Circa Review

Thanks to Eimear McKeith for a very detailed and thoughtful review of our Butler Gallery show in this issue of Circa magazine. You can have a read of it by clicking on the images. She raises some interesting questions about the way David and I collaborate. In particular, the effect of the collaborative process itself on the final artwork. In order for someone to fully appreciate the works she asks, it necessary for them to be aware of all the garden paths we go down as we make the work; cultural, aesthetic, theoretical, scientific, technical. Does one need to know what we think the art is about, or how we get there, in order to appreciate it I suppose.
To quote Eimear: "To what degree do the content and the experience, the process and the end result, collaborate, or interfere, with each other?"

It's something I often ponder myself. Do the traces of the process need to be marked on the final work? Is this even possible with the way artists work today? It all leads to very interesting lines of thought that can take us into all manner of theories folding on top of each other, each thought refuting the last. Since Lyotard it's impossible to read anything without considering metanarrative with a certain suspicion, and in many ways I feel that the work David and I do is both aware of this and consciously moves beyond it. In our works, these metanarratives are often foregrounded as mirage, dissolving quickly into many parts, which when put back together, do not make up what they previously seemed to. Soviet ideology for example, contemporary genetics, time and space, collaboration...these are all possible 'big picture' stories which appear as leads into the works. And are topics that everyone is familiar with to some degree. But yet the videos propose a multiplicty of readings, deliberately splicing numerous elements together into works that are focused, yet open ended. How much each person chooses to negotiate or interact with any of the elements (many of which we are unaware of ourselves) depends on their own individual narratives that they bring into the gallery. Sure, a knowledge of Christian mythologies is interesting when looking at religious painting, but is it essential?

Overall I feel we all try to make work that operates on many levels. If you're looking at our videos as contemporary entertainment, there are pictures and sounds, often quite beautiful. If you are a scientist or mathematician, you might find certain elements immediately resonant or distracting, others if you are a painter, and so on. And each insight is new. There are more details and permutations than I feel we can manage when looking at a work of art. A complete reading of any artwork seems impossible. This is exciting for me, being able to combine all these diverse media and sources, making work in the media of our times, moving images and sounds, with which everyone is very familiar. From our media-rich culture, we all now have highly charged, energised positions of reading, that enable a freedom in reading, a crossing of wires, previously unimaginable. But how much of the traces, history, or background, to present in or alongside the work, in a press release or statement for example, well that's something else entirely.