Home,Introduction,Biographies,Credits,Print Catalogue Works:Tim van Dammen,Nova Paul,Clinton Watkins
A Tension Spanned, film stills 2007
Year: 2007
Medium: Media Installation
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LAY-Z-BOY
If contemporary video art can be said to solicit, by turns, a deconstructive rhetoric of gaps, discontinuities and ellipses, and a politicised rhetoric of attacking, confronting or upbraiding the viewer, what distinguishes Timothy van Dammen’s A Tension Spanned is its sense of calm, homely invitation. Take a seat, make yourself at home, it proposes, as its circular gathering of monitors offers up the spectacle of a serene domestic living space – sofas, chairs, tables – revolving seamlessly around us. The inviting domesticity of its content finds its complement in the compliant transparency of its form: A Tension Spanned, in fact, appears to aspire to a kind of representational plenitude in which nothing is ever lost, misplaced or ambiguous. Eschewing both the conventional narrative cunning of information withheld, and video art’s calculated ambiguity, the ‘narrative’, of which the film constitutes a kind of embryo, is laid out before us with all of the lavish indulgence of a three-piece lounge suite. Temporal development transmuted into full, room-wide panorama, A Tension Spanned enables a single, languid glance to take in quite as much as a careful concentration. The anonymous figure moving about in the background personifies just this opulent excess of information, redundantly describing aloud their entirely visible activities: “now I am making a drink of coffee, now I am sitting on the couch...” Aligning, then, the interpretational ease of its form and the domesticity of its content in a kind of paroxysm of surround-sound domesticated bliss, a fantasy of total cinematic immersion, A Tension Spanned appears to promise some serious R & R – both physical and interpretational – in the otherwise austere gallery environs.
The manifest irony of the work – and one referent of the “tension” alluded to in the title – is that in an institutional space that is most at home when it is most ‘on edge’; most exposed to the perils of the interpretational gap and the hazards of artistic attack, ‘rest and relaxation’ is never as restful or relaxing as it seems. To those schooled in this kind of dedication to their own discomfort, the immediate effect of such visual and spectacular plenitude is less blissed-out satisfaction than anxious semiotic vacuum. Rewarding the passing glance, the channel surfer, the lay-z-boy, where conventional video work valorises the dividends of vigilant attention, A Tension Spanned’s narrative abundance paradoxically leaves the gallery-goer a little short of cultural change. Crucially, however, Van Dammen’s uniquely furnished gallery space functions less to foreclose engagement than to foreground the question of what kind of engagement might occur when there is no engagement required. Mocking the identification of meaning with a kind ofpainful labour, van Dammen invokes the spectacle of the culture-savvy couch potato, putting cultural engagement back on the couch where it all began. What emerges is a subtle re-upholstering of the time-honoured feminist invocation of the gendered tension between gallery space and domestic space, as van Dammen invites us to collapse the difference between the frameworks of engagement attendant on these spaces, and in the process to interrogate assumed oppositions between entertainment and art, between work and play, between consumption and its critique. Redecorating the gallery as living room, A Tension Spanned is a work that, if it interrogates the spectator’s interpretative norms, always does so in the nicest possible way, inviting us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the critique; if it addresses us directly, it is only to offer us a cup of tea.
- Pansy Duncan