Forsyth & Pollard's art, as this selection makes admirably clear, is very much about our desires... So much of this work is about making audience members recognise their own presence and behaviour.
Art Monthly
Photography: Andy Keate
PUBLICSFEAR opened at South London Gallery on 4 February 2011 and ran for six weeks. It was the first time Forsyth & Pollard’s work had been gathered at this scale in London. Eight pieces made since 2003 were brought together around one preoccupation: the contract between a performer and the people watching, and what it costs on both sides.
Photography: Andy Keate
Visitors came in to near darkness. A monumental projection of File under Sacred Music, the 2003 restaging of the videotape of The Cramps playing to patients at Napa State Mental Hospital. Anyone else isn’t you gave fourteen young people the floor to talk about the mixtapes that had carried them through the best and worst times of their lives. Two films put the visitor directly in the path of a monologue, Plan B in Walking After Acconci and Miss OddKidd in Walking Over Acconci, each addressing the camera as though the viewer were the person being left behind.
Four screens showed the members of Dressed To Kill, the longest running Kiss tribute band in the world, applying their make up in single unbroken takes of forty seven minutes. Nearby, in Performer. Audience. Fuck off., the comedian Iain Lee stood in front of a mirrored wall and described his audience back to itself before turning the description on himself. An echoing of Dan Graham’s seminal Performer. Audience. Mirror. (1975)
Photography: Andy Keate
We're a hardy bunch here at Art Wednesday, so we were more than a little rattled when we left Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's latest exhibition feeling tearful.
Art Wednesday
Set apart from the rest, Silent Sound was presented in London for the first time. A mezzanine level was specially constructed in the gallery for the piece. Made in 2006 for the Liverpool Biennial with a score by J. Spaceman, it tells its audience that subliminal messages are carried inside the music, then leaves them in the dark with an ambisonic recording of an orchestra to work out what they are feeling and why.
The work that gave the exhibition its name ran along the wall in polished stainless steel letters over half a metre tall. PUBLICSFEAR is a piece of wordplay on the public’s fear, and it is also a mirror. In the low light it caught the projections from the surrounding works and threw them back, along with whoever was standing in front of it. Nobody in the building was outside the exhibition looking in.
Photography: Andy Keate
The exhibition carried a programme of evening events including a panel on the performer and audience relationship bringing together the comedians Robin Ince, Jo Neary and Ben Moor. Everything is Temporary screened music videos made by Forsyth & Pollard for Gil Scott-Heron, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks, Grinderman, Fanfarlo, Twin Shadow and Mystery Jets. On the final Wednesday, the artists were in conversation with the writer Michael Bracewell.
Download the South London Gallery exhibition guide for PUBLICSFEAR here (360kb PDF).
As observers we attempt to escape and transcend the self, but risk the tables turning and having the focus put back on the self in a more vulnerable, public position... PUBLICSFEAR captures this tumultuous, ever-complex and fruitful relationship as accurately as two artists possibly can in one room.
Dulwich OnView
