Paul Rooney – Bellevue @ SPACEX
If you haven’t made your way down Fore Street and meandered off to find the SPACEX gallery yet, there is an intriguing spectacle to be seen this autumn that is worth a look. SPACEX is the most forward thinking and absorbing source of modern art in Exeter. It is not afraid to put a pile of logs in a room, and ask you to think about it. I mean this in the best sense. It is never intimidating in its presentation, but bold in its choice of artists.
Paul Rooney is the latest choice, showcasing his new work ‘Bellevue’: a film that speaks on many levels about many things. What it articulates in its twenty two minutes of madness (I mean madness in a literal sense – the video does indeed focus on madness as a central pivot) is ambiguous, vague and arguably unfulfilling. Rooney, the winner of the 2008 Northern Art Prize has attempted something the Spacex describes as ‘intricate’ and ‘audacious’ yet still admittedly a ‘creative confusion’. This creative confusion is the predominating feeling I was struck by, until watching the piece for a second time, I had little idea where I was, who I was watching and why. If this indeed matters is another question entirely.
As a heads up the piece is based upon Malcolm Lowry’s story ‘Lunar Caustic’, a man who admitted himself to a 1930’s New York psychiatric hospital. It is not set in New York however but an old English Manor House, dripping in September rain, and surrounded by oak trees and sheep. What bearing this has on the whole affair is something which again is unsettling due to it not ever being explained. The comments that the artist wants to make are deliberately shaded in blankets of meaning, image, text and language. The ‘meaning’ is deliberately lost, like a key thrown an ocean. By the end the audience have no pleasing sense of gratification. I defy anyone to simply accept the images on the screen and say ‘I understand what I have seen.’
The SPACEX also has 3 other works by Rooney, until the 27th of November. The Sound installation ‘Words and Silence’ plunges the reader into the world of the speaker, who happens to be an Indian Call Centre Worker with an answering machine to narrate to. The most bizarre piece has to be the work that you encounter first – a pile of wood and a scrolling text. This turns out to be the narration of the inner pain of a tree who fears his own demise at the hands of man. The work is presented with thought but also a pinch of humour, a gesture that one cannot take everything too seriously.
Overall Rooney’s exhibition speaks on the frustration of speech, communication and the limits of the linguistic world we operate in, trees can’t speak, telesales operators don’t tell stories, and madness is not a suitable toy for market research teams to play with. Sound confusing? It is. But go and see what you make of it yourselves...
