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From: Clem
Category: Art
Date: 14 February 2009
Time: 04:52 PM
Review:
Altermodern is an exhibition that attempts to link contemporary art to notions of uncanniness, "the
return of the repressed " as Freud described it in his 1919 essay . Here the repressed is that which
the positivist ideology behind both modernism and postmodernism is in denial of ; the past , memory,
the romantic sublime, the contingency of knowledge, the false as opposed to the true, the theatrical
as opposed to the authentic. A big theatrical presentation of contemporary art in the biennale mode,
it nevertheless achieves the beguiling effect of allowing the viewer to become lost within its
labyrinthine tributaries .
Nevertheless, the uncanny is an elusive goal for art, and is rarely achieved. Here though , there is
one piece of work that genuinely pulls it off ; Lindsay Seer's "Black Maria", a film that takes the
refreshing view that being an artist is potentially terrible, tragic and frightening ,as opposed to the
usual gloss that posits the artist as "useful to society" . In a fictional documentary that examines her
own life, Seers describes her initial transformation into a camera, and then a projector.She takes
photographs from inside her own mouth: she beams light from her head. Both conditions are
analogous to psychic states,and as we come out we realise we have been watching the film from
inside the "lost object " of the film's narrative, a model of Thomas Edison's Black Maria, an early
cinema that resembles a primitive church .Owing much to WG Sebald, with a touch of David Lynch,
Seers film is genuinely unnerving precisely because the apparent narcissism of making a fictional
documentary about herself gives way to a void ; the conclusion to this self-portrait is, to quote Julia
Kristeva, that "we are strangers to ourselves ".
Nathaniel Mellor's installation of two dogma style films of his play "Giantbum" is similarly an
attempt to articulate , without losing its transgressive, atavistic force,a kind of paranoiac madness ,
an endlessly inwardly folding world in which logic , rationality and the boundaries between inside and
outside are held up for ridicule . In the centre of his maze, animotronic robots of the main actor's face
gurn in obscene endless relay, more horrible for being mechanistic .Whereas Seer's film is
unnerving, Mellor's film is absurdly funny- a joke gone wrong, a theatre of the absurd for the age of
reality TV.
Otherwise, my memory of the rest of the work in this show grows foggy- and I only saw it
yesterday.Marcus Coates is an English shaman who interviews the mayor of an Israeli town, hoping
to shed light on the problems of the Middle East, through an appeal to pagan forces- but he lacks Ali
G's dumb, offensive wisdom . Darren Almond has some nice photos of China and Simon Starling has
some desks based on a design by Francis Bacon . Spartacus Chetwynd has a wall of video
monitors , but I couldnt get to the earphones ; from a distance the film looked like an early eighties
pop video crossed with a Carole Schneeman performance, i.e. beautifully ugly . Like the show itself ,
my recall of it is vague and blurry though not without its own perverse pleasures.