Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. London, June
2006 [photo: Alison Wonderland]
Introduction to Iain Forsyth &
Jane Pollard
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively at Goldsmiths, graduating together in 1995. They are perhaps best known for their recreations of cultural and art historical events and documents. Theirs is an enquiry into the mechanics of liveness, repetition, mediation and reception.
They have pioneered the use of re-enactment within visual art, from The World Won't Listen, their first 'ready-made' live project in 1996 to their critically acclaimed A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide (1998), a painstakingly faithful re-staging of David Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust 25 years after the original event. Through these early live projects they harnessed the past as a present act to reframe contemporary culture; a double-exposure of then and now. Then, in 2003, they consolidated the live side of their practice with their video work for the first time in File under Sacred Music, a remake of an infamous bootleg video of a performance by the The Cramps at Napa State Mental Institute, California in 1978. They meticulously re-staged this performance with an audience from local mental health arts organisations, in order to re-shoot each pan, tilt, zoom and jitter of the original document.
While making re-enactments they began to discuss their work borrowing terms from the language of Spiritualism, describing the work as a 'medium' to 'channel' the 'spirit' of a past event. Researching séances and other forms of Victorian public performance with their eccentric mix of religion, science, magic and music sparked a renewed enthusiasm for large-scale live work. The result was Silent Sound, commissioned by A Foundation and presented during the 2006 Liverpool Biennial. It is one of their most ambitious projects to date. Drawing on psychological and parapsychological research, they staged an otherworldly experiment using mind control technology to transmit a subliminal message during a live music performance. This uniquely emotive experience features an original score by Jason Pierce from the band Spiritualized. It was re-presented as an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2007 where it was described as "one of the fair's biggest word-of-mouth hits" by the New York Times. The performance was restaged in 2010 as a highlight of the AV Festival in the UK.
Music is a potent mnemonic device in their work. It's used as a form of time-travel, to derail the conscious mind and bring the past flooding into the present. This is central to an ongoing series of works, Precious Little in which they portray young people talking directly to the camera about homemade mixtapes, love and loss in a fast-paced single schizophrenic monologue. This bold take on documentary led to them being awarded the 2008 Great North Run Moving Image Commission, to make Run For Me, applying the same technique to participants and spectators of the run. In 2009 they were invited by Nick Cave to produce Do you love me like I love you, a series of 14 films, each to accompany the remastered releases of his 14 albums. These works create a portrait of each album, personified through the stories and intonation of the people who have loved and lived them.
Since 2005 Forsyth & Pollard have pursued an ongoing series re-working seminal video and performance art of the 60's and 70's. The first in the series, Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches), is a re-working of Vito Acconci's Walk-Over (1973). Exploring the parallel they observed between the conspiratorial use of the camera in Acconci's work and the language of urban music videos, they cast a young rapper, Plan B, and worked closely with him to update the script. Following the musical tradition of 'answer songs', they delivered an 'answer piece', Walking over Acconci (Misdirected Reproaches), with Miss OddKidd, a young female MC. In 2007 for Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown Festival they reinterpreted Bruce Nauman's Art Make-Up (1968) as Kiss My Nauman, replacing the artist with Dressed To Kill, the word's longest running Kiss tribute band. And in addressing Dan Graham's Performer/Audience/Mirror for a 2009 Site Gallery commission they produced Performer. Audience. Fuck Off. in which they issued TV and radio presenter Iain Lee with Graham's instructions but tasked him to approach it using the dynamics of stand-up comedy.
For Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, commissioned in 2009 by BFI, they created a multi-screen 3D video installation with ambisonic 3D sound and a cast including Kevin Eldon, Caroline Catz, Terrence Hardiman and Fenella Fielding. The work positioned the viewer in a stereoscopic limbo, transporting them into the centre of an endlessly looping rehearsal of a fictional reworking of a 3D science fiction film from 1922. Crossing the illusion of cinema with the presence of theatre the work conjured up a psychological, conceptual and physical state between reality, artifice and hallucination.
Iain born in Manchester UK, 1973
Jane born in Newcastle UK, 1972
Met and studied together in London, UK
BA Fine Art & Art Theory - Goldsmiths College, 1992 – 95
MA Fine Art – Goldsmiths College, 2002 - 04
Live and work in London, UK
Represented
by Kate MacGarry.
Excerpts from selected works
01. Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work. 2009
02. Performer. Audience. Fuck Off. 2009
03. Run For Me. 2008
04. Kiss My Nauman. 2007
05. Silent Sound (Liverpool). 2006
06. Walking After Acconci. 2005
07. File under Sacred Music. 2003
Adam E Mendelsohn,
Art Monthly "... an illuminating exploration
of artifice and nostalgia. A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide offered
the audience keys to a moment locked away in time, by way of suspended
disbelief and accurate representation. More profoundly, A Rock 'N'
Roll Suicide addresses real-life idol worship, a love affair with
images and fictions that are sucked out of the pages of magazines amd
TV sets and enacted through the uniforms and costumes of daily life."
Charlotte Edwards, Independent on Sunday "You won't find more penetrative
excavations of music culture than in the films and actions of Iain Forsyth
and Jane Pollard."
More...
This Much is Certain catalogue "Iain and Jane are good artists
- very good artists, both sincere and bold. Their work exposes and blows
away the limits of the liberal culture... Iain and Jane are barely thirty.
If File under Sacred Music is where baby-faced art is nesting, then
its eventual monstrous birth will be quite an event." More...
Ian White, Art Review "The magnitude and sensitivity
of this engagement should not be underestimated. Its terms, beyond any
binary, liberal accusations of exploitation, dared to embrace, more
extremely than before, the tragic flaw lying between chance and action
that makes Forsyth and Pollard's epic structures of re-performance such
extraordinary works of art." More...
Iain Simons, Live Art Magazine "Forsyth and Pollard know very
well the power of pop and they wield it inspirationally, knowingly and
above all lovingly... Notions of authenticity had been challenged, real
and replica had been smudged together - it became apparent that this
was less a tribute to six pop icons as a tribute to the gig itself and
a loud, pissed-up requiem for authenticity.."
More...
Susan Corrigan, i-D Magazine "Perhaps the best and most honest
lesson to be learned from these artists' obsessions and inspirations
is the importance of accessibility and lack of pretension in any artistic
sphere"
More...
Mark Waugh, Arts Council England In the era of signal decay where
experience is increasingly mediated through technologies, the 'aura'
of the live event still retains a charge. This charge recalls a desire
for feedback and an overwhelming immersion in the sensory, a tearing
apart of the teleology of the everyday. This charge is what makes performance
or Live Art so challenging to audiences as it demands that they risk
an investment of themselves in an event. What is fascinating about Iain
and Jane's practice is that they are pursuing the limits of the Live
through troubled archives, degraded information, unstable sources. on
the surface this might seem crazy but it is a madness that, like Antonin
Artaud's, unbinds the construction of normal reality making a profound
necessity of experience and thus like Foucault's Madness and Civilisation
- "holds captive a madness whose wild state can never in itself
be restored."
