Healy's Last Man tends a disused airport terminal - it was filmed in just such a setting in Cork
In Martin Healy’s show ‘The Inhabitant’ the artist uses two short silent films to explore the failure of urban living and its effect on the individuals who have created the dystopian world around them
THE TWO short films that form Martin Healy's exhibition at Temple Bar, The Inhabitant, are variations on a theme. In each, a lone protagonist occupies a derelict, though relatively intact, apparently functional built environment. In Fuguea disconsolate figure, a clean-cut young man who looks as if he works in an office, wanders through a lushly planted, archetypically modernist garden city. The protagonist in the other film, Last Man, seems to be a janitor, wearing overalls and doing piecemeal cleaning tasks on his way through a vacant, slightly dilapidated airport building.
No words are spoken and the soundtrack in both cases strikes an unsettling note, though the overall mood is elegiac, even mournful, rather than ominous. Projected on a large scale, the works barely last more than eight minutes each but proceed at a slow, considered pace. Frame by frame, the images are elegantly composed and visually engrossing, though no attempt is made to frame a narrative as such. We are left to propose our own narrative interpretation of what we see.
It is as if both protagonists are mourning. They are, it seems, bemused observers of failed utopian projects, modernist town planning and technological progress, respectively. The title Fuguerefers to the psychological phenomenon of the fugue state, in which one's identity is cut adrift. The film is based on Edward Bellamy's 1888 book Looking backward 2000 to 1887in which the main character jumps forward in time and finds a socialist utopia that is contrasted with the inequities of the Victorian era. The book influenced the garden city movement and the location of the film is the Finnish garden city of Tapiola, a prototypical new town built in the 1950s and 1960s. It is as if Healy's version of Bellamy's protagonist jumps forward in time again, to witness the demise of the utopian dream.
The Last Manreferences another book, Mary Shelley's post-apocalyptic fantasy in which the world's population is reduced by plague to a sole survivor by a plague. Healy's Last Mantends a disused airport terminal (it was filmed in just such a setting in Cork) and, in the final image, works on building a plastic model airplane. Here, it is as if the promises of technology have come to naught.
The Inhabitantis consistent with Healy's past work and extends his range, in line with his 2009 short film, Facsimile. Born in London in 1967, he studied in Galway, then Cork. From the time he began to exhibit, at the end of the 1990s, he has been interested in the persistence of irrational belief. The tenor of his output is captured in the title of his RHA Gallagher Gallery show in 2007, I Want to Believe.
That very impressive show featured a number of projects dating back to the turn of the century, including explorations of the lure of the paranormal in suburban America.
Looking for Jodiedocumented his search for the house at the centre of the events that featured in the series of Amityville books and films from 1977 onwards. The photographs in Jersey Devil Incidentfeatured the area in New Jersey that reputedly harboured a sinister creature, the Jersey Devil. Healy's images conveyed the pedestrian reality of the locales and how they could prompt such suburban myths.
Diabolical messages supposedly concealed in rock-song lyrics and the convictions and activities of ufologists were also subjects he tackled. A series of startling, beautiful photographs of hooded falcons was titled The Sleep of Reason, a clear reference to Goya's iconic etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.Then, with Facsimile, he seemed to broaden the scope of his thinking considerably. Until that point, he might have been sketching the opposition of Enlightenment and Roman- tic sensibilities, of reason versus feeling.
Facsimile, distilled from Adolfo Bioy Casares's brief fiction, The Invention of Morel, can be seen as a Kantian critique of utopian thinking. The ideal world is revealed as an illusion. Practically speaking, a tropical paradise turns out to be the conservatory at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Now Healy has continued to move in this direction with his reflections on modernism.
In his thoughtful catalogue essay, Dara Waldron points to two film-makers, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick, in relation to Healy's work. The janitor in The Last Mancertainly evokes Jack Nicholson in the out-of-season hotel in The Shining. Waldron cites Tarkovsky's extraordinary film Stalkerwith regard to Facsimile, interpreting it as a rejection of utopian thinking. Intriguingly, Tarkovsky's earlier science fiction film, Solaris, sees its protagonist embrace just the kind of utopian illusion depicted in Facsimile.
Tarkovsky comes to mind in relation to Fugue, as well, particularly when the protagonist wades through a large, shallow pool for no particular reason. Water plays a central role in Tarkovsky's films, and it is as if Healy is specifically referring to Stalker. Waldron's conclusion is that he is attempting to define our current position: that is, living in uncertainty, better off without the false security of blind faith in any transcendent framework of belief, and left to our own devices.
The InhabitantTwo recent film works by Martin Healy. Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2 . Until October 8th
