Phil Collins looks at the world through a starkly candid lens. His latest work is the topical 'Baghdad Screentests', writes Aidan Dunne.
Phil Collins' video, Baghdad Screentests, showing nightly in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, consists of footage of 35 or so Iraqi students. The camera focuses intently on each of them individually. They look like ordinary people. They don't do much. Some look a bit bored, some slightly uncomfortable. Occasionally they ask or say something but we cannot hear their words because they are drowned out by a loud soundtrack of pop songs by Donna Summer, The Beatles, Elvis and others. We simply look at people being looked at.
Collins made the video when he was in Iraq in May, 2002.
Born in Runcorn in England in 1970, and now based in Belfast, he is fast building an international reputation as an artist whose photographic and video work aims to undermine the stereotyping of identity - of places, cultures and people - that, he argues, characterise areas of change and conflict. The casual informality of Baghdad Screentests is a hallmark of his approach, which hinges on his direct involvement and interactions with individuals and communities.
"I tried for about a year to go to Baghdad. I was interested in meeting people - civilians - because it seemed to me that Baghdad was an invisible city that we knew little about. And it still is in many ways. By using Baghdad as shorthand for the Iraqi leadership, I thought the media linked everyone there with the regime." He didn't know exactly what he would do. Once there, his camera broke down and he borrowed a big, old video recorder.
"I went around to the universities and asked for volunteers to be filmed and explained why I wanted to do it." Quite a number of people volunteered - up to 100, he reckons. The rather strange format of the video as we see it - with its muted, restless subjects - was influenced by several factors. It owes a lot to the Andy Warhol Factory screen-test procedure, which involved pointing a camera at someone and seeing how they coped with being looked at.
"I wanted to set up a slightly sadistic relationship between the camera and the subject . . . something like an interrogation, either criminal or medical. And they are a bit like hostages - they'd been waiting so long and I wanted them to wait for the camera."
What is perhaps the most singular aspect of the work, the pop soundtrack, came later. "I wanted it to be popular, to be immediately accessible to the spectator. I got rid of the audio and substituted a soundtrack of love songs. It's partly a way of prompting you to read the relationship between yourself and the subjects. Pop songs are immediate and manipulative, and maybe even naive. There's no critical distance, they're about experiences everyone knows on a personal level."
Baghdad Screentests is also currently showing as part of Real Society, a large survey exhibition of Collins' work at Belfast's Ormeau Baths Gallery. Among the pieces there, in a lively cross-section of video works, is an interview with two British veterans of the first Gulf War.
"They talk about the effects of being exposed to depleted uranium used in the shells, and the batteries of vaccinations they got. The Department of Defence won't recognise their condition."
Their problems, he said, are similar to the experiences of people he met in hospitals in Basra in Iraq. Another video records two children in a Basra hospital: "One is suffering from anaemia, one from leukaemia; one easily treatable, one more difficult, obviously, but the point is that because of the sanctions the doctors are in the frustrating position of not really being able to help them."
In Tel Aviv he advertised for "a mature version of Britney Spears to sing, someone between the ages 40 and 80." He only received one reply, from a woman who is featured on video, preparing to and then gamely singing a Britney Spears hit under his supervision. Again, he wanted a certain element of cruelty. "It seemed to me that the song, which is supposedly provocative and light, is actually quite melancholy." It ties in with a sequence of photographs taken in New York in the aftermath of September 11th. He noticed that advertising posters of Britney Spears' features - "an icon of blonde, American youth and beauty" - were violently defaced.
"Some in a sexually aggressive way, some attacking her ethnically, but it gave her a martyred appearance, like someone who'd been tarred and feathered." He has opted not to contextualise anything in the Ormeau Baths show. With just two exceptions, the photographs and videos are offered without explanatory captions or titles.
"There are," he says, "clues in everything. But then, part of the argument of the work is around representation as much as around content, so if there is some confusion in locating particular pieces, it reflects something that we deal with every day. Often all we have to guide us is the authority of the medium, of a TV news channel for example, and, to put it mildly, that isn't always reliable. So in the circumstances an element of confusion is no harm." The Baghdad video is titled, as is the group of photographs which give the show its title. These images are drawn from a strange event in San Sebastian in Spain, organised by an arts organisation, DAE, in July last year.
"During the course of a day, people were invited to turn up at a suite in the best hotel in town to be photographed. The only condition was that they had to take off some of their clothes. They could take off all of their clothes if they wanted but they had to take off something."
Six television stations and about 20 photographers turned up. Collins' involvement arose from an invitation to make work about the connection between the Basque country and Northern Ireland. "What I had in mind was the idea of the prurience of our interest in areas that have conflicts. Saint Sebastian is this great icon of the wounded body. When people turned up they were interviewed as part of the process and they discussed their reasons for taking part. Again and again they said, 'what others call ugly I call beautiful'."
Many of the 50 or so people who exposed themselves for the cameras, individuals and couples, would not be considered particularly beautiful, just ordinary. The images fall in with the purpose of the subjects, which had to do with anything from confidence-building to straightforward exhibitionism.
"It was as though the photographer was a confessor. You were there to listen. I was honoured to be part of it. Everyone left happy with what they'd achieved." He liked, particularly, "the way it wasn't billed as a fine art event. It was a popular event. I really believe art can play a part in people's lives in the same way as popular culture, but it's too often locked away as if it shouldn't."
Baghdad Screentests is screened nightly at Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Tues-Sat 8.30 p.m.-11 p.m. until April 12th. Discussion with Phil Collins and Colm Toibin, Tuesday, upstairs in Bowes, Fleet Street, 6 p.m. Real Society is at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast until April 13th.