Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Tramway, Glasgow
13 January – 5 February
Reviewed by: Ross Birrell
Like the best of Doherty’s work, Eternal Rotation is structured around anticipation. In a previous work, Waiting to Fall, Doherty filled himself with whisky and sleeping pills, donned a white crash helmet and recorded himself attempting to stand upright for as long as possible in an empty studio. In one of the funniest video works around, we watch as Doherty sways, stumbles, regains his balance, sways some more and eventually comes crashing to the floor, a plastered cosmonaut of inner space. Eternal Rotation is equally funny but the victim of Doherty’s humour this time is an oblivious goldfish precariously balanced in its glass bowl on the edge of a washing machine going through its cycle.
As the washing machine churns mundanely and indifferently through its apparently endless cycle, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Arendt come to mind. But it is a decidedly medieval world-view that prevails: Boethius’ wheel of fortune ruling all. But there is no consolation of philosophy in Doherty’s universe, only the cosmic vanity of attempts by humans to control their worthless fate through the ‘appliance of science’. But perhaps there is something profound after all in Doherty’s ludic and existential blood sport.
As the machine builds relentlessly towards its inevitable final spin with the pre-ordained result that bowl, water and fish will fall to the floor, we come close to Heidegger’s claim in ‘Being and Time’ that the fundamental existential experience of Dasein is ‘anticipation’, or more precisely, the anticipation of death. Is Eternal Rotation an image of a Heideggerian being-towards-death? Needless to say, the fish falls as machine completes its orgasmic spin, indifferent to the uncertain fate of its victim. As Eternal Rotation demonstrates, when Doherty is on target he is infinitely rewarding.
Writer detail:
Ross Birrell
Venue detail:
Tramway
25 Albert Drive, GLASGOW G41 2PE
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