Live@8: "The Potential of Vacancy"

vacancy:
emptiness, lack of thought, idleness, unoccupied position, gap

The various video installations at last nights' event in Galway dealt with these themes: empty houses, empty landscapes, empty minds. While the setting itself promised atmosphere and vibrancy, along with the promise of subversive and emergent expression, for me, the show disappointed. With the exception of Trisha McCrea's "What Do We See" and Ella Bertillson's untitled piece examining a journey home through memory, the work in many ways seemed vacuous, and not in the manner intended.

While I freely admit my sensibilities towards this type of work is wanting, I can only contextualise it from my own perspective. Or to put it somewhat more succinctly, "every lens distorts reality, so we can never be sure ours is the right set. I’ll have to get by with my personal lenses. I call the left one think and the right one feel."

Art, for me is a medium that helps us to question, observe and understand the world, and ourselves. Live@8 while having the potential to encourage us to question and understand, abandoned the value of aesthetic and the idea dominated entirely, the concept became 'king'.... Or maybe that should be 'emperor', the one with the new clothes.