Conceptual audio-visual artist James Coleman is internationally recognised as an early pioneer of sound and image in contemporary art. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and the city’s University College. Shortly after graduating, he spent several years in Paris and London, before moving to Milan, where he lived and worked for twenty years. He currently resides in Dublin.
Coleman rose to prominence in the mid to late 1970s with his audio-visual installations. These typically took the form of slide projections accompanied by soundtracks with one or more narrators. Research into the mechanisms of representation and interpretation is central to the artist’s work. What role do they play in the construction of identity? And what is the viewer’s part in creating the meaning, or ‘identity’, of artworks? Themes such as memory and cultural memory are an intrinsic component of Coleman’s works, which often depict these interrelated factors. The sequence of projected images and the soundtrack invariably suggest a narrative, although this is simultaneously undermined by ‘flaws’ in the installation. The slides do not play seamlessly, for example. Image, sound and text are often disjointed. Moreover, Coleman always presents his ‘stories’ in exhibition spaces yet declines to provide any contextual information, subtitles, seating or translations of the English dialogue. He thus creates the widest possible scope for interpretation. The identity of his work invariably depends, therefore, on personal perception, interpretation and even physical stamina. Coleman sees the individual experience as unique and unreproducible. He reinforces this by creating the briefest installation guidelines and by not even specifying the running order of the images.
Coleman has also been known since the 1970s for his pioneering work on (photographic) technology and new media, and for incorporating his reflections on these developments into his artworks. From a cultural-sociological perspective, Coleman’s work has been described as a grounded critique of consumer society and its influence on the modernist concept of art. For instance, renowned art critic Benjamin Buchloh interprets Coleman’s work as ‘a return to representation and figuration, in response to the modernist demand that art – like technology – should always be “modern”.’ Unlike theatre and literature – two art forms that are inherently aware of their status as the media of representation and fiction – modern visual art claimed to coincide with reality. But by playing with narrativity and theatricality in his art, two concepts peculiar to literature and theatre, Coleman emphasises aspects that are, in fact, denied in visual art. His work thus contains multiple visual allusions to literature, theatre, film and television. Coleman’s reflections and ‘hacks’ on the modernist visual idiom, and this at a time when much contemporary visual art was actually indebted to it, made him a profoundly influential figure for a younger generation of audio-visual artists, including now established figures such as Steve McQueen, Jeff Wall, Douglas Gordon, Tino Seghal and Stan Douglas.
