Visual Art
www.list.co.uk/visualart
‘IT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE IMPACT OF OBJECTS ON OUR BODIES’ Hitlist THE BEST EXHIBITIONS *
A scene from Petit à Petit
✽✽ The Last Days of Jack Sheppard Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ film and installation imagines the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and writer Daniel Defoe. CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 26 Sep. ✽✽ Cerith Wyn Evans with Throbbing Gristle: A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N Welsh experimental filmmaker Evans collaborates with the original industrial music pioneers on this large-scale structure constructed out of mirror mobiles. Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 27 Sep. ✽✽ Edvard Munch Last chance to catch this powerful exhibition of woodcuts, lithographs and etchings by the great Norwegian artist. Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 5 Sep. ✽✽ The Raw and the Cooked The first collaborative exhibition by Icelandic artists Baldvin Ringsted and Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir features installations and sculpture inspired by music. CCA, Glasgow, until Sun 6 Sep. ✽✽ Spin on This Street art specialists Recoat celebrate their second birthday with this bicycle-themed exhibition. Recoat Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 6 Sep. ✽✽ Lili Renaud-Dewar: Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of the European Short-hand Typists French installation artist Reynaud-Dewar presents a new work based on the lost profession of shorthand-typists. See preview, left. Mary Mary, Glasgow, Sat 29 Aug–Sat 3 Oct. ✽✽ Henry Coombes: The Bedfords Filmmaker Coombes tells the story of Victorian portrait painter Sir Edward Landseer, in a work which features a cameo from Alasdair Gray and music from Cleveland Watkiss. Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, Fri 4 Sep–Fri 9 Oct.
Power play
Lili Renaud-Dewar’s new installation explores social structures through the lost profession of shorthand typists. She discusses her practice with Talitha Kotzé
Lili Renaud-Dewar flirts with the power struggles between futuristic ideals and outdated technology. Fetishising analogue technology in a digital age, she teases viewers with a seductive installation based on the lost profession of shorthand- typists and the obsolete practice of stenography.
The French artist has used the site specificity of Mary Mary’s office-like ceiling as a starting point for her show. Viewers can expect sculptures and objects that were used in her recent performance on the French coast featuring two typists, one shorthand- typist and a young man assisting them, two wooden cages, two sets of desks and office chairs, two typewriters and a generator. In the same vein as French writer and film director Marguerite Duras’ theatre performances, Renaud-Dewar prefers to speak of her silent performance as a ‘fixed happening’.
The power structures, rituals and sexuality of the European Shorthand-typist conjures up conflicting images: women in mini skirts and high heels, with upright postures obediently typing away, but at the same time earning a wage to buy time and independence. Renaud-Dewar, however, doesn’t want to show either female emancipation or stereotype: ‘I am more interested in how we can misuse objects and deviate techniques to produce different experiences. Focusing on an obsolete technology, into which so many women were trained during the 20th century, seems like a good standpoint for such a project.’ The artist draws inspiration from a variety of sources: Italian designer Etore Sottsass, who helped make office equipment fashionable (he made his name in the 1960s with the red Valentine typewriter); radical architecture firm Superstudio; Donna
54 THE LIST 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
Haraway’s cyborg feminism and her writing on how machines can contribute to liberation; through to filmmaker Jean Rouch’s semi-fictitious ethno-fiction. As Renaud-Dewar explains these thinkers all make use of mass produced objects or mainstream media to develop their ideas: ‘It is a Trojan Horse strategy, consisting of using an apparently innocuous object to develop complex theories about the ritual, the magic, the utopia, and the future. Jean Rouch used cinema to produce ethnological research, Donna Haraway put her feminist manifesto online from the very beginning of the internet, Superstudio and Sottsass worked for the design industry and produced a series of tables and chairs for everyday usage.’
In Jean Rouch’s 1971 film Petit à Petit there is a scene in which a young woman is seated behind a typewriter, locked in a wooden cage. She seems very happy. ‘This is an enigmatic and short scene,’ says Renaud-Dewar, ‘but it says a lot about work, class, gender, and the impact of objects on our bodies. As an object producer operating in a very restricted field – I make sculpture – I am very interested in this relationship between the social, constructed body and the object, whether it be mass produced or unique.’ By employing such juxtapositions, her work creates an anthropological documentary about the aesthetics of technology at work. A generation ago we were trained in stenography, now we learn word, access and excel. What will this tell future audiences about our own power structures, rituals and sexuality?
Lili Reynaud-Dewar: Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of the European Shorthand-Typists, Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 3 Oct.