Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
Autodidact
Autodidact is a filmic and sculptural artwork manifest in a number of iterations for gallery exhibition and cinema screening. Moving images appear on an LCD screen mounted on a tubular steel structure: a hybrid form resembling playground apparatus, an AV-stand and an abstract sculpture. These are intended to recall the legacy of a leading architect of Structuralism, and post-war playground designer, Aldo van Eyck.
Autodidact continues McCrea's practice-led research into the staging of moving and still image and their relation to spaces of reception. The output is primarily a result of McCrea's methodological exploration and refinement, hence an important piece of developmental research. The research also addresses how highly symbolic social spaces of educational institutions and the trope of ‘play’ can be viewed as sites of contested signification, social and ideological anxiety. This anxiety stems from the increasing instrumentalisation and commodification of both education and childhood.
Autodidact's moving image is structured as a series of vignettes portraying a child interacting with a university campus: variously observing, playing, running, climbing, sitting and occupied by moments of reverie, engaging with the architecture, the open spaces, furniture and the many abstract sculptures dotted around the campus. The campus location is the iconic post-68 ‘brutalist’ architecture of the University College Dublin, which now itself struggles to maintain coherent architectural identity, just as the child protagonist struggles to find and maintain their role as cinematic subject. In terms of genre, the film is located somewhere between observational and fictional, between acting and enactment, where both the child and the architecture feature as protagonists.
The research has been disseminated through a solo exhibition at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2011); a group exhibition at Crate Gallery, London, curated by Paul O'Neill (2012), and screenings at Cobra Museum, Netherlands, (2011) and Cologne Kunstverein (2011).
