The gloss with which we coat history: Duncan Campbell/Paulina Olowska

The coinciding of Duncan Campbell’s work Make it new John with Paulina Olowska’s Accidental Collages makes for an interesting programme at Tramway as both artists examine the gloss with which we coat history, using images and language to consider the construction of historical narratives but from different perspectives.

Make it new John examines the myth surrounding the rise and fall of Californian engineer and entrepreneur John DeLorean.   After success at General Motors in the 1970s, DeLorean set up the ambitious car-manufacturing plant DMC in Belfast but quickly proceeded into a downward spiral, running out of money, rousing sceptics, and ultimately terminating the venture in 1982.

Whilst Campbell’s film combines different formal styles and footage from multiple sources, its fragmented, discontinuous nature exposing the deliberation behind its making, Olowska’s Accidental Collages seem – as their title implies – to have come about more naturally.

The sixteen wall-mounted collages incorporate black and white photos of students and Stalinist buildings, magazine-style images of 1960s fashion models, hand-painted fragments of text, and architectural plans and charts.

With Olowska herself appearing in some of the images, the collages have a sense of originating in the artist’s own photo albums and being a personal recall of a past era; they might have begun in the realms of pastime rather than of art.   But the “collages” are also, in fact, inkjet prints, and have been enlarged, elevating the specks in the recycled cardboard to veins in grey marble.   And here is a photo of the Russian artist Kasmir Malevich, lecturing in his classroom: are we to surmise, then, that Olowska was a student of his?

Review: Duncan Campbell – Make it new John

Sitting stranded on a bench for 50 minutes in the middle of the massive, echoing black box of Tramway 2 to watch Duncan Campbell’s work Make it new John, one half-expects a feature film but only hopes it isn’t too long.  And this would be half-right, for the film merges at least four distinct sections each in a different style, shifting from a cinematic mini-melodrama through a sunny agitprop montage portraying the automobile industry as the gateway to the American Dream, to newly-shot footage based on archive material of an interview with Belfast trades unionists after the DeLorean Motor Company – and the dream – have collapsed.

The film’s subject is the myth surrounding the rise and fall of the American engineer and entrepreneur John DeLorean, who impressed many in his prominent post at General Motors in the 1970s but proceeded to take a colossal downturn when he relocated his company DMC to Belfast.  Despite huge government subsidies, he failed to make it work and went into receivership in 1982.

This work continues Campbell’s exploration of the role of documentary filmmakers in constructing historical narratives, juxtaposing archival footage from multiple sources to highlight the filmmakers’ shifting agendas and calling into question the “truth” of documentaries.  Reviews of the work have tended to focus on the formal techniques Campbell employs to form his critique, and indeed, it is impossible to separate them from his version of the story.  But a wonder of the film is that the formal experimentation doesn’t compromise or obscure the narrative as is the downfall of many an avant-garde indie film, and so whilst the dream lasts, we too are able to immerse ourselves in it – albeit temporarily.