paper visual art journal –

[Phil Collins’ marxism today (prologue) at the Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, 35’, HD video]

Phil Collins’ 35 minute documentary-style video installation is a counter-narrative to the overwhelming winner/loser discourse surrounding communism, the Cold War and the free market that grew after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the world communist order in the 1990s.

This film is part of a 15-artist group show called Revolution vs. Revolution, that has run at the Beirut Arts Center from February 2 to April 30, 2012. Taking the revolutions and uprisings that have happened across the Arab world over the past 16 months as a jumping off point, the show is a re-examination of some of the world’s most significant recent revolutions including the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of Communism in the former USSR, the student riots of 1968 across the world, the Communist Revolution in Poland, and the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979.

Phil Collins: marxism today (prologue), 2010 HD video, 35 min. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Artists in the show include: Abbas (Iranian), Vyacheslav Akhunov (Kyrgyz), Francis Alÿs (Belgian), Hai Bo (Chinese), Steven Cohen (South African), Tacita Dean (English), Fadi el Abdallah (Lebanese), David Goldblatt (South African), Alfredo Jaar (Chilean), William Kentridge (South African), Marysia Lewandowska (Polish), Neil Cummings (Welsh), Susan Meiselas (American), and Boris Mikhailov (Ukranian).

In marxism today (prologue), Collins explores the thoughts, memories and current positions of three former GDR (German Democratic Republic) women who were teachers of “Marxism-Leninism,” a subject that was compulsory in communist East Germany, before the fall of the political system there. Once East and West Germany were reunified, these teachers found themselves obsolete and jobless and were obliged to retrain in other professions suitable to the new free market order that engulfed their country. One of them became a social worker, another a businesswoman in West Germany, and the third started a dating service for academics.

Through a mixture of archival news footage, East German propaganda material, and the personal effects of these women (photographs, diaries, class notes), Collins’ film looks at what was lost with the fall of communism and what for some, is still longed for, some twenty years after that most crucial shift in 20th century world politics.

Today, where the global recession has brought the modern capitalist, free market system under considerable question, Collins’ film is a subtle questioning of that system and the exponential political gains it made globally after the fall of communism in East Germany, the Eastern Bloc, and the former USSR.

“I didn’t learn anything new there about how to serve the people better, but I did learn how to get rich,” Andrea Faber says of her transition, post-1989, from Marxist-Leninist professor in East Germany to businesswomen in West Germany. “Now my life is about consuming and making money. It’s quite poor.”

Phil Collins: marxism today (prologue), 2010 HD video, 35 min. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Collins interviews his subjects at their homes or at their places of work. Some of the interviews occur with small, unexplained audiences of (perhaps) friends or colleagues, who nod or react facially but never interject vocally. He intercuts the women’s thoughts with a variety of original material, including entire scenes from East German state propaganda films denigrating West German capitalism and lauding the East German way. One such scene, in a classroom, shows a teacher writing the word EXPLOITATION? on the blackboard, saying that while it is an outdated concept in East Germany, “Do the students think it exists in West Germany?” He urges the students to speak freely and what follows is a montage of young, halting criticisms, of varying degrees, of Western consumerism, its dangerous charms, and ultimately, the atrophy it brings to the individual and to society.

The use of such blatant propaganda material, and the echoes it makes with the contemporary thoughts of Collins’ interviewees, makes the piece a far more nuanced work – it is a re-examination, with the benefit of two decades of hindsight, of a crucial period of political and ideological tumult, rather than an indictment of one political system over the other.

In marxism today (prologue), it is understood that East German communism was flawed, and this is carried through Collins’ use of archival material and through some of the individual anecdotes of the film’s three main subjects (one of the women had an African fiancé who was denied a visa renewal to stay and he gassed himself, another bemoans the intense pressure at school it put on young people). The focus is therefore on the “baby” that was thrown out with the proverbial bathwater after the fall of communism: a mixture of personal nostalgia and solid arguments for certain political and economic precepts that disappeared in united Germany and which are, these women feel, sorely lacking today.

The women of marxism today (prologue) are describing and mourning what has become an imagined homeland, ideas and memories that have become more accessible since the heady, belligerent, divisive Cold War discourse has subsided, and western security preoccupations shifted elsewhere.

“I would have adapted mentally, much quicker,” says Faber of her move to West Germany, “if the West Germans had let me. But they were so keen on letting us know that our whole existence had been a mistake, and we had to constantly say sorry for being East German and for having lived under that system.”

Phil Collins: marxism today (prologue), 2010 HD video, 35 min. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

The theme of revolutions is not only pertinent in an Arab city like Beirut at this time when the region is undergoing such radical political change and contention. Collins’ film about the special and political division and problematic reunification of a place is particularly relevant in Beirut, a city that was physically, politically and religiously divided during the Lebanese civil war from 1975 – 1990. Much like the subjects in Collins’ film, many Lebanese and Beirutis question the problematic status quo and peace consensus that has settled over the scarred city since the conflict ended.

marxism today (prologue) is also a meditation on the camera, the lens, and how it has served, severally, as an agent for emancipation, for disinformation, for exploitation, and for documentation on both sides of the East/West German propaganda war.

One of the more poignant sequences of archival material used by Collins is in connection with Ulrike Klotz, the daughter of Marianne Klotz, one of the film’s three main subjects, who was one of East Germany’s star gymnasts, and who competed at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Slowed down and looped footage of her performing on the vault or the high bar in Seoul, sometimes momentarily losing balance, is intercut with her account of her grueling schedule as a teenaged gymnast in a country for whom success in international sports competition was a crucial facet of its international propaganda.

Over a sequence of shots of a group choreographed dance in an East German sports stadium with the word “Sozialismus” emblazoned across the seating behind, Klotz explains how, by 1989, her spine was beginning to suffer and she had to quit gymnastics just as communism was falling. All of a sudden, much like her mother, the Marxism-Leninism professor (and the other women in Collins’ piece), her role and the society it fit into abruptly disappeared.

“I was suddenly in a body I didn’t really know,” she says.

Don Duncan is a journalist and filmmaker based in Beirut.

http://www.donduncan.net/

Saidhbhín Gibson’s works in the Éigse Carlow Arts Festival at first present an innocent, almost quaint experience; innocent, in that the works seem naive at first glance. The difficulty in viewing her pieces – Evensong, a video installation showing portraits of trees; Rufous, a mixed media bird drawing; and Overhang in Oak, an acrylic on paper silhouette of a leafy branch – is that nothing immediately arrests the viewer’s attention unlike Susan Connolly’s piece Unexpected Logic, which shows a deconstructed canvas. Gareth Jenkins’s The Object of Painting as an Intuitive Process of Recollection is equally arresting with painted sculptural wooden pieces jutting assertively out from the gallery wall, encouraging the viewer to manoeuvre their position to view all visible sides of the pieces. Gibson’s work seems shy in comparison. Therein lays the difficulty in making art with the everyday natural landscape as its subject. There is an innocence in the assumption of presenting nature as something that is aesthetic in itself.

Saidhbhín Gibson: Evensong, (still no.2),  2011, colour video transferred to DVD 9′ 51″; Image courtesy the artist.

Curator Emma-Lucy O’Brien threads a group of disparate practices together from an open submission under the title Constellations. This show takes over the Studio Gallery and Link Gallery of VISUAL, Carlow. [1] Other artists showing include Magnhild Opdol and Margaret Madden. The work by Opdol and Madden are located along the same trajectory as Gibson’s. A Tree Like Network by Madden explores the fragility of intricate constructions while Opdol’s pencil drawing Paradiso is a testament to the possibilities of drawing. Opdol is an artist who gives great weight to the idea of life being circular and in situating Gibson and Opdol on adjoining walls, O’Brien doubles the contemplative quality of each artists’ work. All three artists engage the topic of nature as artistic subject, but here I will focus on Gibson’s work.  I focus on Gibson in this group show because her presentation of her subject matter works in a very subtle way which I found attractive. I also wanted to explore the idea of bringing a familiar, yet perhaps neglected nature – that of the everyday unspectacular kind into the gallery, therefore making it a subject for aesthetic critique.

In an essay titled “Art, politics, environment” written by Paul O’Brien in Circa issue 123, he divided artists taking nature as their subject into three categories – Promethean, Critical and Integrative. [2] He gives an example of Promethean art as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field – a work using nature as the raw material, yet avoiding commentary on the ‘humanity/nature split’. Promethean art tends to focus on the spectacular or sublime in nature. Critical environmental art then, as the name suggests, strives to raise awareness about environmental issues. A notable example of this is the work of Hans Haacke. And the Integrative approach models its practice on healing the perceived ‘humanity/nature split’.

Saidhbhín Gibson: Overhang in Oak, 2011, acrylic on paper, 6 x 11 cm; Image courtesy the artist.

Gibson’s video Evensong captures ‘portraits’ of trees. The camera lingers on a single tree at a time, as the evening light fades in the background. Thus each tree is centre stage, so to speak – presenting perhaps a clichéd stoicism. However, this stillness acts as a counterpoint to a flurry of birds, which draws the viewer’s attention further. Evensong is an invitation to contemplate the workings of everyday landscape.

The species of trees and bird life used in the work are interlinked – this, in turn, induces the viewer to reflect on their place in the order of things. The video piece Evensong (featuring a Scott’s Pine, a Pine, a Beech, and a Lime tree) and the lyrically named Overhang in Oak, and Rufous are in conversation. Rufous shows the artist’s visualisation of the wren heard in the video, while the video portraits bring to life the acrylic silhouette of Overhang in Oak, while also allowing for movement and song.

Saidhbhín Gibson: Rufous, 2011, paper, pencil, watercolour & acrylic paint on paper on wood, 10.5 13 x 5.5 cm; Image courtesy the artist.

The mixed media drawing/painting Rufous is reminiscent of 19^th century landscape painting. Here, a wren in pencil and watercolour is depicted making its way along a nondescript path hemmed in by clouds of black with yellow highlighting its delicate features.  The wren offers itself readily to allegory. The tiny bird has been hunted for centuries  - yet he is also ‘king of the birds’.[3] By tearing the paper that the wren is painted on, Gibson evokes its vulnerability. The wren may not be hunted in the traditional sense so much these days but its habitat is now under threat. This is a reading that could also be applied to Overhang in Oak. Gibson’s placement of the pencil drawing between the video shot at dusk, and the blacked out acrylic Oak branch offers the wren as the common thread between the trees.

Gibson’s work asks questions, with an ecological basis, in an unassuming and accessible way, while striving towards being an artist in the integrative vein of practice. By doing so she offers works that when contemplated upon, open up new habitats for thought.

Edel Horan is writer who lives and works in Kildare.

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[1] Artists included in the Link Gallery were: Maureen O’Connor, Brian Harte, Anne French, Selmar Makela, Remco de Fouw, Emma Houlihan, Mark Durcan, Sanja Todorvic, Hannah Breslin, Emily Mannion, Ciaran Hussey, Ramon Kassam, Damian Magee, Fergus Byrne, and Fiona Mulholland.

[2] See “Art, politics, environment” Circa, Issue 123, Spring, 2008.

[3] Persian poem by Farid ud-Din Attar. In the poem, the wren outsmarts the eagle in a flying competition by hiding in his wings and overtaking him – therefore becoming ‘king of the birds’.

Louise Manifold: Bottle Bird (Wunderkammer Series), photograph, 2010, image courtesy the artist.

Unnatural Esoteric at the Galway Arts Centre, presented over two floors, suits the Georgian architecture of the building. It references the Victorian wunderkammer, the 18^th Century cabinet of curiosities, the precursor to the modern museum. The exhibition has a narrative structure, developing from the documentary to the interpretative.

On the ground floor this narrative begins with documentary-style photographs from The Franke Foundation in Halle, Germany. This moves to sculptural objects, which sit in a series of vitrines, displaying the curiosities of Louise Manifold’s own personal wunderkammer. Three video works occupy the stairwell and first floor.

In A 49 year old Woman, a digital video installation, an elegant though impotent woman believes she is a wolf (the true meaning of the term ‘lycanthrope’). In the video piece, Saturn Transforming Lycan, two male protagonists engage in a fervid wrestle; their churning shadows reveal the form of a wolf. The shadows of their action become literally an intimation, a vestige of their struggle – a beast with two backs.

Louise Manifold: Rook trap, taxidermy, gold leaf,metal, glass, light, 2010, image courtesy the artist.

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