Peter Kennedy's millenium opus
Figures of authority, master narratives, collective dreams and personal memories punctuate Peter Kennedy's installations of the 1990s, as the artist focuses on aspects of critical thought and the big issues of his own lifetime. I want to look in detail at two of Kennedy's installations: one from the beginning of the decade Chorus from the Breath of Wings (1993), and the Requiem for Ghosts (1998).1 Both are large scale works which take up the entire gallery space, and in each the multiple components resonate with each other so that the artist's way of thinking, his process of creating the work, becomes apparent to the viewer.
Chorus was a collection of vertical and horizontal 'totems' which used the debris of consumer and electronic culture to create meditations on ideology and history at the end of the millennium. Loud speakers, old television screens, radio parts and refrigerated domestic appliances were used, along with video and audio tape, to create individual sculptural assemblages. In each work Kennedy cleverly undermined the spectacle of the electronic media at the same time as using a multi-media phantasmagoria to deliver his messages.
In his installations Kennedy pursues a kind of dialectical thinking through which contradictions are made evident to the viewer. However, he is not content to let these things exist in a state of chaos, but elucidates oppositions and plays with a synthesis of ideas that are never quite closed off. Rather than presenting a kind of ' total ' work which leaves little room for perceptual manoeuvring, this process gives the viewer a conceptual entry into the artist's creative space.
This open-ended poetic meditation was important in Chorus from the Breath of Wings... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline