Normal Numbers - permanent public art work 1998

AN magazine February 1999; ISSN 0261 3425

Review - Kirsty McGee

Provincially Provisionally - temporary public art work 1998

Mute magazine #10, London 1998, ISSN 1356-7748

Culturetribes - Pauline van Mourik Broekman

Ever felt like you were suffering from urban Alzheimer's? Buildings here one day, gone the next. Try and remember what the old ones looked like - the new ones will always be more overpowering. What did that 40-storey 'eyesore' look like again? was that bank first or second left? Chances are you can't remember exactly. Yet nothing illustrates the slow, creeping, life-and-death cycles of a city better than a co-ordinated effort to drastically change their course. Sometimes, this urban version of open heart surgery has an uncanny ability to make you miss what you never knew you cherished.

Sheffield, Britain's fourth largest city, is currently undergoing the kind of extensive programme of 'regeneration' that would make many a European city see green with E(c)U-envy. Harder hit than most by the decline in the manufacturing industry in the 1980s, Sheffield's woes - ossified in images of urban decay and grifter economies - have steadily come to define its cultural identity (especially now they're enshrined in global exports like The Full Monty). Previously known for its steel industry and myriad offshoots - most famously cutlery and tools manufacture - the EU now ranks Sheffield among its most needy areas. Reasons enough, then, for the legion of grants and public-funded projects that help make up the programme of regeneration that is currently underway, including the construction of the National Centre for Popular Music, the development and support of a Cultural Industries Quarter and - as mighty cherry on the cake - the enormous 'Heart of the City' project (comprising the construction of a winter garden and three new public squares, the reconstruction of the Peace Gardens and the demolition of an ailing 1977 Town Hall extension, soon to be rebuilt). Much of this has been made possible by European, Lottery and Millennium funds and is aimed squarely at the generation of tourism-related revenues and long-term job creation. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an economy reeling from the collapse of a material, manufacturing based economy, the New Labour (and ex-Tory) buzzword 'cultural industries' plays a strategic part in the master plan too.

In amongst the flurry of building activity lies the Workstation - an ex-garage turned office complex housing Lovebytes, Sheffield's digital arts and commissioning agency, together with numerous other creative, and often digitally oriented, companies. As digital arts organisations go, Lovebytes can count itself a seasoned player - it's now in its fifth year. The experience of founders Janet Jennings and Jon Harrison shows through in HyperTribes, a series of six public art works they commissioned for Sheffield's city centre as part of Public Sightings, Photo 98, including Simon Poulter's Hyperphilately (a series of stamps to collect in cyberspace) and work by Lulu Quinn, Mike Lawson-Smith, Premium Leisure and others. Yet the ambivalence felt towards the city's full-steam-ahead programme of renewal and its relationship to Sheffield's cultural identity shines through in much the same way. One particularly poignant example of the way the two come into contact is Provincially Provisionally, Andrew Stones' neon-installation pondering Sheffield's 'regional' identity as it is reconfigured by the changing dynamics of European 'Union'. Placed in a prominent line at the top end of the 1977 Town Hall Extension, his fifteen bureaucratic sentence fragments blip away incessantly, like some malfunctioning robotic council device that never quite gets its message across. "Joking Aside... Provincially... Once Made Here...". Meanwhile, the diggers and bulldozers bash away at the city's foundations below them...

...

HyperTribes functions as a sanguine counterpoint to powerhouse::uk, nested on London's Horse Guards Parade this Spring. Although Nigel Coates' temporary inflated building is intended as a straight twin of his National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, about to open its doors straight across the way from the Lovebytes 'HQ' on Paternaster Row, this is a dead ringer from a different planet. Both play a strategic part in larger economic schemes and both are built on the bedrock of the 'cultural industries'. But that's about all these brainchildren of the DTI and Sheffield's city councillors have in common. The same could be said of HyperTribes. Thankfully Lovebytes' interpretation of culture, and its industries, still has some room for ambiguity and criticism, no matter how vibrant the context from which it springs. Unwittingly, it has provided an illustration of the stark difference between contributing to a cultural industry and putting on bullish propaganda for it.

Crowd Control and related work 1994-97

Crowd Control catalogue, Site Gallery Sheffield 1996, ISBN 1 899926 15 1

Municipal Yellow - Rob Stone

As an artist who has for years operated in the fluxing, often ambiguously determined disciplines of video, installation and performance art, Andrew Stones is someone with the reputation of one who, on the surface at least, appears to be able produce some very distinct, unambiguous, aural and visual articulations of the world. This exhibition, Crowd Control, consists of the installations The Unwritten Constitution; Bothered (Black Rod); a revised version of The Nature of Their Joy; and a commercially produced edition of situationally multivalent beer-mats - You Are Here. It seems to bear witness to prevailingly terse, literal concision in a marshalling of the conventional representational armoury of the installation artist: photographs, videos, CCTV monitors and the like. lt is work that emphasises verisimilitude and the ability of evidential technology, with authority and immediacy, to represent the world. It's clear too from this new work that Stones has interests in, amongst other things, the mechanisms and experience of the representation of individuals, institutions, crowds and classes. Inattentiveness could hold that the nature of this concern is illustrative; more tritely sociological than aesthetically intriguing, or that it is angst-ridden; more a troubled navel-thumbing than part of an ongoing formulation of a mis-meshing at the confluence of the purposes, the documentation and the interpretation of public gatherings.

The apparent empirical cleanliness of the work, the vauntedly uncompromising nature of the simple plausibility of the messages, the banal obviousness of the near comic character of the visual punning, the earnest, deadly seriousness of it all seems to work hard to resist semic indecision, metaphoric enigma. So much lucid purpose and functional, utilitarian closure seems to be involved in a piece like The Nature of Their Joy for instance - why are these people smiling? - that it seems almost absurdly inappropriate to start to press the repeated themes at play, to make-over its clarity and its single-minded intention in order to intimate the activity of slower, more densely complex and contradictory miasmas of figured meaning.

The suggestion of there being more to the tropological surface interests of an artist's uvre is a by now highly familiar critical gesture though one that remains fraught with accepted dangers of wandering off into an old, much maligned temptation for the historian and critic. Happy speculation on the veracity of any of a gamut of potential, freely subjective responses to particular works bears the stigmata of intuitive interpretation; a gleefully libidinous, semantic decision-making. Such narcissistically assertive critical behaviour has a chequered history. The object of disdain for Marxist accountings of art history that were produced particularly in Britain in the early 1970s and after, and the key term of that project's attempted dejections of instituted varieties of high art-criticism, it has also recently become a key gambit for modes of interpretation which seek to break art-objects free from the constraints of those selfsame, guarantee-supplying accounts of art history. Good examples of this tactically revealing appropriation of the domineering hubris of critical self-reference have been provided in recent re-readings of art works from the perspective of concerns with gender and sexuality.

There is a nexus of problems here that provides the productive horns of a dilemma for Stones. No entirely novel development, the cultural-political import of the act of deciding or refusing to decide on the meaning of an art object or fragment of historical documentation occupies the point of focus of contemporary cultural debate. Stones's work too seems to enjoy provoking for inspection the frameworks that surround the act of interpretive decision-taking. It is often embarrassing and discomforting in the ways it makes a viewer have to own up to his or her own nostalgic involvements in, and only partially disguised sympathies for, imperial conservatism.

Pedagogy has been one of his key themes. Stones's attention to the tradition of historical accounting handed down from the 19th-century; the positivist, Rankean model of the narrative articulation of history, includes an interest in the way that this mode pervades the minor literary genres of English historical writing in the 1930s. Almost personified in the popularity of G.M. Trevelyan, it is further exemplified by the likes of H.V. Morton, G. K. Chesterton and Stanley Baldwin. Stones finds in this writing a rich resource of conservative representations of England, its inhabitants, its perceived place in the world and the way this writing has a role in contributing to the double-handed ideological sophistication of the corporate, property-owning democracy that was consolidated through mass-housing provision at the time - the process that ensnaringly helped form Britain's cultural 'middle-class' from which he unflinchingly regards himself. This compendious historical model is grounded in the assumption that there exists the potential for a correct account of history and, on that basis, attempts to provide a consistent theme for the dispersed and hitherto meaninglessly harvested facts of history. All the historian has to do is cut and paste these stultified icons to fabricate the most efficient and poetically elegant account of the way things were. Simple. And in this sense history writing is as fictionally and aesthetically-minded as any other literary form. Conventionally the arguments against these models of narrative history have been that whilst with one hand it provides the logic of the interested representation of past and current circumstances, with the other it causes the death of past events. Their viability determined by the preciseness of their accord with the imperiousness of the greater theme, historical facts are murdered. Their signifying potential radically delimited by historical and political protocol they become, simply, the dead metaphors of grand narrative.

The members of this English literary milieu; professionally academics, novelists, theologians and politicians, were often called on to supply the narratives to popular series' of photographic digests of the great events of the, then short, century which were published for a largely suburban, petit-bourgeois audience and for schools. In fact H.V. Morton wrote the introduction to the Odhams Pageant of the Century (c. 1933) in which Stones found the source images for both The Unwritten Constitution and The Nature of Their Joy. The book offers a telling instance of the way a dominating approach to history, one prompted by attitudes towards the aura and grain of these images, will favour the frozen vignette, the stock-still tableau that monotonously harmonises the past. Almost in the manner of H.G. Wells, Stones has devised a metaphorising machine to demonstrate the the effect of this archivistic process. The apparatus of The Nature of Their Joy pumps a suspension of fragments of the source imagery, these faces, through tubes across the optics of Commuter II portable microfiche readers. As tiny photographic transparencies, occasionally one of the faces might produce a result, flashing-up on the screen of one of these hopelessly arcane, archive-browsing contraptions. They were designed as recently as 1983 and Stones takes some delight in purposefully exhibiting this final refinement of an increasingly redundant, analogue technology as if some future, provincial science museum curator, interested but not in full possession of the facts, had made an imaginative educated guess in the recreation of their mode of employ. They are included here as a component of an invented appliance the purpose of which might be to parallel the institutional circulation and scrutiny of historical documents. The photographic emulsion wears gradually off of the little clippings of acetate film and their edges round through abrasive mechanical action during the period of the installation. Eventually all that is left to scrutinise, to discuss and refer to are blanks, unresisting non-images, each now the same as the other, as if the evidence had been storied-away.

Importantly, Stones's sense of historical loss is vested in a criticism of the way the narrative form of articulation and rearticulation of documents and details, in its pursuit of some transparent account of what has gone before, itself produces a loss of history. His interest in nostalgia, in what remains, is in making of it a useful problem. His concern, often literally, is to reanimate and ventriloquise historical images in a sense to both suggest what they no longer show or rather what they never showed, and to render them susceptible to more open understanding. The images are the artifice through which Stones points to the social ambiguity of historical events; though this is achieved with considerable regard both for his personal memories of the place of a book like The Pageant of the Century in his own family history, its role in the more intimate circumstances of his own domestic induction into a variety of middle-class Englishness, as well as a qualified consideration of the reveries of vain forfeit and sacrifice that the images may also conjure.

There is no reason, in all of this, to simply see Stones as more lay historiographer than artist, or even, as an artist, merely another in the recent tradition of those involved in the problems of contemporary history painting in the manner of the Art & Language group and its affiliates. Similarly, there is also little reason to see Stones's work too clearly in the general context of individuals like Sherrie Levine and her attempted fractionation of the rhetoric of nostalgia alone in her restagings of Walker Evans's F.S.A. photographs. lt might be easier to see the pieces operating somewhere in between these nodes. This said, however, it might also be useful to define Stones's practice as something grounded in a stubborn concern to investigate the means of effectivity of the interpretive figures of a middle-class, white male who is resistant both to his apparent political interests - a polite monetarism, liberalism and a reliance on the justifying role of accounts of cultural and scientific progress - and who is unwilling, despite occasionally incitive titling (e.g. Class) to dramatically masquerade, to adopt, perform and speak through the theatrical, authenticity-lending roles of a bluff working-class or, more likely, an heroic, self-deprecating, middle-class. In the thrall of provocations of images of class and nation, Stones works in and against, continually questioning the context of artistic positional truism. But even this, with all its menacing of uncertain political posturing, would be selling short the extent of the discomfiture and difficulty provoked.

Stones's work might be seen as radically open, as concerned with the proprieties of artistic etiquette of formal, technical and procedural matters as it is with overdetermining popular historical icons and the previously stitched-up semes of political and ethical populism - class, nation, education, monarchy. It can be contradictorily allusive. The deliberate creakiness of the animation of Bothered (Black Rod), redolent of the lazily comic ennui of the cut-rate staginess of British monarchical melodrama has a referential source in '70s cartoonery - Captain Pugwash, for instance. It's a suggestiveness that sings up a boyish entendre of an amateur, sea-going imperialism, not to mention a streak of scatological, public-school wit. The way that the visage of Elizabeth Windsor is purloined and cropped from available B.B.C. footage of the Queen's Speech - itself an engram of a perfunctorily democratic marionettry - incites consideration of the political montage practice of the likes of John Heartfield or Peter Kennard. Whilst doing so, it also occasions speculation on uncritical modes of approach to the Duchampian or Corbusian found object, with the suspect associations of ultra-right intellectual orthodoxy entailed, and so further signals the role of montage and a sense of historical outillage for conservative history writing. This specific concatenation gives lie to the predominating critical opinion that montage belongs, aesthetically and politically, solely to the left.

The use of the ubiquitous municipal yellow in the text of the You Are Here beer-mats and in the captioning across the crowd scenes in The Nature of Their Joy, is an intended reference to the administration of urban space and to the colourfields, instructions and prohibitions of vast, corporation signage. It might be overworking things to suggest that this yellow, through a gossiping association across the gallery space, brings the CCTV monitors of Bothered whisperingly into the ambit of instituted, anti-Greenbergian art criticism, inferring their loaded, paradigmatic equivalence, for the installation artist, to oil-paint and canvas for the archly-Modern, gesturally-expressive, painter. lt might also be too much to suggest that, because some of the circular images of anonymous faces isolated by perforations in the masks which obscure the enlarged photographs of Queen Victoria's funeral procession in The Unwritten Constitution appear to resemble bacterial cultures, Stones is also making some veiled comment on the accidents of science; or on the principles of nativity, organisation and growth that structure the notion of gemeinschaft. It might be appropriate. Stones's work is peppered with formulations of the adversarial conceits of parliamentary democracy, their reliance on contingent stagings of concerns and their consequent, unilateral failure to usefully represent any interest. His earlier use, in Class, of inverted fruit-pickers ladders to formally adumbrate a Puginian design ethic and placed across the gallery space from each other to hint at House of Commons party opposition, also suggests fantasies of a bucolic, ingenuous peasantry at the heart of political ideology. It is just such an organic, vernacular vision of self-governing civility that defines gemeinschaft, one which summons in dialectical counterpoint a view of an emergingly abstract, rational and alienating Modernity. Neither view is particularly useful but both in their ways devolve on the transcending image of the crowd. In this Stones has blended ideas about nature and artifice to the point of indistinguishability.

In fact it very probably is making too much of at least the intentional appositional aspect of Stones's produce to say this and perhaps I should digress here momentarily. More than a simple multivalence, Stones makes use of an acute, philosophical and practical use of paradox. He may have taken the signifiers, the conceptual totems, of sociological and historical certainty and made of them utterly indecidable and personable ciphers for the where, the interpretive propinquities of the observer, yet in pointing to and attempting to delineate the precise purlieus to which the art historian or critic might have the implications signed by the work run, there is a considerable risk of wandering into an all-too-knowing critical salient at which Stones raises an eyebrow. The speciating, monographic party piece of the critic-historian, whilst productively managing the conditions that allow for some knowledge, some furtherance of meaning, tends too much towards its own professional fondnesses for collaring and exhibiting its prey.

It is probably better to leave Stones's irresolvable visual conundrums to the viewer. However, it might be worth looking at some relatively recent examples in order to sketch-in a series of loose thematic canons of interest, minding not to insist on the authority of a few, apparently emerging motifs. After Tom Brown's Schooldays evolved as a fragment of the large, involved, touring ensemble of 1990/93, Class. Six local authority school-desks, with linotronically produced plates set into the space normally found under their hinged lids, broach an expected repertoire of themes regarding colonialism and education. The plates are montages of images lifted from 19th-century geographies and an illustration from Thomas Hughes's classic biography of a correctly conforming, moral and intellectual development. Tom Brown, recumbent on a rolling Uffington hillside, initially meditating on the incised white horse and the past pagan glories of English rurality, is confronted with a series of representations of dark continent exotica: enormous nest-mounds, mangrove forests, the Sphinx. In part Stones is interested in compositional convention here too, for instance in the way that two caricatured natives, used to provide some locational veracity, are integrated into the repoussoir that frames the natural wonder of the nest-mound. Stones has cropped Brown, languishing on his hillside, in a triangle that conforms to the nearest available, rational compositional form in the original image. The decision to insist on the triangle can be seen to mark the historical ineptitude of self-justifying, formalist aesthetic typology in its production of visual order. In the final collage of the series, this blue triangle is placed in the stead of a mirage observed by a group of camel-mounted figures and the monumental associations of its pyramidal form are allowed to play freely. In this neat reversal, Brown comes to occupy the place of the English ancient monument that was the object of his earlier gaze and himself becomes the object of the gaze of another, equally sophisticated, equally imperialising culture, an other culture with uses perhaps similar to those of Brown, for its own numinous, pre-historic relics. The substitution seems to effect a complex entrapment of the figure of Brown in networks of gazes and interpretations, oppressed and oppressing, at the receiving end of, and at the same time implicit in initiating imperialising activities. Scolding of the piousness of the figure of Brown, Stones might even be showing, if not exactly empathy, certainly some understanding towards this emblem of 19th-century all-knowing masculinity, trapped as it is in a stupid theological blindness to its own rhapsodic production as a self-possesed exponent of British colonial capitalism.

The themes of After Tom Brown's Schooldays recur in the current work, certainly in an attention to the anthropologising and historicising gaze of the camera that captures, holds and sentimentalises the faces of the crowds celebrating both the start and finish of the Great War in The Nature of Their Joy, but also in a somatic interest that haunts Stones's work more generally. In a, possibly very Foucauldian, sense the intimacy of the fit-to-the-body of industrial and informational technology and its associated ideologies is important to him, and in a way that seems to run counter to the works' staged disinterested intellectualism. The nostalgic, somatic evocations of the school-desks, and the portable microfiche readers used in The Nature of Their Joy point also to an acute archaism in the distance between desks, biro and paper on one hand and the awesome, fading obsolescence of networked, Apple laptops on the other. It's an improvisation which also plays on an older theme of artistic modernity; the sources of conceptual fetishism in the pace of technological innovation. But this physical concern evinces in his wider deployment of a range of philosophemes too. Aspects of humanist cosmology, rules, maxims and nomic judications based on the absolutised proportions of the body, provide as wealthy a source of material for Stones as the formulations of Englishness mentioned earlier. This, combined with the disquietingly austere, aesthetic seductiveness in the finish and execution of the material substance, the fabric of the works, helps to produce a curiously transgressive sense of relation to the body. Not strictly sexual, though in ways certainly libidinous, but more; it's as if even a slight wrestling free from knowledge-guaranteeing, intellectual bondage and entrapment so affects the ability to parse for an especially good subject that it can be palpably registered as a physical pleasure - one to be comdemned and condoned.

In his 1995 installation Those Days Are Gone at the Holden Gallery, Manchester, Stones used the architectural specifics of the site to further play-through this idea of the closeness-of-fit of the material of instituted ideologies by signalling the gothic revival mystique of functionalism, one designed to produce usefully Anglo-Catholic subjects; and its antithesis in the more Modernist doctrines of functionalism which have insisted, just as rhetorically, on putting architecture at the disposal of its users. His highlighting of this aspect 19th-century, educational building manners, through the means of a blue neon, back-illumination of masks used to block out the characteristic, pointed-arch windows of the space, sweetly accentuated this contradiction in historically differing understandings of the term functionalism. Two countermanding theatrics of modernity - the solid, truth-to-materials, moralising, mediaevalism of the arch, and the disembodied, techno-urbanity of the valve-glow - provided a framework of diverging attitudes towards technology for the central element of the show. This consisted in a further spatial modulation of the gallery by truncating its upper space with a black, canvas ceiling. By simulating a thunderstorm inside the building with simple sound-to-light technology, the audio aspect of Stones's piece (which included recordings of rainfall and crowd noises from a Manchester United vs. Sheffield Wednesday game) summoned the inside/outside, Nature/Architecture dichotomies that currently obsess artists like Richard Wilson. Importantly however, his handling of these polarities differs from the eleatics of Wilson in the way that the aural trompe-l'oeil of the rain and the crowd-sounds signify popular and commercial interests of football-watching, both at home and under the elements, as much as they conjure Romantically egalitarian responses to the natural sublimity of the storm. Its critical ante is also enhanced in the way the false ceiling partitions-off the clerestory of the gallery, an architectural space which in the terms of a practical, architectural quadratura was taken to denote an encapsulation of the sky, often filled with exotic birds and foliage. The piece was finished with a short text taken from Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay on the practice of the historian - The Storyteller - appliquéd around the wall, and an enormous, mutely Arthur C. Clark-ish, black sign bearing the legend, again sampled from Benjamin - THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. The operatic dumbness of the sign, as large and as convincingly utilitarian and instructional as any motorway sign, draws attention to the enigmatic richness and complexity of Stones's conceptual examination of the idea of lost history through a direct confrontation with the academic propensity to favour certain passages of the, often already translated, texts of its chosen theorists, those that conform most clearly to dogmatically singularised versions of the range of frequently contradictory things that these people had to say in lifetimes of writing. Benjamin serves as an excellent example of this. The recent machinations of the Benjamin-industry are founded on a consolidation of a teachable, defendably consistent and eminently democratic-looking paradigm constructed from the words of Benjamin. Stones remains suspicious of what has been lost through the predeterminations of the meanings of history and democracy used to structure the ratification of the kind of systematic thinking that results from this. His is a fraught relationship to originals and reinterpretations. His work seems to attempt to speak the sense of something lost and yet never having been. Taking almost for granted that a faith in an authentic knowledge of the past is a hopeless vanity, that all its representations can be no more than contemporary articulations, he continues to play-through the paradox of empirical loss. As such, nostalgia stands as a discontinuous touchstone of his aesthetic practice, the deconstructing key to his exploration of the vicissitudes of mechanism as our ruling interpretive morphology.

©Rob Stone 1996

Crowd Control - installations 1996-97

Scotland on Sunday, 11 May 1997

Review of Glasgow Mayfest: The Main Event - Iain Gale

Crowd Control - installations 1996-97

The Guardian newspaper, London/Manchester 14 October 1996

Review article - Robert Clarke

Crowd Control - installations 1996-97

Variant magazine, vol. 2 #3, Glasgow, summer 1997

Review: Chris Byrne

Andrew Stones - 'Crowd Control'

at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow 6 May - 7 June 1997

On entering Street Level, conscious of hope in the air following the general election, it was remarkable to see 'Bothered (Black Rod)', which references directly the symbolic opening of parliament. I was confronted by an array of black and white video monitors, the type used to display images from surveillance cameras. They are positioned above head height, so that the screens peer down at the viewer on both sides, like an audience. On each is displayed an identical image of the Queen's face, only her eyes and forehead showing. The Monarch looks out through her glasses, as when reading the customary speech at the beginning of each session of parliament. Like a gunshot, the silence is punctuated by the hollow ring of Black Rod on the doors of parliament. At precisely this moment, the multiple images of the Queen's face look slightly askance, a sidewards glance giving expression to the unease that this sound generates in the head of State.

Multiple readings of this work are possible: conjured is the obvious phallic symbolism of the staff knocking on the door, seeking permission to enter the womb of parliament, leading to unease in the Monarch/matriarch. However I prefer to deal with the artist's inferred critique of the institution of governmental power. The martial spectacle of the opening of parliament, with the MP's advancing side by side in ranks like a military brigade, is evoked clearly by such minimal fragments.

Concentrating on this ritual, the piece reminds the viewer of the symbolic nature of the handover of power in Parliament. The opening of the House of Commons itself symbolises the hierarchy that places limits on the power of the Commons. Black Rod, the usher of the ancient Order of the Garter, represents the Lords or nobility and the Crown, and by implication the military through the Knighthood. His presence is a reminder of the struggle in the executive between the Commons and the State. Given the loaded significance of the imagery, Stones manages to be subtle. I feel he is attempting to express the ambiguous relationship between the three elements of the medieval institution of Parliament: Crown, Lords and Commons.

The position of the viewer in relation to the piece is also open to question: images of the Queen are reproduced through the mechanisms of surveillance, but the Monarch stares unblinkingly back, distracted only by Black Rod. The method of replication - black and white television - refers to the first mass television spectacle, the Coronation 44 years ago. Back then, the live broadcast was said to herald the arrival of the new Elizabethan age, echoing the beginnings of English imperialism and conquest at a time when the empire was collapsing. The authority of the Crown extended and reinforced its dominion through myriad television receivers in its subjects' living rooms. The use of a recorded video image, looped through a closed circuit, seems to mimic the changed relationship between Crown and parliament since that time: the supposed democratic power of the people still in thrall to the spectacle of monarchy, yet critically monitoring, watching for any slip in the mask.

Situated in the second gallery space, 'The Nature of Their Joy' seems to share an approach with the first work: that of scrutiny of a face, trying to unlock the emotional significance of an ambiguous expression. At either end of the gallery are two large-scale transparencies, mounted on light boxes, the images following a concave curved plane, like surface of a lens. Superimposed titles inform the viewer that these are images of crowds celebrating in London at the outbreak, and cessation of the first world war respectively. The photographs have been manipulated, the artist framing certain faces from the crowd, picking them out from the mass of others in the picture field.

I found myself going back and forth between the two, trying to discern any differences in the expressions on people's faces. A fruitless task: there are differences between individual faces, but these are diluted by the crowd, and by the granular distortions of the enlarged images. The artist is exploring the difficulty of interpreting media, in this case the photographic document.

To the right, on plinths ranged along the gallery space, a series of cases housing portable microfiche readers. Connecting them is a loop of transparent plastic tubing, which passes through the projection beams intended to illuminate microfilm. Clear fluid from a large bell jar in the centre of this strange apparatus is pumped around the loop. On closer inspection, the jar is seen to contain tiny negatives: carried by the current, faces are seen fleetingly, magnified on the small screens. They trace paths across the screens in turn, like figures passing a window, never quite making a clear, still image.

A label on the jar announces 'images in solution'. As the pieces of film are washed, rub against each other and the pipes,they literally begin to disintegrate. Symbolically linking the two polar opposites, war and peace: an arcane, obsolete apparatus allowing the viewer to inspect and magnify image fragments, trying to piece together evidence to support a conclusion like a museum curator. The use of mechanisms that simulate scientific processes of observation, analysis and evaluation posit the masses as data. The behaviour of crowds, and of society, the process of history itself as a fluid dynamic, particles in movement.

The soundtrack that accompanies this installation was constructed from two recorded loops, rainwater on a roof and a football crowd. Both are slowed down, mixed together to form a wave like roar. A melancholic ambience fills the space, articulating a sense of loss, of inevitable change and decay. The artist has described this piece as an attempt to express society's loss of control to the machine. The mechanised slaughter of the war replaced humans and horses, allowing the fighting to continue much longer, beyond human limits. He points to the use of redundant technologies such as the 'Commuter II' microfiche readers, replaced by laptop computers almost as soon as they were manufactured, as evidence that this process continues to accelerate. Images, people, societies, transformed into just so much information.

Despite their apparent simplicity, these are complex, multi-layered works. They act like catalysts for thought - the viewer making links between the images, sounds, materials, and apparatus. As such it would be easy to criticise the artist for leaving meaning too open to interpretation, but Stones has focused on a narrow range of imagery, successfully directing the viewer gently towards certain conclusions. Stones is questioning the authority and veracity of the media and image making itself, the impossibility of a fixed meaning in art or science.

It is genuinely refreshing to see an artist working through political issues, yet not succumbing to glib posturing, or single issue tub thumping. It has been some time since I have experienced works by an artist this rigorous in intellect, and conveying a powerful yet subtle political critique.

© Chris Byrne 1997. All rights reserved.

Those Days (Of Summer) Are Gone - installations 1994

Versus number 4, Leeds/Manchester 1995, ISSN 1352-4240

You Can't See Alienation - Louise Purbrick

A gallery. Some noise. Two photographs. Twelve portable microfiche readers. Six desks with six engravings. And some words. There is an announcement and an inscription and the installation's title: Those Days Are Gone. The inscription, taken from Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay The Storyteller, is written on the walls:

"A generation that had gone to school in a horse drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing had remained unchanged but the clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, human body."

Take the announcement and the inscription together. They read as words of warning about how nothing can be the same again. A sense of loss is produced in Andrew Stones's installation, but without its usual accompaniment: nostalgia.

Nostalgia, according to a nicely punctuated entry in the O.E.D., is "sentimental yearning for (some period of) the past". Good use of brackets. The O.E.D. compilers know what to put in parenthesis in order to explain that there may be a period of the past as the focus for nostalgia,

but not necessarily. Just the past will do. The appeal of the past is obvious: it has happened so it seems certain. It appears easy to know. It feels familiar. Safe. The past provides comfort when the present only offers the capacity to change. Nostalgia is the longing for the old as the new takes over: a traditional reaction.

The past produced by nostalgia as a place of safety has been used to justify a retreat into tradition. And, some periods of the past have been preferred for this purpose. The Victorian era was pressed into political service during the Thatcher regime to represent a traditional time when the power of the English nation-state was secure. Nostalgia, and especially nostalgia for the nineteenth century, is now a standard strategy of conservative administration. Hankering after the past is helped along with a Heritage Ministry. Its projects have been allocated funding from the profits of the National Lottery. Nostalgic enterprises look set to take over even more gallery space than before.

The space of the gallery constitutes the first part of Andrew Stones's installation. There is not much in the gallery so the space is dominated by the words of warning on the walls: the past is over.

The first part: Those Days Are Gone (1994)

The gallery is empty, dark and difficult. It is difficult keeping to the conventions of entering a gallery, following its rules, doing the expected: looking. There is nothing to see. There is the noise: a slow simulated thunderstorm. But you can't see noise. You can read the warnings: Andrew Stones's announcement and Walter Benjamin's inscription. But reading is not the same as looking. In a gallery without objects it's like reading the labels of exhibits which have been taken away and put somewhere else that is out of sight. Without anything in it to see, the gallery itself becomes productive. Something is still going on. A feeling.

I have a stupid problem with the word feeling because of its associations with emotion rather than intellect and so with an unknowing attitude to art. But feeling is the right word. The empty, dark gallery produced a sensation of dislocation. Or, a feeling of alienation.

Alienation is a form of estrangement. Depending on which big social formation you want to refer to first, alienation is the estrangement of labour from the process of labour and its product (the effect of capitalism) or it is the estrangement of individuals from their society so that they no longer belong to a community but to a class (a feature of Modernity). These things are related. Rather than working out how here, I want to try to describe what alienation is like. Estrangement is not a bad description, but dispossession is better. To be alienated is also to know or feel (or maybe both) that being estranged is not the way it ought to be. Something has been lost and it did not just disappear with the ticking of time, it was forcibly taken away.

The second part: The Nature of Their Joy (1994)

End of Empire images are notoriously nostalgic. But not these. The two photographs, one of the beginning and the other of the end of the First World War, have been dismantled. Both were crowd scenes which are now displayed as dispersed. A collective has been individualised. Fragments of the photograph and isolated faces from the crowd are viewed through the twelve portable microfiche readers. Here, then, is something in the gallery to see.

According to their manufacturers, the microfiche readers provide "instant access to stored information". Not quite. Microfiche readers screen only that which is stored. They show only an official record, a list of things so important in an institution that they are not thrown away to save space but are squeezed into small print. Microfiche readers then magnify what has been selectively miniaturised. To look through one is to see what someone else has decided should be there. Stored information is not the whole story. Even if it was, the microfiche divides it up to allow its parts to be individually identified and then sought out. The whole story cannot be kept intact. Complete pictures are altered by dispersion through the microfiche mechanism which claims to offer "instant access". In fact the faces from the photographs now inside the microfiche appear further away. The effect is alienating. The viewed and the viewer are estranged.

The third part: After Tom Brown's School Days (1993)

There is a fairly clear argument that Andrew Stones's installation produced a sense of loss without nostalgia. Until the six desks. The desks are objects from childhood. Made of pale wood and set out slightly apart with their lids lifted up, they stand for a universalised national childhood. They are our old desks. It does not matter which generation of children actually sat behind them. For those who spent their time in school at a new kind of desk (a veneered wood job pushed together with others into a table for group work) the desk with the lid equally belongs to them. It was perhaps before their time, but still represents their childhood as the nation's past. All this is hopelessly nostalgic for a moment of national innocence that never existed.

Nostalgia is not allowed to last for long and in the end serves only to increase the discomfort when faced with what the desks contained. Their insides are lit up to show six engravings. All are nineteenth century illustrations. The first is an English landscape with a figure in the right foreground taking the view. The following five are images of colonial conquest with the figure inserted in each so the he (and the nation at its desk behind him) are again taking the view. The desk then becomes a reminder of the rituals of learning submission to institutional order: a piece of furniture which taught children as national subjects how to know their place.

These, then, are the three parts of Andrew Stones's installation: a sensation of dislocation; a mechanism which dissolves a 1914 and a 1918 crowd and distances the viewer from both; and nostalgic objects reworked as imperial emblems. These objects like the words written on the walls, work as a warning to those who have treated the past as a place of safety and usually shown it in soft sepia tones. All those comforting re-runs of a Victorian era which delivered the First World War as part of its imperialist project always ignore the realities of dehumanisation set out here: the destroyed bodies under Walter Benjamin's unchanged clouds; the altered faces from the crowd; the objectification of colonial nations. The installation presents a past where people have been dispossessed. But, dispossession is not exactly on display. The installation produces this effect; it orders an experience of alienation. Alienation is used to undermine the nostalgic version of the Victorian past. It make sit appear unfamiliar, further away and not so easy to understand. An alienated past is not actually exhibited. Alienation is not something that is seen,. It is a condition. For Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay, it is the condition which has enforced the story-tellers's silence. It has become impossible to tell the experience of a generation because the next would never understand.

©Louise Purbrick 1995

Those Days (Of Summer) Are Gone - installations 1994

Untitled review of contemporary art, Feb/Mar 1995

Review - Simon Grennan

The Conditions - installation 1993

Everything magazine, number 9, May 1993

Video Positive review (extract) - Dennis Dracup

A History of Disaster with Marvels - videotape 1992

11th World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag 1993

Catalogue account - Erik Daams

Ever since Plato's parable of the Cave, it has been known that staring into the flames of a cosy fire invites introspection. Many Ancient Greeks limited themselves to reflections on the fall of the human race (the theory of the descinding triplet Golden, Bronze and Iron Age)' but thanks to the unbridled inventive drive of modern times (summarised in the series: book, printing, gunpowder and compass, culminating in the overexposed fragment 'The Eagle has landed' - including the interstellar squeaks) there is even better grounded reason for alarm. Stones asks us the sixty four thousand dollar question, accompanied by fragments of a radio programme about the Milky Way and the crackle of burning wood: "Can we survive? We're going home, but can we sleep and dream, amidst all the destruction?" He elucidates his arguments with illustrations from the zeniths of western technological culture, also putting quotations from critical scientists on camera. After all, Robert Oppenheimer's assertion from 1946 "The physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge they cannot lose" fits a tradition which goes back, for example, to Francis bacon (died 1626). The moral distress about the consequences of increasing knowledge does not, however, lead Stones to fashionable ecological doom-mongering. He ends his visually appealing tape with...a swaying stalk, after which the shot widens.

Flare/Cataract - installation 1992

Variant magazine, Winter/Spring 1992

Review (extract) - Jon Jordan

Geiger - installation 1989

The Guardian newspaper, London/Manchester 27 May 1989

Photo - Azadour Guzelian

Common Knowledge - videotape 1989

Between Imagination & Reality - catalogue

The ICA Biennial of Film & Video, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; ISBN 0 905263 08 1

Alternative Sounds & Images (extract) - Peter Wollen

... For me personally, the most exciting work combines formal concerns with substantive content, tapes or films which are constructed, not so much as narrative, but as discourse. They deal with political issues...but obliquely rather than directly... Common Knowledge re-tells the history of the atom bomb, from the scientific breakthroughs to the destruction of Japanese cities. It uses a series of enigmatic and poetic images - the camera following a rope snaking through a field of corn, a torch-beam playing over sheets torn from an encyclopedia, a dog running through the night, an ominously lurching, jagged-toothed wheel rolling through undergrowth - combined with deceptively simple verbal accompaniment, both on the soundtrack and overprinted on the image, which draws us into a world of children's games and rhymes, only to pull and tug us across the threshold which leads to knowledge and disaster. Finally, we see the image of a dovecote, from which the first the doves and then the dovecote itself fade away, leaving a screen filled now only with a bright light, a light 'so intense that stories and judgements would mean nothing' " ...

Common Knowledge - videotape 1989

Independent Media magazine, September 1989

Review - Nik Houghton

Harvest Festival - installation 1989

The Guardian newspaper, London/Manchester 13 February 1989

Photo - Don McPhee

The Tide - installation 1990

The Yorkshire Post newspaper, 26 March 1990

Salmon Song - 5-tape video/sound work 1986

Independent Media magazine May 1988

Expanded Media Show Review (extract) - Clive Gillman