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I get knocked down, but I get up again / You’re never gonna
keep me down ...
Pissing the night away / Pissing the night away /
He drinks a whiskey drink / He drinks a vodka drink / He drinks
a lager drink / He drinks a cider drink
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times / He sings
the songs that remind him of the best times /
Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy ...
In his video My Round made in 1999 young
English photo-artist Paul M. Smith presents four young men in
a rural English pub atmosphere – in terms of content and
structure, the video presents the never-ending repetition of the
song, as the young men pass round a bottle of Tequila. The camera
angle is fixed, recording in an endless loop the never-changing
stereotypical drinking rite: the men smoke, lick salt from their
hands, chew lemons, and spit them out again, hammer on the table
top to encourage the drinker to empty his glass, and photograph
each other. Only on closer inspection do we notice that all the
persons are actually the artist, who like an actor dons different
costumes to act the parts of the different characters. Although
the production is highly complex in technical terms, for example
with post-production by means of digital compositing, the grainy
quality of the pictures initially brings to mind the ostensibly
coincidental nature of low-tech amateur shots, prompting us to
remember similar scenes we have experienced ourselves.
Distracted by the familiarity of the pictures
and the joyful pop song, after only a few rounds the endless,
event-less and ever-repeated drinking rite shows itself to manifestly
be devoid of meaning, to be merely a stereotypical version of
such social entertainment: the bottle never empties nor does the
consumption of its contents affect any of the men round the table.
The individual events freeze, becoming readily interchangeable,
bizarre phrases. Smith was for many years a member of the Royal
Army and today teaches at various universities in England: here,
as in many of his previous works, he presents the interchangeable
and questionable nature of those forms of letting off steam such
as are especially typical of certain male circles. Within the
circle of his "drinking mates", the individual is forced,
as it were, to adopt a similar form of behavior. Each man's own
identity gets lost in the search for membership of a group.
Production Company: New Directions, London;
Director: Paul M. Smith; Producers: Will Cohen, Dan Dickenson;
Director of Photography: Simon Carter. Postproduction Company:
Glassworks, London; Editor: Marylin Gould; Productions Flame Artist:
Ian Richardson; Music: Tubthumping Chumbawamba; Music Publisher:
EMI; Sound Design: 750 MPH
born 1969 in Great Britain, studied Photography, Fine Arts, Art
and Design in London, Coventry, Trowbridge; from 1985 to 1990
HM Forces Combat Engineer, PR photographer, since 1997 employment
as visiting lecturer and tutor at several British universities
and work as an artist. Solo and group exhibitions (selection):
2001 Robbie Williams Enders Project, Frankfurt; Ich Tarzan - Du
Felix Austria? Gallery Christiane König, Vienna; 2000 Zeitgeist
Fabrica, Brighton; Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz;
1999 Neurotic Realism Saatchi Gallery; 1998 The new Neurotic Realism
Saatchi Gallery
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