Description:
Common Culture (1996 - )
Bouncers, 2006 (13 of 15)
C-type photographs
Purchased with support from the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund 2006
Common Culture was founded in Liverpool in 1996 and currently includes the artists David Campbell and Mark Durden. Their work blurs the boundaries between art and everyday life, in an effort to unsettle the habitual rituals of cultural consumption.
This series, which consists of 15 photographs in total, was acquired by the Gallery in 2006. It depicts male bouncers who worked at nightclubs in Coventry. The same bouncers appeared in Common Culture’s projected film / DVD presentation at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum in January 2005.
The Bouncers were filmed and photographed in their professional stance as security monitors, but in a gallery context, they became part of the spectacle. The viewer is able to sustain eye contact for longer than is possible in a real-life situation and can consider the ways in which power can shift when the ‘observer’ becomes the ‘observed’.