During the Meanwhile: Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, Off site project,
Brian Duggan / By Declan Long © 2005.

If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more
extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being
reduced to it. - Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

What is it about the protagonist of Brian Duggan's During the Meanwhile that makes him at once so freakishly out-of-the-ordinary and so disconcertingly familiar? Unquestionably, Duggan's character is at first sight an outright oddball: curiously attired in a white protective body suit he performs a series of outdoor tasks which appear designed to test or improve his physical capacities and in each instance his considerable determination is matched only by obvious exasperation at the limitations of his powers. The impression that this is an individual functioning at something of an angle to reality is, however, occasionally exacerbated by the manner of presentation of the scenes: in certain cases, the camera has been turned through 90 or even 180 degrees, thus transforming the frustrating results of our hero's efforts into something beyond the realms of physical probability. One such scene, for instance, features an inverted image of Duggan's character struggling to hang on to a raised horizontal bar - when finally his strength fails, the orientation of the camera allows his fall to earth to be read as a sudden flight upwards.

Such 'special effects' add a sense of the fantastical to the representation of this costumed character's eccentric performances - there are moments, perhaps, when we might imagine that we are watching an aspiring or wholly inadequate superhero in action - but there also remains something stubbornly grounded, even mundane, about these episodes. Despite their ludicrousness, these mini-dramas carry evocations of a recognisable and supposedly 'rational' material world within which individuals are not only constrained by their biology but defined by social, political and even spatial regulation. This is of course, partly a result of the character's chosen outfit: an all-white hooded body suit is in one sense enough of a 'blank space' to resist any strict categorisation, but certain associations remain unavoidable. We might, for instance, note the similarity to a painter-decorator's overalls, thereby linking or contrasting this individual's exhausting exercises with practices of everyday labour....[continues]
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Declan Long © 2005.
to recieve a copy of the exhibition book with essay by Declan Long please e-mail info@pallasstudios.org