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This exhibition begins by inviting us to suspend our critical faculties: 'don't try to understand, just believe' [1] (or, check your analytical attitude at the door, grab your popcorn and enjoy!).
What a strange exhortation, and on behalf of a group of works whose genealogy is largely conceptual! Despite its poetic inflection, this suggestion runs the risk of implying that contemporary art needs to sell itself with the promise of entertainment, like mainstream cinema, that art needs to dumb-down in order to capture audience attention.
Fortunately, however, we do not need to go on faith alone to engage with this exhibition, for the works withstand critical scrutiny. Many of them involve us deeply in ethical, intellectual and sensual dialogues, their ideas and aesthetic strategies mutually dependent. Despite the cinematic rhetoric and references- for example the title itself and the prefatory quote excerpted from Jean Cocteau's interpretation of Orpheus's voyage to the underworld (Orphee 1950) - what distinguishes the most successful installations is their reliance on the discourse of art, and the space that discourse allows for critical thought. One of the early reviews of 2001: Space Odyssey noted that Stanley Kubrick's 'triumph, both in terms of film technique and directorial approach, is in the audience's almost immediate acceptance of special effects as reality ... the credibility of the special effects established, we can suspend disbelief and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clark's space'.[2] However, the best of these works of art do not demand that acceptance: rather, they call attention to the means by which visual technologies construct limited realities, and attempt to articulate a reality beyond that represented in movie special effects. Through balancing... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline