Sorcha Dallas

Last year an exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland, titled ‘The Art of Failure’, explored ways artists have responded to uncertainty and instability in contemporary society. Identifying failure as a symptom of our times, the selection of artworks included Ceal Floyer’s Trash which turned attention to discarded material from computer-user interfaces; Deimantas Narkevicius’s Once in The XX Century showing the Lenin monument in Vilinus; Rosmarie Trokel’s Continental Divide where the artist fights and argues with her double over the question, ‘who is the best artist?’ The 2006 Nordic Festival of Contemporary art presented a series of art commissions addressing absurdity in the face of failure I the exhibition “Fail again. Fail better’ – the title taken from Samuel Beckett’s Worsward Ho, his 1983 prose poem concerned with the futility of the act of expression, the failure of language, and divergences between intention and reception. In 1987 the artist Joel Fisher curated an exhibition titled ‘The Success of Failure’, an anthology of works that were not made for various reasons – Keith Sonnier rejected a work on discovering the unacceptable at a factory making a component; Alice Aycock was hampered by rain; Paul Thek rejected a painting as it failed to follow through his expectations.

The concept of failure seems pertinent to contemporary practice, operating across different modes of address and definition: be it turning attention to failed promises and myths of the Avant Garde, as can be seen in the practice of Clare Stevenson; setting out to realise assumed impossible tasks, as in Janette Parris’s performances; or working with inadequacies of language and representation, for example Cerith Wyn Evan’s explorations of relationships between communication and miscommunication. Active claims are also being made on the ‘space of failure’ – for example in Matt Calderwood’s work. In Ground Experiment #1, 1998, Calderwood carefully places a paving slab on the floor and on each corner, following careful measurement, he places a coaster and then a wine glass. A second slab is balanced on the top, on which the artist then stands and jumps until the glasses shatter and the platform falls – a surprisingly long process. In his 2007 exhibition ‘Projections’ at David Risley Gallery, Calderwood presented five large plasterboard sculptures that are not made so well, and infact would fall over if their weight was not corrected by containers of water balancing the objects.

Paradoxes are at the heart of all dealings with failure – it is both a position to take, yet one that cannot be strived for; it can be investigated, yet is too vague to be defined. It is related to, but not analogous to, error, doubt and irony. Through failure, one can potentially stumble on the unexpected – it is a strategy utilised in the practices of business, politics and entrepreneurship. Yet, to strive to fail is to go against socially accepted drives towards ever better success. Failure, when divorced from a defeatist, disappointed or unsuccessful position, is shifted from being a simply judgemental term. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations. Rather than being a space of mediocrity, failure is required in order to keep a system open and to raise questions rather than answers. Without the doubt that failure ushers in, any situation becomes closed and in danger of becoming dogmatic.

In 1979 David Critchley made a video work titled Pieces I Never Did, shown in December at Fieldgate Gallery in the exhibition ‘Analogue and Digital’. The artist talks to the camera describing 18 propositions for artworks, taking in performance, film, video, installation and sculpture, each one never moving beyond notes in a sketchbook. Critchley sits at his desk seemingly bored by his ideas, at other times a little embarrassed, carefully describing his now obsolete thoughts. The 35-minute tape is shown on three monitors, slightly out of sync, creating a continuous litany of rejected possibilities. One plan that he had was to record himself shouting ‘shut up’ until he ‘couldn’t’ shout anymore’; however, he felt that there ‘didn’t seem any reason to do that particular one and I forgot about it’. Paradoxically his descriptions are constantly interrupted by realisations, often impeding the descriptive accounts. Throughout, the video cuts to the artist, now semi-naked-, standing against a wall and shouting, ‘shut up’ until his voice disappears from over use. He describes an idea to fling himself around a constructed room until it gave way; to change the colour of his body by having things thrown at it; and a work where ‘apples’ is written to obliterate a text – with the same methodology then applied to speech, so that the words ‘apples, apples’, repeated ad infinitum, block out the sound of his voice.

Critchley describes (while eating an apple) the failures of translation between writing something down and its realisation as an artwork. The words are mashed up as he crunches away. For an artwork to ‘work’ it must go beyond descriptive language otherwise there is no need for it to be made. This process brings the work into negotiation with doubt and error, which are exacerbated when the artist releases control once the work is ready to embrace the possibilities of failure , when the work is presented to an audience. Another idea Critchley recounts, and enacts, is to set the camera on the end of a plank while he jumps about on the other end, a plan that would lead inevitably to an unreliable documentary as the camera would move away from the subject, or even break in the process. The description brings to mind Matthew Crawley’s 1999 work with the self explanatory title: Turning on a video camera, opening it up, and poking around in there until it breaks, or Steve McQueen’s Catch of 1997, that shows the artist and his sister throwing a video camera back and forth while it is recording. This performed document is a film-as-event that, as with much of McQueen’s practice, brings about a physical relationship to the film; it is head spinning and disorienting as one tries to make sense of what is being shown. McQueen engages with the impossibilities and resistances of representation, and does so with a politically charged attitude, mindful of the failures in the very operations of attempting to show experience.

As Critchley’s Pieces I Never Did continues, the screaming of ‘shut up’ persists and the dominant narrative slips between the professional account of rejected ideas as the, at turns, angry and tragic figure demanding an end to some unspecified conversation. It is as if the artist is desperately blanking out this rational description of works that were never made, proposals perhaps rejected because the idea was too flawed or dangerous, or because another artist could make the same piece better, or that it was irrelevant in some way or simply forgot about. All the while, these now-made works annoyingly interrupt the narrative of unrealised works. Other, more recent, catalogues of unrealised projects are Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Unbuilt Roads or the online archive Unrealised Projects devised by artist Sam Ely and Lynn Harris. These collections show proposals that have been deemed failures before they have been realised, yet nonetheless they are released into the space of critical engagement.

Chris Burden’s practice acts out the simple question ‘what happens if you…?‘ , making the risk of failure a space of opportunity as he pushes the limits of possibilities. One example is the fully operational B-Car, 1975, a lightweight vehicle he described as being able to travel 100 miles per hour at 100 miles per gallon. Burden proposes questions that are manifested through actions and events, interrogating structures of power and assumptions, introducing doubt, and never fully eliminating the unknown. He offers a series of impossible proposals that are then acted out: integral to each is possibility and frustration of failure. This can be seen most explicitly in When Robots Rule: The Two Minute Airplane Factory, that took the form of an assembly line manufacturing model airplanes to be launched into the cavernous space of Tate Britain’s Dunveen Galleries in 1999.