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Chapter 8 - Treacherous Images and Animal Gazes: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's Reports to an Academy, 2015
- Edited by James O'Sullivan
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- Book:
- Digital Art in Ireland
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 23 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 February 2021, pp 121-134
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Summary
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's multiscreen installation, Reports to an Academy, 2015, is a sequence of four video works shown across three of a room's four walls. The work was first shown at Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and was originally projected large-scale onto the walls of the darkened gallery space. The installation is composed of four scenes – the shelves of an academic library, a stonewall shot on Inis Oírr, vitrines containing stuffed animals from Dublin's natural history museum, and the white walls of a studio space. (Figure 8.1). These four scenes become cross-sections of a drowned world. In each scene water has risen up to a similar horizon line that reflects the space at the top of the image into the space below. Human life appears to have vacated these visions of a beautiful apocalypse composed of gently rippling water and slow-moving clouds that dreamily float through interior spaces.
Although her work is lens-based, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's practice has a painterly quality which is untypical of much film/video work. This observation may be attributed to the fact that Ní Bhriain utilises computer-generated imagery and techniques of post-production in order to create hallucinatory spaces that are connected to, but distinct from the real spaces in which the work is shot. This painterly quality is heightened as Ní Bhriain often records stillness in her moving images, as she does in Reports to an Academy, so that the unfolding of time which gives rise to narrative is usurped by a stress on the formal qualities of an image. Ní Bhriain's work also overtly references painterly traditions. Her precise compositions and considered use of colour ensures that attention remains focused on the fact that the videos work, first and foremost, as images. The videos that make up Reports to an Academy announce their status as representations of reality that work against the implied transparency of the medium of film/video. Considering the traditions and conventions of painting with which Ní Bhriain is engaged, this chapter asks if there is something inherent in the medium of the digital image that influences our reading of the work.
7 - A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance; Tacita Dean’s Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)
- Edited by Laura Rascaroli, Jill Murphy
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- Book:
- Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 08 October 2020, pp 157-172
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Summary
Abstract
Tacita Dean's Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002, signals towards the changing nature of artists’ mediums in an age of digital ascendancy. Marcel Broodthaers is a key figure for a younger generation of artists who are registering the shift from analogue mediums to digital ones. Despite the presence of an affiliation between analogue film and chance in numerous projects by Broodthaers, it has gone unnoticed in much of the discourse that surrounds his work. When we view Broodthaers cinema through the lens of Tacita Dean's film, an openness to chance and contingency emerges as the most promising, and most threatened specificity of analogue film.
Keywords: Chance; Tacita Dean; Marcel Broodthaers; film; analogue; Cinema
The title of this chapter references Marcel Broodthaers's Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1969), which pays homage to Stéphane Mallarmé's 1887 poem of the same name about a shipwreck. Tacita Dean's Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002) also centres on the motif of a shipwreck that is connected to the workings of chance. Her homage to Broodthaers takes the form of a thirteen-minute, 16mm colour film depicting the basement that once housed Marcel Broodthaers's Section Cinéma (1971–1972). This was one of twelve sections of his fictive museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne, which ran from 1968 to 1972 in various locations. Occupying and registering a significant moment of technological transition, Tacita Dean's homage is also a lament on the changing nature of artist film in an age of digital ascendancy.
Throughout her oeuvre, Dean consistently connects the workings of chance with the indexical specificity of film, and this is also the prevailing concern of Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers). This film is almost documentary in style, as Dean appears to be surveying the basement in the aftermath of an event. The space is now a storeroom for the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf; however, many traces of its previous function remain. Dean's camera stalks the space, taking in wide views of the rooms, one of which is now filled with piles of stacked-up chairs (Figure 22). Her film emphasizes the haunted nature of the place by zooming in on these objects, and by lingering on the stencils painted by Broodthaers, which remain on the walls.