Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith,

A curator, critic and lecturer in Modern Irish at University College, Dublin.

Revolutions Per Minute

A young, blonde woman with generously applied, bright red lipstick, dressed in a low-cut, white satin suit, dances to the driving beat of Gil Scott-Heron’s apocalyptic 1970s anthem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Shot in stylized slow motion against a cool, off-white backdrop, her movements are fluent and vigorous, yet they fall short of total abandon. For, as she dances, she is simultaneously translating Scott-Heron’s angry but articulate lyrics into Irish Sign Language. Her fluid, free-form dance movements are interspersed with the codified hand gestures of a language unique to the deaf community of her native land. The ostensibly universal idiom of dance is forcibly modified to accommodate the silent language of a minority within a minority in a video whose soundtrack is inaccessible to the community most specifically addressed by its visual component. Amanda Coogan’s three-minute video, Revolution (2002), is a pitch-perfect modulation of densely compacted allusion and visceral release. Originally designed for the internet as an intervention into the specific context of the politics of the deaf in an over-policed, trigger-happy US (‘a deaf man had recently been shot because he failed to respond to a police command’) Revolution gains in subtlety and complexity from the series of ironic displacements that ultimately resulted in this incongruous image of a white-suited white girl swaying to the urgent rhythms of a funk-soul, proto-rap track first released when she was still a toddler, back in the heady days of Black Power, and smack in the middle of the golden age of Performance Art.

Born hearing (in 1971), but to deaf parents, Coogan’s first language was Irish Sign Language, a manual-visual sign-system rather than a purely verbal one. Her perception of the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of human communication was inevitably coloured by the experience of growing up in a family environment in which ‘everything was expressed through the body and received through the eyes: love, pain, happiness, sadness, hunger, satiation.’ Trained initially as a painter she gravitated, perhaps inevitably, toward performance, first in the context of the sculpture department of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and later in the hothouse atmosphere of performance-pioneer Marina Abramovic’s legendary class at the Hochschule Fur Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig. Coogan’s conviction that ‘the energy transmitted between performer and audience is one which is … unique to the practice of performance’ underlies a practice that is both attentive to the particularities of her own biography and cultural background, and informed by the history of her chosen medium, and of advanced art in general. Coogan’s sense of art-historical allusion and appropriation is both sly and acute. In an early work, After Manzoni (2000), she photographed herself autographing her own bare back in a self-sufficient remake of a famous photo of Piero Manzoni signing one of his ‘Living Sculptures’ (1961), a reconfiguration of a classic art-work in which she happily dispenses with the services of the male author/authority figure so beloved of the modernist avant-garde. Quite literally a ‘signature work’, she describes this piece as ‘a visual manifesto for my practice.’

Coogan’s appetite for iconoclasm is voracious. Over the past five years she has energetically worked her way through a dizzying procession of ironically reimagined figures from the history of Western culture. While her chosen sources include Classical myth (Medea, Athena), Christian iconography (the Madonna, the Sacred Heart) and European art history (Michelangelo’s David, Manzoni’s signed bodies), she displays a democratic indifference to distinctions between high and low culture, and ranges in reference across a variety of art forms. Classic Modernist literature and Hollywood cinema alike are grist to her mill, and she appears particularly partial to Irish subject matter. In Molly Blooms (2004), produced in the centerary year of James Joyce’s fictional Bloomsday, she stood with her back to the viewer draped in a white sheet, masquerading as the figure of Justice, mooning and farting to camera as she imperiously surveyed Dublin bay from a height. In The Quiet Man (2002) she re-enacted with a male performer the famous scene from John Ford’s film in which John Wayne drags a reluctant Maureen O’Hara roughly across country to the encouraging roars of the assembled community. Coogan’s restaging emphasized both the original scene’s extreme theatricality and its disturbing exploitation of the comedic potential of violence against women.

While contemporary pop culture and the cult of the body beautiful have also proved fruitful sources of reference (Kylie (2003), 50 ways to lose your love handles (2003)) Coogan’s first loyalty is to the rich history of performance within the visual arts. The more partisan historians of Performance Art view it as a continuous, if occasionally subterranean, tradition that dates from the early years of the twentieth century, if not earlier still. Beginning with the provocative ‘Evenings’ of the Italian Futurists on the eve of the First World War, and the Zurich Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in its immediate wake, a partial history of this art form might trace a meandering line through the multi-media experiments of Oskar Schlemmer in Bauhaus Weimar and the Black Mountain collaborations of Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, to the profusion in the 1960s of Happenings, Fluxus-related events, and avant-garde dance/theatre/visual arts crossovers. The golden era of Performance Art, however, is generally deemed to be the 1970s. It is among the leading practitioners of that time that Coogan’s most significant and empowering predecessors may be found, especially among those artists whose work was informed by or impacted on the emergent gender politics of the day, artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, Valie Export and, of course, Marina Abramovic.

Times have changed, but perhaps not all that much, and perhaps not enough. Wars have been won and lost, in the cultural as well as the political arena. Revolutions, despite Scott-Heron’s jeremiad, have been and will continue to be televised. In Reading Beethoven (2003), one of a series of recent works that addresses the memory of the quintessential deaf genius of Western culture, an opulently dressed Coogan headbangs her way through the second movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. In a large-scale communal performance, The Headbangers, staged at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, she persuaded 100 (?) people to respond with similar abandon to the Liverpool Philharmonic’s recording of the ‘Ode to Joy.’ Much of Coogan’s work to date has involved an attempt to reinvest contemporary visual art with the power of physical sensation by bridging the gap between the visual and the visceral, artist and audience, high art and popular culture with an energy and wit that occasionally belies her underlying seriousness of purpose.

 

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, November 2004.