artspace
Issue 3 | Jul 07
Claude Closky Love and Fear
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Text and images Š 2007 artists, writers and Horsecross Arts Ltd
ISSN 1755-0866 | Online
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artspace Threshold artspace launched in September 2005 in Perth, UK. It is home to Scotland’s only permanent collection of contemporary media art with 60 works acquired over 2 years. The artspace covers a number of project spaces available for artists’ interventions including an entrance box for interactive soundscapes; a ‘canvas’ of 22 flat screens dominating the artspace for multi-channel video art installations; an interactive playground for art games and live internet art; a trail of sound boxes and sensors embedded in the floor and ceiling; an audio visual treat in the public toilets; copper-clad roof for light artists. All Threshold artspace locations are linked together by ‘intelligent’ software which allows artworks to be displayed through curated exhibitions and experienced 24 hours a day throughout the year.
Horsecross is an independent arts agency delivering cultural, conference and community activity in Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. Located within the foyer of Perth Concert Hall Threshold artspace sits on the site of the original Horsecross, Perth’s 17th century horse market. The name is synonymous with bustling activity in the heart of the city. The development of the £19.5m Perth Concert Hall and Threshold artspace was a Millennium project and is part of the area’s economic development strategy to position Perth as one of Europe’s most vibrant small cities by 2010. Horsecross aims to put this part of central Scotland firmly on the cultural map both nationally and internationally.
artspace
Love, Lust and Fear Iliyana Nedkova
Do you want love or lust, asked Claude Closky in his work under the same title in 1997 and kept the answer suspended through a seemingly endless quasi-psychological quiz. Ten years later this haunting question resurfaces in his work Love and Fear (2007) with a new degree of intensity, absurdity and further satirical twist. The qualities, which persist are Closky’s ongoing affection for the primacy of the word in contemporary art, his site-considered approach to place, his tactical deployment of pseudo-random operations, and his disarming bravado when exposing controversies and dualities in life. Underlying it all, a marked ambivalence between two fields of recurring reference in Closky’s work – contemporaneity and art. The almost romantic, love-hate relationship, involving simultaneous or alternating emotions of love and enmity, is at the formal and contextual core of Love and Fear. The word, or rather the individual letter or number is often a fundamental ingredient of Closky’s visual grammar. In Love and Fear the artist marries media and meaning by employing an entire alphabet – each letter assigned one of twenty-two flat screens. Arranged in a row, side by side, the screens become the hosts for the letters. The multi-channel installation holds out the potential for varied cinematic scenarios, or important announcements. Swapping places and rolling over within each screen, the flickering letters remind us of the arrival and departure boards once prevalent in railway or airport terminals. With a slightly nostalgic air, Closky’s work appears native to the open architectural ‘concourse’ of Threshold artspace, carrying the semiotic authority and immediacy of public signage. Letters and words are signs. That is a truism to a semiotician, but their visual presence in Closky’s work makes them work as spatial indicators, marking the way. Arguably, text gives artists the opportunity to be more direct than they usually are with images. Likewise, in the brain of the viewer, the cognitive primacy is with the words. Love and Fear picks up on the subliminal and pervasive role of the road sign, by giving its viewers directions: ‘be alert’, ‘pay attention’, ‘do as you are told’, ‘go where you are directed’. Although none of these traffic control messages appear in writing in Closky’s work, the positioning of the alphabetical signs in the space primes the viewer for an imprint of an imperative mood. The rapid-fire edit of the letters verges on the iconography not only of the road sign but the fruit machine, too. Closky is hardly a novice to the culture of gaming and gambling, which underpins much of his oeuvre. From Going for the High Score (2000) and his Wish Card (2003) to Me 2 (2007), the artist has explored the fissures and banalities of games, often remixing and deconstructing iconic moments of popular culture. By substituting letters for the patterns of fruit symbols, Closky subverts the traditional appearance of slot machines. The artist points to the notion of displaced cultural energies as exemplified in Thomson and Craighead’s Trigger Happy (1998) – a remake of the earlier arcade game Space Invaders where the player ‘shoots down’ a philosophical text by Michael Foucault letter by letter, word by word.
With a cinematic zest for suspense Closky carefully choreographs the moment when the cascading screens of Love and Fear would stop and the alphabetical roller coaster -metamorphose. This is the climax in the build-up of our expectations for a reward, albeit not of the kind that constitutes the average casino win. The artist brings the frenzy to a halt with an abrupt move towards a freeze frame and silence. Paradoxically, at this point the viewer becomes a listener. The sound of silence makes for a retrospective awareness of the ambient audio, which accompanies the first part of Love and Fear. The non-discernible roar of a crowd, reminiscent of an exhibition preview night or a public gathering, echoes the rather frantic visuality and ‘quiet’ bombardment of letters. It also fills in the aural environment of the large and airy Threshold artspace, amplifying what appears to be intrinsic background noise generated by the visitors’ own voices and movements. What accounts for the ‘invisibility’ of Love and Fear’s sound is also the fact that when ‘on’, it is being transmitted from the underbelly of the building by under floor speakers, allowing for a visceral, corporeal effect on the listener.
ISSN 1755-0866 | Online
Love, Lust and Fear Iliyana Nedkova
The mute mode of Closky’s work signals a sly turn of the synchronised multi-channel video ‘plot’ – the long awaited reward is delivered in the form of unusual juxtaposition of words related to the promise from the title Love and Fear. In a style evoking his earlier works Laugh/Emotion (2001) or After/Before: Action (2002) the artist pairs polarities, and binds binaries together, but this time to construct a new language of neologisms. Love is denoted through new coinages that end on the ancient Greek suffix –philia, while fear is summoned in its extreme relation of –phobia. This pessimistic shift to the dark side of the abnormal and traumatic, dangerous and obsessive is symptomatic of the human condition, and the thin red line where love becomes fear becomes love. The artist’s deliberate choice of a pair of powerful emotions unleashes a subconscious stream of subliminal, and often unexpected connotations: from iphilia followed by aphobia and umophilia, ewayphobia and sephilia, pipiphilia and ozziphobia. The minimalist red and white colour scheme that informs the background and the typography, alongside with the on/off site-specific sound, becomes the audiovisual metonymy of the love-fear relationship of Closky’s artwork. As seen in his previous works and in particular, In and Out (2002-03), colour is used as a signifier for a stripped down aesthetics akin to the post-minimalist visual poetry of other artists’ works such as Alec Finlay’s Mesostic Herbarium (2004); the monochrome story-telling of YOUNG HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site (2000) or the abstracted time-telling of Olle Essvik’s Sun Clock (2006). Closky’s Love and Fear also evokes parallels with the Russian avant-garde, and in particular El Lissitzky’s signature employment of reds, whites and words such as the newly invented proun as a symbol of a new world in his abstract series Prounen (1919). Whereas El Lissitzky’s visual and verbal code often alludes to the propaganda slogans and (anti-)revolutionary agenda of the Russian Civil War early last century (1), it could be argued that Closky’s Love and Fear inadvertently comments on the global ‘war on terror’ waged during the current era. Gone are the explicit belligerent slogans in favour of a more nuanced cluster of public messages expressed in the languages of the world. Taking his colour cue from El Lissitzky, Closky creates a monumental Babylonian tower of philias and phobias where language is simultaneously constructed and deconstructed, like the double-speak of George Orwell’s 1984.
artspace
Love, Lust and Fear Iliyana Nedkova
The public pronouncement of Love and Fear corresponds to the open public hall of the artspace where multiple philia and phobia combinations populate the wave of screens and resonate with the diverse functions of the artspace facilities and architecture. This triple multiplicity justifies Closky’s engagement with the genre of the multi-channel video installation. Recognised as a distinctive area of video art that differentiates itself clearly from either film or broadcast television, multi-channel video is fuelled by the self-sufficiency of the monitor, which can be installed in any quantity and disposition to articulate the viewing space in an infinite variety of ways. (2) Closky’s 22-channel work Love and Fear thus stems from an artistic tradition, which cites increasingly elaborate, large-scale installations, including Nam June Paik’s 400-channel Video Tricolor (1982). It also references Closky’s own 16-channel video installation Manège (2006) where the screens are spaced out at eye level on all four walls of a white cube. Many parallels exist with Closky’s other multi-channel installations, including the way the artist exploits the audio visual rhythm, and ostensibly inexhaustible imagery to orchestrate the viewers’ movement: controlling movement through the space. Considerable in number, the images or the words in both Manège and Love and Fear appear to play ad infinitum, without resorting to the ubiquitous loop of the video art installation. Generated with the aid of a computer yet filtered ‘by hand’ by the artist, the prefixes attached to either –philia and –phobia come in various linguistic guises, make a brief appearance and leave a trace of familiarity. Similar to his works Television (2002) and Revolution (2006) Closky trades in the relentless repetition of the looped moving image to generate art. With pre-set rules of randomness, Closky’s works aspire not to never playback in the same way twice, to dismiss the aura of the artist and highlight the process rather than the object of art. Most of Closky’s artworks, including Love and Fear, thus parody the common belief that video art is repetitive rather than generative, but only up to a point. If unravelled, Love and Fear will eventually repeat its sequence, except that will take approximately 1,000 words and 10 hours to complete – perhaps a nod to what professional gamblers would refer to as ‘pseudorandom number generators’ used to build the slot machine. If one spends the time, one would be able to crack this pseudo code, or find the ‘elusive moment when the work folded back into itself, where images became duplicated or overlapped’ (3)
Time, thus, emerges as the other essential component of Closky’s vocabulary. Chronological progress tends to be accompanied by repetition. If in Manège the artist uses countless different images and jingles, it is the clockwork cycle of those that accounts for the sense of imperceptible time or timelessness. In Love and Fear, Closky induces the temporal rhythm through an almost identical course of re-shuffling letters and coining new words, which unfolds over and over again. The artist assigns pre-determined time values to each letter or word, balancing them on the edge of average reading/looking comprehension. The velocity of the viewer’s gaze may be part of Closky’s ‘theatrical’ apparatus, which also includes the time–space relationship. The artist plays havoc with our initial expectation of being at a road junction, waiting for some travel instructions. He upsets the order of visual and verbal connections to transform the chronotope of our perception – Threshold artspace becomes a waiting lounge operating a timetable of human emotions. The relentless schedule of arrivals and departures of people’s philias and phobias amounts to the introduction of Closky’s new language. This is a process marked by the artist’s typical destabilisation of meanings and ‘babelisation’ of signs. This is a reassurance that ‘art reconfigures and releases systems and languages, replaces them in the problematic status of the living. Reading or looking do not always give us access to messages but take us to new capacities of articulating the visible, minute shifts away from and towards significations’. (4)
ISSN 1755-0866 | Online
artspace Notes (1) See El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) (2) Mick Harney (1983) Landscape/ video art: Some Tentative Rules and Exceptions, In The Undercut Reader. Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video, Eds. N. Danino & M. Maziere, Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2003, p. 258. (3) David Platzker (2003) Blah, Blah, Blah In Claude Closky Hello and Welcome, Domaine de Kergue hennec, Centre d’art contemporain le Parvis, p. 135 (4) Marie Murracciole (2007) Untitled. The paintings of Claude Closky. In 20/27 Revue de texte critiques sur l’Art n 1, M19 and Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, p. 31
Claude Closky’s work Love and Fear has been produced by Horsecross and supported by The Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation The Scottish Arts Council 55degrees
ISSN 1755-0866 | Online