Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
The Touchstones, Rochdale
23 October – 5 December
Reviewed by: Brendan Fletcher
Earlier this year, the Government issued a booklet to each and every household in the UK, Preparing for Emergencies. The design of the booklet, drawing upon the iconographic and social power of information graphics, inscribed in the public consciousness the potential threat of a terrorist attack as a clear and present danger. It is into this arena that artist Alan Birch steps. Birch extends the parameters of the debate to include a multitude of real and imagined threats, the fear of which is sustained by government agency, tabloid headlines, urban myth, and moral panic.
In Safety Instructions for the Modern World, Birch lampoons a genre – already on the verge of self-parody – in a series of images warning of the dangers of unattended luggage, street robbery and Rohypnol-spiked drinks. One telling image features a woman incarcerated in her own home, twitching at the curtains, a prisoner to her imagination. In Moby Dick, Birch draws upon Melville’s epic novel and presents Captain Ahab’s leviathan as a huge laser-cut stencil in steel. The whale contains rebus icons representing a range of fears: criminal gangs, asteroid impact, Christian fundamentalism, nuclear energy, BSE, MRSA, et al. Ahab’s leviathan becomes our enslaver too.
Fear of a different order sees Birch rail at the war in Iraq in an ambitious series of etchings, after Goya, which includes an appropriation of the now notorious image of the mock execution of an Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison. The image appears again, more contentiously, in a digital photograph, as a scenario played out by a child’s action figures. Elsewhere, Birch’s takes a broad-brush approach to contemporary ills: celebrity culture, football, the BSE crisis. It becomes clear that Birch’s target is not simply the climate of fear, but our loss of faith, in politicians, in scientists, in our sporting heroes, indeed a loss of faith in the shared values that help a society achieve cohesion, free from fear.
Writer detail:
Brendan Fletcher is an artist and lecturer.
brendanfletcher@btinternet.com |
Venue detail:
Touchstones
Arts & Heritage Centre, The Esplanade, ROCHDALE OL16 1AQ
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top