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Vivienne Dick

Visibility: Moderate, 1981

Shot on a handheld Super 8 camera, ‘Visibility: Moderate’ follows American tourist Margaret Ann Irinsky as she travels around Ireland taking in the sites, from the Puck Fair in Kerry to H-Block protests on the streets of Dublin, planting a kiss on the Blarney Stone and running barefoot through the fields. In parts, deliberately recreating scenes from popular John Hinde postcards of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s. Scenes of windy landscapes, neolithic portal dolmens and busy shopping centres are interspersed with tv adverts and snippets from the radio, creating a sense of realities in flux. Part fiction, part documentary, ‘Visibility: Moderate’ captures the many complexities and contradictions of an Ireland on the cusp of great change. The tourist encounters a number of recognisable figures within Irish society at the time, including Mary Dunne or ‘Dancing Mary’, a regular performer on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, political prisoner Maureen Gibson, who was involved in the dirty protests in Armagh, and the voices of Nuala O’Faolain, Nell McCafferty and Frank Kelly captured on the airwaves. Other key subjects of the film are members of the Irish Anarchist movement, who the tourist spends time with on arriving in Dublin. ‘Visibility: Moderate’ offers a radical counterpoint to nostalgic representations of Ireland driven by the tourist industry. It brings together the familiar and the strange, documenting the artist’s own reckoning with the politics of her homeland, which, having spent the previous decade living in London and New York, she was encountering as both insider and outsider. Selected writings about Visibility: Moderate: – “Interview with Vivienne Dick.”, Vivienne Dick and Scott MacDonald, October, vol. 20, 1982, pp. 83–101. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/778607 – “From no wave to national cinema: the cultural landscape of Vivienne Dick’s early films (1978-85)”, Maeve Connolly, 2004, LUX Online, https://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/from_no_wave_to_national_cinema(1).html – “A Particular Incoherence: The films of Vivienne Dick”, Rachel Garfield, 2009, Chapter from “Between Truth and Fiction, The Films of Vivienne Dick”, ed Treasa O’Brian, Crawford Art Centre/LUX publication, 2009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46568956_A_Particular_Incoherence_The_films_of_Vivienne_Dick

MediumSuper 8 scanned and restored to HD digital file
Duration Duration: 39 min
Credit LineIMMA Collection: Purchase supported by IMMA 1000, 2019
EditionEdition 1 of 4, plus one artists proof.
Item NumberIMMA.4136
Copyright For copyright information, please contact the IMMA Collections team: [email protected].
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Image Caption
Vivienne Dick, Visibility: Moderate, 1981, Super 8 scanned and restored to HD digital file, Duration: 39 min, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase supported by IMMA 1000, 2019

For copyright information, please contact the IMMA Collections team: [email protected].

About the Artist

Vivienne Dick

Irish filmmaker and artist Vivienne Dick began making Super 8 films in New York in the late 1970’s. Dick became a key figure in the avant-garde ‘No Wave’ scene together with musicians, filmmakers and artists including Nan Goldin, Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay and James Chance. Retrospectives of Dick’s work have been held at Seville European Film Festival, 2016, Tate Modern, 2010, Crawford Art Gallery, 2009, and Berlin Film Festival in 1988. The exhibition 93% STARDUST took place at IMMA in 2017.

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