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A Persisting Anachronism
Untitled V (Luxus) 2006, Victor Sloan
Luxus, Latin for luxury, is also the name of a bar in Berlin. Victor Sloan’s
collaboration with Glenn Patterson celebrates the recalcitrant
ironies of Luxus, and its owner’s refusal to blow with the
prevailing winds of change in Germany. Before the fall of the
Berlin wall Luxus was a subcultural refuge in the GDR. After
reunification Luxus has remained the same dowdy, unreconstituted
remnant of a butcher’s shop, while all around it ‘luxury’ has
sprung up in the form of new apartment living.
Sloan is, of course, well-known for his signature method of
marking, scoring and altering his negatives and prints, and for
his Northern Irish subject matter, which he treats with a mixture
of tenderness and anger. In the Luxus exhibition it is
refreshing and exciting to see him transfer and alter his modes of
working into digital photography. In some of the images the
markings that were once Sloan’s are now subtly reflected in
evidence which time leaves on materials; for example the
(enhanced) cracking in the veneer on a wall tile. The large size
of the images means that their pixilation is visible and grainy,
creating a surface to the photograph which is akin to effects
Sloan previously achieved manually. Another characteristic of
Sloan’s work, a combination of light sources as focal points and
an off-centring of these focal points, is similarly repeated and
transformed, eerily enhanced, and in some images, such as
Untitled V (Luxus),
placed on the
uppermost edge of the frame. The effects here are not just
technical – they lead the viewer towards an understanding of a
nostalgia and a defiance embodied in the subject matter, an
attitude which is also out of kilter and off-centre.
Given the remit of this exhibition and collaboration ( the venture
was commissioned under the title ‘ Interrogating Contested Spaces
in Post-Conflict Society’) it’s a relief that the images refuse to
fall back easily on the obvious analogy linking Germany with
Northern Ireland before and during the Peace Process. Glenn
Patterson’s prose in the book which accompanies and expands on the
exhibited photographs is, to begin with, elliptical and then
direct in its comparison of post- Cold War Berlin with
post-ceasefire Belfast (and Portadown), but by the end Patterson,
like Sloan, politely but firmly delineates the problems with the
comparison. Sloan’s images, taken in the sequence in which they
are exhibited and appear in the book , move even further away from
any anchoring in the paralleling of the two ‘Contested Spaces’ .
The interiors (those of the inside of the bar) play on visual
reminders of the bar’s history as a butcher’s shop and so create a
mystery that is full of a menacing violence. Luxus begins,
then, with allusions to something murderous, to a society which
has been deracinated and depraved, and yet the accumulative effect
will be to praise the persistence of Luxus.
The
second part of the exhibition is titled Luxury, and this
series takes the same creepy deathliness outside into the areas
around Luxus. It’s apparent that these buildings have been
gentrified, yuppified, and re-zoned, while Luxus resists such
transformation. Though quite what is represents is harder to say.
These outdoor images purport to show the ‘regeneration’ of this
part of Berlin. Their cleverness is that they at once show this
and (by repeating the colour pallet from the first half of the
show in the mist of predominate darkness) allow the atmosphere of
the bar to spill out into the street, so that the ‘new’ is
dependent on, and repeats, the dowdiness of the old without
knowing it.
Luxus, the exhibition is unsettling and its conception as a show is
beautifully poised. It seems to celebrate the bar’s eccentricity
as a political statement. Yet, whether intentionally or otherwise,
the scrutiny of Luxus which takes place in Sloan’s images cannot
but question the studiedness of the careless minimalism of the
bar. By the end of the exhibition, where there is a cumulative
critique of bourgeoisification, this questioning unsteadies the
authenticity of Luxus as a truly anarchic, anti-establishment
establishment. Which is not to doubt the sincerity of the owner’s
ethos for the bar. Rather Luxus, the collaborative art
project, hinges on convincing us that Luxus the bar is important
for its endearing and radical lack of any ethos, its continuing
anachronism. Patterson’s pithy final comment is: ‘The opposite of
all that went before is not this.’ Sloan and Patterson want
Luxus to work as something more than an analogy. They
understand it as both a nostalgic past and a forgotten future.
Luxus was a place of dissent in a ‘contested space’. Berlin, like
Northern Ireland, has become a ‘post-conflict society’ and what
this really means is that the processes of economic globalisation
have filled both societies rapidly and with rootless vulgarity.
Criticism of that new post-conflict society often looks like a
guilty longing for the past shrouded in an equally guilty distain
for the more prosperous but ideologically empty present. Luxus, as
a kind of event in Berlin, may well be an admirable alternative to
the dreadfully meaningless present of conflictless living. And
this is certainly what attracts Sloan’s eye. His decision to
intervene in the images more gently than has been characteristic
of his work suggests that he finds the subject matter is partly
able to do this work of commentary for him. But, nevertheless, the
images are doctored slightly, and the viewer is directed as to
what to see and how to see it. And what we are shown is a kind of
natural anarchy. The tension between wanting, even needing, Luxus
to exist without interferience and wanting to record in an
effective way parallels the tension between compromised nostalgia
and not quite knowing how to complain about the agreed present of
a ‘post-conflict’ society. It is this that is the real analogy at
work in the Luxus exhibition, and what makes its words and
images so compelling.
Colin Graham
Source, Spring 2007, ISSUE 50
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