Artist Lecture, Attie, Kerry McDonnell

The Attraction of Onlookers, Video Still, Shimon Attie, 2006

The Attraction of Onlookers, Video Still, Shimon Attie, 2006

The Attraction of Onlookers, Video Still, Shimon Attie, 2006

I had a really hard time taking Shimon Attie’s work seriously for a number of reasons. For one we had a lot of technical difficulties with his slides and the projector and he was very unprofessional about addressing the mishaps. He never failed to condemn the utilities available to us and how they’re insufficient for showing his work. I also thought he spoke very highly of himself and down to the audience. I was almost offended listening to him speak to us and as well as about his work. Overall his demeanor was not charming and he seemed very unapproachable.

His more recent work was interesting, but I was distracted by the ornamentation of his presentation; videos of his work introduced by poems that he wrote along with an established Welsh writer and the credits that scrolled beforehand was all very dramatic and theatrical and frankly, quite comical. As I said, I had a very hard time taking him and his work seriously. His piece The Attraction of Onlookers which focuses on the Aberfan, was presented this way. It was a tragic avalanche accident in a small village in Wales where all of the village’s children were killed, as the avalanche collided with the town’s only school. It has become a center for disaster tourism and Attie strove to create work that would normalize the town and its people. He hoped it would serve as a means to help the populous to overcome such an event. The Attraction of Onlookers is video work in which live persons are filmed in frozen poses on an invisible rotating stage. He wanted the viewer to be able to examine and observe these people, much like how their town became like a fishbowl after the incident. He also wanted to illustrate the effects of trauma with the frozen poses. Attie wanted to depict the kind of people who lived in every Welsh village; “Every Welsh village has a...,” and while he wanted to universalize these people and make them relatable, I don’t think he did it positively. It seemed to me that he was stereotyping these people. When speaking about this piece, I felt like the way he was talking about it suggested he was making fun of the kind of people who exist in a Welsh village. I felt like he was isolating them even more and maybe even being slightly disrespectful.

One thing I connected to during the lecture was his discussion of memory as a substantial thing to the person who the memory belongs to, yet it is not physical enough to grasp and an unsatisfactory way of being able to truly re-experience something. I’m not entirely sure what it was in relation to as it was a tangent off of another subject, but nevertheless I found it interesting to consider within my own work.

Shimon Attie: Between Dreams and History

MoCP

MoMA