Vanessa Bartlett: Artist & Curator

Sarah Harbridge One minute on each of the four days before her death

When Josh sent me an excited email a couple of weeks ago,  to ask if he could borrow four of my flat screen monitors for Red Wire’s next exhibition, I was happy to oblige, particularly as he was insistent that the work he was putting on them was of mind blowing quality. Great I said, what is it?

Sarah Harbridge’s four screen installation ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’, consists of individual 60 second video pieces that play on a continuous loop. The ‘her’ as referenced by the title is the artist’s Grandmother. Josh gave me the link to watch it on youtube and I followed it to find a row of twisted and contorted manifestations of an old woman’s face, gasping for breath, wrestling with some moment of indecision between life and death. Even at low resolution, the images were so tightly and unscrupulously framed that every last tortured detail was visible.

By convention, sculpture is the art of the dead. In order to preserve lost loved ones, we memorialise in stone with statues and monuments. Immovable and atemporal these objects are created to immortalise, often portraying whole heads or full bodies with an air of distance, dignity and grace. While they remember death, they do not evidence its processes or its tendencies toward degradation, decay and suffering.

In her essay ‘Infected eyes: dying man with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The view from here’, critic Peggy Phelan recounts the story of film Silverlake Life, in which aids victim Tom Joslin’s gradual death from the disease is documented on film in collaboration with his partner Mark Massi. She asserts in her essay that  this film “resolutely and imaginatively re-examines the link between the temporality of death and the temporality of cinema,” with her argument pivoting on the fact that film can be rewound and replayed, allowing dying on screen to be reenacted infinitely. On film she asserts, the dead can live again. Silverlake Life is a monument to Tom Joslin that allows the viewer to relive his death with compassion and empathy.

Shot in the early 1990s, this film belongs to the preinternet age of filmmaking, when dissemination of the moving image, although widespread (people could watch movies on VHS at home) was vastly different to the post cinematic, networked age of digital image making that we inhabit at present. Watching ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’ over youtube, I was struck by the overwhelming melancholic sense that in an era of happy snapping, vimeoing and facebooking, not even the dying moments of an aged women are too sensitive to to be filmed, cropped, edited, disseminated on youtube, exhibited in a gallery, photographed and then blogged, reblogged and critiqued here by yours truly. This is the moment at which death becomes transient and timeless, available to be relived and replayed by gallery visitors and net users at their own whim.

Challenging and in tune with the current state of digital dissemination, this makes for a fascinating piece of work that mixes the banal with the sensational and provokes a thousand unanswered questions about the life story of the artists Grandmother, why she died and why her death merits such lucid and invasive documentation.

Apocalypse Now runs at Red Wire Gallery until 8 August.

Superflex Flooded McDonalds

My first encounter with Superflex was during a period of research for an undergraduate essay titled Can Art Change the World? This was my first experience of socially engaged art practice and as such, it planted the seeds of an ongoing fascination with socio-political art production.

While there are a multitude of artists projects in existence that aspire to instigate social transition, Superflex appeared uniquely successful with their invention of a series of ‘tools’ to empower users to alleviate problems in their community or independently influence their environmental context. See projects such as Supergas

I was immediately curious then, when I heard about Flooded McDonalds, a Superflex project that employed cinematic language to communicate its social message and marked a significant departure from earlier work. Set in a specially constructed facsimile of an early nineties McDonalds, the film shows water seeping into the set from an unseen source, filling the space, lifting and displacing empty food packaging and scraps of hamburger and eventually upending a sinister Ronald McDonald statue. Occasionally plunging underwater, the camera works cinematically to build tension, with whirling sub waterline sound effects creating unease and a sense of inevitable disaster. This is a film not only about subverting a global corporate institution, but also about the inevitability of climate change and society’s increasing powerlessness against the forces of nature, that are likely to destroy our homes and industries as we continue to consume at an unsustainable rate.

Yet while Suplerflex’s earlier projects also heeded this very serious warning, they also proposed solutions, a quality that is undoubtedly missing from Flooded McDonalds. The cinematic prowess and artful production of this film induces an effecting message, but with in an era where our media is saturated by warnings of imminent disaster caused by climatic change (see al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth etc), I may need some extra convincing that the energy consumed during the production and presentation of this work in the gallery hasn’t done more to exacerbate rather than alleviate impending environmental disaster. While I find both flooded McDonalds and Burning Car to be beautiful and powerful pieces of imagery, I can’t help but look forward to a return to Superflex’s engaged and practical approach.