ART – REVIEW – MELIK OHANIAN – SOUTH LONDON GALLERY – MUSEUMS
by Martin Herbert
Time Out
December 6, 2006
Submissive audiences won’t get much out of Melik Ohanian’s art. The
French-Armenian artist demands participation both in interactive
sculptures and in video works. Like his widely shown ‘Invisible Film’
(focusing on a cine-projector that beams Peter Watkins’ once-banned
‘Punishment Park’ into a darkening desert’s blank air; we can hear the
premonitory 1971 film but not see it), this show’s 21-minute ‘Seven
Minutes Before’ plays what we see against what we know we’re missing.
Seven screens – too many to focus on at once – relay footage shot
from seven positions around a valley floor in southern France. What’s
filmed is dense, allusive, symbol-laden and rapidly changeable.
The camera pans over people playing Armenian and Japanese instruments,
caged wolves and several vehicles all rushing towards one spot –
culminating in a chain of explosions. A socio-political analogue to
the formal fragmentation is introduced earlier, when a statuesque
African man gives a lamenting monologue about the necessity of
transcending solipsism, escaping from the plane of subjectivity and
appreciating others’ needs and dreams. Allied to the dramatic finale,
this is faintly platitudinous; but only one of myriad potential
endpoints. What’s incontrovertible is that in an era whose guiding
metaphors are webs and networks, productions such as Ohanian’s
sedulously reshape montage and narrative in a manner that’s demanding,
unforgiving – and sparklingly contemporary.