Issue 6: Winter 2010
'Talking Heads' Exhibition
The exhibition ‘Talking Heads', which ran at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art last February, was comprised of just five moving image pieces. Yet one would be hard pressed, even with the option of a more extensive show, to imagine a more incisively selected series of angles on that traditionally authoratative rhetorical staple of television, the ‘talking head', and its bleed into popular consciousness. The four video pieces that curator Claire Feeley has succesfully put in dialogue with each other all seem to specifically engage with the authority of the ‘talking head', whether assumed, desired or undermined.
Oraib Toukan's eponymous Talking Heads is perhaps the most straightforward appropriation of the technique. In this satire on private ownership, ‘experts' expound on the possibilities, difficulties and benefits of buying a country. The mise en scene is slick, sterile and cleanly anonymous. The viewer is presented with the expected mannered voices and faces, the polished concepts- but where is the world that is ostensibly there to be bought? Certainly within the context of this exhibition, Toukan's piece announces the abstraction of the ‘talking head', its potential to generate and ‘sell' virtual realities, and to present these as reality. Although portraiture is mentioned as an aspect of the ‘talking head' in an essay Feeley wrote to accompany this exhibition, most of the works included underline the primacy of the voice and its power to create and unpick worlds and selves, with the speaker's physicality essentially relegated to being an agent of this process
In contrasting ways, both Omer Fast's CNN Concatenated and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard's Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches) examine the ambiguous desire for this airless power and the rather creepy relationship of familiarity that the ‘talking head' enjoys with its spectators. CNN Concatenated was created by selecting and arranging words spoken by instantly recognisable newscasters into an anguished, 18-minute personal monologue. Perhaps most obviously and least convincingly, this jarringly fragmented montage seems to announce that these voices are subject to manipulation. Yet this method of highlighting the newscaster-image's manipulability fails by fracturing the smooth surface of the CNN mode of presentation, the very surface which is the site of manipulation and the means of furthering it, something well understood in Toukan's video. CNN Concatenated succeeds more as a comment on TV viewers' relationship with these announcers, which is taken as being one of desire and projection. It simultaneously appropriates the ‘talking heads' to a messily subjective experience of life and uses their authority to validate it, however much this authority is actually compromised in so doing. Although this tongue-in-cheek exercise seems more concerned with bringing these immaculate agents of spurious ‘objectivity' down to ‘our level', it suggests as much a neurotic involvement with their aura as a dispassionate critique of the news industry.
As its title suggests, Walking AfterAcconci re-imagines Vito Acconci's Walk Over in which the artist, alone before his camera, paced towards and away from it whilst delivering a fitful monologue about a failed relationship. This confessional rant comes re-written and performed by London MC Plan B and wrapped in the visual texture of a gritty music video, even if the static camera is retained. Unlike in Fast, the ‘talking head' is not hijacked; rather, the subject turns himself into a ‘talking head'. Yet the process is perhaps not as different as it might initially appear. The intimacy forced upon the newscasters in Fast, and that of an apparently solitary Plan B confronting the camera both use the ‘talking head' as a technique for mediating personal issues, as a ‘mirror'. Both videos concern finding an image adequate to voicing a confession in a process that demands the intervention of a media-derived trope. Whereas Fast projects his words through pre-existing images, Forsyth and Pollard use the spatiality of their frame to create distance between the ‘talking head' image construct and its ‘absent' author choreographically. That is, through addressing the camera or walking away from it, through communicating or ruminating. It should also be noted that the performative confessionality of both pieces is, of course, false. The newscasters were not actually speaking Fast's texts and Plan B is not baring his soul but riffing on Acconci.
The intriguing Stephen Sutcliffe's very brief We'll Let You Know reverses the viewer-image paradigm of desire found in Fast and Forsyth / Pollard, and instead drolly posits the spectator as judge. He does this by taking a TV clip of a young Ian McKellan discussing his process as an actor and adding an impatient voiceover that treats the star as if he were at an audition- and failing it! In this context, the power balance is very much on the side of the viewer for the only time in this exhibition.
The odd-piece-out is Andy Warhol's. The exhibition opened with a number of his classic Screen Tests projected on 16mm. In these silent works the image is overwhelmingly present, not the ephemeral vehicle of voice-dependent elsewheres. This is further emphasised by the gorgeous materiality of the 16mm film stock, especially evident when compared to the innately wishy-washy quality of the televisual images displayed elsewhere. Staring at the ghostly faces staring back from the highly tangible emulsion, a very different form of authority emerges, one based on a physicality stemming from both the iconographic impact of the models and the quiddity of film stock. The mechanism of desire is more direct, and Warhol's gesture of filming people in this way indicates a simplicity in the process of becoming image that has since become lost. It is enough to be filmed to become image, to become cinema, to become desirable: all it takes is to sit before a camera to move to the other side of the screen. Yet, in so doing, one becomes pure image; there is no negotiating identities with Warhol's camera as there is within the mechanisms demonstrated by Fast, Forsyth / Pollard or even Sutcliffe. Watching the Screen Tests is a head-on collision between viewer and subject, just as their filming was a head-on collision between camera and subject. In emphasising the moment of filming to such a degree, Warhol returns a sense of literal being in time to the viewer which, in the context of this exhibition, translates as returning the visitor to the physical world.
-Maximilian Le Cain