Secondhand Appropriation

Danielle Arnaud

Danielle Arnaud was the curator of Video Art in the Cinema at the
Gate Cinema in London this past November, featuring works by artist
Nicky Coutts.

 

Nicky Coutts, Castle, 2007. Sand on armature, installation view at The Berwick Gymnesium Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, Berwick Gymnesium, and Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art.

Nicky Coutts uses imagery that might be recognized from elsewhere. She appropriates paintings, photographs, objects, and stories, some easy to recognize, others lodged more deeply in our collective memory. These borrowed forms are then altered in some way and returned, often seamlessly, to impersonate what they replace. Currently, Coutts is interested in how we visit places for the first time often having heard people tell of them, and seen imagery representing them, in advance.

Secondhand experience can become the gaze through which firsthand experience is possible. This was reflected in work made during a recent English Heritage Fellowship in Berwick upon Tweed, a coastal town in the U.K. on the border between England and Scotland. She began by constructing a 10-minute film Keep, 2007 entirely from feature film footage that used the locality as a setting, centring on the iconic coastal castles of Bamburgh and Lindisfarne. Excerpts from Jean Vadim’s One More Kiss, 1999, Roman Polanski’s Cul-De-Sac, 1966, Ken Russell’s The Devils, 1970, and Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (amongst others) were edited together so that the characters from the different films appear to talk to each other forming a narrative within a single location.

This approach of looking through fiction in order to represent an experience of a place evolved through reading The Discovery of Slowness by the German writer Sten Nadolny. It is a fictional account, rooted in some fact of the life of John Franklin, who died trying to find the North West Passage through the Arctic ice. As though using the traditional story of an explorer as cover, Nadolny lodges within it what appears his real interest, Franklin’s troubled navigation of social situations, his difficulties with the speed of communication, perhaps the burden of an undiscovered condition we might now call autism. As Nadolny immerses one story of travel in another, Coutts disguises imagery within imagery, an existing story within a contemporary experience. The two video pieces that share Nadolny’s title The Discovery of Slowness: (An Attempt at Drowning and An Attempt at Disappearance), 2007 show a man, made from sand, forming on the shoreline. As in E.T.A. Hoffman’s story The Sandman, in Coutts’s video there is ambiguity over from whose perspective the tale is being told, which elements are real, and which are fabricated and consequently, where this character is to be located in time and space. The film footage is shown in reverse, so that what was being swept away by the tide is in fact returning, perhaps suggesting that no matter how much the stranger amongst, or within us, is erased, he will be arriving anew in some other coordinate.

A third video made in Berwick The Empire of Lights is named after Rene Magritte’s series of paintings of the same title. As Magritte combined night and day in a single description, Coutts combines dawn and dusk using the moving image. The setting is Floors Castle in the Scottish Borders, which allegedly has 365 windows, one for every day of the year. In Coutts’s film, two unseen participants plot their passage through the castle’s many rooms turning on all of the lights one by one as darkness falls while dawn improbably rises in the sky behind. As with The Discovery of Slowness, the viewer is presented with a version of real time, where it becomes difficult to see change as it is happening. It is only available in retrospect, after the viewer has looked away and then returned.

Coutts works extensively with photographic stills, installation, and sculpture. Estates is a series of photographs based on 17th-century drawings and paintings of stately homes originally commissioned to show them to their most opulent advantage. Each original is digitally manipulated to look like a tower by copying and repeating the floors and placing them one above the other. Coutts also made three large-scale structures in Berwick, resembling scaled-down models of well-known ruined castles in the area. Improbably squashed between gallery ceiling and floor, these giant sandcastles are shrinking monuments to places and a time that we cannot see changing and ultimately disappearing from view.