Her solo show at Secession, Vienna, explores what’s at stake in Queer visibility and the emotionally loaded process of digital obsolescence

Chris McCormack  

How Charlie Prodger’s films and drawings challenge the heterosexual norm

From Scotland’s depopulated post-industrial landscapes to the scrubland and termite mounds in Botswana, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19805/Charlotte-Prodger">Charlie Prodger</a>’s filmed worlds are as variegated as the descriptions of the lives we hear in voice-over. The Glasgow-based artist has gained widespread recognition for her trilogy of films that comprises SaF05 (2019), BRIDGIT (2016), and Stoneymollan Trail (2015), as well as for her installation, drawings, and photographs. Each of these strands in Prodger’s practice moves from the personal and the anecdotal to indexical and classificatory descriptions of lives and bodies that examine, in large part, the ways in which the ideas of Land Art and gender, the tensions within progressive LGBTQ+ histories, and the ethics of representation have evolved over time. These topics take center stage in Prodger’s major solo exhibition ‘The Offering Formula’ – at Secession in Vienna until the end of February – in which this Queer trilogy is presented alongside a series of delicate pencil drawings that reflect on the disorienting impact of technology on memory.

SaF05, the final work in Prodger’s trilogy, distils a number of recurring themes in her practice. Largely shot in the natural reserve of Botswana’s Okavango Delta, SaF05 is the conservators’ name for a rarely sighted female lion that shares the posture of its male counterpart: She is larger in size than her fellow females (whom she is known to mount), roars at a different frequency of pitch, and hunts alone. Prodger’s film combines aerial drone footage as well as images captured by night vision, movement-sensor camera traps, and a smartphone camera. In all of her films, she affords each mode of image capture a singular focus, notably the smartphone itself, which holds a haptic, physical corollary to human vision. Despite also being tracked through paw prints, scat, and sonic detection, the titular lioness, however, remains elusive in the film. As if circling and avoiding a certain gravitational order that might otherwise ensnare it, the recalcitrant beast forms a further cipher in Prodger’s connective grid of meanings. ‘There is a sense that the missing lioness fills in the gap at the center of perception, describing the absence of a unified self,’ writes Laura Guy in her 2022 essay What is the lioness after?.

The brief sighting of the lion’s flickering tail is not only a deadly, hairy lure in the night, but perhaps also a reminder of the dangers – or of the costs – of remembering. This is further evoked later in the video when we hear Prodger try to recall an ill-fated Queer erotic encounter in a shop doorway while high on hallucinogens. ‘I don’t remember because it was 30 years ago,’ she says flatly, her fraying memory soaked with uneasy libidinal energy and yet impassively evoked.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Perhaps unexpectedly, the thoughts and feelings that pass throughout the film are often marked by this sense of distanciation – as if the events were happening elsewhere, to someone else – albeit they are always spoken about with disconcerting fluidity. Prodger’s writings provoke, with feather-light tactility, the seamlessness with which interior feelings take on the unrelated places they unfold in. A writer as much as a filmmaker and an artist, Prodger creates work that also strongly resonates with the associative wordsmithery of Gertrude Stein (a figure who has been cited in Prodger’s work) or the pithy, philosophical logics of Lydia Davis and revelatory swells of Mary Gaitskill.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Another continuing theme in Prodger’s practice is the way in which these often brief, personal memories upend the visual, heteronormative order that holds and withholds Queer lives as they ‘pass’ through the public sphere. In the Turner Prize-winning BRIDGIT we hear the description of someone’s gender being confused in a toilet by a group of women while, seemingly unrelatedly, we watch a statically framed shot of a gaggle of swans gently preening themselves on rocks amid sea spray. The numerous discordances that are evoked in this scene are carefully weighted, as if to protect and give space to recognize the neutral or indeed reactive roles we play when entering gender-defined spaces. In Prodger’s films, these encounters not only confront social conditions, but also declare experiences that have been continually foreclosed through an apparent strict familial order – for example, we hear how girlfriends and sexual partners are greeted by strangers as mothers, aunts, sisters, or daughters, while the purchasing of ‘male’ sportswear clothing is for a son: Relationships are continually inscribed by established patterns, while gender is grounded, neutered, and rationalized. This complexity brings to mind Leo Bersani’s sharply stated comment in his book Homos (1995): ‘Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed.’ Prodger’s work reveals the often-contradictory payoffs made when asserting alternative gender and Queer identities.&nbsp;

The films are being shown alongside a suite of new drawings that, like her films, become a similar time-based medium in which to observe the material world. Born out of the need for the verisimilitude of personal totems, the recreation of the record sleeves and compact disc cases of some of the albums Prodger bought in the late 1980s stand as the materialization of the time it takes to transfer the image onto paper by hand. These are facsimiles, open to the corruptive dissonance brought about by the artist’s physical ability and loaded with the associative weight of feelings attached to the objects. Here, the visible crease in the top corner of an album, a scuffed edge, or a splash of coffee form part of an associative self-portrait of the artist who has long cherished these items. The overlaying of the record sleeve at a standard 12 in with that of the smaller scale, more ‘modern’ CD format (at roughly 6 x 5 in) speaks to Prodger’s interest in the sedimentary nature of memory itself, of one material layer deleting or covering another. The drawings also make direct parallels with the inbuilt obsolescence of technology, a further way for us to consider how memory itself becomes transferred, overwritten, or discarded. ‘Data must migrate from one format to another ad infinitum with the threat of obsolescence snapping forever at its heels,’ Prodger once stated.

The drawings also refer to a recurring element in Prodger’s work, where the technological substrates that hold data are proven to be not only glitchy, but also part of an entropic collapse of the seemingly stable and objective ways we retrieve data. The material deposits of a record lost in its transference are also poignantly revisited in Prodger’s pencil drawings of orange rubber-clad data hard drives. Over these devices, the artist writes in a Sharpie pen the numerous names of people who have influenced or were formative in the intimate space between artwork and life. The making of an image of digital storage (with its plural, open-ended capacity to be overwritten) into a conservable, archival work of pencil on paper places the viewer as an unknown future researcher, as if piecing together oblique, suspicious, or unarticulated references or would-be codes that fall inside and outside the work. 
Prodger’s further fascination with preservation and material entropy is also evident in Stoneymollan Trail, when we witness a snowy pathway lit by a lowly winter sun. The video features a rogue vertical strip of pixels that fragment and play ‘catch up’ with the rest of the image. Prodger has described how the transference of the original digital file onto a new format ultimately destroyed the master document and gave her a ‘crunch kind of exhilaration’ from the loss of control. The flickering, digital decomposition at the edges of the video is a visualization of what remains in the continual translation of memory itself: a moment of unchecked control that is the recurring starting place for Prodger’s complex working processes.

Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly. 
Charlie Prodger is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2726/Hollybush-Gardens">Hollybush Gardens</a> (London) and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3704/Kendall-Koppe">Kendall Koppe</a> (Glasgow). 
‘The Offering Formula’ is on view at Secession (Vienna) from December 1, 2023 to February 25, 2024.&nbsp;
Published on December 13, 2023.&nbsp;
Captions for full-bleed images&nbsp;(from top to bottom): 1. Charlie Prodger, SaF05 (still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. 2. Charlie Prodger, SaF05 (still), 2019.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. 3. Charlie Prodger, SaF05 (still), 2019.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens.

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Her solo show at Secession, Vienna, explores what’s at stake in Queer visibility and the emotionally loaded process of digital obsolescence   

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Her solo show at Secession, Vienna, explores what’s at stake in Queer visibility and the emotionally loaded process of digital obsolescence

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