Delirious Flickers: Moving Images of the Contemporary

Written by Hao the essay was published as a chapter in The Future of Image a book edited by Wang Nanming & Wang Xichang and published by the University of Shanghai Press. The chapter explores and illuminates the practices of two British artists born in Scotland, the sculptor Bruce McLean and performance artist Ross Sinclair. The essay provided a platform to enrich, challenge and inspire a predominantly Chinese readership for whom Bruce McLean and Ross Sinclair’s practices in artist’ are largely unknown artists.

Examining their individual practices through a curatorial perspective that foregrounds current debates focused on trans-national exhibition making, the essay references philosopher Hannah Arendt’s political concept of ‘the space of appearance’ to envisage different readings of Bruce McLean’s moving image works developed over forty years and Ross Sinclair’s ongoing project ‘Real Life’.

Using Arendt’s ideas the essay interrogates the concept of contemporaneity from a post-colonial context and explores how different experiences of ‘the contemporary’ are constituted in time and space and inscribed through experiences of duration and action, both pivotal in Bruce McLean’s moving image works and Ross Sinclair’s performance practice. By situating ‘the contemporary’ as both duration and action, the essay re-evaluates artist’s moving image works and performance practices, enabling them to be critically unpacked as manifestations of a transnational experience of contemporaneity.