Occult mysticism has existed as a dial-a-plot utility in popular culture for some time, with varying degrees of success. The classic example is the cosmopolitan occultists of Rosemary’s Baby, released four years before Time Magazine’s ran the charming byline ‘Satan Returns’ for their Occult Revival feature in 1972. After the popularity of last year’s nihilism-channelling True Detective, which took on deeper philosophic influences in its mystic rhetoric (before turning into an inevitable shootout), one could argue that there is again a renewed interest in the metaphysical and transcendental. Two notable exhibitions in Dublin which approach mysticism and ritual in very distinct ways are Garret Phelan’s A Voodoo Free Phenomenon at Project Art’s Centre, and Richard Proffitt’s Wild Cries of Ha-Ha at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
Garrett Phelan produces work which often utilises radio transmissions, drawings, and video work. Consisting of three new sculptural assemblages, a short series of animations, and a longer video with two vignette segments, his new show draws on anecdotal storytelling, and the visual language of Celtic art to examine our understanding of the links between technology and ritual.
A lime green wall by the entrance forms a passage way into the dimly lit, tomb-like exhibition space; High up on the wall sits a glass shelf. Connected by a microphone cable that spills out over the shelf’s edges, there are two gold objects. Closer inspection reveals a microphone attached to a golden box, engraved with strangely familiar ancient circuit-like incisions. Sitting out of reach, this box is near incomprehensible. Its form lies somewhere between reliquary and amplifier. Its high installation instils it with a sense of sacredness; I gaze up at its gleaming shape, getting that same feeling of mystery I’d get as a child looking up at the priest’s tabernacle on a Sunday.
Two similar amplifier sculptures appear on low plinths in the main exhibition space. These smaller objects, made from clay and gold leaf (though exhibited by Phelan as ‘Undiscovered Celtic Gold 2500BC’), lie peculiarly attached to vintage microphones. The reflexive nature of the gold leaf is highlighted by the glossy surface on which they’re displayed, projecting the linear mess of microphone cables up onto the ceiling like a photogram.
A Voodoo Free Phenomenon, the film from which the exhibition gets its name, plays on the far wall. It opens with the camera panning slowly over a collection of Phelan’s ornate, gold, kerbstone-like sculptures, again interspersed by cables. The sculptures, smooth, yet imperfect, are convincing in their realisation. They border the line between synthetic and natural in their rendering, in an uncanny valley between art object and ore. This silent continuous shot lasts for a number of minutes. All sense of scale seems to vanish until a circular condenser microphone enters the field of view. It towers above all that preceded it: totemic, solar, imposing, a thing to be worshipped. An idle amp’s buzz seems to emerge from the silence, leaving me unsure whether the microphone is trying to speak, or if Phelan’s film is conjuring up sounds in my imagination.
The next segment of the video consists of Phelan sitting at a table, coffee in tow, speaking into a microphone about his solstice experience in Newgrange’s passage tomb, age 20. As he discusses permission, restriction, and the administration of the sacred, Phelan’s role as storyteller becomes ambiguous. His position at the table starts to resemble an anchorman, but the surreal green visual filter skews that impression. The green encompasses everything, painting this segment into a sci-fi binary of green and black. The film’s positioning on the end wall makes the audience stand huddled in the darkened space, offering an analogue to Phelan’s experience in Newgrange’s dark passage.
Phelan’s story could be read as a straightforward tale about technology’s failure to capture the experiential (in this case, overexposing a photograph of the solstice sun entering Newgrange), but the show at large appears to be about technology’s role in the dissemination of ideas. The microphone, which Phelan continuously offers up as a fetishistic ritual object, sits at the centre of this: once an expensive piece of equipment, it’s now demystified, a presumed component of any phone or laptop. It can be utilised freely on platforms that are beginning to wrangle free from the grasp of the larger media companies, which Phelan’s vintage microphones may represent.
Wild Cries of Ha-Ha, Richard Proffitt’s show at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery during January and February, took its name from an English translation of a Hindu charnel ground (a ritual site where bodies are left to decompose above ground). Proffitt’s work is about materiality. Drawing from the symbolism of rituals, he collages the sacred with the ordinary to produce installations, found object assemblages, and eerie sound work. Proffitt attempts to translate the banal into the mystical with a series of drawings incised into acrylic-laden crisp packets. Although some of these are slightly overworked, the majority of this series and the related ink drawings on found materials are treated with expert consideration and restraint.
The main installation, ‘You Are Always Risen From the Seeds You’ve Sown’, borders on the theatrical: a glass skull receptacle (full of what looks like rotting cola) sits on worn cardboard tiles next to a hollow organ, a lighter, and bird-feathers. Like a teen’s bedroom floor, metal band tees lay strewn around, although torn and burnt. The debris surrounding the found objects and assemblages hints at some ritual having happened, yet it feels slightly too staged. This sense of the theatricality of ritual links into Black Metal and the Norwegian teens who pioneered it, always placing visual aesthetic representation at the forefront of their music. Proffitt clearly draws references from this kind of teen mysticism. The show borrows often from the symbolic tropes of the occult, feeling occasionally naïve, yet realised with confidence.
Proffitt harnesses the semiotics of the mystical and provides a show of well-crafted objects, but falters in transcending his source material. With A Voodoo Free Phenomenon, Phelan demands patience from the audience as he slowly and subtly aligns the technological with the sacred. While Proffitt recreates the iconography of the occult in his assemblages, Phelan attempts to transform the microphone into a sacred icon itself, and does so quite convincingly. You just have to listen to what it’s saying.
Garrett Phelan’s A Voodoo Free Phenomenon is exhibited at Project Arts Centre until Thursday 9th April.
Words: Aidan Wall
Feature image: Still from A Voodoo Free Phenomenon
