Edinburgh Trip - MFA's / BA Hons

Susie, Mary, Merlyn Riggs (3rd year sculpture) and I head to Edinburgh today, to see the Edinburgh Art School degree show. This is a monster show with BaHons, MA and MFA (departments!) on show. BaHons Sculpture alone has 32 graduates…

Before we head to the art school, we see Aernout Mik’s show at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Four video installations, three of which are “fiction” and one which is “real wartime footage”. The first room we enter has one solitary video playing on a large back-projected screen sitting on the ground, as if the rectangle is an invitation into a parallel world, we could so easily step into. The scene presented appears to be a hostage situation (the notes liken it to the recent New Orleans / hurricane Katrina disaster, where locals were herded into the astrodome and “controlled” by national guard) I didn’t see this correlation, the scene was too sinister for that. For me, the work seemed more eastern European – therefore depicting the recent Beslan and Moscow Theatre siege, but this is where the comparison ends. If one was to casually observe this footage, that is, to pay no heed to it, to see it, but to not look closely, one would assume it was footage of a hostage situation, aggressors in uniform, victims in tatty attire (clinging to plastic bags full of possessions etc), but, when we look closely, we see that the aggressors are not too aggressive, they do organise (line up, prod and move) the “captives” in what appears to be menacing ways, but no physical harm comes to the people. It is also interesting to hear (or “not” as the case is) that there is no sound to this video. This point interests me, it is not a silent movie in the traditional sense – my understanding is that the sound is purposefully removed, in order to create ambiguity – it is the lack of information (aurally) that leads our brains to assume many aspects of the picture. If we heard shouting, aggressive and demanding vocals from the “soldiers”, if we heard whimpering, crying and pleading from the “captives” the work would be more definitive – it is our imaginations that keep us captivated by this situation unfolding. The sensory denial of sound, could also be reflective upon torture methods, sensory deprivation and overload are common techniques employed by torturers to keep their subjects second guessing, psychological warfare is cruel – but in an artistic context, it is another vehicle to “safely” test our perceptions and notions of our place in the world, we know we can walk out of the gallery at any point, where we feel uncomfortable. The seemingly unending act (we’re told) lasts for 40 minutes (we watch for 10). I get the feeling that nothing is going to happen in those 40 mins that we have not seen in 10 – perhaps this is a metaphor for the state of politics in the world – a sense of brinkmanship, North Korea VS the US, Iran with their nuclear weapons / energy and the US’s opposition to it – we seem to be in a state of flux – seemingly perpetual danger, but ultimately no resolve or peak. It is interesting to watch a work with no sound, no seeming direction, narratives and stories are conjured up when we engage with the work, imagined histories and lives are created in our minds, this is all derived from a contextual analysis of our visual inputs – uniforms + guns = oppressors, tatty clothes, unwashed, dishevelled faces = oppressed, or is it that we are looking at a group of terrorists being controlled by a brave and careful peace core? – this is where the openness of the work seems to leave that decision up to the viewer, it questions our perception of the visual, in a war / siege context, we base our assumptions on the histories and current affairs presented to us by the media. We assume a side, we can not be neutral when watching scenes of seeming imbalance