Location One presents work by two artists from this year's International Residency Program. Made on location in Ballymun swimming pool in February 2008 as part of the exhibition, Art in the Life World, The 16-mm film Zarathustra, depicts a performance by The Artane Boys Band. The Band play Straus... Read more
Location One presents work by two artists from this year’s International Residency Program. Made on location in Ballymun swimming pool in February 2008 as part of the exhibition, Art in the Life World, The 16-mm film Zarathustra, depicts a performance by The Artane Boys Band. The Band play Strauss’s “Zarathustra”, echoing Kubrick’s 1968 score from the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film’s release date in April 1968, makes a historical parallel to the launch of the iconic modernist housing project, Ballymun. The film Zarathustra aims to create a parallel between the popular consciousness of this moment and the political undercurrent to it’s ensuing future. The Artane boys band also echo a moment of a militaristic nostalgia and how it has assimilated itself into our culture. This is further questioned by the fact that the band, a famed Dublin marching band that comes from a long-standing tradition of young male marching bands is now almost half female. Zarathustra plays on the sedimentation of historical forces into our culture and questions how the site of leisure such as a swimming pool or marching band are haunted with political ideology.
Our-Lady-of-the-Conscious-Optics is a collaged figure with a single blank eye, a giant coiffure and a dress of enlarged benday dots. The title – a camp inversion of Benjamin’s notion of ‘Unconscious Optics’ – archly proclaims its own superficiality while throwing focus onto its production. The image has previously appeared in scrambled form on large venetian blind structures, suggesting a blinking eye trying to grasp an object, and on miniature Duchampian versions of these. This exhibition features fragments of these sculptures and new related collage works.
