exploration of the location of the contemporary subject. Often, such big statements work as a glaze through which we peer at otherwise unconnected objects, but here the idea is a gel, an interstitial device that is actually effective, and encourages further reflection on the way the works function. At the centre, then, is the virtual impossibility of there being a centre to the self, except perhaps when constituted through surveillance. Instead, the self is shown, or more accurately, worked through, as a construction of Sigmund Freud’s interlocked zones of Ego, Id and Superego. Three works express these modes of being or stimulus processing, and three others extend out into other ways of conceiving self as something other than centred, known, stable or whole.

 
Freud had explored the possibility of mental realms beyond conscious control by the end of the 19th century. The psychological model Wallinger refers to dates from 1920, and breaks the psyche into three parts: the Ego – location of the conscious self; the Id, site of desires and impulses; and the Superego, a controlling region developed through social training to restrain the Id. All three interact continually, and the process of interaction is itself explicitly beyond the reach of the conscious part of a person’s thought. What we are able to do is look at the functioning of the system, or let others explore it. So, as well as the decentring that comes from the presence of the lurking Id, there is the further loss of control that comes from the fact that we require the observations and interpretations of an outsider, an other, in order to have any chance of seeing what is going on inside. The consequences of Freud’s system are joined in ID by other moments where the human has been displaced from the centre: Copernicus’ removal of the earth from the centre of the universe (referred to in this show in Orrery [2016]); Marx’s revelation that the world of liberal politics is an ideological cover for exploitation (underpinning all the works, but almost explicit in Superego [2016]); the processes of ecological change (Orrery again). The show bifurcates from the outset: divided over the two Hauser and Wirth sites, the exhibition text invites us to begin with the upper of two locations (the North gallery) and the piece Ego (2016). This consists of two iPhone pictures showing Wallinger’s hands echoing the digital pose of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. This ostensibly cheap copy illustrates the vanity of The Artist as a creative force, and shows how work is always coming into being, the artist never complete. This seemingly empty playfulness is more interesting in the context of the series of works on show here: for a start, the splitting of the work across two sites is a mapping of conscious and unconscious, social and individual. Ego, whilst referring explicitly to the tip of the Freudian iceberg of personality, also divides in two, as Wallinger’s hands take the place of both creator and created – which in turn plays out in him being both artist and subject, and visually in the form of the two separate prints. The iPhone is not an innocent tool either, and rather than a fatuous statement about contemporary creativity, this piece acts as a musing on the manual interaction with the visual that has occurred with the arrival of this cameraphone. The artistic medium of the extended hand has been replaced by the crabbed thumbing of pads. The way in which the self uses the hand as an artistic prosthesis has been altered by far more than the simple fact of a computer assisting in image production.

 
From here, the unconscious takes over in the form of a large space completely dominated by massive primal paintings, all the canvases the width of Wallinger’s body and double the height. Every Id painting offers another fission: the paint is daubed by hand on half, then doubled onto the other to make a near-symmetrical Rorschach blot. Each piece not only opens up the canvas to the free roaming of the normally contained Id, but also represents one of the modes of psychological testing – such that the viewer’s perception of what is depicted reveals something of their internal workings. I liked the bombast of the pictures but, to be honest, something that is fun to do or interesting as a way of looking into your otherwise inaccessible depths is not necessarily of much value to any other viewer. So if you’re Rorschach-testing me on this, I saw only the form, and the form was a shallow scraping into maudlin expressionism, an emptying of psychic energy – as opposed, say, to the drive of Jonathan Meese’s retro-neo-goth paint lashings. So, oddly, the least interesting part of Wallinger’s exploration of the decentred subject is the unconscious.

 
The South building offers much richer probings into the confluence of self and social, the self and its imposed location in webs of power, in the conventions of the physical world. The back room pairs spatial and temporal aspects in the shape of Ever Since (2012) and Shadow Walker (2011). Both combine a sense of individual perception and self-locating presence with representations of the urban environment. Ever Since is a life-size projection of a barber shop front. The only immediately perceptible sign of movement is in the red and white stripe of the traditional marker of the trade, rotating in the upper right quadrant. A clock also moves, but only for two seconds, as this is the duration of the video loop. The barber sign, however, offers the illusion of perpetual motion – time unbroken. More than a perceptual trick, this piece stages repetition as exception, as meditation on what a moment means, trading, perhaps unconsciously, on Nietzsche and Deleuze. Here we are, with Richard Butler, ‘Forever Now’, but in a now that is always in motion, slipping away while static. The spatial-visual presentation marks another repetition of the same (as simulacrum of real object), but transferred to this new location. The uncanny of the shop front is wittingly conjured in Shadow Walker, a three-minute loop of Wallinger walking and filming his shadow moving through the popular thoroughfare of London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. This uncanny figure moves and negotiates space differently to the physical (filming) Wallinger, leading the way through a different spatial configuration, present and separate. It’s a shadow. It’s both fascinating and dull. But if we think of an urban uncanny, we can connect it to something more interesting in Wallinger’s work. Without directly documenting any change in the location, Wallinger shows us a changing relation to that environment – he ghosts through the familiar place at a distance, mediating through lens and shadow, rendering the place formal and spectral in one go. Wallinger’s personal and political interaction with English culture traverses a London that generates psychogeographical movement. What was once an enticing exploration of ‘other’ Londons is now the condition in which everyone lives – or doesn’t live – as the city is emptied out in favour of high wealth groups in receipt of massive State benefit in the form of tax breaks and urban clearance measures. This slight video work is able to extract us from militant melancholy and offer a small reflection on conflicted urban dwelling, a theme pursued more vigorously in the four screens of Orrery.

 
The planetarium (later ‘orrery’) was a mechanical device that illustrated the movements of planets around the Sun, celebrating the recalibration of the universe in light of Copernicus’ re-centring of the solar system on the Sun, thus deprivileging Man as the centre of all things, and, by implication, God and Heaven too. Instead, space was full of bodies moving in relation to one another. Wallinger uses the idea of the orrery as the organising model for his filming of an oak tree on a roundabout in Barkingside (which was in Essex for the first few years of Wallinger’s life, then in the London borough of Redbridge). There are four screens, each dedicated to capturing the roundabout and attendant tree in a particular season. The screens are placed in formation such that the viewer is centred between them all. On the face of it, then, this is about the seasons, about the passing of the Earth around the Sun, and how this is captured in the medium of the tree. The tree becomes medium for the imprint of both passing time, form, light and colour, and so a further dimension for the work’s reflection on centring, as the medium shifts between the blatant format of digital video, the explicit ordering as installation and the recursively included medium of the tree as intermediary. But Wallinger also emphasizes the perpetual movement of gravity and rotation through the almost parodic figure of the urban roundabout. In so doing, he re-centres the heliocentric model onto a city-dwelling individual, and onto himself in particular, as the gallery text mentions that this roundabout featured in Wallinger’s early car driving experiences. The double centring ends up as a de-centring though, due to the overall structure of the work as presented here. The roundabout acts precisely as a gravitational pull on traffic, and so cars rotate around the ever-changing tree. The four screens do not so much convey the sense of being in a car in the roundabout-centric model as create a vivid and physical sense of disorientation, the viewer being both located in the centre, and looking on ‘the centre’ from a gyratory perspective. We now have a model that establishes the tree, the roundabout, the Sun, as centres, and yet we are transferred onto a centre that is not there – and so the orrery is updated from an early 18th century machine into a replica of internal psychological division, process and relation.

 
Where the orrery of Barkingside illustrates a triumph of secular rationalism over religious rejection and persecution of heresy, Superego represents a return of the repressor. Where the tree that grows its roots into the centre of traffic was planted as an avatar of future utopian dreams, marking the 1951 Festival of Britain, the revolving sign of Superego takes as its totem the symbol of new policing, a darker imagined future. The work consists of a working replica of the sign that marks New Scotland Yard, the centre of the activities of the Metropolitan Police, completed in 1967. A triangular prism, marked ‘New Scotland Yard’ swivels atop a metal pole, its tireless movement a simulation of permanent vigilance. Here in Superego the words ‘New Scotland Yard’ are removed and replaced by mirrored surfaces.

 
For Freud, the superego is the internalised set of rules and restrictions that settle into the mind as a result of familial upbringing. Wallinger extends this, as Freud did to some extent, and Lacan after him, into the idea that the individual is made to internalise discipline imposed at the social level. ‘New Scotland Yard’ consists of a display of power that is iconic rather than indexical, and Wallinger seeks to restore a sense of how power happens through signs and how we receive and act on them. So the superego of Superego is a transfer of rigorous social policing into an internal code that we forget has been imposed. The mirrored planes mean that we now discipline ourselves. This is one lesson that Wallinger has taken from Michel Foucault’s account of Western society as a giant prison. Wallinger’s critical hope perhaps interferes with the darker implications of that thought, which is that we are our own police, as power is a set of processes and relations which we are not underneath but caught within. We police ourselves because we have taught ourselves to do it. It is important for both parts of Foucault’s idea to subsist: firstly, social control, secondly, self-discipline as structuring device of subjectivity. Once we realise that power works through, not behind, mirrors, there is no way out.

 
The installation is impressive and fully conveys the threatening presence of the police sign: alone in the large gallery, its rotation provides a continual sonic backdrop, the meticulous grind of bureaucratic power a reassuring presence for some, but here its isolation shows the muscle that flexes and ripples underneath the expression of power. Britain is not only heavily policed by an official police force and army, but also by millions of CCTV cameras, with the result that this is a society that is ultimately so obsessed with its own punishment it may not need the official force any more. In fact, security seems only ever to increase, rather than change form: as informatic society revels in its self-surveillance, private companies join the official police in expanding their realm of operation.

 
Once again, the use of a specific location does not result in an abstraction but a deepening of location, and, in this show, a heightening of decentring, of the defamiliarising effects at work in the internal processes of any individual. Standing in as that ‘any’ individual (which Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever’ being), Wallinger is resolutely in, not outside of, a personal history, and this is one that is tied up in London and its signifying avatars. The ‘New Scotland Yard’ sign is not just a marker of dominance but also part of the visual landscape of 1970s cop shows and news reports, part of an ongoing process of what the city is and how it works. In the time since its founding, though, our ideas of power have changed, and so have the practices of policing and modes of surveillance. The emptied sign of Superego points to an infinite future of ever more reflective self-administration, but also one that can be used as a way toward a more conscious reflection not on the self, not on what the police does, but on the functioning, acceptance and display of power and authority.

 
The multiple media used by Wallinger in ID take us through the permutations of the urban subject as a thing in flux, caught in flows of data, physical movement and change, and capable of opening up to wider, more critical perspectives. Whichever centring device you choose (and art is one), decentring remains a potential, a prospect, a place from which to look at seeing, and then to see differently. Wallinger has used the methods of the phenomena he represents and works with as formal guides – the works of ID act as seeing devices, and therefore are much more effective than simply content-based politics. It is not a disservice to the artist to construe this show as a properly theoretical mobilisation of image and object. I intended to leave alone the mild pun of the show’s title, but it finally strikes me that even though identity policing exploits current fears to become more focused and targeted, in fact official power continues to struggle with establishing identity, even, or precisely, as they strive to control the subject through it.

 
Mark Wallinger: ID was on view 20 February – 7 May 2016.

 
Martin is best known for her 6 x 6 foot grid pictures, which she started making and exhibiting in the early 1960s, to much critical acclaim. The art historian Anna Chave credits Martin’s success to the manner in which her paintings make little demand on their viewers. For Chave, Martin gained recognition in the practice of the typically male-dominated arena of geometric abstraction because she maintained, like the good girl who is seen but not heard, a gendernormative role of the modest, self-effacing woman. Taking or leaving this account, it is a fact that she consistently received positive reviews and impressed many of the vanguard artists, critics, and curators she came into contact with. The admiration for Martin even began to bother one critic, John Perreault, who in 1979 complained ‘there is an Agnes Martin mystique and it annoys me.’ This mystique seems bound up with the ease with which her life-story lends itself to myth. That tendency to give artistic biography a cultic inflection – perhaps to deflect from the challenge presented by the work itself – finds a seductive model in Martin: her Zen-inspired pronouncements; her 1976 retreat from New York despite increasing commercial success; her rudimentary lifestyle in the New Mexican desert; the ‘apparitionalism’ of her homosexuality that she adamantly refused to discuss. Taken together, these factors portray a kind of monastic discipline in her insistence upon solitude. Enjoyment of the work does not rest on an understanding of Martin’s writings or on knowledge of her life story, however.

 
Indeed, for all the intrigue surrounding Martin’s biography, her art was intended as anything but an expression of her personal view. She never claimed responsibility for her creativity, instead putting it down to that elliptical source of ‘inspiration,’ something she understood to be a universal experience unrelated to the ego and only received by the open and ‘vacant’ mind. Like Rothko – whom she admired – Martin looked to express the foundations of human emotions; but instead of his ‘tragedy, ecstasy, doom… and so on,’ Martin wished to explore the flipside of joy, innocence, and beauty. And despite the offputting, saccharine titles of some works, such as I Love the Whole World and Happy Holiday, the titles at least consolidate the light and positive feeling these paintings evoke.

 
On entering Tate’s installation one catches a glimpse of some unexpected sculptures and paintings amongst Martin’s signature style of refined and minimal geometric paintings. These works predate Martin’s founding moment of introducing the grid motif around 1960 and offer a unique opportunity to appreciate the diversity of her practice. The curators at Tate distributed these works rather densely across the first few rooms, whilst the spacing comes to be more satisfyingly dispersed throughout subsequent spaces, as her later painting style moves into its more uniform banded strips on 6 x 6 foot canvases. The high quality of Martin’s work remains remarkably constant throughout the retrospective: each object label denoted the decades ticking past whilst the integrity of the work never diminishes. Prior to the 1950s, very few of Martin’s paintings survived a rigorous self-critique that resulted in the destruction of much of her early work. It was only on the introduction of the grid motif that Martin would feel a sense of resolve in her practice – yet even then she maintained an unremitting willingness to destroy those works she felt dissatisfied with. Thus, a strict editing process reinforced her distilled aesthetic.

 
Having visited the show in London last June, I recently had the pleasure of viewing it once more in its second venue of Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung. Both shows opened similarly with three of Martin’s paintings from the 1990s, now owned by the Anthony d’Offay ARTIST ROOMS collection, marking the entrance alongside other similar works from this period. These works of large-scale ‘banded’ paintings came to dominate her later style — thereby the exhibition establishes something of a teleological order in the curation of Martin’s oeuvre: the entrance sets up the evolution of her artistic trajectory; and on reaching the milestone of the grid paintings around 1958, Martin would further break down the pictorial structure of geometric abstraction over the next four decades, focusing predominantly on horizontal stripes and bands after the late 1970s.

 
The curation of both venues presents approximately ten ‘rooms’ in a loose chronological order. In the first room visitors are greeted with these large square canvases in light washes of red, blue, and yellow; Martin diluted the primary colours to a pale wash resulting in a room of canvases aglow with painterly light. The horizontal bands of varying width and frequency appear backlit, with the white strips in between the subdued colours appearing whiter than the walls behind them. The delicate and gossamer lines that divide the bands are pencil-drawn, skimming and mapping the roughness of the canvases’ surface from close up, and dissolving from afar.

 
The second and third rooms of the retrospectives covered the breadth of artistic styles and movements that Martin worked through in the 1950s—a time she would later describe as a prolonged period of dissatisfaction with her work. Martin donned styles of European abstraction, biomorphism, and surrealism. Whereas I found Tate Modern’s tight hanging and ‘intermediate space’ threatened to relegate some pictures to the status of mere stepping stones, the Kunstsammlung allocated more space to these works, allowing them to be received as quite beautiful, standalone statements.

 
These rooms also presented the afore-mentioned sculptures made from found-materials that appear diametrically opposed to the refined and quiet aesthetic of her mature work. Burning Tree (1961) resembles a tree’s skeletal frame with dark wood for the trunk and steel-capped, claw-like branches at modulated intervals. It is a representation of a tree far removed from the state of ‘innocence’ that would later inspire her grids. These sculptures plant something of a dark seed in Martin’s oeuvre, something that is further consolidated with the renewed focus upon Martin’s biography and her struggle with mental health—last year saw the publication of Nancy Princenthal’s biography of Martin, and a personal account by Donald Woodman of his fraught friendship with Martin from 1977 to 1984. Thus, the ‘happy’content of her mature paintings are somewhat recast as an aspiration rather than as a reality of Martin’s lived experience.

 
Martin’s ‘breakthrough’ period occurred between 1957 to 1967 when she was living in New York amidst an extraordinary rush of artistic activity ignited by the success of Abstract Expressionism. The vaulting prices of the latter’s outsized canvases energized an art market of galleries, collectors, and dealers. The thriving art scene of the 1960s diverged into multifarious practices, with movements such as Post-Painterly Abstraction, Minimalism and Process Art emerging as a formal antidote to the grandiosity of Abstract Expressionism— whilst Pop Art exploited the cult of the personality and a profuse aesthetic to engage more directly with consumer culture. The exceptionally beautiful grids that emerged from this period—here represented by The Islands (1963), Falling Blue (1963), Friendship (1963), Morning (1965), White Stone (1965), and Grass (1967), to name a few—in part emerged under the aesthetic philosophy of Minimalism. Ultimately, however, Martin was radically independent in her thinking and approach to painting. These large grids are the foundation on which her entire mature career was built: both formally, in the manner in which she would further parse horizontals and verticals into singular and conjunctive compositions, and in their affective capacity: the way in which the homogenized space of the canvas seem to create space for the body to literally move about, but also where thought might touch upon the idea of the infinite.

 
The structural intricacy of certain grid paintings delivers a unique perceptual experience. White Stone is a particularly understated yet powerful example of one of her more close-knit grids. From what looks like an enameled surface, the graphite lines of White Stone measure only millimetres apart and the ivory-coloured oil paint appears to recede slightly from each line. From afar the culmination of the graphite lines visually clump together in hazy patches of grey. The optical play of the close proximity of lines means that they are perceived as if unfixed or flickering in a static field of surface tension. The perceptual experience is one that unfolds and deepens with time. But as much as a painting’s form inspires attempts to represent it in language, a formal description of a work like White Stone cannot fully capture the lingering depth of experience that such a work produces.

 
Variables in the exhibition spaces of both the Tate Modern and Kunstsammlung lent a different charge to how the chronological order was received. Both exhibitions position the suite of thirty screen prints, On A Clear Day (1973), as a sort of intermediary passage leading to the later large-scale bandedpaintings. This project is an anomaly in her oeuvre for its absence of Martin’s indexical trace. The small prints marked a return to her practice after a several-year hiatus. Once again, the grid is deployed, but it is deconstructed—or reconstructed—in a clarion meditation on the multiple possibilities of its form. However, in comparing the two venues, the large, airy space of the Kunstsammlung spreads the entire retrospective across two floors, reflecting the subtle shift that Martin’s practice underwent after several years of renouncing her practice in 1967. On a Clear Day announces a renewed commitment to her art and an aesthetic even further distilled. Walking up the stairs after this series to the later grey-banded paintings from the 1980s onwards, the transitional space aids reflection on the development Martin’s personal philosophy and practice underwent, as it also allows a moment for the viewer to take a breath during this extensive exhibition.

 
The final room of the retrospective finished on a comparatively eerie note with a series of paintings Martin completed in 2003. Paintings such as Homage to Life (2003) and Untitled #1 (2003) depict geometric block shapes in true opaque black, paintings that now seem to presage her death a year later. The dark shapes take the place of Martin’s signature palette of luminous diluted colour and instead float over a stormy-looking wash of grey paint. The use of absolute black, just like the sinister sculptures of the 1950s, suggests a dark underside to Martin’s work. Martin’s writings articulate the simple joys in life, or at least look to conjure a mental image of one. And despite finding immense joy in her beloved New Mexican landscape and trips to the sea and rivers of North America’s northwest coast and abroad, the positive aspirations of the paintings differ markedly from her lived experience. The hardship she endured from her struggle with schizophrenia, which culminated in numerous breakdowns and amnesiac episodes, casts a shadow on the lighter works. This is not to say they harness the paintings to an inevitably dark content, but that the lightness and desire for a ‘tabula rasa’ seems all the more pertinent—and all the more admirable—given these accounts. Here we have the sense that in Martin’s cool, restrained, and disciplined beauty there is a tinge of yearning, of hope—of a longing that has come from a place of deep dissatisfaction or unhappiness. Visiting this show is quite an undertaking; there is too much to take in in one viewing and it ideally requires several encounters. This is not the fault of the curation but rather a result of the way in which Martin’s work encourages (and rewards) slow looking—which would inevitably tax the capacity of a single museum visit. At the outset I discussed the prevalence of myth in the discourse on Martin. Reflecting on the aesthetic experience of the retrospective as a whole, I find that this appeal is testament to her philosophy – that beauty, and art’s connection to it, stands outside cognition and language. The focus on Martin’s persona and subsequent mythologizing might be understood as an effort to close this gap between the works’ effects and cognitive explanations. In other words, it is testament to the potency and lingering power of her practice.

 
Agnes Martin was on view at Tate Modern, 3 June – 11 October, 2015, at Kunstsammlung Nordrheim-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 7 November 2015 – 6 March, 2016. It is currently at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (24 April – 11 September, 2016), and will travel to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 7 October 2016 – 11 January 2017.

As Murray gave a brief introduction, the audience, initially huddled together in clusters, intuitively organized itself into two defined groups, the first adjacent to the long brick wall to the right of the entrance, and the second at the front of the gallery, along its street-front window. A small number of materials had been laid out on the grey concrete floor, suggesting a delineation of space between us and the domain of the two actors, Pour Hosseini herself and, performing with her in this piece, artist Anja Mahler. Marking out two corners, parallel with the front and back walls, were a laptop positioned on a tall white plinth and, across from this, two bags of charcoal powder resting on a square white base just above ground-level. In between these two objects lay the projector, in a square outlined with white tape. This ascetic arrangement had its own poetic subtlety, a compound of normally irreconcilable constituents, drawing attention to the chasm between the terrestrial and the digital.

 
When the gallery lights dimmed and the room was in almost total darkness, Mahler, dressed in black, at times with Pour Hosseini but predominantly on her own, began to lay out seemingly arbitrary measures of red tape onto the walls and the floor of the gallery. Sometimes one would help the other in securing a long stretch by walking the tape onto the ground but mostly the task was carried out by each of them separately, with no interaction. Gradually, each artist assumed entirely discrete roles, with Pour Hosseini working from her laptop while Mahler assuredly continued to lay down strips of tape, forming geometric shapes in disarray, implicating an agreed upon disorder that somehow demanded compliance.

 
At the back of the gallery, on the wall opposite the window, the first few frames of footage came into view, signalled by a vertical strip of red film leader coursing down the screen. This drew a curious kinship between the red tape Mahler was fixing to the floor and the celluloid film used as raw material here. On the makeshift screen, a moving shape came into view in flickering images marked with scratches and imperfections; emerging from extensively re-edited and re-filmed footage, a figure dressed in a beige Mac could be made out walking with aplomb toward the camera across a desert landscape. At times, Mahler paused from her work and stood near or in front of the projector’s light, so that her silhouette could be made out on the wall, thereby creating a new, live image over the film scene, obliterating one figure with another.

 
The sound of something akin to a kango hammer played for long stretches but would then stop abruptly, creating an absence in which the pummelling noise of what came before seemed to reverberate on. After some time, Mahler took one of the bags of charcoal powder from the white base and, while standing fully upright, started pouring small amounts of it on to the ground, causing eruptions of black dust that the projector’s light cast on to the wall, a startling, unique effect that cast a murky and billowing edge at the bottom of every frame. This she did a number of times until there was enough charcoal on the ground for her to spread it into the shape of a perfect black circle. On her hands and knees, Mahler skilfully outlined an arc, filled it in and then mirrored it above itself. Every now and then she ceremoniously rose to her feet and shed more black powder on to the ground, each time as though she was engaged in some self-ascribed ritual.

 
The unfeeling desert scene projected on the back wall dissipated early on and in its place, silent footage of a group of friends relishing a day of summer heat emerged. Here, the camera captured its subjects in hazy sunshine and close-up, resting in togs under the shade of a tree, devouring strawberries, swimming right up to and looking into the lens and then turning around and swimming away. A sense of camaraderie pervaded, an idyllic picture of union and a spirit of togetherness, a democracy of sorts, at intriguing odds both with the austere film sequence that preceded it and the performance’s other facet, its sure-footed routine and dark aspect.

 
When the black circle was complete, Mahler drew out a cable with a contact mic attached and rubbed it into the powder on the ground, amplifying the substance’s grainy texture. This jagged sound gave rise to the suggestion of restless activity, of energy born from earth that is, like a mirage, discernible but intangible. Unlike an hallucination, a mirage is not a figment of human imagination. Instead it is an optical phenomenon, that a camera can record, created when light rays are refracted. However, what makes it so beguiling is that the form the image takes is determined by the viewer’s interpretive bent. Is there a way to use this as a metaphor for the art of cinema, and indeed for this performance, where the potential for meaning, and its power, rests with the spectator?

 
Leaving the sequestered gallery and stepping into the dark and inclement night, I had the feeling of having attended more of a kind of ceremony than a performance, where the purpose of codified ritual lay, at least in part, in shared albeit short-lived experience. Pour Hosseini’s performance as a whole, and her commanding, notably subsidiary role within it, provoked a heightened awareness of the enduring strength and force of the mystic and primordial, offering ways in which they can continue to have an impact, particularly if we are canny and curious enough to know how to use the materials at our disposal to find a way to channel them.

 
Mirage took place on 3 December 2015.

 
 
In Rossin’s words,

Karlin belongs to that generation of filmmakers who, after having gone through the militant experience of the sixties and seventies, developed a new political filmmaking praxis in the eighties […] by rethinking and moving beyond the Marxist tradition,

 
and who is now seen

as an important missing figure in documentary film history, the lost-and-found link between militant and experimental cinema.

 
A significant factor in the recent rediscovery of Karlin’s achievement has been the appearance of the first volume dedicated to his work: Marc Karlin: Look Again, edited by Holly Aylett.

 
Prior to all of this, if one had searched for information about Karlin on the internet, the obituary in The Independent would probably be one of the first links to appear. Its opening description of Karlin as ‘the most significant unknown film-maker working in Britain in the past three decades’ might already suggest placing him within a particular cinematic ‘geneaology’ by reminding us of another filmmaker’s career: that of the French artist Chris Marker. They were friends and Marker’s oeuvre was indeed decisive in Karlin’s education, including the formation of his idea of cinema. The set of thoughts at stake in Karlin’s films is undoubtedly Markerian in many ways and yet Karlin is probably one of the few under Marker’s influence who proved able to create a personal and radical language comparable to Marker’s, and the French artist admired him for that.

 
In almost all of his films, Karlin put historical situations under his critical view, and in one of his first and most remarkable works, Nightcleaners Part 1 (1972-75), made collaboratively when Karlin was part of the Berwick Street Film Collective, one already finds an idea of history as a sort of sleepless / endless night, in which even a political struggle appears in the form of hallucination. The action takes place in the UK, and, to use Rossin’s words once again, the subject is ‘the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid’. Now, this is the framework where individual portraits of these women are displayed, and one cannot but notice how peculiar this ‘portraiture’ is, as the camera ‘enters’ the image – their faces, their skins – and literally grasps the materiality of their existences, the living and silent part of their stories.

 
This dialectic between stories (personal experiences) and history (politics as broader framework) continues in later works such as A Dream from the Bath (1985) and Between Times (1993), essay films in which, respectively, Karlin questions the role of cinema in British identity and the future of the British Left in that period. In discussing A Dream from the Bath, it is important to point out that the context of its making was the Film Act of 1985, which resulted in the withdrawal of state support for cinema in the UK. This starting point helped Karlin to create a film in which his take on British cinema, intimate as a story, becomes premise / promise of an idea of cinema as agent of history. In Between Times, the stories are those of the two major then-current tendencies of the British Left on the verge of changing its shape with the appearance of New Labour. The film offers an endless dialogue, provocative as well as brilliant, between two offscreen characters, A and Z. The interplay of their voices takes the form of an in-depth debate ‘between a socialist who believes in the possibility of workingclass self-activity and a postmodernist for whom the effort to resist is pointless’ (Rossin). In the end Karlin suggests how necessary and yet difficult it is draw any political map, as the history of that present might be blown away like the sand of a mandala just when the whole picture seems complete.

 
In some of Karlin’s other works, history and stories are in dialogue because they share a common factor: the role of memory. More specifically, films such as For Memory (1982) and Utopias (1989) appear as attempts to deal with social memory, therefore with a form of relationship between subjects. For Memory does this through the metaphor of a futuristic city where the life of stories and the trace of events lies beyond its walls; Utopias through portraits of different people as faces and forces for an idea of socialism in Britain.

 
Karlin’s other major work is the series about Nicaragua and its revolution: Nicaragua Part 1: Voyages (1985); Nicaragua Part 2: The Making of a Nation (1985); Nicaragua Part 3: In Their Time (1985); Nicaragua Part 4: Changes (1985); Scenes for a Revolution (1991). These films are headlines which speak volumes about their specific themes, but it is with Nicaragua Part 1: Voyages that he created what was probably his finest achievement. In 1978-79, Susan Meiselas photographed the two insurrections that led to the revolution. Karlin’s film is composed of five unedited tracking shots which move across elaborate arrangements of these photographs, whilst his voice reads Meiselas’ ‘reflections on her relationship to the history she witnessed’ (Rossin). The film can be seen as a gesture of appropriation of Meiselas’ work and here, more than anywhere, the meditation on history in images makes clear Karlin’s extraordinary qualities as observer in complex situations, his oeuvre a watchtower for this present, this endless night.

 
États généraux du film documentaire de Lussas ran from 17-18 August 2015.

 
The immediate thrill of 90 Years Without Sleep comes from seeing a work that does everything ‘wrong’ by any conventional standard, that charges at absurdity headfirst without the shield of irony and manages to break through to emerge as an oddly haunting and affecting work, in which the single-minded simplicity of the treatment perfectly gels with the extreme isolation it explores. An act of unswerving faith rather than smart calculation, it transports viewers into a private headspace where an innocently personal vision unfolds with the intense urgency of the last videotape on earth. A message in a bottle. But even this does not quite account for the film’s quirky power, or the complex questions it throws up about how we categorize moving images these days. I was very glad of the opportunity some six months later to revisit this seldom-screened work on its projection at The Guesthouse in Cork – to be in a position to better formulate the challenge it poses to certain long-standing preconceptions about the relationship between moving images and reality.

 
It is, first and foremost, a response to and appropriation of genre cinema (and, of course, TV). As such, it is a very personal distillation of an emotional essence extracted from mainstream cinema and released into the ‘real world’ – a world without budget, a ‘documentary’ world. Unlike tedious amateur replications of mainstream movies that pedantically follow its techniques, Gallardo establishes a very particular and extreme relationship with time and space. In place of the traditionally pareddown, narrative-driven apparatus of mainstream storytelling, he creates an echo chamber in which the bellow of horror at the centre of both his film and the Twilight Zone original can reverberate endlessly in a temporal stasis born of repetitiveness. Formally, such an experiment brings his work somewhat in line with traditions of modernist art cinema as typified by Antonioni, or certain tendencies in structuralist filmmaking. But Gallardo eschews any claim to the cultural respectability or artistic self-consciousness of these cinemas and opts not only for home video technology and aesthetics but slightly dated ones at that. The result of this strikingly spontaneous combination is perhaps, above all, a radically immersive documentary on urban space that couldn’t have emerged as compellingly if conceived as documentary per se.

 
The dream of universally available filming tools and of being able to pick up a camera as easily as a pen is a very old one. It was born at a time when the technical and economic exigencies of filmmaking were such that the production of moving images was all but entirely under the control of movie studios. Therefore, it was equally a dream of images that would be free and other from the standard conventions of traditional cinema. One that could throw light on reality or lead to new, poetic ways of seeing. Now that this dream has become reality, what seems to have resulted is the multiplication of conventions rather than their obsolescence. And, of course, moving images are in no way synonymous with ‘cinema’ any longer. Gallardo’s film is in ways a reminder of some important works that appeared at the moment when the democratisation of filmmaking began in earnest, and which presented radically disconcerting reflections, perhaps less of mainstream cinema, as of its pervasive cultural influence, while still acknowledging it as the central reference point. Films by Warhol or Jack Smith overturned cinematic perception in terms of temporality and representation at least partly through the no-holds-barred embrace of a fantasy of cinema that, by manifesting in a ‘real’ world that couldn’t have been more different from the calculated formulae of Hollywood, forced a groundup rethinking of cinema’s possibilities. By flinging himself with such flailing intensity upon his cinematic fantasy, Gallardo presents us with an exploration of the margins of a city rendered fantastically vivid and experiential by being filtered through the fictionalised sensibility of his protagonist. Paradoxically, it is hard to imagine any documentary strategy that could bring viewers so close to this reality. 90 Years Without Sleep therefore succeeds best as a fascinating by-product of a by-product of cinema that, by refusing to strive for respectable adherence to any acknowledged cinematic category, and by throwing itself open to charges of ineptitude from all sides, reveals as much about the power and potential of the moving image as anything made in recent years.

 
Juan Carlos Gallardo: 90 Years Without Sleep was screened 10 September 2015.

 
We are constantly being reminded, typically for selfregarding purposes, and more frequently than not as part of awards speeches, that the making of a film is a collective process. Typically this is a process configured around the director as organising principle, but the dysfunction at the heart of this process has rarely been laid bare as bitterly or as vividly as it is in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s little-seen 1971 film Beware of a Holy Whore. Fassbinder frequently cited the film as his favourite of his own works and of the many, many films about the filmmaking process, it uncovers truths typically left out of other accounts. This was also the last of Fassbinder’s films to be created in collaboration with the Anti-Theater group, a collective of actors, writers and other creatives that formed in Munich in 1968, a key era in terms of alternate structures modelled around the collective rather than the individual. In their attempt to reconfigure the dramatic arts as a medium for social change the Anti-Theater had looked to Bertolt Brecht for inspiration, but by 1971 Fassbinder had grown weary of these methods and was ready to break ties and go out on his own.

 
In Beware of a Holy Whore a group of actors, producers, and technicians hang out in a hotel in France. They are in the process of making a film, the details of which remain blurry, but mostly they just kill time and wait. Initially they wait for the director (he arrives by helicopter, starts shouting at people, drinking heavily, and being terrible), they wait for film stock, they wait for actors, and they wait for money. While they wait, they bicker, occasionally have sex, some debate the merits of socialism but mostly they seem distracted by more bodily concerns. Beware of a Holy Whore is a fictionalised record of everything that goes into making a film except for the actual activity of shooting a film. This is also, not incidentally, most all of what making a film is: a muddied, confusing, financially restrictive collaborative process; a system that has taken this shape not because it had to, and not because this was the best possible scenario, but because we never discovered a more viable alternative, or at the very least a viable alternative that would adequately meet the demands of the profit-based economy in which it continues to be embedded. In Beware of a Holy Whore Fassbinder presents an image of filmmaking as a form of collective insanity, a very particular kind of unreality which these figures inhabit for a fixed period of time, a shared fever-dream of controlled excess and debauchery interrupted by occasional bursts of inspiration and productivity. The mode of filmmaking Fassbinder describes, as corrupted as it seems, is also now something of a myth; rarely will we see a director granted the degree of freedom and influence depicted here. Already far from ideal in 1971, the system has, it seems, only become harder to navigate in the interim.

 
The director’s role as organising principle within a loosely-formed hierarchy doesn’t hold the same symbolic power it did in the 1960s and 1970s. The auteurism that helped define cinema’s promise for so long has shifted and other models have developed. As the business has changed the industry can look to television’s recent success for an alternative, incorporating the notion of the ‘showrunner’, a much less clearly defined figure: not writer, not director, not producer, but frequently likely to dip in and out of several roles; an individual who can create consistency across a variety of loosely connected properties. The showrunner-as-auteur will become a useful alternative for what is increasingly a franchisedriven economy, but along the way there were a number of more radical alternatives.

 
In Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ he dreams of something else entirely. Although most frequently associated with the auteur movement, what Astruc describes in his essay is a democratisation of cinema that will be brought about through technological means, made possible by the increased affordability and accessibility of smaller-gauge film production and exhibition. In 1948 Astruc felt technology could soon transform cinema and the film camera into something more fully resembling a ‘pen’ (‘camérastylo’). Cinema would no longer be just entertainment, it would serve more than just commerce. It would become a fully versatile tool that would be used to a greater number of ends. Astruc’s utopian logic foresaw in this regard new systems of distribution and exhibition – ‘projectors for everyone’ – which echo the aspirations of our own digital age. This, however, is not how change works: the impacts of technological development are rarely as totalising as we initially expect or hope. Cinema’s current status has certainly been made precarious, but much of the same logic continues to apply. If anything, in an era of dried up revenue streams, the industry that has grown more calcified. In order to continue to uncover the kind of utopian promise described by writers like Astruc we should look instead to the periphery, to those aspects of film-culture which continue to exist in the margins.

The film collectives of the 1960s and ‘70s

 
In one of his earliest writings on film Vsevolod Pudovkin celebrated ‘collectivism’ as the true ‘foundation of cinematic work’ –

(i)t is not a lone director who is called upon to resolve the creative task (of filmmaking). Only a community united by a shared idea and a unified understanding of a goal (zadachi), creative and controlling itself can do such work (of real filmmaking).¹

 
The Soviet cinema of the 1920s was a key influence in the emergence of a new form of collectivism in the 1960s and 70s, a debt made all apparent by the emergence of two groups: the Medvedkin Group, centred around Chris Marker, and the Dziga Vertov Group, centred around Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin.² Dziga Vertov Group was Godard at his most expressly political, part of his resolve to make ‘political films politically’. This would involve a dissolution of individual authorship, a radical shift for a figure that had been at the forefront of Cahiers du Cinema’s influential auteur-driven mode of film criticism, a movement that had now taken hold in the U.S. through the unyielding allegiance of recent converts like the critic Andrew Sarris.

 
During this same period Julio García Espinosa wrote his manifesto ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, and as Masha Salazkina notes, what we find there is a similarly ‘utopian call to democratize cinema’, an aim that would be achieved by ‘abolishing individual film authorship and dismantling film’s status as art, thereby opening cinematic production to the masses and in the process liberating humankind’.³ Espinosa rails against film as perhaps ‘the most elitist of all the contemporary arts’ – ‘[f]ilm today, no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses’. In response he calls for ‘a new poetics for the cinema’ which will ‘above all, be a “partisan” and “committed” poetics, that is to say, an “imperfect” cinema’. Espinosa rejected the elitism of the avant-garde and evoked instead the legacies of ‘folk art’. He called for a cinema that would no longer have ‘personal selfrealization as [its] object’. An imperfect cinema will aspire to be, above all a revolutionary cinema, and in citing cinema as ‘a pluralistic art form’ rather than a ‘specialized form of expression’, Espinosa reignites something resembling the utopian promise described by Alexandre Astruc in 1948.

 
There were in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of radical alternatives to the hierarchies which continue to dominate modern filmmaking. These alternatives could begin to unravel, it was felt, the existing framework upon which the film industry had been modelled up to that point. The hierarchy of the classical Hollywood system, perfected by the film studios of the 1930s and 1940s as they adapted Fordist principles and deftly annihilated competition, had by this point faded into the middle distance, and in the 1960s opposing tendencies began to emerge. This period of instability had the effect of bringing about a brief moment of relative freedom, as directors within the studio system were granted a degree of authorial control they had heretofore rarely known, but the same period also witnessed the re-activation of avant-garde/experimental cinema, an emerging network of filmmakers, critics, and institutions forming around key figures like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage in the U.S., Peter Kubelka in Vienna, or the London Filmmakers Cooperative in the U.K.

 
With the political and social upheavals that define this era, artists and filmmakers began to seek out forms of creative endeavour that would play a more pronounced and transformative role in effecting change. These alternatives tended to be articulated in relationship with more clearly defined political motives and often grew out of existing social movements. By 1975 Peter Wollen would describe an emerging split between, on the one hand, the high modernist allegiances of the avant-garde, celebrated by critics like P. Adams Sitney, and an altogether different element which was emerging in Europe. Certainly post-1968 there were those that had begun to seek out a more active role for cinema in terms of social transformation, relying on an approach to filmmaking that could be more clearly modelled around collectivist principles. The emergence of collectivism offered an alternative to the ‘art as art’ allegiances represented by existing avant-garde movements. This involved a sharp rejection of individual authorship, an insistence that a film-work be considered as the product of all involved, the various roles in the production being treated as interchangeable. The collective, it was felt, would offer a more democratised, non-elitist understanding of what cinema could be and do, replacing ‘art as art’ reflexivity with ‘art as activism’, shifting its focus from what art could be to what art could do. It announced a new realm of possibility, but it also introduced, in the shape of a cinema more clearly focused on articulated aims and objectives, the possibility of failure.

 
These practices of course were not without precedent, and if we are committed to uncovering a lineage (rather than looking back to the handful of artists turned filmmakers that make up the ‘historical avant-garde’) it makes sense to focus on Soviet cinema and Britain’s documentary film movement of the 1930s. Not a film collective in the truest sense, at its height the documentary film movement under John Grierson experimented not only with a cinema that played a more active role in shaping society, but a cinema that could also experiment with form. The documentary film movement was aspirational, occasionally dogmatic and condescending, but it functioned also as a school of formal experimentation, and for a brief moment it was an enclave for a mode of practice that otherwise seemed to have gone into hibernation at the end of the 1920s.

 
The influence of this movement, inadvertent or not, can be seen in groups such as the Berwick Street Film Collective, London Women’s Film Group, and Cinema Action which begin to emerge in Britain during the 1960s/1970s, groups whose concerns seem to exist somewhere between the tenets of documentary and the formalism of the avant-garde. In many cases, these collectives grew out of existing social movements; again their intention was to democratise and liberate the filmmaking process so as to make it more readily available as a tool for activism. In the U.S. groups like the Winterfilm Collective and the Newsreel Film Collective were established along similar lines, announcing a more socially engaged cinema which would pay first-person testimony to the atrocities of the war machine (e.g. Winter Soldier [1972]) or the corrupting influences of multinational corporations (e.g. Delaware [1968-69]).

 
This brief history serves as a framing device for a recent screening series at the Irish Film Institute, which attempted to reconsider the role of the collective in contemporary moving image practice. After its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, the utopian and revolutionary promise of the collective for cinema seemed to grow obsolete, or became displaced into new and emerging technologies. This screening series offers a number of perspectives in which the role of the collective continues to ignite the spark of utopian promise, disrupting any sense of stagnation that may otherwise infect our current understanding of cinema and its role. The series opened with Marylene Negro’s feature-length work X+ (2010), a palimpsest work made up of extracts taken from ten major activist films of the 1960s and 1970s. Few films have reconfigured the position of the individual in relation to the collective in more inventive and productive ways and Negro achieves this by returning to the kinds of activist cinema that helped define the role of the collective in the late sixties and early seventies.

 
Included in Negro’s film are excerpts from Here at the Water’s Edge (Leo Hurwitz, 1961) The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961), The Bus (Haskell Wexler, 1963) Losing just the Same (Saul Landau, 1966) One Step Away (Ed Pincus, 1967) Black Liberation/ Silent Revolution (Edouard de Laurot, 1967), In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968), Winter Soldier (Winterfilm, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973) and Underground (Emile de Antonio, 1976). From these varied sources, Negro’s X+ weaves a singular work. The film looks back to a key historical period for collectivism, especially as it relates to politically committed and socially engaged film practices and in doing re-inscribes its possibility for our own era. Throughout X+’s 68 minutes, Negro moves continuously and back and forth through these ‘monuments’, as images from different sources overlap and intersect. In each case the material being drawn upon is highly evocative, capturing moments of high intensity in terms of its cultural and political impact.

 
X+ has narrative drive, sequences in which momentum builds, but this is achieved through texture and form. One of Negro’s chief achievements in X+ is the way she directly confronts history’s cluttered, shape-shifting and often destructive aspects. For instance, X+ draws our attention to the ways in which cinema, as a predominantly figurative art,

relentlessly records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses – fleeting passers-by of a period they are going through, tiny extras of a zeitgeist that carries them along. (Nicole Brenez)⁴

 
Cinema enjoys the spectacle of the aggregate, a body of people. The disorienting effect of seeing carefully overlaid examples of this, with horizontal strips of one film used as a framing device for another, means we become conscious of how accustomed we have grown to looking for a film’s centre, for a site where it can land. Negro’s decision to have the relationships between these materials play out not just in time, through montage, but to instead have these sequences overlap and inhabit the same timespace is essential. This is never a strictly analytical or rhetorical pursuit for Negro, a way to insert distance or objectivity – in spite of her disruptions, the material retains its immediacy – but what becomes clear through these interventions is a more unifying objective as we keep circling similar ideas expressed in different ways. What we are asked to consider here is the very idea of collective history and our place within it, a history rendered unstable by the particularities of Negro’s intervention.

 
X+ is a series of encounters between discrete political struggles (Negro seems at pains to stress that the collective can be used to impose tyranny just as it can be used to bring about positive social change); it skilfully pronounces resonances between these by placing the veil of one on top of another. Negro frequently allows scenes to play out in full, inviting us to engage completely the full impact of what we see and hear, while at other times the source material recedes into abstraction as it becomes super-imposed visually upon footage from a number of sources. There is a structural unity to these interventions, with each shift back into abstracted form functioning as a kind of interval, interrupting our immersion in scenes that we would otherwise have trouble distancing ourselves from emotionally and intellectually. As we watch a young black teenager separated from his mother stoically being carted off to prison, or passers-by observing a Vietnamese monk as he commits an act of self-immolation in protest at U.S. involvement in the war, the impossibility of maintaining an objective relationship with what appears onscreen becomes apparent but Negro uses this to her film’s advantage. She remains sharply aware of the power and emotional impact these images have on viewers, herself included, in spite of the historical distance between then and now.

 
In the second part of this programme the collective materialised in a different form, re-situating the limits and capacity of cinema as a political apparatus in the shape of five films which shift from the figurative to the abstract. The programme opens with Mountain Fire Personnel (2015) an experimental documentary by Alex Tyson which describes the impacts of a 2013 wildfire in the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California. Alongside footage he shot himself, a good portion of Tyson’s film is made up of material from numerous on-line and media sources: GoPro sequences from firefighters and paramedics, radio reports, satellite imagery, and a good deal of amateur documentation shot and narrated by local citizens. The idea of an event or a catastrophe generating a sense of community is compounded by the methods Tyson employs in making the film, building up a multidimensional portrait of the event as it affects a wide range of people and places:

My footage was narrow in that it was only one snapshot of a particular area and timeframe. The other media helped illustrate the scale of the fire, which was huge (27,531 acres / 11,141 ha). All these different sources enabled me to organize the film chronologically and spatially beyond my own direct experience, and to construct something that appears linear with elements that are not.⁵

 
This is a kind of crowd-sourced collectivism that has become a frequent practice for artists engaged with the moving-image. Tyson’s gathering of material to convey the magnitude of the fire acknowledges a useful tension between what can be achieved by a larger entity and the individual. Another aspect of Mountain Fire Personnel that resonates here is Tyson’s own personal experience making the film. He describes how he arrived at the Aerial Tramway with a group of TV journalists and, being mistaken for one, is able to travel by cable car to the mountain station where firemen and state prisoners have set up a makeshift camp while battling the fire. Long after the journalists leave, Tyson stays on, befriending a couple of the prison guards, eating with them and filming this large group roaming the smoke-filled landscape and living together in close quarters. These sequences depict an enforced collective, a tight-knit group, out in the wild under constant surveillance, but it also captures Tyson’s more precarious position within the group, a position we can see from the lingering stares in the direction of the camera. The camera’s gaze is returned and viewed at least with curiosity if not suspicion.

 
Captivity is also at the centre of Iowa-based filmmaker Kelly Gallagher’s experimental cut-out animation Pen Up The Pigs (2014), in which she draws out connections between the history of slavery in America and present-day institutionalised racism and mass incarceration. Interested in ‘exploring, or détourning ideas of feminine imagery and then subverting them with intense militancy’, Gallagher’s collage-like films combine flowers, gunshots and glitter in equal measure.⁶ In the work of the Japanese [+] collective, we then shift from the explicitly political to the abstract. Africa I is a study of movement composed of a four-second, irregularly edited close-up of a slowly walking elephant. It suggests a post-colonial politics, but by focusing entirely on the animal’s richly textured skin, the motion gradually becomes hypnotic as the subject is transformed from a material to an immaterial realm, and the film’s politics quickly dissolve into a more abstract form. Under scrutiny, particularities erode and start to fall apart, and Rei Hayama’s film Inaudible Footsteps (2015) considers the idea of aimlessness of the mass by evoking the energy and urgency of a drove of horses on the run, through short, analogous passages which, in every instance, resist both narrative and resolution.

 
The concept of a persistently elusive ending also pervades Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso (2008), where finality is always out of reach. Here empty, tenebrous passageways curve from left to right without leading us anywhere and the figure of an elegantly dressed woman filmed from below never quite makes it to the top of the set of steps she is climbing. Borrowing a diverse range of material, including extracts from the film Brasiliários (1985) and super 8mm home movie footage, Vaz ‘invites us to think about the relative and fragile boundaries between the personal and the collective, the private and the public, and ultimately the self and the other.’⁷ In dream-like passages of whispered prayer, amongst talk of a ‘landscape of insomnia’, Vaz considers the significance and peril of a deeply receptive collective memory and, as with Inaudible Footsteps and Africa I, linearity is supplanted by something more cyclical.

The Films of Experimental Film Society

 
The realms of possibility and pluralism Alexandre Astruc and Julio García Espinosa once sought out in cinema are fully evident in a group of recent works by members of Dublin-based collective the Experimental Film Society, which made up the third and final part of the ‘Collectivism’ programme. Generally speaking, each EFS work is produced as part of a collective of like-minded artists and attributed to a single figure. In most if not all cases the filmmaker controls every aspect of production from concept to post-production. It is impossible, however, to ignore the collaborative aspect of EFS, a feature which becomes discernible in the way in which the various members frequently appear in each other’s work, an expression of unequivocal support. In practice this goes beyond support to become something else entirely, an internal process of shared provocation in which each filmmaker pushes the other to delve deeper, to look beyond. Each of the works shown demonstrates a shared, reciprocal interest in provocation, using cinema to dauntlessly probe what others routinely and systematically avoid, to wonder about the very nature of cinema, our peculiar drive to generate images and meanings.

 
What we encounter here is a cinema of enquiry, a cinema discovered in the process of its becoming. This rules out any pre-formed objective or agenda but it also helps account for the group’s intimidating prolificacy (in a two-year period Rouzbeh Rashidi produced fourteen feature-length or close to featurelength works). Through the works of EFS cinema remains in a state of productive instability. Here, cinema can function as a sketchbook – a way of exploring some of the possible lives of an idea. This is what we encounter, for example, in Rashidi’s visceral and abrasive Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) in which he takes apart and reassembles a 35mm trailer for Brain De Palma’s The Black Dahlia (2006). An interaction with popular cinema also surfaces in Michael Higgins’ Funnel Web Family, a foreboding and sinister inspection of domesticity for which music and soundbites from Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955) make a fitting albeit unexpected coda.

 
The ‘avant-garde’ has always described both a mode of practice and a realm of speculative philosophy, and the works of EFS find a shared sensibility in the realm of science-fiction, an informing feature of many of the films here. In Funnel Web Family Higgins shoots using baby monitors and in doing so grants us access to queasy scenes of everyday domesticity which are both familiar and otherworldly. The highly creative uses of technology we see here, and in Jann Clavadetscher’s use of CCTV in Controle No. 6, remind us of the more mundane uses to which the moving-image is put, but the concerns driving a work like Funnel Web Family are also more deeply felt and personal: the unsettling power of the film is rooted not only in the way in which it makes us as viewers into voyeurs, but in the way it seems to tap into an acutely felt fear of familial responsibility (the film is ultimately more Eraserhead than 1984).

 
Funnel Web Family reminds us of the invasions of privacy made possible by surveillance cameras, a contemporary technology that Controle No.6 counterintuitively uses to create something curiously reminiscent of a silent era comedy. In this way, both filmmakers find distinct means of subverting the ways in which the camera has been co-opted as an instrument for scrutiny and control. Shot entirely on CCTV cameras during a period working at a suburban chain cinema, Clavadetscher’s Controle No. 6 is not budget filmmaking in the truest sense (we arguably have to factor in all the work Clavadetcher is not doing while he is making the film). Shot over a period of weeks, Clavadetscher surreptitiously and gradually performed his film, at first for nobody in empty car parks and lifts, later going back to comb through these tapes in an attempt to retrieve the material that makes up the film. With movie star looks and an affection for body comedy, Clavadetscher can be situated as the Harold Lloyd of the group, as unlikely as that sounds. Lloyd serves as a model here for a naturally physical performer, but also for the ways in which Clavadetscher gracefully skips over what would otherwise be impossibly restrictive conditions in which to make a film.

 
The works produced by EFS have a raw immediacy that is a product of the charged, instinctive way in which the group functions – certainly the case with Dean Kavanagh’s Friends with Johnny Kline, a fearless work made up entirely of archive material in which innocuous, familiar images of public or communal life are set in opposition to illicit sequences that delve into the realm of the private, the sexual, the calamitous, and the criminal. In every instance there appears to be a degree of heightened performance for the camera, as though appearing to be human is always an act, regardless of context. Kavanagh’s is the angriest of the works included in the programme, its emotional register sits closest to the surface. It is impossible to shake off the history of institutional abuse in the film’s use of archival material but what the film seems to really kick against is the notion that sexual desire, whatever shape it takes, is something shameful, something which needs to be hidden.

 
Dean frequently obscures his images or has objects pass in front of them, so that it feels like we are looking through a keyhole, or peering from inside Dorothy Vallens’ closet.⁸ As with each of the works in this programme, he is feeling around in the darkest recesses of what cinema can be. Cinema is rediscovered here as a more fully heterogeneous space, a space which ‘can contain all galaxies and forms of life, even ones we can sense but can’t fully comprehend’ and the works shown here continue to make visible and engage cinema’s plastic nature, its wider worlds of possibility. Nothing is fixed or stable here and many of the works take a variety of forms, with aspects of HSP (161-170) likely to resurface again in Rashidi’s upcoming feature Trailers. Rashidi’s film feels like a form of archaeology. He returns to 35mm material as artefact, and what he uncovers there is a great realm of projected possibility, not only what the artefact is but the furthest realms of what the artefact could have been. Foregrounding discarded, depreciated or flea market-sourced media, collected and re-used without any sense of mawkishness or nostalgia, Rashidi produces a structuralism which transcends any impassive or non-emotive quality associated with the genre.

 
Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan’s collaboratively made Brine Twice Daily (which reads like a productive misunderstanding of Niall O’Flaherty’s ‘bathe twice daily’)⁹ feels like another work that is discovered rather than conceived, its final shape as much of a surprise to the filmmakers as it is for the viewer. The film initially appears to announce itself as an exercise in transgression, but slowly reveals itself as a form of portraiture, a warmly felt love story – a Platonic love story but a love story nonetheless – and like all great love stories its joys are tempered by frustration and self-doubt: love as an act of self-immolation.

 
Moving beyond a purely conceptual realm, these films are what happens when experience is allowed to overtake expectation. This rules out the possibility of failure as each film exists in an indeterminate state of becoming, but they also retain their capacity to upset the continuum, to disrupt the seeming stability of our current condition. No film in the programme better captures that state of fragility than Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s Clandestine. Along with Rashidi’s work, Clandestine is the film that is perhaps most at one with existing in what seems to be some forgotten aspect of cinema’s projected futures. The onscreen space of Pour Hosseini’s film suggests a space-time that is continuous with our own but also altogether foreign. It directly evokes the many worlds of possibility cinema has suggested, and through it the apparent solidity of our own existence is also rendered fractious and plastic.

 
This article coincides with a series of screenings which took place at the Irish Film Institute between March and May 2016. Curated by Daniel Fitzpatrick and Alice Butler for ‘aemi’– a newly developed platform for the support and exhibition of artists’ and experimental moving image – the series explores the role of the collective within contemporary moving-image practices. For more information please visit http://aemi.ie/

 

NOTES
1. Cited in Masha Salazkina, ‘Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map’, October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116.
2. These two have been the most heavily historicised of the film collectives in France but there were many more besides including the Peasant Front, Cinema Libra, and Cinéma Politique.
3. All citations taken from Masha Salazkina’s ‘Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map’, October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116.
4. Nicole Brenez: Political Cinema Today – The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images (2011), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/political-cinema-today-%E2%80%93-the-newexigencies-for-a-republic-of-images/
5. Alex Tyson in conversation with Herb Schellenberger, Vdrome (2015), http://www.vdrome.org/tyson.html
6. Kelly Gallagher in conversation with Kelsey Velez, Incite! (Dec 18th, 2015), http://www.incite-online.net/gallagher.html
7. Oana Chivoiu: ‘Toward an Aesthetic of Displacement in Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso, Cinémathèque: Annotations on Film, Issue 68 (September 2013), http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/toward-an-aesthetic-of-displacement-in-ana-vazs-sacris-pulso/
8. The closet that held Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet
9. O’Flaherty was the front man for the Sultans of Ping, a bandname that already bastardises the Dire Straits song ‘Sultans of Swing’.

 
There is of course something truly loving in George Bolster’s act here: almost resurrecting his friend, Damian Doyle, and granting him a future that he could not imagine for himself. Art, as Bolster says, again in Self erosion, is conditional on the future. Without its pull, art flounders. There is no reason, none at all, to keep pushing, to keep suffering, and certainly no reason to make any more of it. Here, Bolster recuperates Doyle’s practice, remaking his artworks from memory, supplementing them with his own, and so enabling them to live on. It is joint exhibition, but with the sad caveat that Doyle appears only in translation.

 
Of course to remake is always to recreate, to select works and to hone in on elements that might only have become relevant with the passing of time. It is a one-sided conversation. The limitations of language – how to articulate loss, and indeed how to help – are foregrounded throughout the exhibition. Shades of words and symbols recur throughout Bolster’s work, and hang heavy, also, on any interpretation of Doyle’s. The permanence of death, as an indelible ‘punctuation point’ shuts language down. It can’t work there. Bolster’s mediumistic attempt to speak to and indeed for Doyle only makes this all the more apparent.

 
It may be a one-sided conversation, but on the other hand, it is an infinite one. Memory is fallible and thus bottomless. Such rich terrain forms the conceptual horizon for the exhibition, with Bolster remaking a series of Doyle’s modified readymades, alongside some of his own artworks, which often deal with belief and its systems. The exhibition is centred on Bolster’s aforementioned Self erosion, accompanied by a series of other sculptural works, both Bolster’s and Doyle’s, remade from memory by the former, in memory of the latter. The film was made some four years after Doyle’s death. In its voiceover, he reflects on Doyle, now with the necessary distance to articulate what he could not before. It is of course a piece about death, but more than this, it is a meditation on the necessity of belief as a means of endurance. Belief in art, in purpose, but also the retention of an ‘amazement’ indispensable to life itself. With searing precision, Bolster examines how and why Doyle forgot how to live, as the title puts it, and why he himself remembered, somehow. Inevitably, this attempt comes up short: such amazement, that lets life endure, only becomes visible as it’s lost.

 
The two bodies of work are very different. And it’s of course difficult to know how well they would have played against each other in the absence of tragedy, but it’s the only reading available. Doyle’s work, as presented here, appears more rooted in the here-and-now: modified readymades, massproduced thinghood, augmented so as to trick and second-guess the viewer. Bolster’s, by contrast, is more esoteric, more centred on the visual, though using language too. Whereas Bolster’s works have the look of artworks, Doyle’s are far more reticent in making that claim, like odd bits of something that may or may not be art. Preoccupation, an act before insight (1996) consists of an entire gallery wall covered with doorstops, lending an embellished air to an everyday object of little consequence. In another work, Buffer (1996), a pair of sandals – fashioned, somewhat impracticably, from concrete blocks – sit in an aluminium briefcase. Indeed, the pair and the series dominate Doyle’s work here. Taken alone, these objects are simply strange: cumulatively, though, they become familiar, even inevitable.

 
Self erosion, alongside the abstract installation that encroaches on its projected image, and a smaller ribbon text, wall-based work – seem to gather in around Doyle’s work, sensitively granting it the ineluctability of context. However, Bolster’s work cannot be taken alone, either, but must all the time be read in its relation to Doyle. In such a way, they offer themselves up to the same mediatory moves Bolster himself assumes, with Doyle. Whilst Doyle’s work needs translation, Bolster is open to being read through him, too. There’s something beautiful in that. For if all of the work here is Bolster’s, then all of it is Doyle’s, too.

 
Amazement Insulates Us All / Memento Vivere is a steady look at loss and death, and what’s left after it. The anxiety of ‘legacy’ reverberates throughout the exhibition. And yet it deals with such subject matter without once slipping into mawkishness. At times, it is difficult to take: though rooted in a subjective experience, such anxiety is universal. Art, as I said, is conditional on a future: like life, it is only bearable through some semblance of immortality, a means of seeing and effecting beyond the limits of the self. Perhaps what is involved is an acceptance of subjective permeability: of openness, of speaking on behalf of others, and of letting others go on speaking, on our behalf. At times, the unconscious nature of this thinking breaks down, and becomes claustrophobically finite. If such a thing is possible, then, it needs to be remembered and learned anew. As Bolster and Doyle’s exhibition shows, art-making has this singular capacity – to extend and renew, to restart conversations thought concluded.

 
Amazement Insulates Us All was on view 2 December 2015 – 16 January 2016.

 
First impressions are that the exhibition feels overcrowded, with objects occupying the floor and images taking up all of the wall space, leaving little breathing room for individual artworks. Assumedly this lack of space is due to the nature of the curatorial project, which invited the same number of artists to return to Letterkenny as were included in Redline, Denver, a much larger and more minimal, warehouse-type space. In addition, the diverse range of practices, utilising all manner of artistic media, adds to the overall feeling of confusion in the smaller and more traditional white cube environment of Letterkenny’s Regional Cultural Centre. This overall impression signals one of the pitfalls of organising an exhibition in this manner – curatorial editing decisions can be overridden by the fact that artists have been invited to exhibit new works which may compete or jar with one another when brought together in a new space. Despite these initial reservations, closer inspection reveals that many of the works do in fact relate to one another by finding resonances in the landscapes of geographically remote places.

 
Deirdre O’Mahony’s photographic research project FARM (2015) reflects upon the global plight of farmers struggling to cope with extreme weather conditions – the result of global warming and the increasing decline in food prices caused by globalisation. As geographical distance becomes increasingly surmountable, and food can be easily transported from one side of the world to another, FARM explores the detrimental effects this has on agriculture. On first glance we see familiar images of farmland in Connemara and Kerry. To the distracted viewer this work is a straightforward portrait of characteristic Irish farmland. However, as one looks along two rows of photographs of sheep and cattle one notices that they are interspersed with images of men working the land. Like a type of photographic punctum, to use Barthes’ term, to the whole series, one image in the top row jumps out from the others: it contains two North American ranchers complete with cowboy hats. It now becomes glaringly obvious that we are looking at two very different landscapes. The top row of photographs documents the challenging effects of drought on beef production in Colorado, whilst the bottom row of images depicts Connemara lambs and the sodden farmland of Ireland, increasingly at risk of flooding. The surprisingly stark differences between these agricultural sites are cleverly disguised by O’Mahony’s carefully composed shots and the serial arrangement of photographs in a style reminiscent of conceptual art of the late 1960s-70s. The allusion of a visual closeness between these distant places works in harmony with the shared environmental concerns that FARM exposes.

 
Alongside the prevalence of landscape, a recurring theme of the exhibition is the trace, both in terms of the physical trace and the tracing of histories and receding pasts. Artist-curator Kerrane’s Memories of Barnesmore Gap (2016) remembers the history of railways in Donegal through personal recollections told to the artist by her mother who made journeys by railroad from Killybegs to Derry before the closing of the railway in the 1950s. Memories of Barnesmore Gap includes a handtraced map of the railroads of Donegal which is projected on the wall from an obsolete overhead projector. The now-vanished railway is represented by metal sections of track, derived from a plastic toy train-set now cast in aluminium, which roughly follows the course of the hand-drawn map. To the right are two original posters, which date from the 1950s, promoting Irish tourism in Donegal to a UK audience with quintessentially British depictions of piers and seaside promenades, set in the context of Ireland by the inclusion of shamrocks and Celtic patterns. Kerrane visually evokes time lost and memories of childhood through the toy train-track and the motif of the classic ‘choo-choo train’, which in reality proved too expensive to maintain, eventually leading to the railroad’s closure in 1959.

 
Traces of a time now past are joined by spectral traces in Denver-based Christopher R. Perez’s series of photographs that include the spooky Letterkenny Ghost (2016). This photograph depicts a meticulously made bed in a dilapidated and supposedly haunted house. This image is the result of Perez’s chance, and bizarre, encounter with a local Letterkenny man carrying a dead cat in a bucket whom he had stopped to ask directions. The response of ‘do you want to see a haunted house?’ was welcomed by Perez, whose work often combines early photographic processes with an openness to chance. This approach exemplifies what Margaret Iversen has called a type of ‘attentive exposure’ to the world which finds reflection in photographic receptivity and the analogue medium’s connection with chance (‘Analogue: on Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean’). Perez’s photograph draws on the history of spirit photography as he subtly evokes the ghost that killed the cat, presenting this image in an old found frame taken from the property. Perez’s encounter is the result of Kerrane’s two-part curatorial project which invited artists to exchange the landscapes of the US, for those of Ireland and vice versa. Hybrid Ireland explored the resonances between these disparate sites in works that explored common practices of working the landscape in a globalised world, notions of immigration and travel, and the transference of cultural production and iconography.

 
At once scattered and suggestively exact in their composition, the pools of aged found-objects evoke the passionate insistence of teenage shrines or looser versions of Rauschenberg’s Combines. In Lizard King, a goat’s skull balances on a piece of driftwood that slots into an old gasoline can upon on a pile of weathered boxes documenting a trip to Yukon. Like the principles of the rebus, the function of the little pile is to act as a series of visual syllables that present a puzzle to be solved. But instead of any concrete solution, Proffitt’s arrangement hinges on this very invitation to decode: encouraging open-ended associations of meaning with enough specificity to suggest a significance that we are never quite privy to.

 
The recordings played from within the central group of objects, Hold The Candle To Your Eye / Light The Criss-Cross On Your Chest, have a similar diversity and atmospheric charge. Comprised as it is of sounds such as air being blown into a bottle, psychedelic distortions, ambient chanting and distant breathing, we get the impression that a ritual is occurring just a room away. This atmosphere only thickens the longer you choose to linger; rather than being asked to actively tune in, we are instead encouraged to become immersed in free association. The assemblage itself incorporates materials as varied as seashells, African plates, a glass skull, an air conditioning fan and a scattering of cigarette butts and dried leaves that correspond with the many scratches and indentations of the floor.

 
Closer examination reveals the twofold appearance of details such as the webs of woven black bands in Follow Silent to the Flames, which are actually mostly strips of cassette film. Heavy discs engraved with tribal figures are in fact painted coffee cup lids with their undersides still stained with foam. The wire of a phone charger melts seamlessly into strings of seaweed. In another section, an ancient totem on a plinth morphs into what is actually a rusted and cobwebbed lighter on the upturned end of broken bottle. Similar decontextualisation is demonstrated by In This Dark We Call Creation, a series of what appear to be anthropomorphic silver engravings on slate or beaten metal. The ridges at the top of their surfaces offer the initial clue to what they really are: the painted and scratched insides of flimsy crisp packets mounted on cardboard. Significantly, this deciphering is only made possible by the viewer’s familiarity with the disguised minutiae; it is the activation of their own experiences and memories that unlocks and identifies the original forms of the objects.

 
Though the semiotics of rituals are in play alongside these ordinary expendables, it does not feel as if Proffitt’s aim is to explicitly engage with an elevation of the banal or to parody art’s fetishism. The modesty of the floor-based assemblages are devoid of Duchampian irony and, despite the exhibition’s largely autobiographical theme, also absent is the grandeur that would be conducive to constructing an origin myth like that of Joseph Beuys. But while it is undeniably incongruous to set mystical detritus within shabby austerity, prolonged time in the space rewards the viewer with a sense that we are witness to the morning after the ritual rather than its live enactment. As though recently abandoned, the off-kilter shrines are tinged with feebleness, like remnants of a ritual that have served their purpose, their magic now expended.

 
Perhaps the show’s most potent suggestion is that the reincarnations we go through as teenagers are skins to be shed in order to forge a fixed identity. Like the ingredients in a ritual that are necessarily used up and left behind, the purpose of Proffitt’s discarded drawings and tchotchkes is simply process. There is a point in the book, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006), where author Rebecca Goldstein describes looking at a photograph of her eight-year old self and questioning: “Why is she me?” Taking into account the radical physical changes and mental experiences of the years separating childhood and adulthood, the little girl is an entity so inaccessible she is essentially a stranger to the author’s present self. Proffitt’s relics of a past life share this evocative distance, whose air of significance is as tantalising and impossible to reconnect with as the attempt to decode mystic symbols. However, while their original totemic power has evaporated in the sunlight and their meaning has departed from the port, the works’ strengths lie in their presentation of signifiers that engage the viewer’s memories of who they once were.

 
Richard Proffitt: Hold The Candle To Your Eye / Light The Criss-Cross On Your Chest was on view 11 March – 24 April 2016.