'The Irish Times' Visual Arts Review, 11 April, 2007.

How the personal becomes wrapped up in the political
Aidan Dunne

Michelle Deignan's After the Fact at the LAB is a fascinating exhibition. Mind you, you have to put in the time: it comprises five substantial video works, all quite involved, all requiring sustained attention. Lest that sound too forbidding, the good news is that they are also funny and entertaining, and they work on several levels, prompting us to reflect on what we are looking at, not only in the gallery but all the time, on mainstream television.

Her work addresses two areas particularly pertinent to the contemporary world: the representation and mediation of experience; and surveillance. There is a strongly autobiographical flavour to most of what she does. Actors playing the role of television presenters or reporters give anecdotal accounts to camera of episodes in her life. Workaday events are recounted with the gravitas of news programmes. It is engaging, and amusing in itself and in incidental detail - witness the account of her encounter with an elderly, racist customer in a pharmacy. And after a while you think: well, why not? There is a certain absurdity to the relentless dissemination of information by rolling news channels, and Deignan's videos catch that perfectly.

It becomes apparent that the day-to-day life of this one individual, a kind of Everywoman, intersects and is implicated in a web of cultural and political issues, and that the same necessarily holds true for everyone else as well. In one piece, for example, we hear of her experience working on the decoration of an Irish-themed pub in Italy. In a skilful piece of narrative, delivered by a third-person reporter, after the fact, we get a sense of her feelings of cultural displacement, and learn that the adjacent military airbase is being used as a staging post for rendition flights that may be illegal. In a world characterised by globalisation and rampant commodification, Deignan implies, the personal is inevitably wrapped up in the political, and to underline the point she tries to get to the much-filmed location for television news reports, outside 10 Downing St, in To Camera.

In Unmaking or Redoing she recounts how she and a companion came to be photographed by a police surveillance unit when wandering down a street in East London. Instead of merely walking away, she opted to ask why. Because they had emerged from a suspect premises, she is told. In fact, and rather worryingly, they had not emerged from the building in question, but simply stopped to look in the window out of idle curiosity. A mistake then, and she is told that the information will be erased. To get hold of the surveillance photo, though, she will have to apply to her local police station.

Which she does, vainly.

Her treatment of this material in Unmaking or Redoing does not, in fact, amount to anything like her best piece, perhaps because we see too much of her hesitant progress through the location with an actor she is priming to play the role of narrator. The whole thing becomes a bit too meandering. A degree of meandering is actually integral to her approach, and generally works very well, and to be fair Unmaking, despite its relative weakness, is intriguing in its layering of the process of representation. A similar effect is obtained in Assumed Position in which, showing exemplary nerve, she plays the role of an artist taking a series of impromptu street portraits of passersby on a pedestrian link in London's financial district.

The latter is largely, and successfully, a video of an extended feat of performance, with a voice-over commentary. Unmaking suffers, perhaps, because it is one strand too many in a slightly overcrowded show. The effect of any individual piece is exceptional. Given the level of overlap, five together in one space tends to dilute the impact. It's hardly incidental that the work is achieved with tremendous competence, technically, and in terms of its dramatic elements, both writing and performance. It really is a user-friendly show.

© 2007 The Irish Times

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This Space is Unstable
Alison Green on the work of Michelle Deignan, 2002.

Coming in from Heathrow, just about at the point when you know you're really in London (when the few miles of suburbs turn into the recognizable density of terraced houses) there is a surprising sight: a full storey-height TV screen, in a curved corner window on the ground floor, running news and stock quotes, I think there courtesy of Bloomberg. Maybe a talking head is pictured; mouthing words you cannot hear, and numbers flow horizontally or vertically, FTSE, DAX, NYSE, HANG SENG, etc. Doubly-distanced, framed by the windscreen of the car and the window of the building, it’s just another image fleeting; before it on the left, the minaret of a mosque, next, Tesco Central.

Now, London is not apparently a city driven by media and technology, not like Tokyo or New York. This corner-screen in Baron’s Court is not the Big Brother one in Times Square. "London" is meandering streets, white stuccoed facades and gardens. But this is why the screen stands out, incongruous with the streetscape. Maybe it is meant to be there, though, since the UK loves the media. This is true, and it makes for a kind of schizophrenia between the old and the new, which sometimes divides the classes, but more often feeds a compulsion to catch up with the modernity that exists elsewhere. People in Britain watch a lot of TV. And, the TV industry, although smaller than LA’s, draws more than its fair share of creative talent and is the engine behind contemporary culture.

The work of London-based artist Michelle Deignan is about this close correspondence between the media and an individual’s experience of culture. This is not a particularly new subject for art: pop artists figured it overtly perhaps the earliest, and Warhol closed the gap between an "art world" and the other world, claiming a certain kind of status that was generated by the media. Skip forwards 40 years and TV now has depth, variety and a history. Deignan’s work is about TV’s texture, its locations, its duration, and pacing. Some of her works explore the way certain television shows are made; others do the same for camera, editing and graphics technologies. But she attends to the background, so that within these investigations of what is new, she adds what is commonplace, and shifts the subject of a work from figure to ground, so to speak. She shows you what you never see: TV’s structure and what never makes it past the editing room.

Modern art has made much of its relationship to popular culture. Whether it distinguishes itself from it or considers itself part of it, it needs the idea of a mass or popular culture for its self-identity. The various meanings and historical moments of this relationship do not need to be elaborated here;[1] it should suffice to remark that it is unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable. Current claims that contemporary art has collapsed into culture at large seem simplistic, self-serving, or at the very least premature. Artists court the wider audiences and better remuneration of the film and TV worlds, and the popular arts return the compliment by borrowing from artists. Video art, especially, facilitates this cross-flow because the medium allows it. (In the 80s this took the form of sampling; now artists tend to generate their own content.) The drive behind both popular and fine art is technology, although in both cases technological novelty fares badly when looked at retrospectively. As many have noted, the crucial originary moment for video art was the availability in the late 60s of professional-quality video cameras that artists could afford. Because video was also cheap to make (compared to film—no processing) and the camera didn’t require training or expertise, it was a perfect medium for "experimenting". More than that: as a medium it is instantaneous. Since then, a history, a political stance, and a set of rules for making and exhibiting has developed around video art; but it remains in close relation to (a subset of, threatening to dominate?) contemporary art in general. Along the way, video art also grew up, learning the politics of representation and the powerful seduction of high production values. Very recent events in the history of technology have had a huge impact on anyone working in video now; in the last 5 years, digital cameras, and subsequently digital editing software have become available to non-professionals. Artists can fairly easily produce technically sophisticated work, with a relatively small amount of money and training. What makes video a compelling medium for artists today—whether exclusively or sporadically—is how direct and tangible it is, and how it still seems to shrug off the consolidating formalities of older genres.

A good place to start a discussion of Deignan’s work is with one of the pioneers of video art: Bruce Nauman is an éminence grise for British art of the 90s, not only on account of his video works but more generally as an artist who inaugurated a different kind of object, that at first appeared thin or wanting. The conservative critic Hilton Kramer remarked in 1973 that a show of Nauman’s work amounted to "a few sculptures of no sculptural interest, a few photographs of no photographic interest, a few video screens offering images that somehow manage to be both boring and repugnant".[2] Instead of formal intensity, Nauman’s work seemingly depicted nothing—sometimes it would be the viewer herself walking through one of his corridors, other times it would be Nauman in his studio making repetitive or nonsensical gestures. Now we see these works as reflections of sculptural experiences, where the viewer or the artist takes the place of the work of art.[3] Works of Deignan’s, like "Modern" and "Daylit" are similarly slight, similarly content-less, and, similar to Nauman’s early videos, use the medium to place the viewer inside a structured perceptual experience. Importantly, this space is unstable.[4] "Modern” forges a link between a device that makes the camera pan in a 360º circle with the escalators that run up the centre of the Tate Modern. The collision of the two moving machines forms a certain experience of space not possible with either one alone. Mildly disorienting, the piece emphasises the vertical rise, horizontal circulation across each floor, and descent in reverse through the building. It seems to analyse the building’s structure and the way one is directed through it, made all the more complex, and closer to real, by a device that is not fixed in a single direction. A few times the two movements coincide (the camera facing up and the escalator going up), creating a moment of hypostasis, a short breather before the movement starts again. Similar to Nauman, Deignan lets an exterior logic determine the form of the piece (in Nauman’s case, the duration of his videos often were the length of the tape; in “Modern” it is the completion of the escalator tour). Deignan used the same panning device on the camera for “Daylit”, which was filmed in four bedroom spaces, and which obtains its similar complexity from the way she laid it out graphically, as flat, juxtaposed, moving images. The piece is a process of flattening: taking a necessarily deep image (the volume of the room being one of the simplest 3D forms) slipping across a horizontal axis, reduced to a visually engaging, almost decorative, almost abstract image. Both these pieces seem like exercises in identifying video’s current technical capacity. And it should also be remarked that Deignan’s approach is far from the grand designs Krauss ascribed to Nauman et. al., of “dispensing with an entire critical tradition.”

Recent works suggest that Deignan is not interested in the “medium” in a general sense, but more specifically how it is used professionally. In other words, her work is not really a repetition of questions about video’s inherent qualities and how it could be used as sculpture, but directed instead at television’s visual language and how it can be mined for video art. Works like “One Hundred Percent”, “15:1” and “Titles” are based on specific TV programmes. Each follows a different process of abstraction, by way of distillation: the “content” is stripped out and the “structure” laid bare. In this way Deignan uses standard modernist strategies of simplifying in order to focus attention on commonalities (the grids in “Titles” replace the animated text, videos and images in a show’s title sequence; thus you see graphically instead of reading text and images). But, importantly, her abstractions are made from things that are already very abstract. She is working with “cultural” objects rather than “natural” ones, and as such they are already highly constructed. “One Hundred Percent” and “15:1” repeat the series of camera shots used in these two shows. Deignan chose them because of how formulaic they are; it is the set (rather than a narrative) that determines the structure. (She has said that the shots are exactly the same form one episode to another, so her “deconstruction” stands for any one of them.) There is a point to this, and I suggest it is that such things have become like nature to us (a minaret, a TV screen, a supermarket, and maybe a tree in there: all the same). Paradoxically, Deignan wishes to add depth (recall the facture) to a medium slipping easily into its surface. She reminds us—via abject simplicity—of the complexity of the medium we watch all the time. And at the same time, shows us how simplistic a lot of it is.

These three works function as both homages to the television shows they are based on and negations of the complete picture television normally offers. As negations, they follow avant-garde strategies that resist the medium being “artified”, or made aesthetic; this resistance to “the whole” is proof of the work’s artistic integrity. Categorically different from the kind of video art that either shoots already occurring events, or stages original content, Deignan’s work is a type of pseudo-mimesis that critiques—perhaps only implicitly—other art that seems to collude with the aesthetic values already established for TV. In this sense it is parasitic, which is characteristic of neo-conceptual work. (The first time round conceptual artists mainly used photography to critique established genres of photography; it seems obvious that of urgent interest now would be television.) Deignan’s choice of subject matter (“One Hundred Percent” and “15:1” are quiz shows) suggests the lowest of lowbrow culture, but at the same time you have the sneaking suspicion that it is not merely the ideology of anaesthetics that motivates her. On the contrary, such specificity suggests that her subjects are embedded in her own history and experience. Perhaps it is the guilty pleasure associated with watching daytime television, or the direct identification viewers have with quiz show contestants (“I can answer that!”).

The quiz show illustrates what my favourite thinker on television—George Trow—describes as one of its central formulations: that TV simultaneously has two grids, the grid of intimacy and the grid of two hundred million.[5] This is a very strange condition, to be poised between yourself and a “community” with whom you have no other connection than the medium that created it. Trow’s description of TV’s split personality is surprisingly similar to Krauss’ famous claim that psychology constitutes the medium of video.[6] For Krauss, screen images draw attention away from physical surroundings (monitor, room, projection equipment) so that one’s experience is primarily intense identification between the self and the projected image. Krauss was describing what we now take for granted—that there is no consistent self, only a series of representations, most of which come from the culture that surrounds us. Trow is more specific: TV is our history and our collective personality. He calls TV the third parent, and that figure is not parental, but “a value-free ritual.” I suspect that like Trow, Deignan’s interest is not the history of art and its media, but in how to gain any kind of critical purchase on contemporary culture. It also seems important that she makes her living in video production. Previous generations of artists could not have been so close to mass culture without seeming to jeopardise their credibility, but in some way that’s difficult to articulate, the opposite is now true.

Deignan’s approach seems situated between film and video’s structuralist past and art’s populist, neo-romantic present. She maintains the notion of critique in the former, but also uses video for all it does well, and that is its evocative ability to capture and re-present the world as it goes by like a stream of consciousness. Like a lot of art now, Deignan’s work ultimately aspires to film, its popular appeal and effectiveness as an absorptive medium. Barry Schwabsky has recently observed that “artists may be interested in cinema precisely to the extent that they experience it as not structurally connected or homologous to art. This is what allows it to function as ‘material’ to be worked on.”[7] This is in a discussion of Douglas Gordon, but I think it works better for Deignan (her work should be described as the opposite of his—“24 Hour Psycho”, for example, is replete with the original, while “One Hundred Percent” and “15:1” work literally with the original’s absence). Her works are like proxies for lost experiences, where the original ones never kept their promises. She tracks, in some cases to the place where the TV show was made, sniffing around for traces that might hold its unfulfilled potential. Ironically, Deignan’s works are full even though they first appear empty.

•••

1. A good essay that tackles the complexity of this subject is Bettina Funcke, “The Masses Laugh Back: Exposing the Artist’s Persona on TV,” in exh. cat. The Glass Eye: Artists and Television (Project Press). Deignan was included in this show. [return to text]
2. Hilton Kramer, as quoted in Neal Benezra, “Surveying Nauman,” exh. cat. Bruce Nauman (Walker Art Center, 1994), p. 30. [return to text]
3. Rosalind Krauss makes this point in an important early essay, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976). She situated early American video art in the discourse of art generally: artists like Nauman, Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra, Peter Campus and Joan Jonas “were largely involved in parodying the critical terms of abstraction”, and this was “clearly intended to disrupt and dispense with an entire critical tradition.” p. 52. [return to text]
4. This is what made early video art fit existing discussions of the avant-garde. See, for example, Chrissie Iles, “Between the Still and Moving Image,” in exh. cat. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 (Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams, 2001). [return to text]
5. George W.S. Trow, In the Context of No Context (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997). [return to text]
6. Krauss, “Aesthetics of Narcissism,” p. 52. The idea has to do with the way, unlike other media, even photography, video has the potential for instant feedback. She relates this to the media’s effect on art production such that it renders invisible anything that does not get reported. [return to text]
7. Barry Schwabsky, “Art, Film, Video: Separation or Synthesis?” in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds., The Undercut Reader (Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 2. [return to text]

Alison Green is a London-based critic, curator and art historian. She was the director of the Stark Gallery in New York from 1990-96; more recently she worked as an exhibition organizer at the Barbican Art Gallery. Publications include: “A Short Chronology of Curatorial Incidents,” in Gavin Wade, ed. Curating in the 20th Century (University of Wolverhampton, 2000) and the forthcoming “‘When Attitudes Become Form’ and the Contest over Conceptual Art’s History,” in Michael Corris, ed. Conceptual Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She is currently working on a PhD on the American painter Myron Stout, and writes regularly on contemporary art for Art Monthly magazine.