In its emphasis on ephemerality and on the uncertainty of perception, Cassandra Eustace’s What Lies Between Repeated Differences encapsulates the concerns of The Infinite Line (A Search for the Unknown), a group exhibition that also featured the artists Richard Forrest and Roseanne Lynch, as well as an opening performance piece by Fergus Byrne. Eustace’s drawings of dense, knot-like tangles on transparent acetate paper, hung so that the sheets float away from the wall, produce shadows that similarly complicate the separation between the artwork and its reflection, with its illusionary transfer onto the backing wall integral to the overall composition.

Eustace’s work also shares a certain formal affinity with Roseanne Lynch’s series, Exposures 1-9. Subtly manipulating folded structures directly onto light-sensitive photographic paper, the resulting one-off images offer startling diversity with very limited means: a flicker of pure white light, gradations of shadow along creases, angles and apertures, all set against a field of pitch-black emptiness. Intriguingly, Lynch also points to another perceptual gap here, stating of the work that ‘the print is the link between the moment of making, and another moment of viewing.’

Richard Forrest’s Truncated Tetrahedron is a minimalist sculpture trimmed along one side, upsetting the anticipated geometrical unity of the form. Yet its placement alongside another work, Fractal Structure, infers a specific bodily relationship to mathematical order and symmetry. This photographic print, laid on the floor, portrays a view of the open brain of an anatomical dummy, and it is this disruption of perspective, whereby one looks down yet also sees the skull from the side, that Forrest seems to prioritise over any correlation between subject matter or content. The spectator is repositioned and disoriented in his or her relationship to the work.

If Forrest’s incorporation of figurative elements seems strangely at odds with his formal concerns here, it shares an affinity with a performance work by Fergus Byrne, held on the exhibition’s opening evening. In some ways, this piece captures the idea of the perceptual lacuna simply through its status within the group exhibition: it occurs in a different room of the gallery, and for one night only. However, the curatorial concept has also informed its conception, as a nude Byrne methodically and slowly organizes his movements in relation to the unwieldy, open wooden structure that he bears. The burden is shifted from his shoulders to his back, then held aloft by a single extended leg, then balanced on the back of his neck. Occasionally, the object collapses or settles into an angular prop, whereby the artist quickly traces out its formation onto a nearby sheet of paper. Each stage is transitory, temporary, a phase in a potentially never-ending succession of gestures that resists representation as a definitive moment or image.

In this way, The Infinite Line also challenged the tendency (or compulsion) for viewers to perceive an exhibition as a series of discrete, distinct objects. Brought into proximity through arrangement or thematic consistencies, one nevertheless compartmentalizes each artwork as a singular, if interrelated, entity, drawing an invisible frame that distinguishes one work or artist from another. Artworks are generally finite, determined by the dimensions or duration specific to the piece. Perhaps it is for this reason that The Infinite Line (A Search for the Unknown) hedged its bets slightly by acknowledging a certain inevitable allusiveness in its (bracketed) title. The works here may blur together, overlap, affect and interrupt each other, yet at the same time they point out that, as spectators, we arbitrarily insist upon a certain, respectful distance, both between the objects themselves and in our relationship to them.

“Well, I don’t think you do… you make your own conclusions too fast and I am not surprised… no, I didn’t say that, please, just listen to, can you… listen to me?… I have never said that!… well, I have never said that, you made that up, it is in your head, not mine, and I have never said that!”

In Annika Strom’s exhibition From the Community Hall at Temple Bar Gallery, the speeches which attended its opening are relayed on a video monitor in the exhibition itself. The black-and-white footage shows these introductions disrupted by a seemingly thoughtless man arguing into his mobile phone, wandering amongst the crowds, walking in front of the speakers, rapt in his conversation and unaware (or uncaring) of any so-called exhibition protocol. At one point, he sits on the apparent centre-piece of the exhibition, a wooden stage covered with Swedish embroidered textiles, before being asked to move by gallery staff. He does so, begrudgingly. In the documentation of this intervention, the audience’s gradual awareness is slowly revealed, as the actor moves between the back of the stage (where his script has been handwritten) and the centre ground, and as clues within the prepared text allude to the action at hand. The stage, then, can be seen as a proxy artwork, a stage only in the sense that it serves as a prop within a wider tableau.
 
This frustration of the viewer’s expectations, the obstruction of the designated artwork by an interloper who, in turn, is exposed as the work itself, recurs in another video here; a woman whose position on stage blocks the view of the recorded documentation of other, earlier performances. Timed to occur at specific intervals throughout the looped screening, Standing in the Way Woman (all works 2010) not only disrupts the extant footage but is integrated into it, adjusted to accommodate its duration and structured in a way that acknowledges this fact. As in The Upset Man mentioned above, the arrangement of the intervention both conforms to and subverts the theatrical notion of the fourth wall. The actors perform their roles naturally, as if oblivious to the audience’s reaction. However, the viewer’s implication as an unwitting accomplice positions Strom’s works within modernist theatrical traditions, recalling Bertolt Brecht’s alienation of the spectator, Antonin Artaud’s tactics of shock and repulsion, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s occupation of non-conventional spaces.
 
The art gallery represents a location, and a history, that carries its own conventions and expectations. Strom’s interventionist practice must therefore be read in this parallel context, where the spatial dimensions of the gallery often operate as a site of designation, where what happens within its walls is, by definition, art itself. The performances co-opt the everyday, functional aspects of the exhibition venue (welcome speeches, health-and-safety instructions, conversations over glasses of free wine) in order to incorporate them into the artistic gestures. These moments, which generally fall outside the exhibition proper, are brought into the open. It is this response, caught between artistic appraisal and social embarrassment, which Strom initiates and captures.
 
 
From the Community Hall ran from 10 December 2010 – 4 February 2011 and was curated by Aoife Tunney.

Similar appropriations of popular culture occur elsewhere. Chen Hangfeng’s The Last Supper: Fast Food (2008) presents accelerated footage of a drawing performance, marking out the image of Kentucky Fried Chicken ‘spokesman’ Colonel Sanders in rice before turning the chickens loose to peck apart his work. At the same time, on another screen, Cecile Wesarlowski interjects her (virtual) image into footage taken from The Sopranos, acting as accessory to the numerous, quick-­edit scenes of Mafia executions and gangland hits. The works look to subvert mainstream, spectacular culture by slyly inserting the artist into existing media and advertising. However, to what end? While there may be something liberating in such strategies, the end result is merely clever, a witty appropriation that one can easily imagine appealing precisely to the very advertising agencies that they critique.

 
Far more disturbing is Bjorn Melhus’ retrouturistic confessional talk show. The Oral Thing (2001) refers to the artist’s use of sampled snatches of conversation from exploitative daytime television programmes (The Maury Povich Show, I believe) and to a phrase repeated in the video itself. The presenter welcomes two floating orbs as guests, who transform into armless, legless figures, disconcertingly mouthing stock phrases from such shows: “She hits me, she pushes me…” “Why? Why? Why?” “I’ve got a big surprise for you”, “and I do the oral thing.” Despite the setting of a lobotomized dystopia, Melhus’ use of recorded footage and familiar motifs borrowed from science-­‐fiction imbues the work with a certain plausibility. It’s not a million miles (or years) from Jeremy Kyle to here.
 
Of course, the tell-­all format has taken on new permutations, with the prevalence of Internet sites such as Youtube and Chatroulette offering individuals a more egalitarian forum to communicate and disseminate their opinions. Several works pick up this strand. Clint Enns’ Putting Yourself Out There (2009) montages pixellated snippets of webcam footage of online chatroom users against a melancholy soundtrack. The subjects simply look into the middle distance, silently and patiently waiting for a response, any response. This sense of mediated detachment can have sinister results, however, as in Selina Shah’s Connected (2008). Multiple screens-­within-­the-­screen and typed text relay an online correspondence between two subjects, progressively moving from flirtation to provocation to outright hostility. Through an increasingly abrasive electronic score and shifts in conversational tone and style (obscenities, capital letters), Shah demonstrates how the physical distance between speakers can lend itself to unaccountability, aggression and extreme fantasy.
 
In a way, these works challenge the prevailing rhetoric of the Internet as a site of instantaneous communication, global exchange and technological revolution. The dissolution of geographical boundaries might lead to a parallel breakdown of social and ethical ones. To the online user, repercussions are meaningless, or rather, merely virtual. Likewise, such unrestrained freedom of expression can induce a sense of overwhelming stasis, a realisation that if ‘the medium is the message’, then having any actual content to communicate seems irrelevant. Take, for example, Oliver Laric’s 5050 (2007), a montage of music fans cut together to reenact a song by the rap artist 50 Cent. Cute, but hardly anything that couldn’t be seen on You Tube. Instead, the work feels merely like a celebration of the fact that one can contribute, can participate, in the gesture, even if the act itself doesn’t say anything of note.
 
In a way, such appropriation of online sites is unnecessary. Video art has already colonised this territory of the provisional, low­‐budget, short­‐form and endlessly inventive work. The best example of this comes through in a brief and punchy work by the artist(s?) Mice Hell. Suckbrillen (2009) shows a young woman wearing goggles with baby dummies attached in place of eyes, as a couple frantically suckle the rubber nipples. The work evokes the darkly comic, early performance videos of Cheryl Donegan, yet the cutaway shots of the artists struggling to keep a straight face, and the soundtrack of giggling, slurping noises, gives the video the feel of a homemade experiment. It might be amateurish, even crude, but its unsettling simplicity confirms the possibilities inherent in both the video format and the exhibition itself.
 
 
The EYE‐KEA Project was on view 17–25 April 2010.