Michael Curran
Matt's Gallery, London, UK
For his first London solo show Michael Curran presents an installation, film, publication and CD under the title Look What They Done to My Song (2007). The work documents a recording session which took place over a three-day period, during which time three different songs were recorded. The session was filmed and heavily edited. Eschewing straightforward documentation, Curran attempts to make visible particular emotional or mythic undercurrents that underlie both the individual performances and the history of popular music by using overlays, overdubs, changes in tempo and repeated scenes.
The film’s positioning, if not its slick production, has rather a provisional feel, presented on a flat-screen monitor in the gallery’s lobby area and surrounded by neatly racked copies of the publication. This juxtaposition purposefully confuses the relationship between the usually clearly defined areas of exhibition and interpretation. In the main exhibition space the ghosts of performances, and of the performers, haunt the minimal installation: an abandoned recording studio-cum-soundstage; MDF platforms and space dividers; a lone mic stand; headphones and recording equipment strewn across the floor; a pin-board covered with recording schedules, newspaper clippings and flyers – just a handful of clues as to what did or didn’t take place. Drawings made directly on to the walls depict centaurs and nymphs, but Curran is predominantly occupied with the Orphic myth. Behind a large curved screen lies a pile of mirrors, putting one in mind of Jean Cocteau’s retelling in his play and 1950 film, Orphée. The mythic figures of The Rolling Stones and Jean-Luc Godard are also evoked, the installation being in part based on the recording studio that was constructed for the Stones’ performance of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in the French director’s eponymous film.
Look What They Done to My Song attempts to create a mythic character of its own through presenting only fragments of itself, and by constantly referencing other ancient and modern myths. While examining the mythic quality of artworks is a potentially useful way of approaching certain (so-called) ‘relational’ tendencies in recent practice, Curran seems to turn away from this inquiry towards a more personal interpretation of myth creation, leaving aside any critical questions about the work’s form. The abandoned performance space, the film’s slow pans and enigmatic figures, the work leaking into the lobby of the gallery and out into the world through the publication and CD – all are well worn tropes, and are used by Curran as if they were neutral carriers for new ideas, with the assumed capacity to carry any content the artist wishes to impart or ideas he wishes to explore.
This inattention to the form of the work means that a more critical response to the theatricality and myth making character of certain relational practices, and their relation to the participatory and performance-based practices from the 60s and 70s, is, like the meaning of the work itself, sadly deferred.
Dan Kidner
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