on Boredom
1997
ICA, London and Cambridge Darkroom Gallery
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‘The Boredom Factor’, Fiona Rattray, Blueprint Magazine, February Issue, 1998
Looking at computer art in an office surrounded by white noise, it is hard to make as much brain space for contemplation as you would in a gallery. Nonetheless Boredom, a kind of group show of work by eight artists published on CD Rom by the Cambridge
Darkroom Gallery, has sufficient variety and ease of use to make it worth persevering. Despite its title (and some of the work) this is not an exercise in being boring. As curator Susan Morris says in the introduction: “pleasure is not excluded from this exhibition, nor is there within the works a sense of only exhaustion or depletion – terms or states perhaps normally associated with boredom”.
Morris’s own contribution, Text, is one of the most interesting. Consisting of page after page of scrolling texts it resembles the random act of flipping through the pages of a book. The words are culled from psychology text books dealing with the chronic boredom that is a symptom of depression. They range from the banal and abstract to the illuminating: “longing can be best understood as an emotional trap”. Variations in pace, fonts and type sizes mean that the screen action is compelling. Occasionally Morris bleeds the text off the edges of the screen breaking the concentration and suggesting in the viewer those feelings of alienation and marginalisation referred to in the texts.
Jeremy Akerman’s piece Road: (I was thinking about a time once) uses sound, film and stills photography. A computer-generated female voice narrates while images of traffic and buildings and people dissolve into one another in an intriguing piece dealing with themes of loss, memory and isolation. Edward Dorrian’s hPrick uses footage from a low budget porn video to create an interactive piece in which the viewer points-and-clicks to remove items of a woman’s clothing. It’s fun at first but, as actor William H Macy (Fargo, ER) said of watching porn as research for his role in Boogie Nights: “It was titillating, curious and then boring”.
It seems important that computer art should offer something conspicuously different to other art forms. In his accompanying essay Boredom and Baroque Space – which appears on the CD Rom’s fold-out cover /exhibition catalogue designed by Jonathan Barnbrook – David Bate says that the invention of computer imagery in itself suggests that “the appetite for illusion knows no bounds” and that “new computer-based practices of representation are, without knowing it, precipitating a mutation in representational space”. Mariele Neudecker’s work Default Twilight offers just that – an endlessly mutating pattern of colour waves that generates abstract representations of land/ cityscapes which transform the computer screen into a mesmerising gallery space. Unfortunately Boredom only exists on CD Rom and these were only distributed as a one-off to ICA members at the launch and by post to the Cambridge Darkroom’s mailing list. Which means that if you want to see it you probably can’t (the Darkroom has only a handful of copies left). And that’s a pity since it’s an interesting show.
‘CD ROMS’, Michael Gibbs, Art Monthly Magazine Issue No. 214, March 1998
The producers of another recent artists’ CD-Rom. Boredom, have eschewed virtual environments and opted for a fairly conventional catalogue-like format, complete with introductory essays printed on an accompanying fold-out poster.
Davld Bate’s essay makes a comparison between Baroque space and boredom and points to ‘a Baroque trend of spatial illusions, theatrical imaginations and intense feelings’ which has been made possible by digital forms of representation. Although it may be argued that the ubiquity of computerised images has produced a kind of boredom, or ‘Sunday neurosis’, where simulation has replaced stimulation, none of the works included in Boredom could really be said to illustrate this symptom.
What several of the works do illustrate is rather a thwarted stimulation, as in Edward Dorrian’s hPRICK, which uses shots from a.soft porn video session together with the coaxing voices of the two cameramen. The viewer can control the girl’s poses to some extent but only at the cost of a sense or frustration and awkward complicity.
Equally thwarting is Susan Morris’s Text, which slowly scrolls from top to bottom for 38 minutes, revealing a succession of bibliographic entries and quotations on the subject of boredom. Not only are various typefaces employed but the text is also frequently cut off at the sides, rendering it unreadable.
‘Boredom’, writes Andrew Benjamin in his philosophical essay printed on the fold-out, ‘will open up beyond itself only to close in on itself’. Boredom is characterised by the confines of repetition and continuity, and so too are some of the pieces on the CD-Rom, such as Marielle Neudecker’s Default Twilight which loops low-resolution bands of colour based on four stock images of sunrise, dawn, dusk and sunset.
Anna Mossman’s Tunnel is also a loop, a relentless, repetetive zooming in and out of a mundane video scene showing cars and pedestrians moving through a tunnel. The use of repeated variations in Baroque ornamental art is updated in Robert Mabb’s animations of changing circular patterns, which, although mathematically precise, are definitely boring! So too, l’m afraid is Mathew Hale’s There was Silence in Heaven about the Space of Half an Hour, which requires the viewer to complete a 24 minute writing exercise using barely decipherable letters comprising circles and ellipses, with a translation of a German word representing each letter. lt’s all too reminiscent of those pointless exercises teachers give to schoolchildren as punishments.
Nevertheless, as a whole Boredom is not boring. Indeed, the issues it raises (and these include social issues such as electronic tagging of recidivists) are relevant to the conditions of life as experienced at the end of the 20th Century, a time in which the sensual, the decorative and the melancholic combine in an ennui not unlike that at the end of the previous century.
Michael Gibbs is an artist and writer based in Amsterdam, where he operates the website: Why not Sneeze?