Moving Windows
War Memorial, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
War memorials, reminders of the heroic deeds of the past, are superfluous in Northern Ireland. We have too many dead of a recent origin: lives lost because of an ideological ‘war’ which has spilled over into self-righteous abominations, committed by both sides. Like Shop, Dungannon, the image insists on a strong feeling of surveillance: the thick horizontal of shiny black, flanked by the shapes of car seat headrests, indicate the warmth and security of the car interior from which the unseen viewer peers. He or she is so close to the window that the filaments of a heated rear window are clearly visible
However, this work has none of the immediate rhetoric of Shop, Dungannon: no bombs, explosions, or bursts of light. Instead it is the nature of meditation. The rainy weather insulates the viewer from the crispness of the real image; the objects on the rear window shelf-actually child’s toys and seat headrests – function like abstract shapes, while the blackness of the car interior contrasts with the pink and yellow tonalities that infuse the outside atmosphere. Unlike a documentary photograph, this kind of image indicates what it is like to live in Northern Ireland. It does not reproduce a surface. It creates a mood, an attitude and – in the use of the war memorial - an iconic authorial comment on the use, and abuse of ‘High Art’.
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
......................................................................................................
If you think about it, the title of this series Moving Windows, is both a pun and a paradox. It is a paradox because windows are usually thought of as being stationary as in the phrase ‘a window on the world’. Through the window you see a ‘view’, framed and thus ordered; tamed; made safe. It is a pun because moving can be interpreted in a double sense: in its literal sense of a window which moves, as in a car window; and in its metaphorical sense of something which ‘moves’ or stirs the emotions. The twintrack aspect of the pun and the unsettling nature of a paradox (especially G.K. Chesterton’s rationale of focusing upon the apparently trifling or commonplace before extracting a paradoxically meaning out of it) are inherent in Sloan’s working methods. In terms of the ‘twintrack’, the baseline is the straight photograph, a photograph which records. The unedited, mechanistic aspect of this documentary-style record is emphasised by the artist’s use of an autofocus camera, and in the manner in which he captured the shots: taken while driving around Northern Ireland with a camera in one hand, and snatching shots. Most photographs after all, as in the designation ‘snapshot’, are images which capture a fleeting moment but are deprived of context. Editing - the juxtaposition of one image with another – can provide a context – as can the intervention of the artist with respect to either the negative or the print. In this case, the intervention is in the shape of toners and watercolours.
The paradox emerges in the relationship between the subject matter, and the treatment of same. The baseline for all of these images is profoundly quotidian. Whether a shop, a car, a bus shelter or a road is in view, the actuality of the things depicted is the stuff of our monotonous, everyday, common existence: the brutal facts of ordinary life. However, the artist’s purpose is to reveal the sinister, the suspicious, the surreal dislocations and the latent violence which lurk underneath the backdrop of normality. In this sense the angle of approach, and the subject matter, is akin to the provincial scenes of novelists from Balzac to Simenon with their evocation of stagnant little towns where everything significant happens behind closed shutters: the Irish equivalent would be the short stories of a Northerner like Patrick Boyle with their cast of dour suspicious countrymen, and their harsh, often ironic scenarios.
The basic material – the photographic templates – were taken as Sloan went about his everyday travels in the North, driving through the counties of Tyrone (where his parents lived), Antrim where his wife’s family lived) and Armagh where he himself lived and worked. This regional odyssey was viewed, literally, within the frame of two distancing elements: that of the autofocus camera, held at arm’s length; and that of the window-frame, be it windscreen of side panel. It was then re-viewed and re-presented through the media of toner and watercolour. In fact most of these images are the equivalent of watercolours painted upon a printed image.
Initial reaction to this series of works was contradictory on two fronts. Gerry Burns, for instance, argued that ‘no attempt (was) made at composition’ whereas Belinda Loftus commented that ‘all of these photographs (sic) have a very strong formal element with the geometric shapes of car windows, steering wheels and mirrors cutting into the prints, generally giving them firm compositions’. Burns also considered that ‘the locations…could be virtually anywhere’, whereas Loftus stated that the works were ‘intensely localised photographs’. These two sets of comments are reconcilable, essentially because they confuse the subject matter with the means. Sloan has stated that he has taken large numbers of photographs without giving a thought to the composition, but he also stated that, for the finished series, he wanted every image to have a part of the car within it, thus ensuring strong horizontals and verticals. Shooting from within a car also limited the framing opportunities whilst the interventions in terms and watercolour determined, at the least, the interweave of tonal relationships.
Notions of locality (an indigenous bedrock) are easily squared with universality in that while the subject matter – bus shelters, roads and the like – are shot so that they could, in theory, be anywhere from Craigavon to Carlisle, two factors intervene to register the intensity of locality. The first factor is the sectarian graffiti, while the second is the intervention process: the markmaking and the colour-coding.
Farm, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Craigavon Centre, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Edenderry, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Shop, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Road, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
From the beginning, Victor Sloan has also sought to alter our relationship to the photographic image, it should be said, by consistently undercutting a predictable compositional aesthetic, formulating and emphasising the apparently casual, oblique qualities of his own imagery. Yet what this amounts to is, inevitably, partly a formalist achievement, in that it indicates a novel way of seeing, spectacularly so in the case of the Moving Windows series, for example, which are in formal terms outstanding. One could say that his general pictorial approach is to continually casualise the pictorial organisation of his subject matter, with the aim of pulling it out of whatever narrative and iconographic frame we might be tempted to slot it into, thus denying us our habitual sense of detachment and control.
Undertones of surveillance discernible in some of the Craigavon series images come to the surface in Moving Windows, an extraordinary series made in 1985. Based on photographs taken over a period of about a fortnight, they form a kind of visual diary of Sloan's movements by car during that time. His idea was to try to get a sense of the "strange, unexpected architecture of things" as viewed through the car window - an increasingly common vantage point and also a highly pertinent perceptual filter. As it happened, over the fortnight he travelled around a lot and the images are a map of a landscape imbued with a personal history, from Portadown and Craigavon, where he lives, to Dungannon where he grew up, and to Bangor, where his wife's family live.
There are sinister connotations to the view from the car window, by no means only in relation to Northern Ireland but obviously in a heightened sense there, given the history of pervasive surveillance by a variety of agencies, waves of sectarian assassinations and hugely destructive car bombing campaigns. We are ambivalently positioned, prompted to question our own motives as observers. In fact, taking photographs from the car in Dungannon made him acutely aware of a reversal of viewpoint. His father ran a newsagents and sweet-shop in the town centre which was predictably, repeatedly targeted by bombers and he has vivid memories of being woken up in the middle of the night to clear up the debris of broken glass and confectionery.
Like the Craigavon work, Moving Windows builds a cumulative mood of subtle unease that is typical of his overall approach. That is, the more we seem to be dealing with workaday normality, looking at snapshots of anonymous daily life, the more we become quietly sure that the apparent normality is deceptive. But they are also quite prescient in their exceptional informality, the unforced casualness of their pictorial aesthetic. Influenced by film, they are like isolated frames from fluid film narratives, with that sense of chance and transience about them, as though the camera is caught in mid-pan, between one thing and another.
Extract from A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan's Photographic Work by Aidan Dunne in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000, published by Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, January, 2001
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However, this work has none of the immediate rhetoric of Shop, Dungannon: no bombs, explosions, or bursts of light. Instead it is the nature of meditation. The rainy weather insulates the viewer from the crispness of the real image; the objects on the rear window shelf-actually child’s toys and seat headrests – function like abstract shapes, while the blackness of the car interior contrasts with the pink and yellow tonalities that infuse the outside atmosphere. Unlike a documentary photograph, this kind of image indicates what it is like to live in Northern Ireland. It does not reproduce a surface. It creates a mood, an attitude and – in the use of the war memorial - an iconic authorial comment on the use, and abuse of ‘High Art’.
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
......................................................................................................
If you think about it, the title of this series Moving Windows, is both a pun and a paradox. It is a paradox because windows are usually thought of as being stationary as in the phrase ‘a window on the world’. Through the window you see a ‘view’, framed and thus ordered; tamed; made safe. It is a pun because moving can be interpreted in a double sense: in its literal sense of a window which moves, as in a car window; and in its metaphorical sense of something which ‘moves’ or stirs the emotions. The twintrack aspect of the pun and the unsettling nature of a paradox (especially G.K. Chesterton’s rationale of focusing upon the apparently trifling or commonplace before extracting a paradoxically meaning out of it) are inherent in Sloan’s working methods. In terms of the ‘twintrack’, the baseline is the straight photograph, a photograph which records. The unedited, mechanistic aspect of this documentary-style record is emphasised by the artist’s use of an autofocus camera, and in the manner in which he captured the shots: taken while driving around Northern Ireland with a camera in one hand, and snatching shots. Most photographs after all, as in the designation ‘snapshot’, are images which capture a fleeting moment but are deprived of context. Editing - the juxtaposition of one image with another – can provide a context – as can the intervention of the artist with respect to either the negative or the print. In this case, the intervention is in the shape of toners and watercolours.
Car Park, Shopping Centre, Bangor, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
The paradox emerges in the relationship between the subject matter, and the treatment of same. The baseline for all of these images is profoundly quotidian. Whether a shop, a car, a bus shelter or a road is in view, the actuality of the things depicted is the stuff of our monotonous, everyday, common existence: the brutal facts of ordinary life. However, the artist’s purpose is to reveal the sinister, the suspicious, the surreal dislocations and the latent violence which lurk underneath the backdrop of normality. In this sense the angle of approach, and the subject matter, is akin to the provincial scenes of novelists from Balzac to Simenon with their evocation of stagnant little towns where everything significant happens behind closed shutters: the Irish equivalent would be the short stories of a Northerner like Patrick Boyle with their cast of dour suspicious countrymen, and their harsh, often ironic scenarios.
The basic material – the photographic templates – were taken as Sloan went about his everyday travels in the North, driving through the counties of Tyrone (where his parents lived), Antrim where his wife’s family lived) and Armagh where he himself lived and worked. This regional odyssey was viewed, literally, within the frame of two distancing elements: that of the autofocus camera, held at arm’s length; and that of the window-frame, be it windscreen of side panel. It was then re-viewed and re-presented through the media of toner and watercolour. In fact most of these images are the equivalent of watercolours painted upon a printed image.
Edenderry, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
What, you may ask, is the thematic rational behind both the subject matter, and the treatment of it? In terms of the baseline prints, taken from a, moving car with an autofocus camera, the nature of contemporary Northern Irish society is revealed in that cars and cameras are viewed with suspicion. There are notices at army checkpoints forbidding one to take photographs; and many’s an unwary photographer has had the experience of soldiers descending upon him or her in response to a snapped image. Furthermore, the view through a window (often with front and back window and side-mirror in operation) suggests inevitably the omnipresent surveillance techniques in the province. Another analogue would be Hitchcock’s Rear Window…
The Square, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Furthermore the undramatic, unsensational nature if the baseline images – no photojournalistic opportunities depicting bombs, burnt-out buses, destroyed streets or dead bodies – makes the argument that the media image of the North is distorted and false. Against such simplifying rhetoric is poised the critique contained in Sloan’s work.
Initial reaction to this series of works was contradictory on two fronts. Gerry Burns, for instance, argued that ‘no attempt (was) made at composition’ whereas Belinda Loftus commented that ‘all of these photographs (sic) have a very strong formal element with the geometric shapes of car windows, steering wheels and mirrors cutting into the prints, generally giving them firm compositions’. Burns also considered that ‘the locations…could be virtually anywhere’, whereas Loftus stated that the works were ‘intensely localised photographs’. These two sets of comments are reconcilable, essentially because they confuse the subject matter with the means. Sloan has stated that he has taken large numbers of photographs without giving a thought to the composition, but he also stated that, for the finished series, he wanted every image to have a part of the car within it, thus ensuring strong horizontals and verticals. Shooting from within a car also limited the framing opportunities whilst the interventions in terms and watercolour determined, at the least, the interweave of tonal relationships.
Hill Street, Lurgan, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Notions of locality (an indigenous bedrock) are easily squared with universality in that while the subject matter – bus shelters, roads and the like – are shot so that they could, in theory, be anywhere from Craigavon to Carlisle, two factors intervene to register the intensity of locality. The first factor is the sectarian graffiti, while the second is the intervention process: the markmaking and the colour-coding.
Portadown Road, Lurgan, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
In terms of the artist’s oeuvre, the series is important on two counts. In the prescient phrase of Brendan Carolan, his ‘images penetrate the safe confines of windscreen and side panels’ – an insight which indicates the growing awareness on the part of the artist as to his mode of working: the ability to take the quotidian which is universal, and then illuminate its hidden agendas in a manner which allows us to grasp the universal application. Secondly, Sloan’s use of colour acquires a marked complexity. Moving Windows marks an apogee: the colour is sensual, painterly, almost lush, and in marked contrast to the subject matter; so lush in fact that it frequently overbalances the images, suggesting an uncertain balance between form and content. As the critic Jill Nunn suggested, he was in danger of producing ‘neat little art objects with a political sting in their tail’. But Sloan was never likely to descend into prettiness or pure painterliness. Succeeding work swiftly disregarded excessive visual ripeness, opting instead for sinew; for a muscular, astringent intensity of vision.
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
Bus Shelter, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Damaged Car, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
Bus Shelter, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Damaged Car, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Farm, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Craigavon Centre, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Edenderry, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Shop, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Through the side window of a car we view a row of shop windows, at night. By a happy accident, the product of a slow shutter speed and a slight camera movement, an after-image occurred. As it happens, one of the shops belonged to the artist’s father, and had been bombed a few times. Perhaps that associative train produced the interventionist development of the after-image for, with the use of toners and watercolours, the effect is now of an explosion taking place in the shop doorway which has triggered a conflagration in the adjoining window space.
The strong framing provided by the side window of the car, and the thick black areas representing the car interior, strongly suggest the presence of the driver who may, or may not have been the instigator of the explosion. Either way the motif is one of surveillance. What the reproduction cannot indicate is the contrast between the casual brutality of the subject matter, and the ripe painterliness within which it is clothed.
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
Road, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Bank, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Kitchen Hill, Lurgan, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
In this image, Sloan photographed a disused factory, an ugly block-like structure, that for many years served as a British army base. It is attended by a comparable air of dereliction to the buildings in Borne Sulinowo, and living conditions in it must have been equally grim and cheerless. The pervasive feeling of the waste of both material resources and human potential that characterises Borne Sulinowo clings to the shell of the redundant barracks.
Extract from A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan's Photographic Work by Aidan Dunne in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000, published by Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, January, 2001
Car Wash, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Motorway, The Birches, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
The strong framing provided by the side window of the car, and the thick black areas representing the car interior, strongly suggest the presence of the driver who may, or may not have been the instigator of the explosion. Either way the motif is one of surveillance. What the reproduction cannot indicate is the contrast between the casual brutality of the subject matter, and the ripe painterliness within which it is clothed.
Extract from Marking the North - the Work of Victor Sloan, by Brian McAvera, published by Open Air, Dublin and Impressions, York, England
Road, Dungannon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Bank, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Kitchen Hill, Lurgan, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
In this image, Sloan photographed a disused factory, an ugly block-like structure, that for many years served as a British army base. It is attended by a comparable air of dereliction to the buildings in Borne Sulinowo, and living conditions in it must have been equally grim and cheerless. The pervasive feeling of the waste of both material resources and human potential that characterises Borne Sulinowo clings to the shell of the redundant barracks.
Extract from A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan's Photographic Work by Aidan Dunne in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000, published by Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, January, 2001
Car Wash, Craigavon, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Motorway, The Birches, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
Road, Portadown, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 23.5cms x 23.5cms, 1985
From the beginning, Victor Sloan has also sought to alter our relationship to the photographic image, it should be said, by consistently undercutting a predictable compositional aesthetic, formulating and emphasising the apparently casual, oblique qualities of his own imagery. Yet what this amounts to is, inevitably, partly a formalist achievement, in that it indicates a novel way of seeing, spectacularly so in the case of the Moving Windows series, for example, which are in formal terms outstanding. One could say that his general pictorial approach is to continually casualise the pictorial organisation of his subject matter, with the aim of pulling it out of whatever narrative and iconographic frame we might be tempted to slot it into, thus denying us our habitual sense of detachment and control.
Undertones of surveillance discernible in some of the Craigavon series images come to the surface in Moving Windows, an extraordinary series made in 1985. Based on photographs taken over a period of about a fortnight, they form a kind of visual diary of Sloan's movements by car during that time. His idea was to try to get a sense of the "strange, unexpected architecture of things" as viewed through the car window - an increasingly common vantage point and also a highly pertinent perceptual filter. As it happened, over the fortnight he travelled around a lot and the images are a map of a landscape imbued with a personal history, from Portadown and Craigavon, where he lives, to Dungannon where he grew up, and to Bangor, where his wife's family live.
There are sinister connotations to the view from the car window, by no means only in relation to Northern Ireland but obviously in a heightened sense there, given the history of pervasive surveillance by a variety of agencies, waves of sectarian assassinations and hugely destructive car bombing campaigns. We are ambivalently positioned, prompted to question our own motives as observers. In fact, taking photographs from the car in Dungannon made him acutely aware of a reversal of viewpoint. His father ran a newsagents and sweet-shop in the town centre which was predictably, repeatedly targeted by bombers and he has vivid memories of being woken up in the middle of the night to clear up the debris of broken glass and confectionery.
Like the Craigavon work, Moving Windows builds a cumulative mood of subtle unease that is typical of his overall approach. That is, the more we seem to be dealing with workaday normality, looking at snapshots of anonymous daily life, the more we become quietly sure that the apparent normality is deceptive. But they are also quite prescient in their exceptional informality, the unforced casualness of their pictorial aesthetic. Influenced by film, they are like isolated frames from fluid film narratives, with that sense of chance and transience about them, as though the camera is caught in mid-pan, between one thing and another.
Extract from A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan's Photographic Work by Aidan Dunne in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000, published by Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, January, 2001
Return to Works
