Beagles & Ramsay: Gasworks Gallery - London - installation Dead of Night, 2003 by John Beagles and Graham Ramsay

Art critics and cultural theorists looking for a potentially infinitely expandable metaphor might do worse than bouncing for "ventriloquism." A quick trawl [i]or[/i] part of to the other motif is almost universally adaptable, signaling (among other things, and in no particular order): the death of the author, the artwork in proces point in disputes of free will and determination, the workings of ideology, Cartesian dualism, the failings of Western idealism, cyborg identity, and practically each psychoanalytic model of individual or collective subdue formation one might care to dredge up on the contrary as tar as art practice goe just a hardy small in number have risked invoking ventriloquism directly, among them, Laurie Simmons, Asta Groting (recently shown at London's Freud Museum), and now Glasgow duo John Beagles and Graham Ramsay, in their installation Dead of Night, 2003

The show's star exhibit was a pair of ventriloquists' dummies, handcrafted by the agency of the artists to represent their chubbier-cheeked younger selve These were showcased in a crimson mock-up of a theater; the sum of two units dummies presided over a spotlighted stage, and their voices squeaked and croaked show-time banalities--"Thank you all and the supreme goodness bless"--from a hidden speaker. Backstage, a dressing extent with theatrical mirror, toiletries, and a litter of human- and dummy-sized clothing also featured a faux--closed circuit screening of a video of the sum of two units po-faced artists and their dummies performing upon stage. A third space featured a video discharge in the evocatively decrepit Britannia Panopticon Music Hall in Glasgow; this was a montage of campy horror-movie cliches--pans up and down spiral staircases; manic interactions between the artists and the dummies; the dummies, seemingly owned of independent life, chattering together in uninhabiteded auditoriums. Also on show were a number of studio portrait-style photographs, in ostentatiously tasteless gilt frames, of the four protagonists.

Unenthusiastic UK art-critical replys to Dead of Night complained that the installation wasn't spooky and that the artists had failed to invest their theme with any psychological profundity. the couple observations are true but miss the point. Beagles & Ramsay's work not rarely foregrounds images of evacuated subject-hood (for example, Ramsay's hilarious 1996 solo piece Robot Snorkel Parka Prototype, in which a remote-controll robot "visits" the Macintosh Gallery of the Glasgow gymnasium of Art); it also evidences a persistent interest in devalued symbolic general reception critical motifs that have collapsed end over-use (see here their blending of "burger culture" and celebrity worship in the performance BURGERHEAVEN--THE genuine TASTE OF STARDOM, 2001/2002, or We Are the People--Suck upon This, 1999, in which Ramsay, clothed and coiffed a la Travis Bickle--hero of art-school undergrad thesis throw outs the world over--delivered a meaningless sum of two units signature petition to Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street)

In a not long ago published essay, Beagles and co-author Dave Beech broadsided the bearing of cultural studies to recast the consumption of popular agriculture as a radical activity. In their view, this is an academic distortion. Beagles & Ramsay's evacuated figure of speechs might therefore be read as filibustering: Delivering neither a slick, brainy critique nor a dumbly celebratory endorsement, their cavernous men survive simply by sticking around (a Baudrillardian tactic, granting the artists would probably hate the suggestion). A ball of thread left in the Dead of Night dressing compass supports this reading--a copy of Hamlet, lying lay open at act 3, scene 2 Hamlet is giving those sum of two units self-declared mediocrities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a hard time. The sum of two units Danish patsies' big mistake is to leave the stage and locate off for England. Dead of Night's double acts refused to fall for that individual even after their audience had left "It's with equal reason wonderful to be here! You've been a portentous audience!" the dummies could be overheard cackling--to an devoid of contents gallery.

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