Phil Collins at Artes Mundi 5: Critical review

Out of the seven artists nominated for this year’s Artes Mundi prize, Phil Collins is the only Brit on the shortlist. However, his endeavours are as international as any other, as shown by the work he has produced for the exhibition, and his profile as an artist. Collins has shown work across Britain, Europe, Australia and the US and shows no sign of slowing pace.

The Cardiff-based prize is in its fifth year, having established itself as a visual arts initiative aiming to “provide an opportunity for wider discussion of the role of artists in society.” Other artists represented in the prize this year are Teresa Margolles, Tania Brugera, Miriam Bäckström, Apolonija Šušteršic, Darius Mikšys and Sheela Gowder. The works on show span enormously in their formal differences, however a thread of social engagement runs through all of the selected pieces. Collins’ part in Artes Mundi is perhaps one of the more traditional - if such a term still applies - forms of contemporary visual art.

Born in Cheshire, the now Berlin-based artist has put forward two pieces for the prize, installed across two sites: free fotolab is an automated slide projection based in the contemporary gallery of the National Museum Wales, and This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (otherwise abbreviated to TUTBU) is a video installation at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff.

Free fotolab began in 2004 as a curatorial project in Milton Keynes. Collins offered a service to the public to develop their 35mm films in exchange for the right to use them any way he saw fit. This element of voyeurism is crucial to the work; without it, Collins is just a lab technician at Jessops (as he once was).  The project went on to expand and exhibit across Europe, and the resulting slide installation in the Museum is a culmination of years of processing, analysing and archiving.

The premise of free fotolab is to question the reproduced image; Collins is probing the boundary between the ownership of these images and the exploitation of the subjects within them and their original creator. They are surrendered to Collins willingly by the original author, to be appropriated as he sees fit, therefore the slideshow before us is not made up of covert or found photographs, but of images selected for a special purpose. Accordingly, the images presented in free fotolab are evidence of the beauty of the snapshot and perhaps even the fragility of human interaction. As an audience, we marvel at the mystery of them: who took the photograph, where and when it was taken, why was it selected? These questions shroud the piece in a nostalgic presence, which at best appeals to aesthetic conventions, but may be considered to conceal the meaning of the piece.

Accompanying free fotolab for Collins’ entry is This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, a two-part recording of a scripted teleshopping channel, broadcast in Berlin last year on live television. The recordings are shown on screens in two caravans parked outside Chapter. TUTBU tv is a parody of consumerism, where the viewer has the option to purchase one of three ‘life experiences’: the chance to be interrogated, Stazi-style, on live television; to play a part in a period-drama sex scene; or to wake up on your deathbed and tell your loved ones exactly what you think of them.

It makes for compelling viewing. Beneath the comedy and quirkiness of the actors’ garish costumes and wigs, there is an underlying sense of commercially-tinted unease. Collins’ dissection of the teleshopping format brings the issue of modern desire to question in an explicit and demanding way. Although it seems that there is no clear, forceful message through the piece, the viewer is undeniably made to consider his or her own agenda in relation to it.

Of the two pieces, TUTBU is probably the more revealing of Collins’ motives as an artist; his practice is highly referential to popular visual communication and in particular, the television programmes which utilise reality in their production inform the work in several ways. We are confronted with a hyper-real version of the everyday, prompting a heightened consciousness of our own lives. Now Phil Collins asks: is this what we have become? More specifically, he asks: how does the camera produce us? By using television as a way to propose opportunity, Collins engages with the notion of communication as an art form. This is nothing especially new to the arts scene, and Collins has been leading to this for several years, however the platform on which the work is distributed offers a different way of thinking through seeing. In the work we discover ourselves, and our own experience of human joyousness, suffering, indifference - Collins does not put a name on it, but offers us its meaning instead.

The key motive that forms the basis of his work is the investigation of human behaviour under the influence of contemporary media. Speaking recently at the Artes Mundi conference at the National Museum, Collins revealed a little more about the works: “snapshots were referred to in derogatory terms but they were remarkably beautiful to me … the centrality of an object which holds an account of memory [is] related to trauma and life experience. What are the modes of address in which we record emotional landscape?” It appears that Collins, as an artist, is oriented towards the mediums that document life itself.

Regardless of winning the £40,000 prize awarded for Artes Mundi, it appears that Collins will inevitably gain a wider audience through his populist approach. Screening TUTBU live on German television has made him a name in the arts scene there, and with the Artes Mundi prize coinciding with the more recognised Turner prize this year (which he was once short listed for) perhaps this will be a year to remember for Phil Collins.