Bridget Smith
If Bridget Smith's first exhibition was an allegory, then at first sight it seemed to be an allegory of abstract painting. Like all allegories, the works had a distance from the real thing that could be seen as both critical and helpful; or perhaps the distance could be seen as simple evidence of a thwarted love for abstract painting. Consisting of photographs of illuminated - but firmly closed - cinema curtains, the exhibition summoned up doubts and hopes concerning a dominant contemporary cultural form. The combined sense of expectation for both cinema and painting - neither of which photographs are - was quite something. What the photographs might be about, beyond this sense of expectation, is less clear; but their relationship to painting feels like the wrong place to start.
Odeon (Blue) (1994) presents a top-lit curtain in a 200-seater cinema; the sheen of the fabric hanging unexpectedly in repeated blue waves seems to glow independently of the light source. The rhythm is picked up in the shallower curves of the tops of the staggered seating, which also catch the light and make a wave pattern. Vanishing points to the left and right have the effect of drawing attention to the viewpoint itself, the only respite - if such it is - from the all-over rhyming of curves. Like any decorative work, the problem proposed is where to look; but this is an experience strangely unfamiliar in a cinema, where the violence of editing technology can now guide the eye with an unparalleled authoritarianism.
Other images, such as Odeon (Green) (1994), draw attention to the actual stage behind and in front of the curtain, enforcing a palpable comparison between theatrical and cinematic illusion. The eye quickly adjusts to views of a cinema screen from way below or to one side of the perfect viewpoint. The power of the image on the screen makes the surroundings - and even the sense of audience - almost disappear. Functioning as powerful reminders of the space in which this collective reverie takes place, the theatrical stages, complete with wooden floors, reacquaint cinema with its origins.
Empire (Blue) (1994) is the nearest to a specifically period homage: saturated colour, swags over a drape, and an immense pelmet from which constellations of stars wink above you. But even when choosing period interiors, Smith does not emphasise the aura that the earlier stages of a technology acquire; she draws attention to the sliver of possibility contained in the stage itself. Though quite empty, the stages make mixed forms seem possible - like cabaret between features and discussion afterwards. The cinema is sensed, even when empty, as a social rather than a passive space; in an earlier work, The Entertainer (1992), (not included in the exhibition) an actor was photographed in front of a curtain, telling jokes in an in-between moment.
Nevertheless, the role of colour in these works creates a powerfully intoxicating stupor that is hard to account for. There is the possibility that formalism is a motive. The defencelessness of the works against a conservative reading of them as a reprise of 'painting' - thereby patronising painting as a supposedly superseded realm of pure pleasure - is marked. On the other hand, recommending the chilliness of photography as critique and as unengaged with pleasure, is no help. It is the poles of pure painting - or pure, unblemished critique - that are really abstract here; the works a least have conviction in their sensation of floating - of wanting things both ways.
Curtains are the props of night. Cinemas - large, warm rooms without windows - can induce drowsiness as much as enjoyment, helping us to forget what time of day it is. A polemical account of these works might re-describe their attractiveness as a radical espousal of sleep and narcosis: a strong dose of intoxication to test out the narcolepsy that hides effectively in other areas of experience - parts of experience that we suppose fuller or busier. As work becomes insecure, the boundary between it and the weekend dissolves: activity becomes stupefied and perpetual. Enjoyment is sensed as a neglected duty, sleep loses its ability to refresh, and dreams - cinematic or otherwise - lose the ability to tell us anything. This particular group of works might be said to present collective somnolence head on.
