Thin Connections
Kevin Sheehan
June 28 - July 25 1998
If the intricate D.I.Y. mechanisms that sprawl across the
gallery in Kevin Sheehan's installation Thin Connections
look a little bit dangerous, we shouldn't be surprised - these are
triggering devices, bombs that the artist has made himself. Each
of these kitset detonators is a fully operational replica, save
for the explosive charge that would allow them to act out their
fullest potential as social messengers.
The idea of the artist as a revolutionary instigator of change is
inextricably implicated in the various rhetorics of modernism, yet
has lost it's potency in recent years, the artist eclipsed by a
newer breed of politcally motivated activist who utilises far more
direct means to get their message across - the terrorist. Referenceing
the language of both art and terrorism, Sheehan's work sits in the
uneasy gap between these two competing spheres, and draws our attention
to the points at which their ideologies and actions intersect.
In a 1978 critique of the Red Brigade, Umberto Eco surmised that
in an information era multinational corporations, nomadically wandering
the information pathways, can only be successfully countered with
acts of harassment that exploit their own logic: "If there exists
a completely automated factory it will not be upset by the death
of the owner, but rather by erroneous bits of information inserted
here and there, making work hard for the computers that run the
place."
In this light Sheehans project appears much like a museology of
the outmoded tools of radical resistance, harking back to the heyday
of spectacular radical terrorism in the 1960's and 70's, when plane
jackings and airport bombings were a dime a dozen.
Yet while this mode of 60's style street level activism is proving
fruitless for the left in an age when power has retreated into cyberspace
(Critical Art Ensemble have proclaimed that "The streets are dead
capital! There is nothing of value to the power elite to be found
in the street."), it is being used with increasing effectiveness
by the right, who, organised along the lines of militia groups as
innumerable interconnected pockets of activity, are modelling new
forms of resistance. Chemical and bioweapons are the most trusty
companions of the right wing radical terrorist, but as the World
Trade Center bombing proved, the humble explosive is still a perfectly
adequate method of communication.
Of course Sheehan's bombs confuse readings of radical activism/terrorism
as a tool of either the left or the right by deftly side-stepping
ideological alignment altogether. Organised in a museumlike manner
around the gallery, divorced from their practical environment, they
stand instead as aestheticised monuments to the spectre of terror
itself - invisible, ever present, and brutally efficient. With building
instructions culled from readily available literature, and the sort
of construction materials you might find in your garage or basement,
these piecemeal triggering devices utilise the vernacular of terror
particularly effectively by demonstrating the ease with which they
were manufactured. Underscoring this point is the surprising fact
that Sheehan was able to import his bombs into the country simply
by assuring suspicious customs officials that they were artworks,
not guns as they had first suspected.
By offering artists the means of resistance, Sheehans work throws
down a challenge to it's audience. But operating under the sign
of late capitalism, and dependant on it's mechanisms, what artist
is going to cross that fatal line?
Reviews, Essays & Articles
Invisable presence taunts
imagination The Press, 1998
July 15, p. 18
Lorimer, Wayne.
Avatar, by David Haines and Thin Connections, by Kevin Sheehan
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