Amanda Beech, Sanity Assassin, Spike Island, Bristol

Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin, 2009, installation views.
Photos: Stuart Bunce, courtesy of Spike Island.

Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin
Spike Island
133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX
23.01.10 - 11.04.10
Tuesday - Sunday, Screenings every 20 minutes, 11 am - 5 pm

Sanity Assassin is an installation in 2 parts with an accompanying publication, produced by British artist Amanda Beech during Spike Island's 2009 main production residency. Beech's practice often grows out of research visits to sites in which exercises of power and law are manifested in architecture and manipulations of social space; Sites such as Los Angeles - the source for this piece - and Harlow New Town, which features in Statecraft, one of a number of earlier works on show alongside the new project.

The audience are encouraged to enter the first room at 20 minute intervals in order to take in a dazzling sculptural installation, followed by a intense and enthralling 3-screen video installation.

The sculptural element (photographed above) is an immaculately presented set of bright yellow chain-saws, at first glance all identical, yet on closer inspection all subtly different models. Arranged atop a mirrored plinth and lit from above with floodlights, the piece is a spectacular piece of 'pure display' 1. It is an explicit comment on commodity fetishism, with a substrate of suppressed violence and a nod towards horror movie cliches. Apparently based on the corporate lobby of a real Los Angeles showroom, it sets an ominous tone for the coming video work.

After a few minutes in this space the lights drop and we are compelled by sound emanating from the adjoining room to move on to the second part - a multi-channel video installation projected across 3 large screens positioned at differing heights and awkward angles. Beginning with a CGI rainstorm reminiscent of a classic film noir device of mood-setting, the installation is permeated with an atmosphere of imminent violence.

The new video work is an abrasively composed edit of scenes of LA, pithy statements and digitally manipulated photographic elements, cut to a throbbing soundtrack of electronic noise; the buzz-saw pulses reminiscent of the installation we have just left behind. The vision of LA - portrayed through shots of a mixture of public and private spaces, by day and night, which bounce and repeat through an array of filters, effects and physical rotations across the screens - is a nightmarish, Lynchean one. Spliced in in a style that brings to mind both MTV and political sloganeering, are texts collaged together from a mixture of appropriated and original narratives - sources range from an interview with LA photographer Julius Shulman, a reworking of émigré German philosopher Theodor Adorno's Dream Notes, pulp literature, FBI files and song lyrics. For some reason I can't help but think of Brett Easton Ellis' dystopian visions of America throughout.

Sanity Assassin is divided into two distinct halves, each exploring the philosophy of a character of Beech's creation - Arnold Rottweiler and Artemis Star. Rottweiler's dialogue explores culture's alienation of nature and ideas of self-enforced seclusion, Starr's echoes with New World Order paranoia. In both we see beliefs that descended into psychosis, leading to suicidal despair and physical violence. The experience is submersive, dizzying and terrifying.

The accompanying screening and reading area serves as an introduction to Beech's highly idiosyncratic, polemical style, and penchant for aggressively electronic sound-tracking. Sparking myriad associations that coalesce around questions of the relationships between culture, politics and public space, and the rhetoric employed to espouse them, the works are exciting in tone and reinforced with deeply thought-provoking subject mater.

1. Spike Island exhibition guide.

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater, Picture This, Bristol

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater
Picture This
Corner of Sydney Row & Mardyke Ferry Rd, Spike Island, Bristol BS1 6UU
23.01.10 – 06.03.10
Thursday to Saturday 12 - 5.30pm

10 Seconds Or Greater, is a new video work by British artist Rachel Reupke. Her multidisciplinary practice employs video, text and sculpture to examine ideas of taste, status and social position as defined and expressed in the mainstream media.

Produced as part of Picture This' residency program, the video is made using a group of actors to construct scenes reproduced from royalty-free stock footage; Formally a composite of unrelated scenes, that are here tied together by the uniformity created through the film's limited cast and small set, it is a fascinating and novel take on the process of creative appropriation. The title suggests the arbitrary kind of search term one might use when browsing through the bank of sources utilised in the creation of these shots.

Set to a score that alternates between long draughts of silence and a specially written R&B soundtrack, the video presents a group of attractive young adults carrying out scenes of domesticity and sociability, channeled through interaction with a range of products. The tracts of silence create a situation in which our voyeuristic position gives us the sense having of an objective eye into this situation. The real effect is in fact far from objective. Inevitably when faced with a world that we do not take part in (nor want to take part in), we adopt a critical stance and begin passing judgement and examining opinion.

Reupke is an artist who 'engages in the artisanal production of the generic.' 1 The look and feel of the setting of this film - the kind of pristine interior we can imagine existing in a suburban new-build, punctuated with functional objects displayed with a designer's precision - is an exercise in blandness that appears like an advertisement stripped of its logos and slogans. Intentionally reminiscent of the language of the corporate promo, everything is utterly devoid of human touch and believable personality, everything contrived and paired down to portrayal of a kind of self-satisfied success that induces a cringing distrust bordering on disgust.

Through the formal act of gathering these unconnected scenes into a lingering gaze, Reupke creates an opportunity for us to reflect upon the kind of the world promoted in the ideology of consumer capitalism. Scenes of social interaction, the hand-shakes re-shot again and again, endless introductions and unheard conversations, are played out repeatedly by a succession of recombinations of the 5 or 6 characters. Lingering product shots, the occasional, unnerving, long look or smile into the camera, and the underlying banality of stylised acts such as food preparation and the use of communications technology, point us towards the language of aspirational lifestyle marketing. The scenes take on a hyper-reality that sits at an awkward intersection of the idealised and the vacuous - a misplaced or misguided ideal of aspiration and self-actualisation.

1 Marina Vishmidt, Reverting To Type (accompanying essay)

A clip from the new video can be seen here.