Courtesy and © James Coleman

James Coleman, "Charon (MIT Project)" (1989). Projected images with synchronized audio narration.

March 2009 Field Guide

Ellen Gallagher

Jerzy Grotowski

Nina Könnemann

Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussy

Do Look Back in Anger

Christian Jankowski

The Collection

William Kentridge: Five Themes

James Coleman Didier Ottinger on La Force de l’Art

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Although slide shows and projected images have become commonplace visual-art practices, when the Irish artist James Coleman began making his now seminal slide-tape works in the 1970s, they were pioneering in both form and content. Consisting of projected still images with spoken soundtracks, Coleman’s works explored notions of image and language and upended the way the two traditionally work in tandem to create authoritative narratives and meaning. An early work, for example, paired identical slides of an Italian plaza, while wildly different interpretations of each provided the voice-over. Born in Ballaghaderreen in 1941, Coleman returns to his home turf this month for an extensive survey that fills three Dublin institutions. Of the works on view, three—including 1989’s Charon (MIT Project), featuring 14 photographic vignettes and a didactic commentator who expounds on the medium—have never before been seen on Irish soil.

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"James Coleman" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.