Alan Phelan
Sokea Yksityistilaisuus
Project Show of HIAP Resident Artist
Oksasenkatu 11, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
22-26 October 2011
All works 2011
Brian’s Bright Future
kansakunnan synty
clay, cardboard, paper, paint, apples
35 x 21 x 28 cm
Checkers Paranoia (this is not a DUMB)
allas pommisuoja kakku (tämä ei ole tyhmä)
archival paper, EVA glue, toner
100 (long) x 18 x 46 cm
Larry the Centaur
mies laama karitsan
c-prints
20 x 30 cm
Suburban Faux Real
itäkeskus kenkä
fabric, c-print
Rosebud Window Tunnel Curtain
nuppu malli vieraassa paikassa
cut velvet curtain fabric, printed cotton, adhesive
240 (high) x 197 (wide) cm
Speaking of Drives
oppia kokonaisuuksia
video projection
duration 17 minutes
from the story by Medb Ruane
Prologue:
Imaginary place, imaginary time. Footballer’s girlfriend Charlene Hume-Berkeley encounters former Carmelite nun, Dame Judy Tutler and Irish Nationalist Arthur Griffith, in Erottaja underground car park and tunnels, Helsinki.
Status and achievement fascinate Charlene Hume-Berkeley (25). She’s obsessing about what men want, however, because of an ebbing sexual rapport with her partner. Determined to star in her own reality TV show, she recently discarded her research into later Lacan and the art of handbagging because it’s bad for her image. Played here by Rachel Cheung.
Dame Judy Tutler (39) lives currently as a celibate. Sometimes, she dreams of driving in the Leggenda e Passione at Maranella, with her ideal lover by her side. A mechanic in her Carmelite years, Judy loves tinkering with various Scaglietti-designed, pontoon-fendered Ferrari 250 TRs. Her wish list number one is to inspect all 22 constructed between 1957 and 1958. Played here by Fionna O’Sullivan.
In another life, Arthur Griffith (1872-1922) might be DJ’s ideal. Editor, essayist and politician, his article ‘The Resurrection of Hungary’ (1904) questions how sovereignty evolves for smaller countries within larger entities, there the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Coincidentally, the 15 years he spent (1895 -1910) as an engaged man overlap with key moments in Sigmund’s Freud’s articulation of psychoanalysis. Played here by Frank Boyle.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to all who helped in this production made in such a short time-frame. Firstly the actors and crew Ulla Linnanvuo, Tomasz Szrama, Pii Anttila, Daniel Moynihan, and the many others who helped along the way including The Finn Brit Players, Thespians Anonymous, Toni Ledentsa, and Marita Muukkonen.
HIAP Press release:
For this exhibition, Irish artist Alan Phelan will present several works that have been developed while on residency at HIAP over three months. Phelan works in a variety of media which include fabric, papier-mâché and video. The underground tunnels of Helsinki city formed the starting point for Phelan’s work here. These allowed him to develop his interest in “infrastructural aesthetic”, a concept that allows several parallel narratives to exist, linking the physical to the political to the societal to the individual.
Phelan will also screen for the first time a video made in the underground car park chambers of Erottaja in Helsinki, built originally during the early Cold War years as an air raid shelter. The script has been developed with Irish writer and psychotherapist Medb Ruane and has three unlikely characters discussing the psychology of car culture. The three argue over some of the nuances of the field from early Freud to the later Lacan, teasing out the illusive O-Object, or the unobtainable object of desire.
With Phelan’s work there is a mix of literal and symbolic references, encouraging conflicting viewpoints and interpretations, attempting to gently undermine the certainty of our cultural assumptions. The works in the show contrast greatly so as to engage political history, cultural theory, psychoanalysis, science fiction and sexuality – shaped through interests in narrative, trans-cultural potential, and provisional meaning.
The HIAP residency is in partnership with Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.
Alan Phelan
Seeing Things That Aren’t There
Sokea Yksityistilaisuus
HIAPin residenssitaiteilijan
näyttely Oksasenkatu 11 -galleriassa.
Näyttelyn avajaiset:
Lauantaina 22.10.2011 klo 18 alkaen
Gallerian aukioloajat:
Sunnuntaina 23.10.2011 klo 12–18
Keskiviikosta Lauantaihin 26.–29.10.2011 klo 12–18
Oksasenkatu 11, 00100 Helsinki, Finland www.oksasenkatu11.fi
Näyttely esittelee useita irlantilaistaiteilija Alan Phelanin työn alla olevia teoksia, joita hän on työstänyt viimeisen kolmen kuukauden aikana HIAPin taiteilijaresidenssissä. Phelan työskentelee laaja-alaisesti niin tekstiilin, paperimassan kuin videotaiteenkin parissa. Nyt esiteltävien teosten lähtökohtana ovat Helsingin maanalaiset tunneliverkostot, joiden kautta taitelijaon kehittänyt kiinnostustaan “infrastrukturaaliseen estetiikkaan”. Käsite mahdollistaa useiden rinnakkaisten narratiivien olemassaolon liittäen fyysisen poliittiseen ja yhteiskunnallisen yksilölliseen.
Phelan esittää näyttelyssä ensimmäistä kertaa videoteoksen, joka kuvattiin maanalaisessa parkkihallissa Erottajalla, alun perin pommisuojaksi kylmän sodan alkuvuosina rakennetuissa tiloissa. Käsikirjoitus, jossa kolme erilaista hahmoa keskustelevat autokulttuurin psykologiasta, on kehitetty yhteistyössä irlantilaisen kirjalilijan ja psykoterapeutin Medb Ruanen kanssa. Videon kolme hahmoa kiistelevät alan nyansseista Freudin varhaistuotannosta Lacanin myöhäisempään tuotantoon, metsästäen petollista O-Objektia tai halun saavuttamatonta kohdetta.
Phelanin sekoittaa tuotannossaan sananmukaisia ja vertauskuvallisia viittauksia rohkaisten ristiriitaisiin näkökulmiin ja tulkintoihin yrittäen huomaamattomasti romuttaa kulttuuriset ennakko- odotuksemme. Näyttelyn teokset rakentavat suuria kontrasteja liittämällä yhteen poliittista historiaa, kulttuuriteoriaa, psykoalalyysia, sficiä ja seksuaalisuutta, jotka muokkautuvat kiinnostuksesta narratiiviin, kulttuurien väliseen potentiaaliiin ja suhteellisiin merkityksiin.
Alan Phelan (s.1968 Dublinissa, asuu ja työskentelee Dublinissa, Irlannissa) valmistui Dublin City Universitysta Dublinista 1989 ja Rochester Institute of Technologysta New Yorkista 1994. Hänen töitään on ollut esillä Irlannin ulkopuolella mm. Cabinetissa New Yorkissa, Chapterissa Cardiffissa, Whitney Museum of American Artissa New Yorkissa, SKUC:ssa Ljubljanassa, Feinkostissa Berliinissä sekä SKC:ssa Belgradissa sekä Irlannissa Irish Museum of Modern Artissa, mother’s tankstationissa Dublinissa, MCAC:ssa Portadownissa, Limerick City Gallery of Artissa, ja Solstice Arts Centressa Navanissa. Phelan toimitti/kuratoi 51. Venetsian biennaalissa julkaistun Printed Projectin numeron viisi ja on kuratoinut näyttelyitä Royal Hibernian Academy:n Dubliniin, Project Arts Centreen Dubliniin ja Rochesteriin New Yorkiin. Phelan oli ehdolla AIB Art Prize –palkinnon saajaksi 2007. Hän on totettanut useita julkisia taideprojekteja Irlannissa, Walesissa ja New Yorkissa, mm. Dublinin kaupunginhallituksen, Dun Laoghaire Rathdownin kreivikunnan sekä Irlannin liikenneministeriön toimesta. Hänen teoksiaan on hankittu Irish Museum of Modern Artin, Limerick City Gallery of Artin, ja The National Self-Portrait Collectionin kokoelmiin sekä useisiin yksityiskokoelmiin.
HIAP residenssi on toteutettu yhteistyössä Temple Bar Gallery + Studios sekä Arts Council of Irelandin kanssa.
Script for Speaking of Drives
Alan Phelan
from a story by Medb Ruane
Meet at Korkeavuorenkatu 26, Erottajan pelastusasema at 10am
Prologue to original text for character breakdown and setting:
Imaginary place, imaginary time. Footballer’s girlfriend Charlene Hume-Berkeley encounters former Carmelite nun, Dame Judy Tutler, at a Show and Shine spectacle provoked by Alan Phelan. Re-worked now to the Erottaja underground car park and tunnels in Helsinki.
Status and achievement fascinate Charlene Hume-Berkeley (25). She’s obsessing about what men want, however, because of an ebbing sexual rapport with her partner [Lacan: There is no sexual relation, ie impossibility of being complete or completed]. Determined to star in her own reality TV show, she recently discarded her research into later Lacan and the art of handbagging because it’s bad for her image.
Dame Judy Tutler (39) lives currently as a celibate. Sometimes, she dreams of driving in the Leggenda e Passione at Maranella, with her ideal lover by her side. A mechanic in her Carmelite [nun: silent order] years, Judy loves tinkering with various Scaglietti-designed, pontoon-fendered Ferrari 250 TRs. Her wish list number one is to inspect all 22 constructed between 1957 and 1958. [born from Judith Butler/ Gender Trouble, great queer theorist, thinkin also practical/sensual, Judi Dench-feel tho younger cf in Bond films]
In another life, Arthur Griffith (1872-1922) might be DJ’s ideal. Editor, essayist and politician, his article ‘The Resurrection of Hungary’ (1904) questions how sovereignty evolves for smaller countries within larger entities, there the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Coincidentally, the 15 years he spent (1895-1910) as an engaged man overlap with key moments in Sigmund’s Freud’s articulation of psychoanalysis.
TITLE on black Dialogue 1: Driving dialectics in the hyper-modern era
INT Erottaja Car Park – underground parking hall, rows of parked cars under the roughly hewn, white painted, man-made cave. The three characters are grouped around one car and shots cut between them when they speak. They move between different cars at one end of the car park. Each dialogue piece from each actor is a mix of medium close-up (head and upper torso) and close-up (head and shoulders). Cutaways also between non speaking characters are important, reacting to dialogue related to them whether disapproving, affirmative or simply ennui.
The scene opens with a wide shot of the car park and then cuts to a medium shot of Dame Judy who is closest to a car and strokes it lovingly but respectfully.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT MCU DJ You all know something about motors? I want to talk about their carnal delights. At the level of the body, CUT CU DJ I’m like a Mongolian horsewoman readying her steed for competition when I’m shinin’ my car. The rituals are the same whether you’re groomin’ a Fiat Punto or a Ferrari. CUT MCU HB I wash, rub, preen; polish ’til the skin glows. CUT WS GRP I enjoy the standing back then, walking round, CUT CU AG raising my eyes up, and down, as I seek wholeness and completion – in vain, CUT CU DJ of course, because there is never an oeillade, never a unifying moment where I can see it all at once and experience, CUT WS GRP what may I say, ecstasy? Mmmm … and the fragrances – sweaty engine oil boosting waxy sleekness, leather’s unguenty whiff, the interior’s taut, expectant aroma hovering, veiling …
ARTHUR GRIFFITH
CUT MCU AG You sound like Teresa of Avila, my dear! I’m more interested in the drives you inadvertently describe. I wish to explore them, if I may presume. Prof. Freud believed that they regulate sexuality and make us distinctively human in distinctively individual ways. CUT CU DJ It was a shock at the time, may I say. CUT CU AG They’ve nothing to do with biology, he found. Not one connects to instinct. CUT CU HB The tragedy is that the drives are unsatisfiable, relentlessly partial, CUT CU AG condemned to spark off their discontinuous components of pressure, end, object and source.
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB With respect, Arthur, that’s so old handbag. Your friend Freud changed his topography, you know, on top of opposing life drives and death drives. CUT CU AG Yes, the opposition mirrored old literary binaries CUT CU HB like Apollonian and Dionysian, or Eros and Thanatos, but Lacan sorted that. He’s more useful here because, after all, we’re considering something that’s creative and destructive – the art of boy racing versus the crime of boy racing. What’s different here? CUT CU DJ The drives are analogous to boy racers: they enjoy by pursuing a circuit, a closed circuit, quite repetitively. CUT CU HB There’s no final destination, it’s the doing, the re-doing, and re-doing some more. It’s about dicing with desire.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ A moment please, Charlene. I admire your poeticism Arthur, I always have. Let me share my thoughts about the boy racers, remembering the Mongolian horsemen … and my darlin’ Ewan McGregor filming there…
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB Pardon me, Judy. I’m trying to articulate something here and your cuts aren’t helpful. Every drive is a death drive for Lacan because it’s excessive, repetitive – even destructive. CUT MCU HB It’s no accident that we’re playing with the sound-sense of the boy racers’ “driving” and the “drives” as over a century of psychoanalysis has it. CUT CU DJ These are important signifiers. And, it’s no accident that many people hate boy racers at a gut level. CUT CU HB It’s almost primordial, that disgust, so we have to ask why. Something else is going on …
ARTHUR GRIFFITH
CUT CU AG You may think me old fashioned, Miss Charlene. I hesitate to correct a young woman yet I’m duty bound to introduce the term libido, which your master Lacan transformed into jouissance. CUT WS GRP I must inquire where the drives as you know them feature in your subjective panorama and how they are relevant there.
CUT WS HB walking away from the group
TITLE on black Dialogue 2: Myth and symbol in the hyper-modern era
INT Erottaja Car Park group gathered around a different car, in another part of the cark. They walk around the car while talking also. The scene begins again with a wide shot of the group.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT MCU DJ Something marvellous happens when a human climbs inside a car and becomes as one with it. Vroom, vroom! The highway beckons, the future sheds limits. Years of enforced silence often leave me struggling for words, but in my imaginings, the racers are twenty-first century centaurs. Where does man stop and beast begin? Why are …
ARTHUR GRIFFITH
CUT MCU AG Shall I assist, Judy? You’re implying, if I may be so bold, that the racers are a trope, like centaurs are. You’re saying that they function rhetorically as fantasy figures carrying the burden of people’s fears and aspirations. CUT CU DJ Centaurs are extravagant inventions, as I saw with my own eyes when reviewing Slavic mythology in the early 20th century. CUT MCU AG They’re Dionysian hybrids, liminal beings born out of conflicting territories: our human world or the nether regions which may be benign, but represent as likely malign, CUT CU AG even malignant forces. We don’t know if they’re friends or foe, therefore we fear. We’re clutched by anxiety’s suffocating embrace.
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
(groans)
CUT CU HB Nature/culture? Limens and margins? Way too easy Arthur, too romantic. Next you’ll be dissertating on the archetypal implications à la Jung. What a loser.
ARTHUR GRIFFITH
CUT MCU AG I’m mystified as to why I irritate you, Miss Charlene. Surely there’s room to consider the centaurs, and by association the racers, as giving free rein to id representations and thus to uncontrollable inner wildnesses. CUT CU HB They represent the unrepresentable. CUT MCU DJ Dame Judy, let me introduce you to Freud’s second topography. He set it out during the Anglo-Irish negotiations which preoccupied me, although he doesn’t mention them. CUT CU AG Id–ego–superego: the id, or das Es as Freud also writes, doesn’t organise itself coherently; rather it’s the ‘great reservoir of libido’, ‘a chaos’ of unrelenting drives, here, life and death as I noted previously. He says the ego is like a rider trying to control a wild horse, it being the id. Is this the centaur’s domain, the boy racer’s?
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT MCU HB You may not mean to be so patronising, Arthur, but puh-lease give Judy a break. CUT CU HB Me too before I cliché my life away. Get real! Think about the real, the real Real, the rim round Das Ding, the void, chasm, the nothing at the core of being. Think about racers inscribing the deadly space we can’t name, challenging it like matadors, toreadors, whatever, brandishing red banners before huge, blank eyes that could kill.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ You’re losing me.
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB The racing knots the three registers, don’t you get it? Real, Symbolic, Imaginary. It’s a dazzling, desperate display of jouissance punctuated/punctured by limits. The car is like a carcass, an envelope – and the thought of it, the fantasy, is the hinge that knots carcass and subject together! Beyond, the death drive! Within, the hole of being! Or the other way round…
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ I’m lost.
(A pause. Conversation resumes)
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ The Gordon Bennett myth intrigues me. I understand he lived in real time yet if he did not, we’d have had to invent him.
ARTHUR GRIFFITH
CUT MCU AG What an unusual man. Rather like the primal father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo who enjoyed without limits. The exception. He did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and no one could stop him, until the sons cooperated and killed him! Then they had to invent laws and regulations so it wouldn’t happen again. CUT CU AG In Bennett’s case, his vast wealth and media empire made everything possible.
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB Sounds like another speech is coming. Anyway, Darwin mentioned the primal father first. He was probably psychotic.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ Darwin?
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB No, Bennett. Or perverse, perhaps, because he acknowledged the Law without obeying it. He skirted around it, toyed with it. Here, though, the only way the racers can do what they do is to respect limits.
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ The intervention interests me. Am I using the right word, intervention? I’m into cars. You two are talking about God knows what. I read newspapers. I listen to Joe Duffy. People hate boy racers at a visceral level but of course the racers they hate aren’t the centaurs I love or the car-lovers I admire. What’s the difference?
CHARLENE HUME-BERKELEY
CUT CU HB It’s hyper-modernism via Foucault’s ‘new relational mode’ with the artist intervening almost as an analyst does; using witz, joke, parody, skill…
DAME JUDY TUTLER
CUT CU DJ What team does your boyfriend play for, Charlene?
CUT WS GRP DJ and AG look toward HB who remains silent
