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An Outsider in her native town - The work of Susan MacWilliam
Turning off the main Dublin-Belfast road onto the construction-crowded entry points to Belfast city, the primary view is of development and an apparent renewed prosperity. This is when Belfast hits you with an intensity and aggression of modern living, manifested amongst the rejuvenated anachronisms of imperial buildings and monuments. This is a new world economy of social change that masks itself as striving for something better. Hyperconsumerism provides the most visible of distractions, and television is its primary purveyor, with the 'gospel' of the moment being reality TV. Groups of strangers line up to march down the aisle to marry a partner randomly picked by a bunch of other strangers. Another group of near-strangers, in a fierce match for a fast buck, gorge upon animal parts even the butcher doesn't like to talk about; families exchange spouses; and celebrity wannabes reveal their innermost selves in the desire to be famous. This is the new vaudeville, a pathological reality of metaphors, cheap pranks and twisted observations; a world where nothing is new and the self-absorption of daily life becomes a safety barrier against raw reality. Before movies and television, society flocked to fairgrounds and burlesque shows, where they could find every kind of marvel and amusement. Freak shows gave them escape from their own banality. The entertainments, with their emphasis on illusion and trickery, relied heavily on the imagination and naïveté of their audience. With the new age, such entertainments could not keep up with the sophisticated tastes of the audience. This new sophistication, born of the projection of the moving image, encouraged the development of a world of 'falsified reality'; in parallel, it fostered para-scientific curiosity, whereby the apparent 'others' of the freak shows became the 'subjects' of scientific investigation. The emergent anomalistic reality is one which Belfastbased artist Susan MacWilliam exploits for a 'sideways' viewing of the normal; in more recent work she looks at the apparently empirical claims of the extraordinary. This is a world where science is burlesque, where the naïveté of the audience member is the dominion of the charlatan, and the crossover point provides a confused picture that insists on both the verifiability and 'falsifiability' of claims that are correspondent with their degree of extraordinariness. Born in Belfast, MacWilliam moved to Manchester to study art at Manchester Polytechnic. For her, Belfast was a place of deep-seated family memories and support that provided her with the impetus to get out of an atmosphere where the background of 'The Troubles' was the only identity allowed to artists studying or working in Belfast. Manchester provided a decisive ground for independence from nationalistic, religious and political categorization. This independence has continued to be a prominent part of MacWilliam's practice. Returning to Belfast, and avoided by the hip curatorial visits that would continue to question her reasons for not addressing the political situation, MacWilliam took her apparent 'apartness' as a point of negotiation for a series of bodies of work that continue to this day.
MacWilliam operates in the area of alternative observation. Prominent in early work is a personal search for the familiarity and comfort of the symbols and materiality of a bygone, infectious spirit of curiosity, fun and freedom. Taking the faded elegance of the dilapidated, she realised works in the window of a derelict shop ( Disco inferno , 1995) that used the gaudy, tinsel-curtain backdrop of working men's clubs and offset it with a constellation of glitter-covered balls, a crossover of the last remnants of the vaudeville with the fetishism of recently demised disco. This form of symbolism continued, with a particular nod to the fading theatrical temples of entertainment and an aesthetic that referenced her past in painting, with the exhibition Curtains , (1997), a plasticine representation of a theatre curtain, in the Project Art Centre in Dublin. MacWilliam democratises within her work. Precisely defined and assigned, objects are bestowed with a form of privilege. The commonplace and familiar are endowed with aesthetic and ideological complexity. This placement of symbols and staging is important as a memory point for individual history. The use within works of family objects, in the form of chairs, televisions, and other remnants of MacWilliam's domestic history, lends them the role of totems and fetishes of moments of past life. The common items address the viewer and set the context in an assured fashion. It is in this loaded context that stability evolves and becomes the foundation for historical placement within MacWilliam's work. This is not a primitivist approach. Instead, the references to the familial objects of MacWilliam's childhood and adolescence provide an elemental view of notional 'enlightenment'. This is clearly seen in Kuda Bux [1], 2003. In this work MacWilliam carefully chooses to present her video-based pieces on a 1950s television set that can be viewed from a 1930s armchair, allowing the audience to experience the work from within the work. A pseudovaudevillian backdrop, an illuminated text in the style of fairground signage, creates an overall effect of extreme pathos, and yet the installation places no judgement on the core subject of New York mystic Kuda Bux, who was famous during the 1930s and '40s for his dramatic demonstrations of eyeless sight. Placement is a strong factor within MacWilliam's practice. In preparing installations, a large amount of time is spent in the selection of the correct staging for the 're-enactment' of scenes. Her deep-rooted need to understand not only the subject matter, but also the fabrication of the surrounding objects, is key to MacWilliam's sympathetic approach. The term 'sympathetic' is much overused in modern society; it has an almost romanticised connotation. However, MacWilliam eschews this romance in favour of understanding the original circumstances, without promoting any revisionist theory. The discomfort of analysis is given over entirely to the viewer.
The quackery, chicanery, and deceit come only from the viewer's apparent 20:20 vision of what is now known to have been the reality. For example, Experiment M [2], (1999), an installation which comprises a set and a two-screen video work, recreates the spaces within which the séances and experimental research of Dr William Jackson Crawford and Belfast medium Kathleen Goligher took place. MacWilliam expands the scenography by carefully investigating the manufacturing processes required to create the props as used by the original subjects - in this case the table and 'foot box' reproduced using images and measurements in Crawford's texts. In writing about MacWilliam and her practice, this repeated back-referencing becomes very obvious. From this an almost fractal mix of patterns within patterns within patterns. This mix underscores MacWilliam's huge concern with ideas of re-production and illusion, as she explores aspects of the history of photography and the presentation of the image as well as their sometimes crude use in the recording of para-scientific experimentation. There is a seamless flow between media in MacWilliam's work. She exploits the investigational-laboratory setting as much as experimental forms of subject matter editing, with many possible realisations of the 'para'. The Last person [3], 1998, first shown in Catalyst Arts and later shortlisted for the 1999 Glen Dimplex Award, in addition to the stage settings, moved strongly into the world of the para-scientific, and specifically into the para-normal, and 'grotesquely' questioned the role of the victim and the perpetrator. The central placement of the 'person' as a symbol of 'vulnerable' and 'enabler' points to a romantic and almost sinister study of human naïveté. In Faint [4], 1999, with the sound of bird song placed over images of a fainting girl, the direct references to mesmerism and trance are taken out of the closed, controlled environment of the parlour game, and partially moved to the verdant surroundings of Powerscourt Gardens and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This careful investigation, combined with the focus on construction, can also be seen in 45rpm [5], 2000, a short, black-and-white video work that presents images of a spinning zoetrope. Within these fabricated zoetropes are images of the artist repeatedly raising her hand to her forehead, which directly references the earlier subject matter of Faint . In addition to these earlier reflections on representation, MacWilliam's fascination with '70s late night TV, such as the BBC's Open University , comes together with early-twentieth-century 'chicanery' and combines with the very real negotiation of 'anomalistic' experiments for which there seems to be no acknowledged scientific explanation. The raw sets, the staged experiments, are bereft of their commentator or apologist, and are removed from the diagrammatic representation of a 'solution'. Carefully crafted by MacWilliam, works such as Headbox [6], 2004, turn the gallery setting into that of a laboratory, where research into the areas of illusion, falsification, trickery, visual perception, notions of otherness, and normality take place with the audience as the main protagonist. This installation of objects and video works initially focuses on research with Rosa Kuleshova, a young woman whose remarkable ability to read with her fingertips made her the subject of intense scientific observation in Russia in the 1960s. In Headbox , MacWilliam continues her interest in the support props used in research. But, as with most video works, MacWilliam places herself in the role of the subject, re-enacting singular moments of their particular claims to fame. These re-creations invite the audience not only to enter the installation but also to become key characters in the judgement of the experiments.
MacWilliam uses the realm of 'psionics' and the scientific study of paranormal phenomena as a backdrop to the exploration of human identity and the need for understanding. It is an investigation of diversion. The selfcontained installations, that place the viewer and ideas of human experience at their centre, challenge us to further investigation. The lack of definitive findings becomes a starting point for more discovery and reflection. The building of physical and sensory environments demonstrates an eye for detail and quality of construction. There is a sense of totemism that is moved forward and aestheticised by MacWilliam. In addition, there is a notion of referencing the 'garden shed inventor', a distinct moment when 'boffins' took highly practical approaches to the creation of solutions and mechanisms. This was a time of practical realities, lived not in opposition but in parallel - an adjusted sideward view. MacWilliam's work shows a strong interest in the mechanical. In a similar manner to artists such as Steven Pippin, it stems from early childhood memories of the father figure and it leads to an interesting questioning of gender roles and role-crossover, where the 'girl artist' makes stuff like her father, learning the trade/ skills to complete the work. Marx noted the similarity in logic that explains primitive fetishism, "the primordial religion of sensual desire", and the modern belief in political economy. MacWilliam displays 'divinised' material objects in a world that sees economic capital as a magical source of wealth and value. She carefully negotiates and removes the subjectivity of Modernism, and places herself firmly into the current moment. In this way, the underlying ordinariness becomes a criticism of contemporary life; the present is a place where the very definition of 'civilised' seeks to distinguish anything that is past as primitive and paradoxically returns us back to a fetishistic abandon. For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the 'real conditions of existence' due to our reliance on language; however, through a rigorous, 'scientific' approach to society, economics and history, we can come close to perceiving if not those 'real conditions' at least the ways that we are distinguished in ideology by complex processes of recognition. MacWilliam can be seen as a key contributor to this argument. The paredback use of language and the keen eye provide for a successful marriage of ocular and emotional recognition. There is a brutishness to the science as displayed within MacWilliam's work. Ugliness of nature is provided with a façade of burlesque respectability. The works moves away from simulacra; they retain the ability to turn a theatre of shadows and universally accessible illusions into the concretism of experiential knowledge. The installations are a means to expose the artifice that binds realities together. MacWilliam unfolds the past as a new event before the eyes of the audience, creating a new whole within an artistic space. 1 installation with Video Work DVD, black-and-white and colour, stereo; winner of Perspective 2003, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA. 2 installation with two videos, both black-and-white, silent, 5 mins 43 secs. 3 black-and-white, silent, 10 mins 30 secs. 4 colour with sound, 3 mins 40 secs. 5 black-and-white, silent, 4 mins 34 secs. 6 installation of objects and video works. Susan MacWilliam's website is www.susanmacwilliam.com Noel Kelly is a curator and art critic based in Dublin. Reprinted from Circa 118, Winter Issue 2006, pp. 48 - 54 [596]
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