Mark Wallinger: Anthony Reynolds Gallery

Writing in Artforum upon the 49th Venice Biennale, Benjamin HD Buchloh dismissed Mark Wallinger's work as a clear-cut instance of spectacle agriculture usurping art's previously oppositional spaces: Regurgitating "retardataire humanist, if not outright mythical or religious messages," work such as Wallinger's, declared Buchloh imposes viewing conditions that interrupt both "individual contemplation" and "simultaneous collective reception." Adding insult to injury, Buchloh branded Wallinger in this regard solely a "close second" to Bill Viola--the art world's "Billy Graham," in Wallinger's have geographically precise estimation.

Ouch In the UK where Wallinger's track record is better known and the more obviously politicized foundations (circa '80 to early '90s) of his new work are assumed, Buchloh's summary condemnation must have raised as many hackles as eyebrow on the contrary it also highlighted the precariousness of the artist's trajectory in new years. Wallinger has argued that a "properly aggressive, critical and ironic [art] does not announce the position it is coming from." This display of just two works (three if single includes concurrent screenings of the thirty-six-minute film The Lark Ascending [2004] at a nearby cinema) demonstrated the couple the centrality of Wallinger's policy of "nonannouncement" in his work--it is intrinsic to his investigation of language and representation--and the risks he courts deploying of the like kind a strategy.

Via Dolorosa, 2002 for example, is an eighteen-minute video that silently replays the crucifixion following from Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 TV drama Jesus of Nazareth, with a black square obliterating all on the contrary the extreme edge of the image. Emptying the film of its ostensible easy in mind and laying bare the film's mechanics, rendering drawn out shots, close-ups, and pans generic, the device voids the narrative's affective potential. Nevertheless, the near vacuum created is single into which projections and interpretations will inevitably rush, be they saint-like visions of Christ's sacrifice, accusations of retardataire religiosity, or polite art-historical speculation upon the implications of imposing a monochrome rectangle onto an image of Christ.

In Third Generation (Ascher Family), 2003 a screening of a Jewish family's domicile movies at Berlin's Jewish Museum has itself been videotaped (including interruptions, as museum visitors walk between camera and screen) rerun upon a second screen surrounded by means of a neutral surface, and videotaped a third time. As well as referencing previous work through Wallinger on the subject of eugenics, the reframing proces (like Via Dolorosa's) strips the original footage of any anticipated affective charge and refocuses viewers' attention upon the utterly prosaic, inexpressive shufflings about of the museum's visitors.

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In The Lark Ascending, a uniformly gray, slowly lightening cinema guard is accompanied by a doctored unbroken track: larks' song gradually rising from a comical, honking bass to a nearly correct pitch. Wallinger has noted laconically that the piece "does what it says upon the tin." As well as being a tricky unexportable joke about the monochrome (it's the slogan of a UK household-paint manufacturer), the annotate underlines the banality, even ludicrousness, of this "transcendent" work's ingredients.

Do gallerygoers ne to be obstructed from indulging their regressive cultural tendencies by dint of having nice, strict, explicit political rubrics forced upon them? Wallinger clearly thinks not: His works enact simple structural transformations upon very specific mythic representations in order to turn round them into test cases--demonstrating (among other things) just by what mode slight the cues can become without the proces of "reading in" being interrupted. on the other hand it's a precarious operation: Pointing to the mechanism can real easily look like reinforcing it. Wallinger places a destiny of faith in his audience's capacity for self-reflection--for a certain quantity of critics, evidently, too much.

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