First published 2006 by susak press11a Buchan Road, London SE15 3HQwww.susak.co.uk

book n. 2

ISBN-10: 1-905659-00-8ISBN-13: 978-1-905659-00-5 first edition

© daniel devlin 2006www.danieldevlin.co.uk

Designed in Nunheadby Daniel Devlindaniel@f-art.comwww.f-art.com

Printed in Plymouthby Latimer Trend & Company Ltd

All tights reserved

DANIEL DEVLIN

susak press

Two men sit at a table, sipping coffee and talking fitfully

about art. The man on the right is thoughtful and anxious,

wondering aloud what art is and whether he can legitimately

call himself an artist. The man on the left, a more sceptical

and irreverent character who has, apparently, little interest

in either of those questions, tries at first to reassure his

companion but soon loses patience and finally throws a glass

of water in his face. The man on the right is Daniel Devlin.

The man on the left is also Daniel Devlin. And in this video,

Conversation, we see three of the hallmarks of Devlin’s

work. One is coffee, which serves as a sign of conviviality

and sensuous pleasure—of the kinds of gratification that,

unlike the more rarefied pleasures of contemporary art,

can always be counted on. Another is the splashing; in

Devlin’s work, the glass or bucket of water is like Chekhov’s

proverbial pistol: if it is introduced in the first act, someone,

often the artist, is bound to get a soaking in the third. Finally,

this video, like so many of Devlin’s pieces, features the artist

himself, who acts as both agent provocateur and fall guy in

an art work that queries its own merits.

Between a Bucket of Water and a Cup of Coffee

by Hugues Le Roux

Let me describe Gatanje, another video by Devlin. Again,

two figures are seated at a table, drinking coffee. One of

them is the Devlin himself, who is conversing in Serbo-

Croat with a middle-aged woman. It soon becomes clear

that the woman is a fortune-teller who will shortly try

to read the artist’s future in his coffee dregs. When she

asks him what he wants to know, he says he is wondering

whether he will be successful as an artist—or should he just

give up? After a little gentle banter to the accompaniment

of cawing seagulls in the background, the two finish their

coffee and the woman examines the patterns formed by

the dregs at the bottom of the artist’s cup. First she sees an

ostrich, later a dinosaur; and as she disserts encouragingly

on his future, it slowly dawns on the viewer that Devlin,

while expressing doubt about his prospects as an artist, has

quietly staged in the video something akin to the creation

of a drawing or painting. After all, images appear in the

bottom of the cup and the fortune-teller, who expertly

interprets those images, looking for hidden truths, is in

some (hilarious, outrageous) sense a stand-in for the critic.

So a work of art, or at least a set of images, emerges here,

not through the artist’s talent or enterprise, but randomly,

triggered by his anxiety.

As he appears in his own work, Devlin is always both a

brazen self-publicist and a reluctant, doubting, apologetic

artist. And his works are at once sober pieces that adopt

the protocols of the documentary or the home video and

shaggy-dog stories that occasionally lapse into a kind of

existential farce. Devlin is a post-modern naïf, always

working to recapture the lost dignity of the art object but

never quite knowing where to look for it. His canvas is his

own vocation and he turns it into a tragic-comic narrative

with an uncertain ending.

The Importance of Failureby Jo Melvin

There’s something about the creative act, the endeavour

of making work, work we call art, that is predicated on

the possibility of failure. It is the possibility of failure, and

ensuing vulnerability, that are key components in Devlin’s

practice. In these films he sets up a series of challenges

to tackle the paradoxical moment that defines a decision.

He draws direct attention to the thin cusp between an

either/or possibility and we could identify it as a split

second of stasis. For a work to be worthwhile, whether

it’s conceptual or actual, to be worth doing there’s the

risk that it may not work out as planned, the plan itself

proves unfeasible, or other unpredictable elements thwart

an expected outcome.

Maybe when Daniel Devlin was planning his re-enactment

of Bas Jan Ader’s Fall at the Serpentine, as when we see

him riding his bike along the path beside the lake past

some passers-by he does the unexpected and continues

his ride by steering the bike straight into the lake, for a

split second of decision-making he did not know what

would happen.

by Jo Melvin

At the moment of confrontation, or rather just before it, is

there a way out and for how long is the option available

to turn back and say it doesn’t work, I can’t do this, I

can’t follow this act through, and to accept instead the

disappointment of failure. The instinctive reaction of

avoidance is subverted by an act that is both comical and

ridiculous.

There is a more complex participation in the possibility

of failure in this work, the recreation of Ader’s Fall in

Amsterdam, and in the conversation of art and its objects.

There is a deliberate recognition of the age-old paradox

between an ideal and its expression. At each moment of

a possible high point or the exhilaration of heightened

sensibility, at that moment the inevitability of failure kicks

in. Here the comic but salutary dousing, either immersion,

falling in, or simply having a bucket of water chucked in

your face.

The passers-by at the Serpentine may not even have

remarked on the event other than to recount it as

humorous. A man rides his bicycle in the lake-splash. In

the busy bustle of everyday metropolitan life where the

individual struggles to assert radical autonomy, Auden’s

poem about Icarus’s fall identifies the stark vulnerability

of an event that begins with hope and ends in despair.

Auden’s account takes us to the core of the moment of

simultaneity when there are both possible and impossible

events taking place, a boy flies in the sky, the terrestrial

being becomes aerial. He says that though the bystanders

may have heard the splash and ‘the forsaken cry’, for

them ‘it was not an important failure’.

There is a lightness of touch in Devlin’s work. We encounter

it in the use of conversation for instance in Drazen where

Devlin and a friend sit at a café drinking coffee and

discussing the nature of coffee and the performance of

its making. His friend speaks of a coffee maker whose

reputation draws people to seek him out to taste the

magical combination of flavours and to experience its

philosophy, by implication becoming something of a quest.

He speaks with a persuasive authority lightly subverted

when we discover he himself has never tried it, only heard

about it and been drawn by the allure.

Drazen

In another work the dialogue continues. This time it’s a

simultaneous duality of internal thought processes, we

see two Devlins side by side drinking coffee, defining an

idea of art’s ideality, its absurdity and in frustration the

reaction, dousing with water, another splash and the

dream dissolves.

Drazen

In Window Tate we see the artist sitting in a room with

a window behind him. Our view through the window is

of the slope down into Tate Modern with the Frida Kahlo

banners hanging above the entrance. And again the

gentle play on artistic projection sets us following Devlin,

whose figure we see through the window approaching the

entrance. We watch while the action takes place behind his

seated figure: he remains sitting, and behind him he walks

purposefully down the ramp to the entrance as if recessed

in his own mind, the thought seen simultaneously with

the action. Then as with a blink, the name on the banner

changes for a second or less to Daniel Devlin before

returning to Kahlo as he himself turns to walk back up the

ramp, back to and through the window.