Rose Ruane on Tessa Lynch - New Work Scotland 2007
Commissioned by Collective
It's already no longer now, everything happening all the time to everyone, everywhere, a news ticker spooling and telling, red tops and broadsheets and people you don't know fucking and fighting and wars in places you can't point to on the map, it's a glut of words, banner headlines blaring and distilling the actual into comestible snippets, the simplicity of translating the whole world into words.
Tessa Lynch finds fodder in this constant glut of testimony and reportage, pulling from the stream of absurdity and flux a source for performances, tableaux and workshops.
Headlines are picked over and cannibalised as a source for whimsical and imaginative scenarios, in which audience and interaction emerge as key components. The impossible quest for attaining any fixity of truth within the morass of words bearing witness to events is abandoned in favour of an immediate and arresting visual exploration of snippets and fragments of tabloid text. Personal interpretation and an imposition of an urgent fanzine aesthetic onto magpie selections of appropriated text take precedence over any desire to uncover the actuality behind the chosen reportss, and gradually a more considered interrogation of the nature of fact and the dissemination of news begins to become apparent.
Performance is key within Tessa Lynch's practice, the immediacy of the medium provides an appropriate framework for the mutable and constantly shifting focus of the work, and opens up myriad possibilities for the conception and constant subversion of scenarios to be presented, in which others are frequently present.
The starting point for the performances and tableaux are often "and finally stories", sidebars and snippets that appeal to a heightened sense of the odd within the everyday, an end of the pier ribaldry or small testimonies to the strange heroic melancholy present in the most innocuous of things, the pathos of anonymous lives made temporarily public. The interpretation of these fragmentary scraps of story form the basis or loose set of rules for the invocation of performative scenarios.
Props and costumes are minimal but central to the work, often taking the form of transient and disposable materials fashioned into something fit for fleeting purpose, with the cardboard and found objects redolent at once of Dada theatrics and amateur dramatics; the avant-garde and the school play cheek by jowl.
The provisional nature of the props, their loose handcrafted appearance seems to lead us back to the source for the work, to point to something passing and ill-defined being wilfully captured and subjected to a process of playful inquisition and reclassification, setting in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of events of one sort propagating events of an entirely disparate nature, the ephemeral generating a more concrete secondary existence, however temporary, for itself.
The collective and interactive nature of the works creates further opportunities for an even greater abstraction of the original story, and a deeper entrenchment of half-truth and misunderstanding into the narrative as it grows and assumes its own life.
Like a game of Chinese whispers, or the constantly shifting uncertainties of oral history the process of enacting these scenarios draws out questions about the assured, authoritative tone of news reporting, returning an experiential or feeling quality to the material.
The tableaux create arresting images, completely self-reflexive, the set-ups existing as they do only for the moment where the shutter snaps close, opening a dialogue around the before and after of iconic images.
The workshop is also assuming an increasing importance in the process of making; the gathering of participants in a hothouse scenario where a deadline is imminent constructs an atmosphere perhaps not unlike the newsroom, and in the rustle of turning pages, the papers are picked over, as if rapidly cooling and to be voraciously consumed, re-framed and re-told quickly as possible. From these subjective relationships and distortions of communally chosen stories a consensus is reached, forming the architecture of an event or exhibition, with all the associated ephemera, drawing from the tone and graphical style of the source.
The apparatus of the marginal or evangelical is often present in both Tessa's events and installations, the single microphone and amp, the felt-tip banner, the placard and the makeshift, beer crate stage, creating a folk aesthetic, more associated with community based, social, political or religious movements, the question of protest is raised. The exuberant pulse of the DIY music scene or culture of fanzines is suggested. A sort of protest is implied and the spirit of movements for social change is invoked by the invitation to participate in crafting the installation through drawing, collage and participating in performances.
Here, it seems, the crux of the work is to be found; an exploration of the place of collective memory and oral history within a homogenised and monopoly controlled system of recording and reporting events, and a re-introduction of communal human experience to the process of interpreting our changing social and political landscapes. It seems to be a playful deconstruction of a culture of sensationalism and systematisation, an arch and determined dismantling of redundant distinctions between the personal and society, tacitly acknowledging that the story of the individual is a single facet of the story of a broader community.