Jeremy Welsh - ‘kevin atherton three decades three works’ arthouse Dublin 2001
Excerpt from ‘You don’t go into a butcher’shop and ask for a piece of cod’

The theme of virtual exhibition/virtual gallery was developed further in “Four rooms and a toilet: A virtual exhibition” in 1999 - a piece which like the earlier “Video Times” combined a videotape and a printed publication. This time the video is entirely computer generated, whilst Atherton plays the role of Gallery Guide or Curator - either in a live performance context where the video is projected on a gallery wall whilst the artist holds a running commentary, or in voice-over on a pre-recorded tape. The work again investigates notions of interior/exterior, public/private, the material contra the immaterial in post-conceptual art and the role of the artist as both creator and mediator of his own constructed reality. The entirely virtual artworks that are presented, or in fact exhibited, in Four Rooms and A Toilet can be seen as metaworks in relation to Atherton’s actual output as an artist. The sailing dinghies, for example, which pass up and down the bay outside the gallery window, relate clearly to the mid-eighties public art project Atherton made for British Rail. In the latter site-specific sculpture, a series of cut-out horse figures are placed alongside a railway track and are viewed from the windows of a moving train. This mediated relationship between viewer and work of art places these actual sculptures firmly on the threshold to virtuality. Similarly, in a short video piece from the late eighties, Atherton as The Sculptor describes a site specific work involving life-size models of rock climbers installed on a mountainside somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Atherton delivers an underplayed and almost believable monolgue about the realization of the project, before laying bare the entire charade at the end of the piece when it is revealed that the monumental sculpture is in fact a small stone on the table top with miniature plastic figures glued to it. The title of the video was “Scaling Up”, a typical double take on semantics, but its play on the relationship or the gap between model and reality is deadly serious, especially seen today from the perspective of a world in which the distance between virtual and real has collapsed. The catalogue text to Four Rooms and A Toilet paraphrases/parodies the rhetoric of millennial obsessions in art criticism/curatorship, whilst the preposterousness of the propositions being made by the Gallery Guide on behalf of the virtual artworks deliver a timely slap in the face to the Digerati’s over inflated pronouncements on behalf of cyberspace and virtual reality. It may well be that in this accomplished work, the mature Atherton is correcting his younger self by serving up digital cod in a virtual butcher’s shop.

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