REVIEWS AMY O’NEILL
AMY O’NEILL: THE GOLDEN WEST
ALEXANDRE POLLAZZON, LONDON
27 FEBRUARY – 31 MARCH
Amy O’Neill’s work recreates those things we associate so readily with footage, as these enormous fl oats speak of optimism but also vanquishment,
America: wide-open highways, high school proms, football parades. Such of a newly forged cultural identity emerging out of a century of migration
is the allusive power of these signifi ers that they have collectively acquired and conquest.
the term ‘Americana’: pop-cultural markers recognisable the world over. In the main gallery the giant half-wagon-wheel, made from
For her solo show at Alexandre Pollazzon, O’Neill presents The chickenwire, covered in gold and black foil pompoms and placed on top
Golden West, a continuation of her Parade Float Graveyard series, which of a quietly rotating plinth, invokes melancholy for the mythology of the
began in 2000 when the artist came across the remains of a Mardi Gras American West. Instead of following a wheel’s normal revolution around
fl oat in New Orleans. its axle, this crippled half-wheel, its spokes radiating like a cartoon setting-
In the anteroom of the gallery are prints of past Rose Bowl parades sun, rotates with all the sullen silence of a lighthouse beam or a prize car
(the annual New Year’s pageant and football game that takes place in on a podium; an icon of Manifest Destiny reduced to mere kitsch, a wheel
Pasadena, California) and silkscreen prints of vintage advertising fl yers. turning to face every direction, yet going nowhere.
This leads to the main gallery and an installation in which the top half O’Neill’s spotlight on cultural memory suggests that the way a
of a gold wagon wheel rotates on a circular plinth, behind which a video period is remembered has little to do with its reality and more to do with
projection plays faded and fl ecked cine-footage of a past parade. its representations. Her footage, originally found at a fl ea market, then
Though the Rose Bowl was founded in 1890 and continues today, intentionally aged and degraded by the artist, simulates the fractured
O’Neill’s footage dates from the 1964 parade, not six weeks following the memory of the individual, expanded (given the nature of the medium)
blow of JFK’s assassination to what had been America’s peaking postwar to absorb the memory of a larger community. Her glittery silkscreen
confi dence. Her works evoke what Jack Kerouac described in On the Road print Parade Float Extras (2006) advertises slides for customers wanting
(1957) as ‘end-of-the-continent sadness’: frontier-free modern America, ‘a complete representation of the Tournament’. No such representational
nostalgic for a time when the West was still golden and full of promise. In completeness can ever be produced, O’Neill seems to be saying, other
one print, a fl oat moves in the opposite direction to a sign pointing west, than that agreed to by the makers of visual culture. O’Neill’s success lies
suggesting both a triumphal and defl ated return from a frontier outpost. This ultimately in inducing in the viewer nostalgia for a period possibly (and
is already colonised territory, and there is a quasi-militaristic aspect to the probably) never experienced. Laura Allsop
The Golden West, 2007, mixed media installation including digital video projection from 8mm fi lm (15 min, loop),
motor, wood, glitters and plastic pom-poms. Courtesy Alexandre Pollazzon, London
one.lintwo.linseven.lin ARTREVIEW
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