Reviewed: I'm a Success, Gallery of Photography until Oct 28th
Tables of Power, Jacqueline Hassink, Gallery of Photography until Oct 28th Tel: 01-6714654
Falling in Love with Heavy Things, Tim Maul, Project Arts Centre until Oct 27th. Tel: 01-6796622
In Liam O'Callaghan's photographic project, I'm a Success, at the Gallery of Photography, 100 people "of various ages, backgrounds and occupations" were asked to take three photographs that show why they feel they are a success. It's interesting that O'Callaghan nominated the idea of success rather than, say, happiness or contentment. The way it works out there is some overlap. What emerges strongly is the variety of means of treating the idea of success in ways other than the obvious, materialistic ones - ones that are constantly pushed in the context of economic buoyancy, incitements to get rich quick and rampant consumerism.
In this respect it is a hugely encouraging, thought-provoking exhibition, unexpected in revealing what people actually prioritise in their lives, as opposed to the notional aspirations enshrined in popular cultural forms. Family, friends and home emerge as being enormously important. So is work, particularly when it is also life, as for Jim, a farmer, who trains border collies, Patricia, a weaver and gardener, and rug-maker Catherina. But most of the participants seem to approach life with great warmth, generosity and enthusiasm.
Almost every set of images, together with the usually terse captions, offer an intriguing glimpse into someone's world. You are likely to find yourself speculating, filling in blanks, puzzling out relationships, wondering about pasts and futures, because for the most part the snippets we get produce more questions than answers. Perhaps it is a format that could be adapted to produce a documentary. As it is, it provides an engrossing and illuminating cross-section of contemporary Irish life.
Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink's Tables of Power grew out of a project undertaken in 1993, when she set out to "map our modern society by photographing tables in the city of Oslo". This is not as eccentric as it might sound. The table, with its myriad functions and contexts, is a symbolically charged object. She devised four categories of table to document: "the table of power, the table of family, the table of justice and the table of heaven." She found the first category the "most fascinating", and subsequently came up with the idea of photographing tables that represented the most significant form of power in modern society: economic power in the global market.
She drew up a list of the top 40 multinationals in Europe, focusing on industrial companies and excluding banks and insurance corporations, and phoned and wrote asking if she could photograph their boardroom tables. Twenty-one companies allowed her into their boardrooms with camera and tripod, the rest declined for a variety of reasons. In a way the most surprising thing here is the 50 per cent-plus level of co-operation, given the slightly puzzling nature of the request and the focus on security.
Less surprisingly, nearly 50 per cent of the original 40 companies are based in Germany, and we see into the boardrooms of Daimler Benz AG, Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG and BMW AG, but not BASF, Hoechst or Bosch. Hassink accompanies each image with an informative caption, detailing the company, its activities, relevant facts about the table and whether she was offered coffee or not. She was offered no coffee at BMW but, she adds enthusiastically, got a super lunch in the staff canteen.
Besides being exhibited in the gallery, all of this material is marshalled into a small, beautifully produced book, The Table of Power, which is likely to be extremely useful to designers of boardrooms.
The show confirms what one suspects, that corporate spaces, despite the often conspicuous levels of expenditure that go into their construction, are generally not that comfortable.
It is clear that the boardroom table, though, retains some of the mythic, special status that attached to Arthur's Round Table at Camelot. Hassink's is a slightly surreal taxonomic project of questionable usefulness, but it is for some reason fascinating.
Certain films and filmmakers have had an impact on visual art apparently out of all proportion to their concerns and intentions. Notable here are Andrey Tarkovsky, whose extraordinary vision has influenced sculptural installation, video and much more. Michelangelo Antonioni has also been an important figure for visual artists. Several of his films have made a significant impact in a variety of areas, but even so, his 1966 film Blow-Up, inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar, and transposed to Swinging London, is exceptional. You could say that the film, keyed to a precise stylistic moment, has dated, but it stands as a remarkable work.
Several sequences have an almost mythic status, among them a discussion on abstract painting between Thomas, the cynical photograph protagonist and his painter neighbour, and Thomas's attempts to discover whether he has inadvertently photographed a murder by successively isolating and blowing up details of an apparently innocuous roll of negatives. Tim Maul's Falling Love with Heavy Things, in the form of a video projection at the Project Arts Centre, is a kind of extended meditation on Blow-Up.
Actually it aspires to be a little more than that - a piece of cyber art that spring-boards from the film to somewhere else entirely. As he puts it "I want to make a work about the mechanics of looking/reading where you can enter/exit at anytime." Not coincidentally, Blow-Up is a great work about "looking/reading" and Falling . . ., while it is an agreeable, diverting, engaging footnote to Antonioni, does wander on a bit and is to cyber art what Blow-up is to cinema. Antonioni does something extraordinary in that he maintains a tension of genuine discovery throughout the film.
