Curated by the artist Mary Morgan, the exhibition as a whole induced an aesthetic experience by the chosen rhythmical display. I read a wall like a sheet music – imagined intonating it in a- minor after repeating five times the same note first. Lodovico Einaudi – could have composed it.
At the end of the public space – a derivation from iconostas. Five images, five fingers on one hand, five senses, five continents… a chance like similarities.
The battery of the five medium size images on the left from the door had their superiority undermined twice: Morgan selected anti-heroic images, laced by strangeness of what happens to the performer’s head: a red suitcase, green branches, umbrellas, various garments increase the comic, theatrical character of the adopted persona. The definition of the action by a frame is both sufficient and insufficient. Sufficient to evoke the concept and its tonality, insufficient to capture the meaning forged by the duration, action, move, changes, negotiation of space, rhythm, responsiveness to others or other objects. The display made the single shots from different performances in different places into a kind of polyptych, whose rich history could still teach contemporary art about correlations and our feeble power to discover the power that binds non related events together. Morgan risks variations of conjunctions in hope that we shall move “beyond the evidence of memory and senses.” (David Hume, 18th C) .
Morgan made improbable coincidences valid because they share a common cause – i.e. performance art. The five images do not deliver all the data required for unequivocal answer who is it, what does it mean, and what is the history behind it. Only that they are views taken by Jordan Hutchings – without any other consciously formulated intention. Yet, in Morgan’s display, their visual force (of the images, not of the whole performances) take over. Almost in agreement with Umberto Eco:
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Read image where he has text.
It is the photographer’s decision that uproots an image from its birthplace – as would a fleeting attention of a passerby. Jordan Hutchings is superbly attentive observer of group performances – labouring not under a necessary illusion that performance art can be documented. He seems to lightly, nonchalantly, catch some into his camera. I vouch for him – he is good. I have worked with him in relation to some of my older essays . Most admirably he avoids pretense and lies – so easily forged by digital manipulations. He does not avoid fatigue from sameness of some performances that fail to offer generous number of “target images” (my term). The five images above are strong “target images” – for ability to stand both for a performer’s intention and for their independence from it, ie outside the flow of the action. Morgan chose carefully – from almost accidental shots – those that appear carefully composed.
In mathematics you can map one into many – one into one, many into one, and many into many.
What is needed to do any of these mappings is to have related data lines. This exhibition makes use of all. Each image is one of many absent views of the performing person. It cannot exactly repeat any other, thus holding on to its aura of originality. Each image also contains similarities to the ones before and after it was taken. There is a causal link, perhaps deformed by a sudden thought to deny the effect. That we shall not know.
To map many into many is beyond the range of this lens based practice. A moving image is more appropriate.
The above simply supports the doubt that a performance may be, can be documented by any number of target images. The still image undermines the lens’s capacity to document a performance,the durational performance in particular. All we have are approximation to fragments of viewing experience. Jordan Hutchings often makes these fragments worthwhile. Sometimes, he told me, it happens by chance. He does not know what will happen, when it will happen, and what will be the best viewing point. He is like a hunter gatherer – using his senses to observe, recognise and respond. It is his visual sensitivity that selects what he responds to. He is a painter, after all.
Hutchings is quoted on the gallery handout:
I won’t be the one to tell you what performance is. I can only tell you what I do. I take pictures of people doing things.
It matters that he does not claim to document performances. Even if, for the past six years he followed to performance group Bbeyond everywhere they went for their regular Performance Monthly and more. Hutchings is an artist in his own right, a quality Mary Morgan included in her curatorial concept. The whole exhibition exuded dionysiac intoxication with framing the real. With breaking one part off the whole and resurrect it as a new whole. Morgan has not shied away from humorous coincidences, e.g. two bottles of milk echoing two blue stilettos, in images taken two years apart.
The display reminds me of W. Kandinsky comparing a peasant’s room to a painting. I felt like walking into a painting .
The black frame uncannily resonates with a memory of a TV screen – Hutchings made the light translucent in a nod to the verism.
As a punctum of the whole display, on the way out, Morgan placed the largest image.
Like a coda in music – this is the end. Do not trespass.
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The images courtesy Jordan Hutchings.
Project developed by BIFPA 15 and funded by Cultural Development at University of Ulster. Special thanks to Brian Connolly to enable this exhibition to happen.
Dear Slavka,
I have been reading your posts for a while and really enjoyed your writing. I am interested in meeting to discuss a proposed exhibition/ exhibitions and local artists( Northern Ireland) can you get in touch ? I would be very happy to meet you in Belfast,
Warm Regards
Katie
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Thank you, I have seen it only now – will email you soon. Slavka
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I emailed you on lindsaykatie1@gmail.com – it cannot be delivered it claims the address is not found. I suggested that you connect to my FB page, please.
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