Duncan Campbell: Is seeing believing?

Will Irish artist Duncan Campbell win the Turner Prize tonight? He talks with Alan O’Riordan

VIDEO artist Duncan Campbell is the bookies’ and the critics’ favourite to win the 30th Turner Prize, to be announced this evening at a ceremony in London. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is also hosting the first major Irish show of his work.

Campbell was born in Dublin in 1972, but moved to Northern Ireland as child and now lives in Glasgow, which is home to a thriving alternative art scene. Yet, he speaks with a neutral accent, such that one would not be surprised if told he was a lifelong Dublin dweller, rather than a long-departed son.

Campbell spent a year at Dublin’s National College of Art and Design in 1990, the year Imma was founded. “It’s hallowed ground in my mind,” he says, “and while I am back a lot more for personal reasons than work reasons, it’s a big deal.”

The Imma show comprises four of Campbell’s films. Three are idiosyncratic biographical works: Make it New John, about John DeLorean’s ill-fated venture into the luxury car market; Bernadette, about the Derry socialist, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who was the youngest-ever MP, in the the late ’60s and early ’70s; and Arbeit, the story of Germany’s post-war reunification and eventual spearheading of the European monetary union, as told via the life of an unheralded economist, Hans Tietmeyer. TURNER NOMINATION The fourth film, It for Others, is nominated for the Turner. Unlike the other three, it is about objects and culture: how we use them, give them value, debase them, contextualise them, steal them, appropriate them, interpret them.

It draws on a striking 1953 film, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, a still remarkably fresh criticism of colonialism, white cultural hegemony, and the alienation from itself of African culture. It for Others references Andy Warhol, Karl Marx, the IRA, Sergei Eisenstein and the theory of negritude.

The film even takes issue with the British Museum and its lauded director, Neil MacGregor. Campbell approached the museum to film its Benin bronzes, but its reservations and conditions proved a deal breaker.

But avoiding didacticism remains Campbell’s aim. “I think it’s more interesting, and I appreciate it more myself, when someone is not trying to force-feed me their opinion,” says Campbell. “I’m not sure why my opinion is more important that anyone else’s, or that, as one person, you have that influence. Politics is a collective endeavour, an exchange of ideas.

“I rewatched films by Chris Marker and he changed his mind from the 1950s to the 1980s, but what I appreciated about them is that they are open-ended snapshots of a moment in thought, not an attempt to petrify something. I think that’s basically what I’ve tried to do. There are vast subjects in it, the issue of repatriation alone — you could make 10 films about that.”

This suspicion of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ as neutral values, rather than as techniques and cultural assumptions, informs the other works in the Imma show. The voice of authority is undermined in Arbeit, when we hear the donnish tones of the narrator occasionally sniff and snort, and offer rather emotional defences of Tietmeyer in the face of the idiotic opinions of the popular press. DELOREAN FILM In the DeLorean film, Campbell has actors play workers in a scene that’s mocked-up to look like archive footage. This kind of slipperiness is typical of Campbell, as he questions our presumptions about the documentary form.

“There is a precedent for that kind of re-enactment in documentary itself,” he says. “The very start of documentary-making, the whole idea was different. Even if there were real people used, they were told where to stand and what to say.

“It wasn’t until the 1960s that the notion of vérité came about, the invisible camera as the transparent portal of reality.”

With Bernadette, on Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Campbell relies on archive footage from his subject’s days as a socialist firebrand and MP. We see her always at the centre of a scrum of supporters, or reporters, or opponents.

We are invited to be seduced by her intensity, her eloquence, this “Fidel Castro in a skirt”, as she was called. Yet Campbell’s is no straightforward biopic. It elides perhaps the most famous public moment of Devlin’s life, when she slapped the British home secretary, Reginald Maudling, for saying the Bloody Sunday paratroopers had fired in self-defence.

The film ends with a shifts into a Beckettian epilogue, written by Campbell. An invented interior monologue of hesitation, abnegation and contradiction is overlaid on doubling and blurring images of Devlin. We have not, it turns out, been watching history, but a history of iconography, a history of how Devlin was represented, and not her true, unknowable self.

Conscious that his subject is still very much alive, Campbell says his aim was not to be definitive. “I think my intention was that the film would unravel,” he says, “that it would do that.

“It was important to me that I not try and make a conclusive thing, ‘this is who she was’. This is a short period in her political life.

“You never really know what you’re going to get in an archive,” Campbell says. “She was very aware, for good and bad, how she was misrepresented through prejudice or the iconic status she achieved, especially for Irish-Americans.

“There was a lot of that spiritual nationalism projected onto her. What I found was there are a lot of layers of misunderstanding and wilful misrepresentation. It’s not history, it’s a representation of what went on.”

Such a description could apply to much of Campbell’s work. He challenges us to become estranged from our habits of seeing the world, to perform the difficult task of remembering that they are cultural, not natural, nor the only rational way of interpreting reality.

The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced tonight, on Channel 4, at 7.30pm. Duncan Campbell’s exhibition is at IMMA until March 29