- Venue
- Motorcade/FlashParade
- Location
- South West England
Between times —-
Artist Katie Davies’ work deals with the fine lines that exist between different cultural spheres, whether public and private, formal and informal, local and central, or national and international. Through video and photography, Davies explores the subtle ebb and flow of human interaction that occurs when different cultures rub up against each other, and exposes how these boundaries are governed by culturally embedded modes of behaviour, whether conscious or unconscious, forming performative blocks of time, the start and end of which can be visibly traced in the structures of her work.
The Separation Line 2008 – which did not form part of this recent exhibition, but was screened before the opening and the subject of a discussion between artists – contained themes similar to that of the exhibited pieces and provided insights into Davies’ work generally. This video opened with a collage of panning shots of members of the public lining a street in a small town. It wasn’t immediately clear what the event was, since the focus of the video at this point was the expressions, gestures, movements, physical idiosyncrasies and identities of the crowd gathered at the pavement edge – old, young, male, female, civilian, military; attentive, restless or shifting from foot to foot. The purpose of the event was kept from the viewer at least initially, as attention was focussed on the behaviour of the bystanders. A cavalcade of cars passed, mostly unseen by the camera but it became clear that the event was a funeral, probably a military one. A church bell began to toll, the shuffling stopped and the formality of a three-minute silence was observed amongst the crowd, broken only by the comic yawning of a dog or an unintentional cough. At the end of the three-minute duration there was a visible relaxation amongst the assembled crowd and sense of relief amongst the people watching the video as less governed behaviour was resumed. What is very evident from Davies’ work is that she is able to negotiate her way around these ambivalent areas with sensitivity, dealing with potentially tricky subject matter through the subtlety of the editing and, in the process, revealing the intricacies of human behaviour without treading on the nerve ends of the people who have agreed to participate. This sense of diplomacy must have been useful when Davies visited a demilitarised zone between North and South Korean borders to make her film 38th Parallel (2008), where military ritual is essential in order to maintain a peaceful area between national boundaries. In conversation, Davies’ has described the rituals that take place in this region as a ‘collective buy-in’ by both sides, essential in order to maintain a formal veneer of order and stability in a potentially volatile area where opposing political ideologies could clash despite a common cultural heritage. Artist and fine art lecturer Emma Cocker has written about Davies’ work and described such regions of ambivalence as ‘tilt-points’ ; Foucault referred to them as ‘heterotopias’ when identifying liminal spaces that exist outside or between the usual cultural parameters where things external to our common frame of reference are allowed to happen. He stated, “The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” Rituals such as goose-stepping by Korean soldiers when changing the guard or observing a three minutes silence at a funeral may appear constructed or absurd whilst also forming essential cultural interfaces that allow rights of passage to take place.
Commonwealth (2009), the main piece of the exhibition also concentrated on a set of rituals, this time closer to home at Sheffield Town Hall, in particular a citizenship ceremony that highlighted the dual position of immigrants as they made their pledges of allegiance to the Queen in a brief but orchestrated ceremony. The right to hold religious beliefs, freedom of speech, the right to vote and respect for the law were invoked inside the hall as newcomers to Sheffield received their citizenship status, cameos that are intercut with footage of a passenger plane slowly labouring into the afternoon sky towards some distant destination. The dry legalities and anachronistic tone of the ceremony contrasted with a variety of ethnic appearances and underlying cultural attitudes, as well as micro-details such as a flashy red and gold watch on the wrist of one of the participants. I wondered if the watch was a fake, and if so how an appreciation of such things would sit with Western attitudes to copyright. Such contrasts can make culture gaps visible.
Ceremony as performance was also addressed in the ironically titled Snapshot 2011. This was a large square black and white reproduction of a Polaroid image of the Queen at a photographic shoot with photographer Cecil Beaton prior to her coronation in 1953 in Westminster Abbey, the first coronation to be broadcast on television; the title belied the amount of preparation that must have been necessary for this ritual of all rituals, which took place at a pivotal point in the history of the monarchy as it sought a new and more public role for itself and new images to support it. The reproduced image was lit from the front by a small angle-poise lamp placed where we might have expected the photographer’s assistant to be standing when he caught Beaton amidst the behind-the-scenes preparations at Westminster Cathedral. The moment of illusion conjured up by the vision of the Queen in her coronation clothes with ermine-edged train is broken by the revelation of the photographic equipment and lighting in front of her used to set it up and also by the point at which both the Queen’s line of vision, that of a startled assistant caught mid-turn towards the camera and our own intersect via the lens in a suspended moment of self-consciousness.
The third piece in the exhibition C-27J Spartan 2011 was displayed on an HDTV screen and comprised a number of shots of the internal and external structures of a stationary aircraft at Fairford air show. The footage of the highly engineered metal carapace, the grey, padded lining and bright orange traps fitted to the interior look like modernist design but contrast with their real life functions as a means of transporting troops, stretchers and resuscitation units.
Apart from its philosophical and thoughtful examination of interstices that exist within and between cultures, the work is seductively shot with an appreciative eye that at least in part ensures that it is visually engaging. However, the existence of real events behind each of the pieces ensures that they are rooted very much ‘in the world’. The Separation Line documents the return of soldiers from Afghanistan via the town of Wootten Bassett near the former RAF Lyneham, although it isn’t necessary to know this as the work can be examined on a number of different levels – philosophically, structurally or culturally. Whilst aware that a number of readings are available, Davies believes that it is possible to address such human concerns through work that is both thought provoking and accessible.
Emma Cocker, The Shimmering of the Tipping Point (Yorkshire ArtSpace Society, 2009)
Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces 1967 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucaul… accessed: 24/11/2011 12:26 PM