Melanie Gilligan, Michael Stevenson, Emily Wardill at International Project Space by Harry Blackett

The central work in the new exhibition at IPS is Melanie Gilligan’s film, Crisis in the Credit System. A serial drama, it features newsroom setups, scrolling infobars, reporter link-ups; familiar language hammered into TV nonsense. These tropes have been so exhausted by a certain brand of comedy that this is where Gilligan’s film sends you: it bypasses News at Ten and reaches Not the 9 O’Clock News, The Day Today, The Colbert Report.

Through these acknowledged satires we have become accustomed to the structures and artifices of The News. Gilligan does not take direct aim at newsmedia (it seems rather a redundant target). Instead, her film articulates the advanced Viewer, and the state of dramatic irony we have reached — newsreaders continue to play out their roles as narrators of reality to a distrusting audience.

Crisis segues several ‘episodes’, each defined by title cards, each about 15 minutes long. There are recurring characters and scenes, played by professional actors on convincing sets (this is no Paul McCarthy style knockabout). Armando Ianucci’s ouevre is particularly resonant: sedately-performed sketches involving financial traders and speculators perfectly capture the weightless atmosphere of The Armando Ianucci Shows, broadcast in 2001 on C4. The script is dense and in places, very funny. Analysis is offered on listless things, using meaningless qualifiers:

Reporter: Angelina Jolie?

Trader: (affirmitively) Short on substance, long on form.

It traverses instructional film, news report, interview, fly on the wall. It’s a non-narrative, dreamlike bubble of insular, empty language. Perhaps, it’s a bubble that’s already popped? It’s that other TV device: The one where they wake up and it’s all been a dream. Gilligan observes the recession and the sources of information we rely on, and the archetypes that emerge in such a climate. But finds that – in the moment – nothing is as it seems.

Emily Wardill’s Sea Oak similarly considers language’s potential and deficiencies, through language itself. Interestingly labelled as an ‘imageless 16mm film’, Sea Oak is a hour of interviews relayed through a beautiful, mechanical 16mm projector, here presented under spotlight on a plinth, as sculptural object.

Wardill’s subjects discuss American Neo-Conservatives’ selling of belief, through a language of fear. Educated voices intelligently analyse American politics and the construct of a ‘collective consciousness’. But just as Wardill’s talking heads are absent on film, they are powerless in politics. Imageless, invisible and outside of the mainstream.

Michael Stevenson offers an extract from a series of illustrated fables soon to be published, co-authored by the artist and writer Jan Verwoert. The fable is an antiquated and economical container traditionally used to morally educate and inform. The single panel image presented at IPS, The Bull and the Beginning of the World frames a bull, preparing a devastating stomp on a fragile egg miniature of the world, alongside a paragraph of text.

Reproduced as a slide projection, Stevenson’s role begins ambiguously. The loose notion of ‘the archive’ has emerged as a familiar theme in contemporary art, and the work initially seems to be about selection: ‘Stevenson has a found fable that neatly reflects ultra-current, Crisis events.’

However, on discovering that the bull is a product of ‘the age of Crisis’, and not as old as Aesop, it becomes interesting. By resurrecting the Fable Stevenson suggests that there is a present-day morality that can be found in storytelling and fiction, truer and more valuable than endless, disposable news updates. Despite its naivete, in an exhibition that considers language and how we receive information, the reductive fable is the clearest statement of all.

Runs till 30th May, open Weds-Sat, 12-5pm at International Project Space.

Image Courtesy of Michael Stevenson and Vilma Gold.