Blog by Irish Fine Artist Eamonn B. Shanahan, BA Fine Art graduate of Crawford College of Art & Design. Currently undergoing MA in Creative Producing at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London.
Exhibition installation featuring the work or Cenline Condorelii at Dublin City Centre's Project Arts Centre.
The artist uses the space effectively. There is a very natural atmosphere. Going through the piece the sounds are created both naturally from the fan on the foil patrician and the recorded natural sounds that are amplified through a collection of large speakers. There is a very intimate feeling that you get going through the piece. Its representation of a stormy night creates an eary and un-secure feeling. It is very performative in ways, you find yourself immersed in the piece and have a need to stay but an uneasiness is certainly present.
It is very structural. It begins with a high chair that initially looked like an adult version of a babies high chair but in the latter of the experience you realise it could be the plinth of a life guard. You are guided through the effective lighting that symbolises a dusky feeling pass the 'space sheet' moved by a fan and lit from a free standing light. The bank of speakers are in the peripheral vision.
After meeting the Artistic Director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre - John Scott last week, I have found myself thinking about a performers involvement within my work. Currently the work features an endorsement of acting and contemporary dance. Scott states that a contemporary dance artist involve their entire self into their performance. It is an expressive art form that immerses all elements of the body and its interaction between the space, music and others. Scott believes that with this type of artistry acting is forbidden. The performance is to be expressive response to the music and concept. It endeavours the pain, suffering, love, friendship or otherwise relative emotive reposes that are to be conceptualised by the artist.
The question is however, is this correct? The use of acting within a performance extends and elaborates the concept. It gives feed to the voyeur, hooking them further into the performance allowing it to become more approachable. Especially when you are trying to create a stark contrast between reality and the subconscious, something that can be so close in interpretation can have the need to be more distinguishable.
‘…the function of film, like that of other art forms, was to create experience…It is an organization of ideas in an anagrammatic complex instead of in the linear logic to which we are accustomed…Whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact.’
Screen Dance as described by the fundamentalist of the movement, Maya Deren, allows, through the mechanics and manipulation of the lens and abstract observation into the collaboration of fine art practices including yet not limiting that of Music, Dance, Art and Film. In most cases Screen Dance removes the chronological narrative that features in many typical commercial movies. The adaptation of the camera as the language driver allows classical art forms and their derived contemporaries to become stronger as a unified art form allowing endless opportunities for the artist to evolve their concept and a greater individualized interpretation from the voyeur.
Composers, Artists and Choreographers have montaged together to create what cannot be conceived in a live performance or to stretch and condense a multi-media form. It is therefore not a necessity for the artist themselves to have the necessary skills in each area of the necessary disciplines can be employed. For example Deren herself, was not a choreographer, her influences in dance come from her assistance to Katherine Dunham, it was her interest in Dance and it’s technique that triggered her need to use it as a language for her ideas.
“Imagine an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eyes? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the beginning was the world.”
