David Beattie A Knowledge of Things Familiar Temple Bar Galleries June 2011 Having made the decision to approach

writing on some current work blindly my initial reaction on entering this particular space is that I could have chosen an easier show. The title to David Beatties A Knowledge of Things Familiar may indeed be disingenuous. Will the show offer up knowledge of the everyday which is ordinarily hidden from experience due to over-familiarity or will I require a degree in quantum physics to truly perceive the gesturings of Beatties complicated audio-visual language? My expectation of the logistics of a surrealists heightening of the ordinary is that it requires an initial shock in order to jolt one out of passive unconsciousness. I need to be defamiliarised. But nothing hits me, in fact I walk in to an open space at first and need to bend down to observe some unassuming objects which are barely a different shade of colour to the floor. A masonry brick on the left holds a metre square pane of glass which both frames and obstructs the view of the far corner. I wonder to myself Is the large pane of glass proud of its position...Is it displaying anything of itself to me, or is my expectant observation infringing on its right to simply do its own thing? Certainly there is something political going on here but I dont know what yet. Facing the frame on the floor is a small brown hi-fi speaker and connected to this in behind is a floor mounted amplifier, which is in turn plugged into a socket further back in the wall. I understand Beattie is somehow stringing these objects together in the form of a sentence but I am still confused as to the causal connection. For one the speaker doesnt seem to be omitting any sound, previous experience tells me they usually do, so I ask the gallery attendant and she tells me it is running at a particularly low frequency which is barely perceptible to the human ear, even more so now since the noise from the buskers outside provide more than the usual barrier. The attendant tells me that the vibrations from the piece should affect the glass, and in turn the perceivers visual experience to the extent that ghostly images may sometimes appear. I wonder if the specter Beattie has in mind is more a gestural suggestion towards something that is clearly absent. I realise Im still looking for the point and dont get it, so in the meantime I crouch down close to the objects on my hunkers and enjoy the unassuming aesthetic. I realise I love being brought down to ground level. On the back wall I recognise the signature piece of the show from the promo material, that lovely image of a violet light bulb sharing a bed of warm sound proofing foam with an old vocal mic. I know Im supposed to think of the physical relation between light and sound but it curiously reminds me of a holding shot for a poster advertising an open mic night night, one in this case which never starts because nobody decides to say anything, the interlocutors are happy enough with realising potential as potential. There is an emission of something feeding into a small speaker, conversing with a large sheet of corrugated steel lying up against the back wall, and when I bend my head closer and run my ear along its length I am surprised to hear vibrations. I am inspired by this tiny thing generating such an audible impact but its strength leaks out over the steels expanse to barely nothing. There is a sense like in the previous piece that these objects together arent quite working. There is a frustrating weakness. As much as they offer (energy) potential they are somehow failing. I take strides towards the large steel shelter by the window, passing a small antenna on the floor which looks like a miniature mast, and gives the floor a small city feel. Does this say signal or conductor? It barely seems configured. Is it the absent member, the all seeing eye?

The scale of the tall shelter sets it off at a distance. I stand inside surrounded by steel, not the most comfortable of materials, but it feels neither claustrophobic nor airy. Its like being perfectly enclosed in ones own personal space, I mean the expanded radius of it. The experience is oddly normal, but surely not. The light comes through the space below so I am not cut off from the room but peering out the open side towards the rest of the work I am aware of what an observer must look like in this now familiar alien environment. My metal housing is almost enough to blend in, but I want to crouch down to the floor again and take a second look. I am towering over the work at this height. The speaker on the floor is now reaching fuller capacity and I can hear its rumbling. The fabric face of it is oscillating frantically with the sound. I look again to the nonplussed square glass pane. No ghosts. I exclaim to the gallery attendant that there is no way Beattie could have expected the speaker to physically impact the glass. The distance is too great, the material too rigid and the angle too disengaged. There is something vaguely tragic about the set-up; the austere detachment of the large glass slightly turned away, the energetic frenzy of the conversing speaker. Try as it might the small speaker would never win over the superior mass of the pane at a game of attraction and repulsion. If Beattie is said to be exploring the principles of the electromagnetic spectrum there is definitely a range of reflecting results. The politics here if any are a politics of scale and proportion, and of the inability of an independent observer to fully capture and contain the essence of what is at work. Does Beatties interest in communications system manifests itself here in the failure of these objects to commune, at least on a level that speaks to me in my own words? The discursive energies remain contained within the things themselves. They radiate out at a range almost alien to my ear. The work in A Knowledge of Things Familiar is really minimalism at its best, not in anyreductionist way but with complex levels of austerity and intimacy that invite closer and longer engagement. I was still conceptually confused when I left the show, in fact it took a good hour or two to regain my usual level of perceptual blindness. In the interim I found myself spacing out and zoning in on my surroundings; the groans of a pub ventilation system, lightly dripping rain drops and echoing heels on stone. Beattie's work didnt speak to me so much as it solicited my own perceptual energies. It appears it's ghostly after effects brought me closer to the things themselves than at first thought. Helen Horgan July 2011