INTERFACE

REVIEW

Sarah Harbridge, 'One Minute on Each of the Four Days before Her Death' as part of Apocalypse Now

Red Wire, Liverpool
24 July - 8 August 2009

Reviewed by: Vanessa Bartlett »

When Josh Tennant (Red Wire's informal director) sent me an excited email a couple of weeks ago to ask if he could borrow four of my flat screen monitors for Apocalypse Now, I was happy to oblige, particularly as he was insistent that the work exhibiting on them was of mind blowing quality. Great I said, what is it?

Sarah Harbridge’s four screen installation ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’, consists of individual 60 second video pieces that play on a continuous loop. The ‘her’ as referenced by the title is the artist’s Grandmother. Josh gave me the link to watch it on youtube and I followed it to find a row of twisted and contorted manifestations of an old woman’s face, gasping for breath, wrestling with some moment of indecision between life and death. Even at low resolution, the images were so tightly and unscrupulously framed that every last tortured detail was visible.

By convention, sculpture is the art of the dead. In order to preserve lost loved ones, we memorialise in stone with statues and monuments. Immovable and atemporal these objects are created to immortalise, often portraying whole heads or full bodies with an air of distance, dignity and grace. While they remember death, they do not evidence its processes or its tendencies toward degradation, decay and suffering.

In her essay ‘Infected eyes: dying man with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The view from here’, critic Peggy Phelan recounts the story of film Silverlake Life, in which aids victim Tom Joslin’s gradual death from the disease is documented on film in collaboration with his partner Mark Massi. She asserts in her essay that  this film “resolutely and imaginatively re-examines the link between the temporality of death and the temporality of cinema,” with her argument pivoting on the fact that film can be rewound and replayed, allowing dying on screen to be reenacted infinitely. On film she asserts, the dead can live again. Silverlake Life is a monument to Tom Joslin that allows the viewer to relive his death with compassion and empathy.

Shot in the early 1990s, this film belongs to the preinternet age of filmmaking, when dissemination of the moving image, although widespread (people could watch movies on VHS at home) was vastly different to the post cinematic, networked age of digital image making that we inhabit at present. Watching ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’ over youtube, I was struck by the overwhelming melancholic sense that in an era of happy snapping, vimeoing and facebooking, not even the dying moments of an aged women are too sensitive to to be filmed, cropped, edited, disseminated on youtube, exhibited in a gallery, photographed and then blogged, reblogged and critiqued here by yours truly. This is the moment at which death becomes transient and timeless, available to be relived and replayed by gallery visitors and net users at their own whim.

Challenging and in tune with the current state of digital dissemination, this makes for a fascinating piece of work that mixes the banal with the sensational and provokes a thousand unanswered questions about the life story of the artists Grandmother, why she died and why her death merits such lucid and invasive documentation.

Apocalypse Now runs at Red Wire Gallery until 8 August.

Writer detail:

As a creative practitioner I produce many things: my own artwork, the artwork of others, curated projects, writing and research.

My principle passion is video, although I am also drawn to live performance, sound, spoken word, new technologies and artwork in the public realm. This breadth of engagement across media allows me to occupy shifting territories where I believe the most innovative cross-disciplinary and collaborative practice occurs.

www.vanessabartlett.com

Venue detail:
Red Wire
Red Wire Carlisle Building, 69 Victoria Street Liverpool

www.vanessabartlett.com 

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