ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Silence is the Master by Orlaith Phelan

A recap on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Earwitness Theatre at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. The show marked the artist first solo UK exhibition in 2018, and remains one of such interrogative force that it has duly propelled him into this year’s Turner Prize arena. Occupying a trajectory that encompasses art, activism and investigation – boundaries are rewritten, language is reconstituted, and interrogation breathes a new articulation where even silence becomes deafening.

Earwitness Theatre artist and researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan shows his latest enquiry into the political effects of listening at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. The exhibition is a double installation presenting Abu Hamdan’s latest research with Amnesty International and the first portrayal of his sonic library of sounds. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, his initial interest in the spatial qualities of sound has ledway into a career where the extent of his knowledge, acoustic research, and art production now even position him as an authority in legal cases where sound analysis is required. Apart from an ever growing list of accolades most notably he was approached to undertake the sound dissection of the ammunition used in the killing of two teenage boys in the Gaza Strip (2015). Expanding his acoustic analysis for the trial, stills and video of sonic imaging were distilled from the killing and used to form the basis of his acclaimed exhibition Earshot (2016), questioning the “aesthetics of evidence and the politics of sound and silence”. His affiliation to Forensic Architecture, nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, should also start to ring some bells.

Earwitness Inventory is Abu Hamdan’s physical offering within the Chisenhale. 95 objects are on display that make up his catalogue of sonic violence. The objects are sober, unnatural and sharp within the space. Without knowing his work or the usual preoccupations of the Chisenhale Gallery they could almost be dismissed as the exhibition of an angst ridden assemblage artist. Almost. Once rushed through the immediate entrance of the exhibition space, amidst those first seconds of disorientation and strain for comprehension, the flickering text on the wall is just enough to ground your attention to a halt. The sudden anchor is exactly Abu Hamdan’s power. While you’re busy trying to side step the paddling pool, breeze block, and melon configurations on the ground to find where the real exhibition is, the words begin to register. Streams of text start implicating the various objects in descriptions of death and trauma; descriptions of brutal violence now being reconveyed through textual sound analogies of the everyday. The carefully stacked Pepsi bottle now evokes someone being bludgeoned to death, and the generic box of cinema popcorn becomes the plummeting sound of a collapsing building. Text and objects flicker across your eyes and body but though no sound is uttered the impact is deafening. You want to use a different word to describe this but there really is no other, this is exactly what it does. Confusion and naivety are replaced by a reality with such immediacy you’re now shocked, grateful, and fully engaged without having even glanced further into the gallery then past the objects by your sides.

The second installation is Saydnaya (the missing 19db); an audio work portraying the new limits of torture by the Syrian regime within the existing prison now used to house only political protestors. In this prison silence is their torture. The audio installation is housed separately in a dark sealed room placed at the center of the gallery space. Inside is the kind of dark that makes you fumble anxiously until you gratefully bang your head on the opposite wall; it is consuming. The audio track is less than 15 minutes long and gives you firsthand accounts of the prisoners within Saydnaya. To begin, Abu Hamdan uses sound samples in an ever descending scale to take you into the silence of the prison – because this is not sound as you know it nor that you could comprehend without these efforts. On our way there we plummet from the boom of a Boeing 747 landing, the screaming sounds of a New York highway, to the whispers of tranquility at a Swiss Alps retreat, and into stark sharpness of the Chernobyl exclusion zone… and we are still not at Saydnaya.

The prisoner testimonials that follow eradicate the assumption of anything over an inaudible whisper existing within the prison. In Saydnaya “the border between sound and silence is the border between life and death.” To move, to cough, to make any sound involuntarily or otherwise results in punishment of death. If life in Saydnaya has any opportunity to be clung to, how excruciatingly can you choke silence for survival? Using tonal comparisons between the whispers of prisoners before and after 2011, when the prison switched from housing standard inmates to those of political protestors only, 19db was found to be the difference. To put this into perspective a difference of 19db is the same as comparing a jackhammer on a footpath to a dishwasher. Now instead of subtracting from the sound of a jackhammer, subtract from the average level of a human voice. That unbearable border of sound, the difference of 19db, suddenly becomes quantifiable. Once the brain has grasped this recognition its effect can’t be removed. Saydnaya is a reality that we could never have conceived before, but through Abu Hamdan’s tools of reconstruction it’s as if we sit in those cells too.

While the title of “artist and researcher” might cause an initial dismissal of the credibility of the work, it is clear that Abu Hamdan is a master of both the subject matter and its representation. He is using distortion to portray distortion, something only achievable through the manipulation of language to demonstrate the perversion of its use in Saydnaya. The result of this complex contradiction is incredibly evoked between both installations. It is as if the war of sound that now suddenly exists, can only be combated and reconstructed with the architecture of an exhibition that exploits sound itself. The uncanniness in the work makes it impossible not to surrender. It’s something which we have never had to question before, but now after this experience will find it hard to clear from our minds.

The content may appear brutal but it is so necessary; Earwitness Theatre is making us all accountable. Whether these are issues you want to engage with or not, there isn’t really an option when encountering this work. It is presenting concepts that are sordid and extreme, yet it still manages to transform them into something fiercely tangible. The installations succeed in quantifying the unquantifiable and your reward for listening is a brief glimpse into the realms of terror of a Syrian political prison from the safety of a respectable East London Gallery. You will never have experienced this in an exhibition before.

You feel the silence of Saydnaya when Abu Hamdan wants you to feel its silence, and you hear only the sound of brutalized violence when his text and assemblage compositions invoke you to do so. Freedom of speech now becomes confused with freedom of silence, but you can’t quite work out which is more necessary or whether one exists without the other. Crystal clear but almost out of grasp, this is the art of Abu Hamdan’s work.

Orlaith Phelan is an architect and a current student of Art in the Contemporary World.

Interview with Alan Butler by Seanán Kerr, ACW student

Alan Butler has been examining the implications of new media, the internet and the politics of appropriation for over a decade, he works with various media, from sculpting virtual landscapes for astronaut cats, to large scale multi-coloured paintings, and sending glitter bombs to Julian Assange, though even when venturing away from computer-based work, there is usually some call back involved to the looming spectre of this ethereal, and not so ethereal technology we find ourselves increasingly enmeshed with over the past two decades.

A recent strain has been an examination of the world of Grand Theft Auto V, a widely popular open world computer game released in 2013. The core mechanics revolve around the theft of cars (approach the side of a car on foot, press a button and in one movement (if the door is unlocked) you open the door, haul out the driver and take their place ready to drive), and running rampage with various weapons around an environment that has become increasingly intricate with the advancement of hardware and the developers’ drive to give their world as much life as possible. Butler sees this drive as attributable to nothing other than love, as GTA co-author Dan Houser said in a 2013 interview with the Guardian, “They have to bring a huge section of the world to life, get things working in the right way, make areas that look believable but work well for gameplay and give good roads for car chases and areas for shootouts. It has to be planned out but must still look organic; you have to capture the essence of what’s really there in a city, but in a far smaller area. It’s a great, great skill.” (Stuart, 2013).

The two series that deal with GTA V are the one-off ‘On Exactitude In Science’ two screen installation where a shot-for-shot remake of Koyaanisqatsi made within the GTAV world is screen next to and in sync with the original, and the ongoing ‘Down and Out in Los-Santos’, a photography series where he utilises the in-game camera function to document homeless characters in the game environment. I visited him in his studio to talk about his work in general, but with a focus on these piece in particular in light of consideration of the theme ‘mess’.

His studio was a bit cluttered and with a lot of exhibition and projects in the pipeline, I wondered if captured in time-lapse would the space seem to pulsate with chaos as deadline approached, did one kind of form necessitate a sympathetic deform…

Seanán Kerr: “…like the way a tidy house is a sign of a wasted life, is this some kind of manifestation of your inner mind?”

Alan Butler: “No, because it’s totally temporal, it’s like this now because there was an intersection of ten different deadlines in the last few months which resulted in disarray, after the deadlines it gets tidies up. I don’t really get back to work until it is tidied up. There’s other factors where knowing that I’m going to have to move out of here, I’m not dedicating a huge amount of time to manicuring the whole place, I’d sooner dedicate time to throwing stuff out. But I don’t think there’s any over-arching pattern to it, like this particular mess is because of a number of things, sometimes when I’m making work I’m tidying as I’m going along, when installing if everything is going well I do a tidy up every day, but that’s just me then, everyone is different I’ve friends who’d never have a clean studio, it’s a mess, because they’re pigs.” And he laughs. He shows me his computer desktop.

AB: “You’ll notice, there’s no fucking files on it.”

Which is true the desktop is entirely bare, though it takes me a moment to realise it, a desktop without any files on being indistinguishable from an image, we move on to discuss his works made within the GTA world…

AB: “What those series were really about were structural issues to do with language. Some people get that out of it, there’s a segment of the audience who enjoys deconstructing it to look at the episteme and the paradigms within the language of simulation, there’s still a few echoes of Foucault and Baudrillard lingering around in how people are reading them, but what’s interesting for me if we talking about mess in virtual terms: the mess is simulated to add realism, because reality isn’t clean and neat and laid out the way architects and city planners want it. Once people start living in things, the shine comes off, the corners get smoothed over, but what’s interesting about the inclusion of poverty in a simulation of our reality is in the video game they don’t take part in the narrative either. It highlights the actual tragedy of reality, in order for the simulation to be realistic, we have to include this shit. So therefore we should look at simulations to look at what reality is like, and how things exist in reality, it’s only when things are simulated we begin to see what things are important, with things like the mess, or class issues, or any of that, like the mess simulated, we should look and see what kind of agency do these people have.”

SK: “So this is like the head in the fridge trope, which comes from a green lantern comic, where the hero finds his girlfriend’s head in the fridge and that her character and her character’s death exists purely to give the main male character a motivation?” (Wikipedia, 2019)

AB: “Yeah, but it’s structural stuff as well, when I make work inside a simulation, it’s not to say, “oh look this equals that”, didactic, it’s more if I operate and produce my work as if that is reality, that we are in a simulation, then it affords and audience a bit of critical distance form the world and we have to rethink paradigm and episteme of how we live, where power is, what is it we value? Because I think there’s a real material consequence to that, I’m doing a research residency in Glasgow in December, which is a month for me to sit down and calculate the real world environmental impact of street litter in video games, because it needs to be downloaded, processed, put out a HDMI cable into a TV screen. Litter is there to create realism, but if you think that every street in GTA has a hundred pieces of litter in it, so how many microprocessors does it take to render them in each instance. And a hundred million people bought this video game, so to think about how this stuff is having real world devastating effects on the environment via power consumption. It’s a nice thing to do for a month, a way to ask “what is happening with the virtual?”. Even just isolating a single piece of trash, narrowing it down to the file, how much energy is being burned between the Playstation, the server, the network nodes, the home router? I don’t know what I’m going to do with that, but I’m thinking about how the mess in the simulated world is also the mess in our world.”

I mention the recent fire in Notre-Dame and how the scanning of the inside for video game series Assassins Creed is now the most accurate image of it (Rea, 2019)

AB: “It’s great isn’t it? It shows they’re doing their jobs properly.”

It’s the broader implications for how we define reality when copies become originals.

SK: “Would you think you’re holding a mirror, trying to ground the viewer in what is going on, raising consciousness?”

AB: “I don’t feel like “raising consciousness” is the right direction to describe that, I’m more re-examining things that seem familiar to us, trying to use existing worlds, like they could be video game worlds or some cultural artefact, but representing them in a different context to allow people to consider their relationship to these things that exist anyway. I am presenting something in a different context that people are able to stand back from. Existing in the world and having a routine is a kind of psychosis, trying to be normal all the time, and how the psychosis of normality clouds and conceals our relationship with what’s happening – with reality. So by accessing things that are familiar and shared with each other, that we both subjectively experience and doing something with the context of that and how it’s experienced, permits people to reexamine these shared things we have. “Oh it’s just a video game”. Well, ”oh, it’s just a song” or “oh, it’s just a painting” we’re so normalised in own consumption, most people don’t have time to critically think about these things, so I’m into art about creating space for people to meditate on their relationship with other things.”

SK: “So like that moment in a recent interview (Vincenteli, 2019) where you discussed the uncanniness of being in Los Angeles and knowing the place from Grand Theft Auto without having been there before…”

AB: “It’s so weird, to know where a carpark is before you turn the corner onto the street for the first time, it feels like a psychic ability. I know if I walk up a couple of blocks there, the scale might be off, so I won’t know if it’s two or three blocks, but I know I’m going to come to a big piece of public sculpture that is red.”

SK: “It sounds like Yuri Gellar or Derren Browne.”

AB: “It is, it totally is, but it’s because people in video games do their job very well, like the Notre Dame cathedral thing, like that guy, he could have just taken short cuts, it didn’t need to be that well done, but the people who work in these industries, it’s something to do with real love and putting love into things, people who put love into their work will do a really good job.”

I ask then if he feels phenomena like that are an indication that we’re passed through the rabbit hole?

AB: “If you read someone like Graham Harman, what’s he’s saying is if we have a philosophical theory that helps us understand what reality is nowadays, it can’t be a procedural scientific one, because mythologies and fantasies can’t be explained through maths, we could explain what’s going on in someone’s brain when a thought happens but he has a nice one where he talks about where Sherlock Holmes lives on 225 Baker Street, when the book was written there wasn’t one, but the street was extended in reality, and so the new 225 becomes a tourist trap and now American tourists who go there think that he was a real person, so it becomes a reality in someones head. Things we misinterpret as being real or true, need to be explained somehow as well, you can’t have a theory of everything with quantum physicists that doesn’t allow for fictions to exist because we know they exist in some minds. If we just rationalise or describe or quantify everything through algorithmic procedure we’re presented with a problem where the spectre of existence can’t be accounted for. There’s things we know that we will never be able to account for in the world, because science is also a lens to look at a particular things. So in video games we begin to think about processes, in terms of the material function of a character in a video game, if you spend too much time underwater you’ll drown, if you run for too long you get tired, so there are all these restrictions interlaced to simulate real life.We can quantify it all down to these reflexive components and algorithms and that’s going to align very nicely to object orientated ontology. Where if you’re looking to deanthropocentrise Seanán into these other components, these different systems at play, but what the video game algorithms can’t describe is that Seanán also has fictions and mythologies and structural relationships to culture. So the video game character looks a different way, or has a certain kind of swagger, there’s a cultural reason behind that that wouldn’t be quantifiable by some doctor with a high tech body scanner. So video games provide us with a way of expanding the thought process of ontology, and allow us to look at the reality that we’re not just blood and guts, but we also somehow ended in Alan’s studio because of what was going on in the heads of Francis, Declan and Sarah.It’s like a virus in the minds of these MA students, you end up here, and that can’t be explained algorithmically, that’s why scientists will never explain everything.”

I mention a recent Adam Curtis interview in the Economist (Future, 2019) where he concludes with saying religion is set for a come back, but that’s the wrong way of putting it, I mention how speaking of Notre-Dame the cathedral was an instrument of technology in that it told the story of God, but what was what was thought then of as reality that the illiterate would understand and that arguably the computer game could be said to have a similar function.

AB: “Well there’s a definite morality to it, it’s a form of political story-telling, like the great stories in scriptures yes totally, Curtis has the right idea in thinking beyond the scale of the individual, he talks about socialist realism and the modern equivalent isn’t the likes of a Banksky painting of monkeys in parliament., Social realism now is all of Twitter happening at once, all the energy, human thought and anxieties, the Big Other stuff that’s happening within that. It is the true expression of our time all happening at once, when everybody thinks what they have to say is important, and it’s a testament to the level of individualism and how people want to be complicit in their own packaging and marketing, like good neoliberals, Conor McGarrigle has a really interesting piece in the Green on Red where he follows the hashtag ‘riseandgrind’, and there’s people who are good little capitalists on social media all over the world, they’ll say, “I’m getting up, gonna be in the money #riseandgrind” and he has machine learning algorithms scraping them up and trying to learn the heuristics by generating new tweets with riseandgrind and hashtag hustle (1). And it’s great it’s getting better, the tweets start to feel more accurate with time, but ultimately it’s producing a kind of beat poetry for neoliberalism. But what Adam Curtis is right about is we need to think about scales larger than Tony Blair, we need to this about scales larger than Donald Trump because the only problems we have really right now, are the ones that aren’t just ideological, have to do with the survival of all life on the planet, so to think about scales ever larger than that so the process of deanthropocentrisation, is a political endeavour and a spiritual one as well, not just a cultural one.”

(1) Visible in action here on McGarrigle’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/_stunned/status/1124326555860127745

TYPECAST X David Booth Exhibition Launch & Artist Talk

TYPECAST x David Booth Exhibition Launch & Artist Talk

Opening 14 June 2019 at 18:00 – 21:00
Runs until 29 June 2019

Artist Talk between Una Sealy RHA and David Booth on Wednesday, 26 June at 18:00
(please RSVP to hello@hangtoughgallery.com)

The Hang Tough Gallery is delighted present Typecast, the first solo show by Dublin based artist David Booth. Booth’s practice deals primarily with painting and drawing, using both traditional acrylic and oil paint on canvas but often incorporating mixed media on unconventional surfaces. Sympathetic to the human form Booth’s attention is largely monopolised toward portraiture. While engaging with a widely traditional format such as is portraiture, it is Booth’s stark contrast between hyper-realistic detailed features and graphic illustrative brush strokes which carry his paintings into the contemporary. Rather than an intention to display the expression or likeness of a human subject, Booth’s subjects are often anonymous; displaying the expression of the artistic gesture.

Occupied by the ongoing study into representation of identity, Typecast is the result of this ongoing theme. While working from his own resources, source imagery is developed in collaboration with contemporary photographers Philip White, Cayne Kxa and Eric van Kampen. Booth uses the portrait as a starting point that usually distills other multidimensional viewpoints. As the concept and vernacular of identity is reorienting, Booth recontextualises the term typecast to challenge these developments and how they refer to social, psychological factors.

David Booth completed his BFA at Wexford Campus School of Art. In 2013 he moved to Dublin to begin his full time career as an artist and has since exhibited both nationally and internationally. Booth has featured in The Irish Times, The Independent and has been awarded the Evans Painting Prize in 2016. His painting ‘Unit’ was selected for the Zurich Portrait Prize 2018/19 at The National Gallery of Ireland. Booth was recently accepted to the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London. His work is held in both private and public collections including Office of Public Works (O.P.W) and various private collections in Ireland and Europe.

This exhibition is co-curated by ACW alumni and Hang Tough Gallery Assistant Sara Muthi.

Hang Tough Gallery | 25 Lennox St, Portobello, Dublin 8

www.hangtoughgallery.com

FB | IG @hangtoughgallery

a heap of language #002: radical publishing

Please join us for the second instalment of a heap of language, an ongoing event series organised between Paper Visual Art Journal and the School of Visual Culture at NCAD.

For this event we have invited a number of contributors to speak about radical (artists’, small press, activist, and samizdat) publishing.

A publication, compiled by current students of the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World, will also be launched. This publication has been collaboratively produced in response to the idea of cohabitation.

Contributors: Christodoulos Makris, Sam Riviere, David Crowley, Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn, as well as students of the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World.

4 pm: transcription writing workshop with Christodoulos Makris [numbers limited, separate sign up]
6 pm: talks at the Goethe-Institut, Merrion Square
8 pm: publication launch at the Goethe-Institut, Merrion Square

This event is kindly funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. All aspects of this event are free but booking is required. Separate registration for the workshop, beginning 4 pm, departing from the Goethe-Institut.

Tickets here.

Opening: Pauline Oliveros, Software for People @ The Goethe Institut

Constellations by Orlaith Phelan

C o n s t e l l a t i o n s
Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebuilding the Future Exhibition | IMMA

I’m photographs, sometimes photocopies, sometimes even photographs of photocopies. I’m taut, stretched and bare. Thin skin on clips balanced on an edge, human in and of paper. I’m framed, bound, sealed and dispersed in my own ordered disorder. I’m not hierarchy. I’m raised, pressed in corners, by door frames, over eyes, scattered flecks along each wall. Patterns colliding with vulnerable intent. I hide and I consume, between hard glass, white edge, and a devouring red that lingers as mirrored traces against the flat planes towards the hand that holds your dripping head.

I’m moments and the interstitial. The infra thin of borders and after borders, leaving both a position and a question. I’m that yellow line down the middle. The stain, the muck; the scratches that are not meant to be. I break, spatter and gather; a box of empties all used up. Systems, fragments and scraps of something dirty and divine. The excesses of the time; the love on the dance floor, the cock in your mouth, and the hands you hold in prayer. I’m the white wave catching colour, the fold that denies and caresses dark and light.

I’m showing you what makes the “me” of this, the pieces of now, and the things not of us. The measures of power, growth and decay at every scale. The cracks in the sand, spilling veins of disruption and collapse. I’m the apparatus and the ties, the plastic tubes that coil and hang. Colours that melt of horizons that must remember not to fade. I’m the light that hits your back, in the glow to the gutter of what came before the morning with the remains smeared at our feet. I’m your hand that rests in the crisp blue.

I’m of an old future looking back. Always changing; a process of medium becoming object becoming body. My body that’s been recorded, crumpled, erased, and exposed, but always rebuilding forward. I’m the black on brown, the tight brace on your flexed muscle reminding. I’m an approach without fear to push or pause. Cravings and thoughts of joy and distress; the singular pluralities of all parts human. I’m the intimacy of the explicit unprotected, and the desire that punctures the mundane desperate to seek and see. I’m all parts human and the need to be expressed.

I’m not a theme and I’m no one thing. I’m the opposite of your reductive thoughts and the will to be the obvious. An abstraction that keeps abstracting, but somehow I manage to hold and hover in the sounds of “just enough to think” and “let’s stop before we go too far”. A life of work from a work in life. I’m a thread of all things, like a constellation that burns in and out of sight; an offering of all points with nothing denied.

Orlaith Phelan is an architect and a current student of Art in the Contemporary World