Nicholas Keogh
At the 2005 Venice Biennale, Northern Irish artist Nicholas Keogh took to the waters of the Grand Canal in a homemade motorized gondola. Constructed from a crude jumble of domestic and industrial junk, including a bulky outdoor garbage container, a stained and battered bathtub, and some rusty oil drums, Keough’s Bin Boat, 2005, was a ridiculous but nonetheless viable vessel. The artist and his creative partner Paddy Bloomer piloted through the city with noisy, impertinent disregard for the decorum and tradition of the Venetian waterways. Bloomer and Keogh’s amateur boat-building venture—essentially, heavy-duty trash transported at great expense from one country to another—perhaps offered shambolic subversion of the Biennale’s ambassadorial ideals. At the very least, it was an open-ended product of this admirably irresponsible duo’s instinctively punky disposition.
Scrap metals, discarded consumer durables, outmoded electrical goods, and the receptacles from which such clutter might be rescued: All have been essential art materials for Keogh, both in his collaborations with Bloomer and in recent projects in which he has increasingly worked on his own. “A Solo Exhibition” at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery was, as its no-nonsense title seemed to insist, a step toward consolidating this independent status. With appropriate perversity, though, Keogh chose to make his case for artistic individuality not only by recycling some earlier jointly authored pieces but also by pursuing other collaborative opportunities. Two of the works had appeared before in quite different forms and different contexts. Bin Disco 5, a Belfast wheelie bin pimped out with salvaged technology to become a mobile sound system, was first seen in San Sebastián, Spain, in 2004, and Dust Bin Disco, another portable music machine custom-made from abandoned hardware, debuted on a New York street in 2007. Reconfigured for the more controlled environment of a gallery, these scrap-heap stereos were granted impressive upgrades, their ramshackle forms reframed, their audio features augmented. Key to their retrofits were the contributions of collaborators such as Belfast-based musician Barry Cullen. Cullen (and friends) created Bin Sounds 2013, a specially commissioned sound track for Bin Disco 5, helping to heighten the trippy intensity of seeing this techno-fied readymade within a darkened gallery. Cullen also worked with Keogh on a remarkable expansion of Dust Bin Disco, adding a sprawling, interconnected collection of analog synthesizers and repurposed guitar pedals that together formed a unique electronic instrument. Consistent with Keogh’s aesthetic, however, each component of this effects orchestra was merged with household rubbish. Cereal and cat-food boxes, detergent bottles, and the like became the absurd casings for assorted sound-modifying mechanisms. Invited to twiddle the dials and improvise on these everyday recyclables, gallery visitors could produce their own wild sound tracks of droning, shrieking, or pulsating sound—thereby becoming collaborators in turn.
When Keogh really did go solo here, the results were even wilder. A Film About Bluebottles, 2011, shown as a large-scale single-screen video projection, features close-up shots of fat flies wandering one by one across the flat white surface of a fridge. Insects come out to several different tunes, ranging from upbeat easy-listening to moodier minor-key instrumentals. Each fly is visible for just a few seconds before it is blasted with a shotgun. These are brutal, bewildering scenes, yet hideously compelling. However nasty they may be, their correspondence with Keogh’s wider work is almost clear: They represent expected flow of ordinary life, riotously interrupted.