One obvious pleasure is source- spotting – there’s the note from Rear Window, the bottle smashing in Notorious; then there’s the aspect of criticism-before- your-very-eyes, the themes that return again and again; best of all is the sense of one distinctive Hitchcock mode – the intimate handling of objects – extracted neat and put on repeat for our savouring.Other tapes are more ambitious. You have, say, half a dozen shots of door handles being very slowly turned, then ditto of keys being concealed, handbags rifled, notes written, things dropped, phones dialled, steering wheels turned, pistols fired. The artists have taken the complete films of Hitchcock, made a descriptive catalogue of every shot, and then edited together sequences of recurring motifs, with linking themes.The first of these videos you meet is devoted to hands in close-up. But one of them proves quite otherwise.The six “Phoenix Tapes” are short videos made by Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller They steal and save the show They’re not a remake so much as a remix. But perhaps the real affinity, or aspirant affinity, is with Hitchcock’s tone, an uncertain one, a shifty mix of passion and irony, sophistication and crudeness, which comes with his uncertain status as high/low artist, and which makes him, in fact, a peculiarly difficult object of inspiration – as many film “homages” prove, and several of the artistic “remakes” here do too.
Hitchcock offers lots of things we like (or like to analyse): sex and violence, fetishism, voyeurism. So what it also means is that the Master, in his centenary year, holds a fairly strong place in today’s artistic mindset.This needn’t be surprising. The show has a dozen or so bodies of work, mostly video and photo; it includes such artists as Cindy Sherman, Douglas Gordon, Atom Egoyan and John Baldessari; and almost all the work is Hitchcock-inspired in perfectly explicit ways. And what it means, for one thing, is that we live in the age of the proactive curator, and curators love themes, and this is obviously an excellent theme, because so curiously specific – excellent, at least, if the theme can be made to work.
It can It fills a gallery convincingly.
But for a critic, or any journalist, it’s also the voice of the ideal reader Lisa says, very calmly: “Tell me what you saw. And what you think it means.”
Both jobs, this week, quite easily done. “Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art” is at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and it is what it says it is: an exhibition of contemporary art that takes off from the works of Hitchcock. There’s a line in Hitchcock’s Rear Window that’s always taken my fancy. It is, so to speak, the Act I curtain: a pause, a moment of sudden trust and directness, the point when Grace Kelly/Lisa’s doubt turns – when what had seemed to be James Stewart/Jeff’s wild, wheel-chair-bound fantasy about the man in the flat opposite looks like it might just be horribly true. Soon these things will acquire at least period charm; the cycle of taste, revolving ever faster, will quickly bring them, with cinema posters and jazz lino, within our range of aesthetic appreciation; but they are not really pleasing just yet.” Now, maybe, their time has come.Barbara Jones: Paintings and Drawings is at Katharine House Gallery, The Parade, Marlborough, Wiltshire (01672 514040) until 31 July, Monday to Saturday 10am-5.30pm.
