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Phil Collins at Victoria Miro
Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Ana Finel Honigman
By presenting a detailed rebuttal to the "reality" of reality TV, British artist Phil Collins has created a most provocative and challenging response to Picasso's oft-quoted dictum, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." When Collins was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006, in addition to screening pre-existing work for the exhibition at the Tate, he also set up in its galleries his own TV production company, "shady lane productions," with a working office. There he interviewed former participants in talk-show, makeover and reality-TV pro grams who felt that they had been misled, violated and damaged by their experiences.
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At Victoria Miro, Collins presented linked works using the material he gathered from these interviews. Outside the gallery's entrance, a lightbox announced "shady lane productions." Inside hung seven modestly sized screenprints from the video series that ran in the large exhibition areas on both floors. These rooms, carpeted with cheap burgundy rugs, gave a professional office appearance that became increasingly suspect as the nine interviewees' stories unfolded on wall-scale screens. In the 64-minute video downstairs, Collins presented the unedited, real-time press briefing he organized at the opulent Cafe Royal, Picadilly's historic conference and meetings venue. A sparse yet attentive group of journalists listen to nine veterans of reality TV recounting their experiences on shows such as "Wife Swap," "Brand New You" and "Trisha" (Sally Jessy Raphael's UK version).
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Their stories range from a pretty young woman's, about how the callous manipulation, goading and prying of her program's producers caused her relationship to unravel, to a father's harrowing experience of having his autistic son publicly portrayed as just an unruly, tantrum-prone brat. At two separate makeover shows, the staff, in sadistic decisions that were potentially lethal, refused to properly treat a woman with M.S. and irreparably damaged another's appearance, health and finances. Three teleprompters presented scrolling transcripts of anonymous testimonies by leading industry professionals, revealing the specific machinations used to "get the story." Upstairs, some of the stories were fleshed out in six multiscreen projections, which show the participants in one-on-one interviews.
As interesting as the actual accounts of professionally ordained and mandated mendacity may be and they are all painfully interesting--even more compelling is the question that lingers: Is this art? And more specifically, is Collins further exploiting these people in the process of presenting their suffering as art? All the participants at some point state that the betrayal they felt has made them mistrustful, and one woman tells how her experience even triggered extreme agoraphobia. In the end, Collins could have made a documentary (which was what most of the participants were told he was doing before they signed contracts), but instead he employed the Turner's highprofile platform as a means to explore the boundaries between creative crafting versus unethical manipulation. He was obviously very careful to edit as little as possible and to give the speakers as much time as they needed to tell their stories. The result is that viewers can only feel empathy and sympathy for the same people they might have mocked in the reality-TV context. By offering them a complex "high-culture" forum, Collins attempts to restore to his "reality TV survivors" the dignity producers robbed from them in providing television audiences with easy entertainment.
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