Uncomfortable Proximity [shown above] is an on-line commission at the Tate gallery website, London. This work http://www.tate.org.uk/webart/mongrel/home/default.htm mirrors the Tate's own website, but offers new images and ideas, gathered from Harwood's own experiences, his readings of Tate works and publicity materials and his interest in the Tate's British site. Another work, Rehearsal of Memory is an interactive program that took place over several months in 1995. Harwood's program was a provocative and realistic re-creation of lives of inmates at the Ashworth Maximum Security Mental Hospital, near Liverpool, England. (The program used an anonymous computer personality to reflect the collective experience of the group.) These patients include serial killers, potential suicides and other casualties of society considered either a danger to themselves or to others. Harwood also worked with experienced, trained nurses and orderlies in the facility. According to the artist, this work is about "the recording of the life experiences of the client group that [is] a mirror to ourselves ('normal society') and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty; a nightmare for some that constructs misinformation and fear about insanity, violence and victims. This mental space is occupied by the psycho, the nutter, the mad dog and Bedlam. This is the space where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity. This work is about people everywhere who are trying to remember the faces of the extras in the cinema of history. This Artwork is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten." Harwood's description of the piece boldly contrasts the actions of these patients with those of war veterans who have killed and feel little remorse, thus raising important questions about good and evil, the normal and the abnormal. Rehearsal of Memory also demonstrates that technology plays a key role in social control, that "computers as a primary technology can give us a safe distance from difficult decisions: whether they be deciding which patients to treat, which to leave to die, or which employees are surplus to production. Whether we agree or not, the modern machine is currently perceived as a neutral decision-making space. This image of anonymity creates a sufficient distance from events to create a situation in which we are ritually free to give up our ability to feel the consequences of our actions." --Barbara Lee Williams, Leonardo/ISAST Awards Committee chairperson to learn more about Graham Harwood's work, visit these websites:
http://www.mongrelx.org http://www.scotoma.org http://www.tate.org.uk/webart/mongrel/home/default.htm/
Graham Harwood |
| New Horizons Gallery | | gallery entrance | | past exhibitions | | Leonardo On-Line |