“Shulman, whose shot of a retail showroom entitled McCulloch Motors, Showroom, provides the main reference point for the chainsaw display, was interviewed by Beech shortly before his death. Both he and Adorno serve as sources for an imaginary configuration of two philosophical positions that appear to be at odds with each other yet merge to produce a nihilistic polemic, creating a composite worldview, that is visceral and wholly unstable. Through these strategies, Beech dramatises a process in which critique seems to determine and reproduce its object. In the process, she draws attention to the limits of artistic agency, and the “contradictions produced as a consequence of theorising how to act when there is no absolute power to target and no centre from which to operate.”

Maeve Connolly