Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), on Darren Banks
“the place given there to voyeurism and sadism... its remarkable structure suggests that dominant cinema is indeed a mirror with a delayed reflection.”
Kaja Silverman
Flickering metafictions, voyeurisms, appropriations and an unendingly disparate visual research and presentation on the circumstances, distribution, dissemination and cultures of creation, particularly the internet and moving media forms, lie centrally within the practice of British artist Darren Banks. An amalgamation of specifically editorialised found and made film footage is sequenced into sculptural pieces and installations to analyse key issues of contemporary art and its relationship to broader critical and cultural concerns: film, memory and personal biography, dialogues on the history and present condition of Appropriation Art, and to more current theoretical discourses and developments such as Postproduction and Altermodernism. In tandem Banks’ interests in the abhorrent, horror and gothic as outer conditions of the world, as cultural references and politics are reframed, cinematically, technologically and sculpturally within an inner condition of psychological self-reflexive questioning and interpretation. Together these form a kind of personal pursuit of private and public implicit and complicit voyeurism: in this sense Banks is like the character Mark Lewis, the director Michael Powell, the central devices of the camera and the mirror in Powell’s controversial mediation on violence and voyeurism Peeping Tom (1960), he is also the ‘suture’ as writer Jean-Pierre Oudart and J.M. Magrini describe: “Suture is best understood through a consideration of what is at stake in the process of "reading" film” and the “system of filmic grammar and syntax, incorporating the spectator as signifier within a system of “signifiers,” producing meaning while simultaneously instilling and establishing a sense of subject-hood, which is to say, the effect of suture produces the phenomenon of spectator as “subject”.
Banks film and image articulations gives further form to British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s identification of three forms of looking in cinema: the look of the camera as it records events, the audience's look at the image and the looks between characters within the diegesis, the (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur. The look of the camera is, wherever possible, denied or suppressed in the interests of verisimilitude. It communicates layers of voyeuristic activity between screen, audience, action and his recollection or remodelling of the work and in this sense his activities also engage with the Metafictional: “self-consciously addressing the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”
Alex Hetherington 2011
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In a parallel universe, Darren Banks makes drawings of enigmas, blobs, microbes,and beasts from beyond. In this, his elusive process of slow erasure produces phantasms of a homespun calibre. A collage of film clips feature (or rather don't feature) the invisible man, revealing (or not) 'When Nobody's There' (2006). An over zealously washed baseball cap 'Hotwash' (2006) will eventually disintegrate, cleaned to death by mum. 'That Phantom Sock' (2006) you've been looking for down the back of the sofa dematerializes as it vanishes up the end of the large hadron collider.
Banks summons up these phantoms not to divulge themselves, but to playfully engage more of our time by obsfucating and deceiving us further. 'Public Sculpture/Private Radar' (2008) loops an anomalous remnant of sci-fi to create a retro-futuristic hybrid of a radar station and Moore-esque monumentalism. 'Palace Video' (2005) is constructed from the first few animated frames of an old VHS rental tape, rapidly rewinding and advancing footage of a lightning struck Schloss frame-by-frame to create a teasing gothic air of suspense. The loop crescendos to a studied anti-climax that reveals, ironically, that it is just an anti-piracy warning, guaranteed disappointment that would do Scooby Doo.
Banks contaminates his world by what is absent. It's a mash up of once familial things that don't, as yet, hold any value: old white goods, doodles, executive toys, VHS tapes. He plays with domestic pondlife, the fringeworthy, the car boot beatific, the stuff you stuck in the attic and pretended wasn't there. These are cultural experiences and objects that fill up our days and kill our time, the bits of our consumer lives that aren't normally considered worth freecycling. It's where the action isn't. Putting the kettle on but forgetting to make the tea, hunting for a lost sock but never finding it, sticking on a video but failing to get past the titles. Banks' devotion to disturbances of meaning are the things that screams are made of.
Neil Mulholland 2009