Reel time
Elisabeth Anderson
It might seem rather perverse to put on an exhibition which has to be seen in the dark in a town renowned for its beautiful and constantly changing light. Yet it works. Tate St Ives's Real Life focuses on film and video art by eight artists, and each installation merits the 12 minutes or so it takes to watch because each one shows us new ways of seeing, experiencing and appreciating different aspects of life. The work has been seen before — most pieces date from the Nineties or earlier — but it's the first time
Tate St Ives has mounted an exhibition dedicated to this type of art.
From the early 1970s, Bill Viola was involved with the development of video art in America and his The Reflecting Pool' (1977-1979) is part of a collection of five independent works made to work as a whole — describing an individual's progress from birth to death. A man comes out of a forest, leaps into the air and then freezes, suspended in space, while the water continues to ripple and move below him; his image then slowly disappears. After a while, the man emerges from the water and walks back into the forest. The unhurried, hypnotic pace of the piece makes one question what is before us: what is the truth of what we are seeing or do we sec only what we want to? What is time, can it be suspended?
In 'Gordon's Makes Us Drunk' (1972). Gilbert and George sit at a table by a window drinking gin, getting drunker and drunker. The only words spoken are 'Gordon's makes us drunk', 'Gordon's makes us very drunk', Gordon's makes us very, very drunk', repeated over and over again, to music by Elgar (`Land of Hope and Glory') and Grieg (`Morning'). The sense of the ridiculous is heightened by the fact that the small television on which the video is played is sited in the gallery's cafe, and people are eating, drinking, talking, while Gilbert and George drone on and on in the background.
Tracey Emin's 'CV C"" Vernacular' (1997) is a diary of her life — from her birth in London in 1962 to 1995, by which time she had become an established artist. A camera pans round her flat, while Emin tells of her childhood in Margate, being raped at 13, her two abortions, her relationship with her Turkish family, her attempted suicide .. . a bleak life in a bleak flat. The video ends with a shot of a curledup naked Emin on the floor with her mother sitting on a sofa behind. It is extraordinary how such a desolate life can make such compulsive viewing. Next year, Emin, with money from the BBC and the Film Council, is set to make a 'loosely autobiographical' film of how she was raped, a 'rite of passage for a 13-year-old girl' that is 'hopefully going to be very poetic and spiritual'.
In Shirin Neshat's film installation 'Soliloquy', 1999, two big screens face each other showing two different films which respond to and complement each other. Neshat is an Iranian living in America and her film reflects the cultures of East and West, and their divergent pressures. A woman appears on both screens, at times in an ancient town in southern Turkey at others in an American city; alone she stares out from a window, looking either at a peaceful courtyard or at a busy urban highway. As we follow her fleeing down a busy road or across a barren landscape we are made to confront her dilemma: does she fit into an Islamic world on the threshold of change? Does she fit into a Western culture? Will she always be an outsider both in the East and West?
'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ... ' Mark Wallinger's 1997 video installation 'Angel' shows a blind man walking on the spot at the bottom of an escalator in the Angel Tube station reciting the first five verses of St John's Gospel. His voice seems rather distorted because Wallinger recorded himself saying the words backwards; he then inverted the tape so that the words could be understood when played. We also realise that the film of the people on either side of the artist on the down and up escalators is being shown backwards. So what we are seeing is the exact opposite of the truth, which brings up all sorts of questions about accepted 'facts'. The climax of the piece comes when Wallinger stops walking and talking and rises slowly up (or is it down?) the escalator to the sound of Handel's `Zadok the Priest'.
The other pieces on show in St Ives are Steve McQueen's 'Bear' (1993), a silent film of two black naked men in turn wrestling, teasing, sparring with each other; Susan Hiller's video An Entertainment' (1991), in which the artist has taken more than 30 scenes from Punch and Judy shows and then edited and projected them on to screens on four sides of a room in a series of disturbing and violent images; and Sam Taylor-Wood's 'Brontosaurus' (1995), a film depicting a naked, very thin man dancing in his bedroom — 'a eulogy, a death dance and at the same time a dance of life'.
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