ART CITIES:Geneva-Cally Spooner
Cally Spooner has developed a distinctive body of work consisting of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical. Fluctuating between the intuitive and the bureaucratic, the unplanned and heavily managed, her work grapples with how indeterminacy, instincts, conviviality and less cogent time can be organised and arranged within the linguistic architectures of corporate, mediatised and institutional production.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève Arhive
Cally Spooner in her solo exhibition “DRAG DRAG SOLO” at The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents three distinct bodies of work on separate floors of the institution. The first is in the past, as a closure; the second remains in the present, in formation; the third is in the future, as a speculative event. Sitting somewhere between a retrospective and a rehearsal, the exhibition arrives at a moment when reality can feel degraded. Here, Spooner considers how subjectivity and its bodies are shaped by technological and performative conditions, as well as how and where language undergoes damage. Beginning from the position of a writer, Spooner considers her work equally to be that of a choreographer: arranging language across a page, then through a space, placing writing in a moving performer’s body. Evolving over long periods of time and across a variety of venues, her works are carried by casts, text and objects, which embed in the living and mediated fabric of her practice. The exhibition takes its title fromSpooner;’s the ten-minute silent film “DRAG DRAG SOLO”, commissioned by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for their Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in 2016. The film absorbs, and is affected by sounds in its proximity, which have thus far included Bruce Nauman’s film “Violent Incident” where two actors fight at the dinner table in a cycle of slapstick aggression, live radio, an alarm clock, as well as sound works by Spooner herself. At the question “how do you understand the term moving-image in relation to your work?” posed by curator Cecilia Alemani, in preparation to the 2016 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement – the artist claimed: “I don’t make moving image in the sense of film. I mean, I am not – really not – an image-maker. You know how if you’re in the movies, you say you’re in the business of “making pictures”? Well, I have never made a picture. Not deliberately. I’ve always wondered why so often film scripts are really shitty and of course it’s because it’s about making images first. It’s the same in visual art – perhaps less so; there are so many language makers – but making images is very powerful in the visual arts still”. On the second floor, is on show “And You Were Wonderful, On Stage” (2013-15), a 5-channel film installation which has more in common with a live choreographic event than cinema. On the third floor, works created between 2015-18, comprising objects, sound, drawing and live events, in varying states of aliveness and deadness, create an ecosystem of fact and fiction, hinting at a “novel in progress”. Finally, in the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s Cinema Dynamo are the early research stages of Spooner’s yet-to-emerge performance company, OFFSHORE.
Info: Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 10 rue des Vieux-Grenadiers, Geneva, Duration: 3/2-18/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.centre.ch
