In 1998 Anne Tallentire and John Seth made Trailer, a series of videos comprising footage of Dublin, each shot and screened within a single day at different locations around the city. The product of a collaboration that began in 1993 and which eventually fell under the moniker work-seth/tallentire, Trailer muddied the boundaries of performance, screening and documentation to inquire about modes of perception and urban spaces. Twenty years after the original presentation was commissioned by Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, work-seth/tallentire have restaged the project (renamed Trailer: itinerary, 1998–2018) as an exhibition at Hollybush Gardens.
Simultaneously looped on projectors and monitors around the gallery, the ten short videos that comprise Trailer are set in unremarkable spaces of Dublin such as housing estates and grassy expanses that lack, to use the language of urban development, placemaking qualities. Each video shifts between documentation of these spaces and simple actions: unravelling a roll of plastic wrap on the ground, walking through a revolving metal gate, hitting the ground with sticks. Perhaps the most striking image is a shot of a woman placing her ear against a wall, suggesting an observational mode that is critical to Trailer. Although it may seem that little is happening or that there is nothing to take note of, there is also a suggestion that we are not paying close enough attention to the everyday.
To see Trailer in its original incarnation – I did not – you had to call a number to find out the location of that night’s screening, meaning that the viewer had to move around the city as Seth and Tallentire did in making the videos. As an exhibition in a gallery, Trailer has a harder time accounting for this way of navigating the urban space, but it nevertheless remains attuned to the mechanisms that condition experiences. Among the most impactful shifts in Trailer is the addition of the word ‘itinerary’ and dates to its title. This expansive dating convention reframes the work as a shifting 20-year project, inclusive of its other iterations: the 1999 group exhibition 0044 that toured Ireland and New York State, and a two-night presentation at Hollybush Gardens in 2016.
The evocation of provenance and dislocation in Trailer: itinerary points towards the losses and creations of meaning inherent to restaging an artwork in a different time and place, across a border and sea. To look back from London to Dublin 20 years ago – when the Good Friday Agreement was being implemented – is to revisit another moment of negotiation and settlement over issues of borders and sovereignty. Although Trailer avoids such explicit politics, its acts of observation and engagement reveal how important it is to attend to the built environment – its concrete and invisible infrastructures, its residues of political life – to understand how we move through, and perceive, everyday spaces.
work-seth/tallentire, Trailer: itinerary, 1998–2018 at Hollybush Gardens, London, 23 November – 21 December
From the January & February 2019 issue of ArtReview
