Tina Keane at the Transit Gallery and Stan Douglas at The Serpentine Gallery
Recently whenever I've asked the questions "What is art?" and, following swiftly on, "What's the point of art?" the answer that has satisfied me and allowed me to move on to other ponderables ("Is this show crap or what?") has been around seeing the world differently. So "What do you want from art?" elicits the answer "Show me something I've never seen before." And both these shows, time-based and using projection as their central form, do that but in quite different ways.
The Stan Douglas show is based around three film and video installations with accompanying photos on the walls. Le Detroit, a single screen projected onto from both by two film projectors to produce an almost syncronised image and Journey into Fear, a chopped up narrative, is the most recent work. But my favourite piece, the oldest of the three, is Der Sandmann. Its appeal for me may simply be because it immediately shows you the world you think you know in a wholly different way- it's like a science-fiction device, distorting the vision of an exterior, outside world as the light that illuminates it passes to the interior. I kept thinking of Ray Milland in The Man with X-ray eyes, seeing everything differently to the rest of the world and ultimately going mad because of it.
Der Sandmann: On a single screen play a left and a right-hand image, both gently panning, continuously, to the right at an equal pace. It has the gentle sense of motion that looking out of the window of a slowly moving train (but more of that later). What distinguishes Der Sandmann is that the two scenes that share a single screen appear to be the same location and objects, the same shot and movement but one is showing a past and one a future. The same object is invariably altered, its past state changed by the slightly blurred line where it crosses over into its present/future state.
Voices appear on the soundtrack and there's a building sense of characters doing something (one appears in vision) that I neither figured out, nor ultimately cared about that much – for me the real excitement has what was happening on the screen. There's an explanatory text outside the projection room refers us to the area outside Berlin where the accompanying photos were taken, Freud's essay on the Uncanny and the children's story of the Sandman that I hadn't paid too much attention to on the way in to the film and didn't get (or made a point of not getting on the way out).
Ghost Train, Tina Keane's installation at the Transit Gallery is a much more modest affair, swapping video for 16mm and one installation for three, but is no less successful. Where Stan Douglas's show inherits that slightly peculiar Serpentine Gallery too-much-light-and-oxygen feel from being located in a central London park – couples in fleeces strolling through the park pretending it's summer, Barbour jacketed families who've made the trek over from Hampstead in their four-wheel-drive-fuckwit-mobile – The Transit Gallery is your artist-led urban gallery and very nice it is too. Outside, abandoned cars balanced up on collapsed 10 litre paint tins compete for your attention with the dog shit and rubbish-strewn streets while inside a single video projection and two custom-made neon lights illuminate the smaller but perfectly formed space. Ghost train is a short looped video of a suburban train journey where the footage has been treated, first into reversal (all black skies and white roofs and trees) and then with spots of heightened eerie colour. The soundtrack sounds like early electronica (Suicide, the New York band of Alan Vega and Martin Rev sort of thing) but, the press release says, is actually chopped up sampling from the readings of samuel Beckett, kids' songs and train noises. Overhead a pink neon aeroplane hangs down silently as if from the ceiling of a kid's bedroom and a green neon train greets the visitor as they first enter the space – colours that are reflected in the video projection. There's an openness and a space for the viewer to occupy between all these things, to make their own decisions about what the artist is showing us that might in some way be different to what we knew before we entered the gallery space.
With Stan Douglas's work I know why I like it and what I don't like about it. Formally it's great – both playful and intelligent - but the narratives don't hold together as well. Journey into Fear is probably the reason for the show, it's the most recent and perhaps most ambitious of these pieces. It's a lovely conceit, beautifully conceived and delivered but the narrative and the relationships we're asked to buy into – the ones between the characters, ourselves as spactators, the gallery space and the references of the work to name a few - can only function as well as they do because of all the surrounding exposition in the catalogue, the press and on the gallery wall about the randomising of multiple soundtracks to the shot sequences. There is something very clever, deeply referential and thorough going on here that desperately wants to show me the world differently but ultimately, it feels to me, that where it works best is when it's not really trying too hard.
Transit Gallery
24 Tudor Grove
E9 7QL
020 7359 3885
art@transitspace.com
to 14 April 2002 Sat and Sun 1-6pm.
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
W2
020 7402 6075
to 7 April
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