Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Streetlevel, Glasgow
20 April – 3 June
Reviewed by: Janie Nicoll
Mark Neville is currently making waves as a result of a residency recently undertaken at Port Glasgow, where he spent a year documenting different aspects of life in this post-industrial west coast [of Scotland] town. Faced with the usual cultural dilemma of creating an artwork that was both valid and worthwhile, he produced a coffee-table-style hardback book of eighty documentary photographs. This publication was never intended to be for sale, instead the books were delivered free of charge to every household in the town, thereby redistributing his images back to the people involved in their creation. His artwork became an active subversion of the usual documentary approach to photography.
In this show Neville exhibits The Jump Films, made during the 1990s and shown for the first time in the UK. Three looped 16mm films show the artist jumping or falling in different locations, at different speeds and with ambiguous meanings. He has filmed these events with a high-speed camera usually used for scientific research, with the result that a few seconds of footage unfolds over several minutes, leaving us overwhelmed by the passage of time and the painterly effects of the medium.
The viewer is immediately hit by the physicality of the work: the projectors are very much part of the spectacle; their whirring, creaking and clanking reminds us of the reassuringly satisfying nature of cine-film. The scratches and blotches on the film signify the preciousness of the medium and its finite lifespan. We are made aware of how we have been seduced by the slickness of digital media, and the realisation that maybe we are missing something despite the progress of technology. Sometimes that slickness equates with an insidious dulling down, and maybe a rougher low-tech approach can throw up something a bit more raw, a bit more special.
These works aim to document a scientifically unquantifiable event, and also investigate the mythology of supposedly heroic male performance artists of the 1960s and 70s; in fact one of these films is the restaging of a 1970 performance by Dutch artist Bas Yan Ader. Like many of these early actions, Neville’s main concern was in “finding a voice to express a kind of repositioning of the body”. He is interested in the way early performance works are now only accessible through documentary photographs, and also in the way that artworks are disseminated and have influence over time: as certain works are rediscovered and re-contextualised, others might seem to be less seminal or influential.
The strength of this exhibition lies in not just the mesmerising and lyrical nature of the work and its presentation, but also that it combines these more serious undercurrents. For Neville, photography is crucial as a democratic mediator between event and audience. This down-to-earth approach to the distribution and availability of the artwork and its relation to the art world as well as to wider society is as important an issue within these earlier works as it is within the context of the Port Glasgow project.
Writer detail:
Janie Nicoll
www.axisweb.org/artist/janienicoll
Venue detail:
Street Level Photoworks
1st Floor, 48 King Street, Glasgow G1 5QT
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