Culture
You’re being watched
by Anthony Byrt
From reality TV to the surveillance state: British artist Phil Collins is fascinated by our desperate need to be on camera.
Turbulence: The 3rd Auckland Triennial has a line-up of artists who deal with tricky international issues – movement, conflict, globalisation – and near the top of the bill is Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins. His work has often focused on the world’s most tense locations, throwing a new light on the camera-saturated “hotspots” we’ve come to know, the skirmishes and invasions and civil wars that we see daily, even hourly, on 24-hour news channels.
He doesn’t choose under-exposed conflicts; in fact, the media helps Collins decide where to go next. This is why his 2006 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, which was in its last week when I met Collins in London, makes for such interesting viewing. The artist is trying to expose a different kind of appetite for destruction in the broadcast media by taking on its most insidious genre: reality TV.
Collins’s video they shoot horses (2004), included in Turbulence and perhaps his best-known work, is a record of a disco marathon in Palestine orchestrated by the artist. “I first travelled to the refugee camps in 2002,” Collins says, “and the Second Intifada was in its third year. The next year, I emailed saying I’d like to do a disco marathon, and I was invited over almost immediately.
“At the time it was supposedly illegal to travel to Palestine, so although I’m normally quite public in the way I put out calls for participants, there I had to work through people and their address books to get an audition together. We had about 30 or 40 people, and I asked them to dance to Joy Division, Beyoncé and Larry Levan. From there I chose the best-looking people and they danced for us all day for several days.”
This might sound flippant, but for Collins the dance marathon had a clear rationale. “The title comes from a 1930s novel called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which was made into a film starring Jane Fonda in 1969, about dance marathons during the Depression. Dance marathons were a real phenomenon in the 30s. You would literally have people dancing for months on end to win money, and crowds would come to see them. So it’s a kind of brutality, an uncomfortable structuring of desperation as a form of entertainment. I wanted my work to have a complicated structure based on a specific kind of cruelty, out of which you’d see a form of beauty emerge.”
For Collins, the surface lightness and lack of historical context in the work parallel the way the Palestinian cause has been reduced over the past several years by simplistic media imagery and insipid political debate. Looking at his other works, a pattern emerges.
In the late 90s, he spent time in Belgrade and produced a series of photographs of young Serbs; as in they shoot horses, the subjects are attractive young people and the photographs have little direct reference to the Balkan conflict. But the war inspired the photographs: “The bombing of Belgrade interested me because Britain, once again, participated in a campaign [albeit a NATO one] alongside the US. And even though there were strong arguments for intervention, the bombing was illegal; it was an attack on a sovereign state. Under Tony Blair we’ve seen more conflict than we did under Thatcher.
“So I suppose the UK participation in conflicts motivates me more than anything else. If your country is involved in something like that, why would you not be interested in going to see it?”
So it’s not surprising that Collins also turned his attention to Iraq, visiting the country just before the US-led invasion.
In some ways, the work he made there, baghdad screentests (2002), is his most poignant; he invited Baghdad residents to a screen test for a non-existent Hollywood film and recorded their auditions, showing that even with the impending bombardment of their city, ordinary people seeking fame and fortune were prepared to engage with the US media machine.
These works have several obvious common threads: they are all about conflict; about British involvement in conflict; about the media’s role in portraying conflict. Yet the core drama does not come from the surface issues, but from the way Collins creates an uncomfortable mixture of vanity, cruelty, need and desperation. His work is about the human complexities of intimacy and exposure.
Superficially, Collins’s Turner Prize show the return of the real seems to take him into new terrain. As viewers enter his exhibition, they are confronted with two opposing screens. On one, former participants in reality TV shows who feel harmed by their involvement discuss their experiences, while on the other screen is their interviewer, who, rather than being hidden behind a camera, nods his subjects through their ordeal.
The conversation volleys between the pair, with viewers in the middle. The interviewer’s identity is significant: far from being a natural sympathiser with the interviewees, he is the director of a plastic-surgery makeover show. Gradually, stories of ruination are relived, presumably in the hope that this second stab at public revelation will help to alleviate the grief and bitterness caused by the first.
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