Further Fictions

Although the two exhibitions were presented within a collaborative format – 'a joint yet evolving narrative space for their individual practices' – Norman’s exhibition was clearly conceived outside this dynamic, and for this reason I’ll address it separately, first.

2011 witnessed a spate of sweeping revolutions in North Africa that were crucially aided and disseminated through social media platforms that challenged and undermined official media control at critical points. What these platforms enabled, beyond simple communication, was the liberating capacity of the individual to expose and counter oppression, whether political or technological, by telling a different story: not one story, but many stories told from different viewpoints, revised, repeated and reinterpreted through text, photo, video and soundbite. The outcome was a breakdown in the official narrative and its attendant (political) hierarchies.

'Further Fictions' is, on the one hand, a meditation on this kind of breakdown, focussing on the narrative of war and conflict as it has been explored in film. However, it also offered a reappraisal of the medium of print in relation to its progressively more advanced digital successors, and interrogated the way in which technological space is mediated as a means of opening up space for personal experience.

The exhibition is predominantly comprised of a series of large woodcut and monotype prints, together with a wall installation of replicated images accompanied by a soundtrack of chirping crickets, and a video piece (a later, collaborative addition). The prints, uniform in size, directly reference the screen with identical images flickering backwards and forwards between the different works. The two films referenced are Francis Ford Coppola Apocalypse Now (1979) and Peter Brookes’ 1963 black and white adaptation of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954); I only recognised the former. Although it is not critical that you identify the sources, I would argue that it is really helpful if you can. Both these films deal with the breakdown of substantiating narratives, the moment when, according to the artist, the 'mediation' of the military (in Apocalypse Now) and society (in Lord of the Flies) is 'revealed'. Mediation refers to normative behavioral constructs.

Nevertheless, the snapshots of found footage that Norman employs, along with the imaginative disjuncture created by the soundtrack, are sufficiently evocative to be read in their own right. Some are easy to make out – a gun tower, grass, palms, jungle, a small boy looking back at the viewer, the fan – others less so. Printed in different combinations, with colours revised, repeated and layered to both construct and disturb the image, the outcome disrupts any sense of sequential narrative. Unlike film and television, technologically advanced mediums in which a reliance on repetition is often hidden, print retains repetition as an intrinsic and often visible element of its production process. This is made even more apparent in the wall installation, Lacan’s Mirror, which shows Marlon Brando’s half-concealed face stacked and mirrored. Repetition thus functions as a thematic as well as a structuring device throughout the exhibition. 

'Print', says Norman, 'is a technological medium that spawned a conception of making images that enabled the development of photography and later cinema. It is a line of thought, I would argue, that is defined to a large extent by its ability to reproduce itself "indefinitely"'. The construct of the edition, she adds, is central to print-making’s development as a fine art medium. 'In the current era of digital reproducibility, the idea of the "limited reproduction" seems incongruous in the light of endless streams of posting and reposting images on tumblr, blogs or even billboards, busses and magazines. The repeated image in this context seems to be a means of speeding up or reiterating something in an attempt to move forward in a capitalist sense of "progression"'. According to Norman, she uses the idea of repetition in her work to both slow down contemplation and isolate the frame as a moment in time.

Contemplation is provisionally the subject of Robyn Nesbitt’s 'Damn your eyes, damn your eyes', the title drawn from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). The exhibition arose out of the email and postal correspondence between the two artists – details available for visitors to read – and included a video piece showing a long static shot of a tree shifting in the breeze and a collection of small sketchy accompanying drawings and watercolours. These abstract excerpts remained inconclusive in their attempt to depict 'an imagined space in relation to the illusion of time', as explained in the exhibition text, despite the admitted infancy of the project. This was perhaps more apparent in relation to the complexity and finish of Norman’s offering, with the exception of the additional video work – a static shot of small swimming jellyfish – which seemed to operate in a similar exploratory register. Nesbitt’s previous participatory endeavors with Nina Barnett are evidence that collaborations can be enormously productive, but in this instance I was not convinced that the artists quite managed to achieve the constructive synthesis intended.