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A particular incoherence: some films of Vivienne Dick

This is a significant book as it is the first monograph of the artist, establishing her as a key artist of her generation. This chapter was commissioned by Treasa O’Brien for the monograph that accompanied the first retrospective of the work of Vivienne Dick at the Crawford Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland. The book was co-published by The LUX with a DVD accompanying.Garfield‘s aim in this chapter was to explore the work and to write about the way Dick exposes the politics of the formation of subjectivity through the figure of the outsider: as social, economic and geographic. The work had until this time been written about in relation to the “No Wave” genre (Jo Hoberman) or as part of the building of a national art form (Maeve Connolly). My own text departed from this reading, positing it as work that was preoccupied with global concerns, labour rights, Diasporic and feminist sensibilities. Drawing from sociology (Saskia Sassen), Art History (Rosalind Krauss, Kobena Mercer, Gavin Butt) I posit two theoretical propositions, firstly the incoherent subject and secondly a maximalist aesthetic, both closely bound through formal concerns that I analyse in the work. This chapter developed into a broader paper (REF 4) that brought together work from the LUX commissioned text on Keith Piper Speaking with forked Tongue: Keith Piper: http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/keith_piper/essay(1).html (2009) with this text on Vivienne Dick and is therefore part of a wider discussion on contemporary lens based work and a critique of neo-minimalism in the current prevalent paradigm of “long shot” video work.