A POSITIVE SENSE OF DOUBT

This century, Duchamp, Cage, Schwitters and others have all exploited the artistic use of found objects taken unaltered from the mundane world and finding a new life as art pieces in galleries. A recent exhibition by Australian artist Sean Loughrey in London employs the inverse of this premise by his use of the 'found gallery ' of the Elephant & Castle Shopping centre of South London for his fourth in a series of 'site specific' projections.

Queens Hotel, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. May 1989.

'Site Specific Projection no.1'

The Queens Hotel was to be the first in a successive series of site specific projections. This site was built around the turn of the century in a classic tudur style. At the time the building was closed due to fire damage caused by children, drunks and the more serious arsonist waiting for demolition. The building stood dominant in tits surroundings, perched on a hill next to the railway station. It might remind one of the house on the hill from Hitchcock's renowned film 'Psycho'.

Queens Hotel, Westcliff-on-Sea

The building did not make heritage listing so was to be demolished.

Facade of Queens Hotel, Westcliff-on-Sea

A series of images were projected on to the facade of the building, these images included; a detail from what might be a Rembrandt painting (above), a plastic wrapper and the artist as a young boy (below).

Facade of Queens Hotel, Westcliff-on-Sea

The idea was to bring two found objects together, coexisting in a temporal space. In a sense it was to offer the site one last breadth while acknowleging the temporal nature of existance as a whole. The nature of these projections function more like events rather then exhibits. The work was viewed by drunks and suspicious passer-byes as well as the local police who kept the area well under surveilance.

'Bembridge' Leigh-on-Sea Yacht Club, Essex.

'Site Specific' Projection no.2, July 1989.

'Bembridge' was a large yacht anchored between Leigh-on-Sea and Chalkwell, Essex,UK. It was mainly used for club functions. In 1989 it was the subject for the second in a series of outdoor projections. Several images, 6 - 8 feet square were sequentially projected onto the bow of the boat.

Bembridge' Leigh-on-Sea Yacht Club, Essex.

The first image, a skull and cross bones, made from a dart flight, the second, an advertising wrapper depicting image and text against child abuse, cut from a packet of biscuits. These were found objects, in the Duchampian sense, reconfigured.

Front view of projection on the bow

Side view of projection on bow

Hadliegh Castle

Hadieigh Castle, Essex

In Site Specific Projection III, it is our sense of monumentality that Loughrey foremost puts into flux. Here Loughrey unites the decaying, solid, historically potent battlements of Hadieigh Castle in Essex with the prolected image of an aggressively complete public law building in smaller scale but again it is not that one necessarily overwhelms the other, but that together they compete, complement, correlate throughout a viewing. Visually the low building is smaller, an inset amongst the castle's solid walls, yet it sometimes draws the eye more as it is in broad daylight, the castle darker the low building whole and solidly rooted 'In the present, the castle powerful, weighty but partial, a 'ruin'

Projected images III, (Law Building), Hadieigh Castle, Essex

. Yet the law building is 'only' a projection, 'only' two dimensional, the castle walls centuries thick three-dimensional. Mental precepts of current relevance and state endorsement versus historic validity and uniqueness are also all thrown by Loughrey into the tension between the power of the images and, hovering over it all, is the twentieth century premise of the assumed primacy of the prolected image, perpetually reinforced by the passivity of our film screens.

Projected images III, ('MAKE GOOD'), Hadieigh Castle, Essex
Projected image: 35mm transparency of clouds collaged with wrapper text.

Around the turn of the eighteenth century John Constable made many preliminary sketches for possible use in larger works, throughout Essex. One such sketch was of Hadliegh Castle. Constable finished his final painting of Hadliegh Castle in 1814 shortly after the death of his wife, thus it is said to be steeped with remorse. It was this picture amongst others which reinforced Constable in the realm of 'Romanticism', alongside Casper David Fredrich. On a trip to Berlin (from London) I visited the Gallerie Romantik which houses much of Fredrich's work. and became interested in the English and German connection, via Romanticism.

Projections IV - Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, London

The pristine Elephant & Castle Shopping centre has a layer of pink paint and two elephants with castles as jockeys outside, but an interior unremittingly and devotedly mundane, and it is here that Loughrey presented for three weeks a series of light and object based installations. The viewer could approach the work through two entrances, either a door directly into the room. or less obviously, a star shaped aperture, existing unlabelled amongst the rows of shopping items. This aperture consisted of black painted glass looking into the projected image whilst reflecting a slight penumbral image of the viewer, an involving technique uniting prime elements of the aesthetic experience   the image, the process of perception and, slightly, the viewer themselves reflected back as a shopper amongst goods.

Installation View

The main projection seen through the starshaped aperture was a fly, the fly projected onto a field of clouds, the fly and cloud projected onto the the solid Elephant & Castle wall.

Installation View

  A fly is always an emotive image. In Elephant & Castle, it is a provocative antithesis, the sort of thing that places like Elephant & Castle are set up to stop, yet Loughrey's installation here isn't merely used to present a fly to a viewer for in spite of its size and moral weight, it was not such as to necessarily hold precedence in the experience of the work. The clouds, aperture and penumbral viewer all at various times overshadowed the fly and here lies the essence ' and challenge of all Loughrey's site projections. He shows that focus is a plastic thing, not something irrevocably stamped down by the artists sense of imagic weight. He shows that the viewer is involved in the making of the work, and not merely sampling the product after.

It is this premise that Loughrey primarily jettisons. His province is the shifting visual power structure between projection and its reflector (reflector at one moment and then setting at the next). His intention is not to sift through the post trompe 1'oueil questions of whether those are white squares on black, or black on white, a vase or two faces, but rather an investigation into the supposed role of the real and the unreal, object and 'image, projection and setting/reflector.

Loughrey's projections displace and make dynamic the focal, make certain at one moment and equivocal at the next, the question of prime image. Necesscirily each work is unsettled and unsettling at the advent of perception. The images are often disparate, particularly Site Specific Projection 11 of a child's face on harbour boats, but the disparity does not make for roped off concrete blocks of tension like the marriage of impossible contraries. ~_There is no Kampuchean in the Cariton Club. '

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~~ The viewer does not face the deciphering of the code of Loughrey's perception, only the deciphering of their own varying codes of perception.

In the end, Loughrey uses power, not to exert over his audience but to give to them. Loughrey asks his viewer into a realm in which all manner of intrigues of power occur on all planes, a realm where what is subject and what is country are always uncertain. Here it is a case of the works petitioning the viewer, not the viewer petitioning the artist for answers they need to find themselves.

By David Smith, 1990

(A Melbourne based writer)