Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, Peterborough
5 September – 16 November
Reviewed by:
Mike Stubbs' Jump Jet is part of a strand of his work you might call 'horsepower art': noisy macho artworks in which the man-machine relationship takes centre-stage. Stubbs claims that when young he had "a fascination with power and speed" that has now turned into "an ambivalent attitude towards the masculine fetishisation of technology". In Jump Jet this ambivalence is played out in a series of contradictions.
The work consists of a large outdoor video projection of a hovering Harrier Jump Jet (a military aircraft that can take off and land vertically) and a gallery installation including a smaller scale version of the projection. The giant projection above a dual carriageway in Peterborough has an immateriality that belies the power and bulk of the aircraft. Its silent, poised presence, suspended in time and space contrasts with the noisy, puny vehicles that whiz along beneath.
Inside the gallery the installation contrasts the graceful image of the hovering aircraft; refined, balanced, implausibly weightless, with the deafening roar of its engine. The pervasive, almost painful noise isolates the members of the audience, making communication impossible. The noise evidently belongs with the image, but seems disconnected. Respite is offered by two pairs of headphones attached to a monitor in front of the projection that shows the artist in pilot costume, his mouth covered by breathing apparatus. But the headphones expose the listener to another kind of roar. Stubbs rants on the link between petrol and war, the oil guzzling greed of a technological society and the hi-tech war machines that maintain it. His monologue challenges the idealisation of the jet, but its aggression and frustration seem insubstantial in the face of the Harrier's awe-inspiring grace, and the adoration with which it is filmed.
Jump Jet conveys a sense of suspension between a feeling of impotence in the face of political and military 'realities' and an irrepressible fascination with the machines of war.
Writer detail:
Lizzie Muller is Digital Arts Programmer for the Junction in Cambridge.
Venue detail:
Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery
Priestgate, Peterborough PE1 1LF
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