Visual Arts: Reviewed Artificially Reconstructed Habitats, Finola Jones, Temple Bar Gallery until June 4, 01-6710073
Finola Jones's exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery is unruly and cacophonous. For the show, the gallery's extensive glass street frontage has been given an opaque covering. Step inside the big glass door, out of the sound and fury of Temple Bar at the beginning of another frenetic summer season, and you could be forgiven for thinking that you have, through some spatial trickery, actually emerged into something remarkably similar.
In Artificially Reconstructed Habitats, Jones has organised a concerted assault on our senses. We are greeted by a tremendous jumble of TV monitors (more then 20) and large-scale projections noisily relaying a bewildering variety of everyday documentary imagery. Elephants in a zoo, a man in a pool, fake centurions in present-day Rome, a little dog lying on its back - sleeping, dead? - a white-hatted policeman conducting the symphony of a city's massed traffic.
Monitors are stacked and distributed throughout the gallery as though randomly, each repeating looped vignettes. Their soundtracks overlap, merge, cancel each other out, and they are dominated by one in particular, which sounds like the deafening blast of rush hour traffic in a busy city centre.
The experience is not unlike that of landing in the centre of a strange city. You have to work your way around, backwards and forwards, to try to get your bearings. It becomes apparent that animals in zoos play a pivotal role in Jones's scheme.
Logically so, since zoos are indeed artificially reconstructed habitats. There are plenty on view. Some have featured in the artist's earlier shows, and now the consistency of her interest becomes fully apparent. In fact, she's quoted in the catalogue as describing her interest as a "serial obsession".
It's hard to avoid the feeling that she regards the elephants, giraffes and other animals in her videos with real affection, rather than merely viewing them as material. To judge by the proportion of attention lavished on them, she seems particularly partial to elephants. It's not that there are narrative or other contrivances to suggest any such thing, but in the patient attentiveness of her video recordings, there is a sympathetic responsiveness to the rhythms of the animals' routine rather than, say, a selfish imperative to get a shot and move on. Perhaps as a result, we gain a real sense of the animals as bodies, as physical beings, and as characters.
Jones is certainly observant, as in the curious case of the dog in the railway station. The video of the sleeping dog, concisely titled Dog, featured in a solo outing in the Return gallery at the Goethe Institut last year. Against the bustle of a busy public space - conveyed aurally - the diminutive dog has learned to make its own, personal space.
The predicament of Jones's animals, confined to miniature, parodic facsimiles of their natural habitats, and often, as a result, afflicted with obsessive-compulsive behaviour patterns, can be read as a metaphor for the lives of humans. When she says that her subject matter includes animals in willing and unwilling confinement, we can take it that the humans tend towards the willing end of the spectrum.
For the most part we live in huge conglomerations of boxes and are easily diverted. We generally presume a certain level of free will in all of this. But the extent of our presumed freedom is hedged by any number of factors and may well be, depending on your philosophical slant, entirely illusory.
Here, popular culture in the form of reality television shows fits very snugly into Jones's overall project. She uses a couple of clips from digital channel E4, including a sunny sequence of a man wading in a small swimming pool that equates with several views of animals swimming in captivity. There is a curiously enervated, purposeless quality to his progress around the pool.
And Big Brother and its myriad relations are kinds of human zoo. Though we are indisputably animals, we like to feel we are fundamentally different from other animals on various theoretical grounds. Perhaps some of the critical anxiety about our appetite for reality television relates to the fact that the genre tends to undermine our claim to enhanced status.
The spectacle of the human zoo isn't that different from other zoos, though admittedly the animals we see in Jones's videos tend to disport themselves with more dignity and forbearance than inmates and audience in some of the human counterparts.
This isn't to disparage reality TV, incidentally, or bemoan cultural dumbing down. You could say that Jones's anthropological gaze merely takes in what is going on and reflects on its significance.
When we see actors dressed as Roman centurions, or soldiers in ceremonial uniforms playing a role for tourists, we gather that their plight is in some respects being compared to that of the zoo animals. But are the tourists themselves, going through the predetermined motions, any better off, any freer? Trapped on his podium, the traffic policeman controls the ebb and flow of humans with unchallenged authority. They are all in the same cage.
Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novel, Never Let Me Go, uses the idea of cloning as an allegory of life in general, intimating that there are shocking limits that apply to our notion of free will.
In a similar vein, the conclusion of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris sees the main protagonist willingly embrace a reality that he knows to be a fiction, settling for a theme-park version of his familiar world rather than deal with the fact of irredeemable loss.
Jones doesn't shy away from the fact that such implications are attendant on the composite picture she creates. At the same time, there is also something distinctly optimistic and relaxed about her view of things. Dog, for example, seems to have things down to a tee.
