Sorcha Dallas

GALLERY ONE & TWO

Spike Island presents the first major solo show in a public gallery by Glasgow based artist Craig Mulholland. Grandes Et Petites Machines continues Mulholland’s investigations into systems of social control and their technological manifestations. The exhibition, first staged at Sorcha Dallas and Glasgow School of Art, had been expanded and reconfigured in a specially curated show that responds to the epic scale Spike Island’s galleries.

The title refers to the ‘Grandes Machines of the French Salon, large-scale history paintings depicting human struggle and violent revolution set against a crumbling state authority. In this contemporary update, the revolutionary hero is now an atomised figure, pitched against the silent stealth of surveillance culture. This new authority is faceless and potentially corruptive: it can be argued that we have now subsumed the desire to be watched. The artist chooses not to replicate arguments that already circulate within the public realm. Instead he creates a parallel universe in which to explore these ideas: a fantastical place in which art works wage war against each other and the lonely task of the Surveillance Operator is played out against a Futurist Opera.

Spanning across drawing, painting, sculpture and computer animation, Mulholland presents the viewer with a world within a world, comprised of a myriad of intricately crafted forms. There are three new bodies of work: Paths of Resistance, Resistance Rising and Peer to Peer. The first is an installation which positions bronze catapult-like tripods in dynamic opposition to intricately drilled aluminium drawings, as if presenting the outcome of a battle between pre and post-industrial machines. In Resistance Rising Mulholland animates these physical elements in an immersive four-screen video work that appears to monitors all who enter the space.

The final element is Mulholland’s new film Peer to Peer which sets the dystopian tale of a Surveillance Operator labouring futilely inside a Panopticon against a newly composed libretto. Delivered with knowing bombast, the work contains recurring motifs from both installations and stylistically references the deadpan visuals of Kraftwerk videos and the totalizing use of soundtrack in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Grandes Et Petites Machines thus operates as a gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork that re-imagines and re-configures the contemporary moment. The seriousness of Mulholland’s enquiry is balanced by absurdist tendencies which propose humour and irreverence as potential modes of resistance.

Peer to Peer is an Artists Film and Video production supported by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen.