Radical Freedom: Gareth McConnell, From Belfast to Ibiza

6 minute read

Photographer Gareth McConnell speaks to Anne-Celine Jaeger about his recently published book Close Your Eyes. They met in London to discuss civil liberties, mass communion, Ibiza and printing techniques. Here is an edited transcript of their two-hour discussion.


You say your book, Close Your Eyes, is a “frenzied reworking of your accumulated archive.” It contains images from your Ibiza series, from God & Man, from Night Flowers, as well as images culled from the Internet, and yet it goes beyond a straightforward monograph. How did this book come about?

The germination was a meeting with Bruno Ceschel from Self Publish, Be Happy, who was interested in doing a book with me. Looking at much of my work, I realised there was a huge disparity between its aspirations and what it ended up looking like. This was an opportunity to free myself from self-imposed restrictions and just go for it. I then really got stuck in it for five or six weeks just mashing everything up, working together with an amazing bookbinder, and something emerged from it all that expressed what I was trying to get out. The freedom of being able to use other bits of found imagery to shape the narrative and punctuate it with different ideas really helped.

It feels like a hugely personal piece of work. We see ravers in communal rapture, psychedelic skies, but also the fear of potential disappointment . . .

I remember going to a rave, taking ecstasy and dancing all night in Belfast in 1990 and the world completely changing, going home the next morning and putting all my old records under my bed and thinking, “From now on, all I want to do is dance.” I was in Northern Ireland, literally sharing a dance-floor with members of the IRA and UVF [Ulster Volunteer Force]–on acid–at the height of The Troubles. Ibiza was this mythologised place. I thought everything in Northern Ireland was shit, therefore anywhere else must be brilliant. I went to Ibiza filled with expectation. Though I had some incredible experiences there, ultimately it ended up being a series of disappointments. My epiphany came years later when I read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. It touched on the orgiastic experience and the tools we seek to overcome aloneness as a human entity–including music, drugs and mass communion. So when I first started taking pictures in Ibiza, I was looking for people who were aspiring to a particular idea. I was looking for disciples drawn to this place, like I had been, to try to find some kind of oneness or unity.

The book is also dotted with found imagery of key moments in recent British history, where civil liberties were savagely attacked. You also feature, for example, a bit-mapped image of a purpose-built Barratt home, suggesting conformity and uniformity of thought. Are you making a political statement?

Yes, there is a political aspect to the book. The title of the book, Close Your Eyes, refers both to the aspect of getting completely off your tits, that feeling of ecstasy, of losing yourself, but also to closing your eyes to the horrors of all that’s going on. It’s like we’re encouraged to get off our head but discouraged from participating or understanding the world around us. I think Robert Anton Wilson’s quote from Sex, Drugs & Magick (1987) really sums it up: “The heretic of the 21st Century might be, not a man who takes a drug the government forbids but a man who refuses the drug a government commands.” We all need to wake up a little bit.

When did you start the process of dismembering and re-assembling images (“Ibiza Mistakes”), and using found imagery (God & Man)?

It started in 2008, when I was so dissatisfied with my own work, the failure of it–the fact that I’d developed this particular idea, but was unable to express it. It was the year my daughter Sorcha was born, and the first year I didn’t go to Ibiza. I was totally broke and was printing out images of the Ibiza series at home and the portraits came out all lined and faded and I realized they said more than the original photograph, so I further manipulated them, by running them repeatedly through the photocopier. Off the back of this I decided to make new work using only the really low-fi methods, such as my home printer, the internet, the photocopy shop and the local pharmacy for digital prints. That’s also when I started working on the God & Man series, where I multiple-exposed found images of sunsets, using the last of the Kodachrome film, and made Cibachrome prints out of them.

The printing in Close Your Eyes is exquisite, some of the images are so thick with ink they are almost fluffy, others are super glossy like pools of nail varnish. Why was this attention to color and texture so important to you?

I wanted to make something that not only communicated its ideas successfully but that was also a real experience to hold and look at, and one of the strategies to achieve this was to put real art works and prints in the book as opposed to reproductions of those art works.

Tell me about your publishing company, Sorika.

Sorika has no particular agenda other than the realising of interesting ideas, books, prints, shows, films–for the love of it. It started with Chris Wilson’s book Horse Latittudes, which I published in 2013. I’m currently working on a re-working of Tom Wood’s Looking for Love and will soon be publishing A Concise Reference Dictionary of Art by Neal Brown. I really enjoy the collaborative process. After all those years of working for myself, it’s a real release.


Anne-Celine Jaeger is a writer base in London, and is the author of Image Makers, Image Takers

Gareth McConnell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and graduated from the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography at Belfast Exposed and Observers: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930s to Now, Galeria de Arte Sao Poalo, Brazil. Donlon Books, London, is hosting a book-launch and signing on April 17th from 19.00-21.30. His book Close Your Eyes is avialable now. For more on Gareth McConnell visit www.sorika.com.

 


Acid Thunder (detail), 2009 and Another Double I, 2010. The following series of captions were written for TIME by Gareth McConnell. On the left is a detail of a Cibachrome print which is part of my God & Man series (all named after early acid house tracks or electronic bands). Another Double I is part of an ongoing series, where I place tear sheets from my own fashion editorial on a light box and then look for areas to re-photograph. In the book, it is a heavy matt inkjet print laid on top of a digital print of another abstract work. Gareth McConnell
Spotlit Police (Battle of the Beanfield, 1985), 2013. This is a reworked scan from a book which examines the events of the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield, when Police attacked a convoy of New Age travellers en route to what would have been the 11th Stonehenge Free Festival in Wiltshire, EnglandGareth McConnell
Charmain, Ibiza, 2006 and Confusions Revenge, 2009.Charmain, Ibiza, 2006: I enjoy this straight portrait as it’s fractured. For me, her heavily made-up face is the "punctum" - Roland Barthes' term for anything that jumps out at the viewer within a photograph. Hers is a "going-out" face, but it’s the morning after. The flooring looks like the cosmos and the sitter is a kind of exhausted goddess, the posters on the back wall are for a famously debauched party called Circo Loco at a club called DC 10. Confusions Revenge is a part of my God & Man series and is named after a big acid house track. Paired together as a skewed and flawed vision of utopia. I suppose it’s referencing a number of things from psychedelic art to the re-occurring sunset motif that appears in Brian de Palma’s ‘Scarface’ and the idea of a continually retreating paradise. The sunset is a detail of the original work, which is printed as a cibichrome from a Kodachrome transparencyGareth McConnell
Coalescence I, 2013 and Coalescence II, 2013.These are re-photographed contact sheets from my Ibiza portrait series. A kind of ‘frottage’ or divination through entrail gazing, a kind of shamanistic process where I spontaneously and intuitively multiply re-photographed prints and contact sheets and watched for shapes or specters to appear that spoke beyond the ‘straight’ photographs.Gareth McConnell
Coalescence XIII, 2013 and Error V H J (detail), 2008. The image on the left is an amalgamation of two portraits of girls I shot in Ibiza in 2002 and 2006. I photographed the original prints onto a single frame of film and then reprinted. I’m toying with the idea of oneness and unity at the quantum level. We are different and yet the same, and we shift from one state to another. The image on the right is part of the Ibiza Mistakes series. Ibiza is significant in the history of rave culture and was where English DJs first took ecstasy in 1987, in Amnesia nightclub, before returning to England. Once home, they tried to replicate the MDMA experience and sparked what came to be known as The Second Summer of Love. Gareth McConnell
Crystal Distortion, 2009. This is a Cibachrome print made from a Kodachrome transparency. Originally the series was to be called Untergang, meaning descent, decline and destruction. But then I discovered that Kodachrome, the first mass marketed color film - on which this series was shot - was no longer being produced. Kodachrome was invented by Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes, and I felt that Crystal Distortion was a more appropriate title. Gareth McConnell
Distorquere VI, 2013 and Refraction (Castlemorton Common Festival 1992) 2013. Distorquere VI is a multiple re-photographing of an image in the God & Man series. I assume it’s a photograph from a police helicopter. The Castlemorton Common Festival was a week-long free festival and rave held in the Malvern Hill, England 1992. Castlemorton is probably the most significant rave in the history of British rave culture as the attendant media coverage and hysteria lead to the passing of the Criminal Justice and Order Act of 1994, a change in law that still resonates today . Gareth McConnell
Error II LC, 2008 and Another Double II, 2010 from the Ibiza Mistakes series.I put these two images together for the earthly horizontals present on the left hand image and the celestial verticals of the right-hand image. The whole spread is meant to be fractured and trippy – kind of trapped between channels of materiality and spirit. Gareth McConnell
Gallery of Hate (Poll Tax Riots 1990), 2013 and Pills Fractal, 2013. The left hand-side is a reworking of a newspaper picture from titled ‘Gallery of Hate’, which was a call for the arrest of people photographed participating in the Poll Tax riots in London 1990. Pills Fractal, 2013 is an image sourced from the internet and reworked, showing Ecstasy pills (MDMA) – the drug which fueled rave culture. The Poll Tax riots and later the Criminal Justice and Order bill of 1994 are credited with politicizing a formerly apolitical youth movement (rave culture). Gareth McConnell
Living in a Land, 2009, taken from the God & Man series. A Cibachrome print made form Kodachrome transparency. The source material was a low res digital file taken from the Internet. I printed it at high street print lab and then exposed it several times onto Kodachrome, and then printed again as cibachromes. Gareth McConnell
Night Flower LA II, 2010 and Terpsichorean III, 2013. Night Flower LA II is part of an ongoing series started in 2001. It is the only Night Flower in the book and is here as a simple memento mori. In the book it is a glossy c-type print layer over a bigger digital print of the same image. The dancer is a scan from a Polaroid taken from old video footage of a rave. They are paired as an elevation.Gareth McConnell
Post riot (detail), 2011 and Machines (detail), 2013.This is the only photograph I took in the aftermath of the London riots of 2011. It was kind of horrible walking about and all these media types with their iPhones out shooting away thinking to themselves this could be their big break, in a way it summed it up for me. More than anything I took the shot because I liked the pattern on the van and that’s why I paired it with this other shot, the textural similarities and this sense of failed beauty and impotent anger. I see this as a key spread in the book as it sums up the dual reading of the title ‘Close Your Eyes’.Gareth McConnell
Shelter V (Red Wimpey), 2013. For me this style of housing is representative of the British property boom sparked by the Thatcher/ Conservative government. I found the original full color image on an estate agent’s website and was struck by its formal qualities, but also by the fact that it sums up a very particular aspiration and a certain conformity, or model of living, which was encouraged, while other ‘alternative’ models were demonized and destroyed.Gareth McConnell
Terpsichorean I (detail), 2013.Terpsichore means a delight in dancing and as Nietzsche said "I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance." These works are created using long exposures of archive footage from early raves circa 1988.Gareth McConnell

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