John Stathatos
SUSAN TRANGMAR: Amidst

Susan Trangmar's slide projection installations have been among the most consistently original visual work produced in this country during the last decade. Some of these pieces, including Blue Skies and Ancestors III, made themselves more or less happily at home in a wide variety of venues; others, including Amidst, the most recent, are site-specific in the fullest sense of the term. By this I mean not merely that they are visually integrated into a particular architectural site, but also that they are conceptually linked to the location for which they were designed to such a degree that they would be almost unintelligible if recreated elsewhere.
     This applies with particular force to Amidst, which was commissioned by London's Dash Gallery, a venue unusual in at least two respects. First of all, it consists of a single, almost perfectly circular space, only slightly broken up by four thick pillars; and secondly, it is located in the Isle of Dogs, on the edge of the late twentieth-century planning disaster known as the West India Docks Development - a megalomaniac toyland of unwanted office blocks and empty yuppie bolt-holes dropped in the middle of some of East London's most deprived communities. And also, of course, the home of Canary Wharf, that ultimate monument to the self-destructive nature of blind Thatcherite greed.
     Amidst made an immediate physical impact on the viewer: no sooner past the isolating black curtain than the work was, literally, all around one; eight slide projectors placed equidistantly along the periphery of the room projected a 360-degree panorama of an evergreen forest onto the walls. Technically, the installation was well-nigh perfect; the joints between the individual images were almost indistinguishable, with no sign of any spill-over onto the floor or ceiling. The intrusive pillars, the one element which might have undermined the illusion, actually became part of the dynamic, their lines echoing the near-perfect verticals of the pine trunks.
     Of course it was all an illusion, nor could there have been any pretence that Amidst was anything but illusionary; other considerations apart, the constant whir of the projectors and the intense beams of light stabbing across the centre of the gallery would have seen to that. Nevertheless, on a gut emotional level it remained an astonishing experience, one which invited the viewer to move about the seemingly vast space for a long time, intrigued and seduced both by the accumulation of sensations and by the sheer successful effrontery of the photographic enterprise.
     Trangmar had effortlessly, and this time to greater effect than ever before, succeeded in overcoming her medium's supposed limitations: though remaining entirely photographic in nature, Amidst was a work which offered the viewer an experience of more than filmic intensity, and one furthermore in which the viewer's participation became an important element, since by changing position one could introduce an elaborate play of shadows across the panorama. So much for the experience of this enchanting work; but with Trangmar, the experience is never the whole story. Amidst may have been a spatial and visual delight, but it was also a work of considerable intellectual virtuosity, not unlike a nest of Chinese boxes in its construction.
     Here, after all, was a spurious forest - a facsimile, in every sense of the word - introduced not merely in an urban context, but in an urban environment itself utterly spurious; for what else are Canary Wharf and its satellites, those unreal constructions in the most debased of post-modern idioms, but a sham, an empty and echoing replica of a speculator's dream of urbanity? Only a speculator could have imagined an urban ideal made up of a totalitarian architecture devoted to the production of nothing, and only that strange suspension of ethical and aesthetic considerations characteristic of Britain in the eighties could have brought it to fruition. What better park for this factitious city than Trangmar's humming, illusionary forest?
     Nor have we yet quite reached the end of the labyrinth; for if we turn to that emblematic, that paradigmatic forest, what do we find? Why, that here is no healing dream of Arcadian purity, since this forest of regimented pine-trees is as artificial a construct as any office block. The fruit of dubious tax-shelter legislation, it is not merely unnatural - in real life, an offence to the landscape and a good example of unbalanced, ecologically unsound monoculture -, it is also both unnecessary and unproductive. It is, in other words, a vegetable equivalent of Canary Wharf; and what Amidst presented us with, for our greater edification, was the facsimile of a facsimile forest located in a facsimile city.
 
© John Stathatos, 1994
First published in Portfolio 19, Edinburgh, 1994
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