#file_1# Manchester-born, Scottish artist Chad McCail spoke on Saturday afternoon at the Baltimore Museum of Art. McCail is a participant in "01 Collective Action," the first installation of a new series called "Cram Sessions." The series, created by new Curator of Contemporary Art, Chris Gilbert, is composed of month-long exhibitions organized around a particular theme, often with political overtones, and involving weekly Saturday afternoon activities (lectures, fora, participatory activities). McCail was purportedly to speak on the "content and method" of his digital printmaking, but his talk was largely focused on the inspiration behind his work, and involved a lengthy exposition of his "Snake" series, which was not on display as part of the exhibition.

Chad McCail was born to Scottish parents in Manchester, England in 1961, in a "rather bourgeois" family (his parents were lecturers). He now lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland, having attended University in the 80s at Goldsmith's College, University of London. His early work included black-and-white drawings done in the style of architectural renderings. The drawings portrayed complex building structures that housed a sort of Rube Goldberg-like conditioning process, in which individuals would travel along a path that took them through a room for educational testing, a platform where the energy was extracted from their bodies, and ultimately to a rooftop where they were loaded into a sort of cannon and fired off into the distance. This sort of bleak depiction of the life-sucking properties of contemporary society was repeated in numerous sketches in his early years, but the artist was ultimately frustrated by the realization that they contained no hope of anything but submission to the process.

As he recounts it, a sequence of disturbing dreams over the course of 18 months eventually led him to discover the theories of Wilhelm Reich. Reich, a psychoanalyist and contemporary of Freud's, developed a unique political slant to his psychoanalytic research that included in-depth research into the social and biological function of the orgasm. McCail expounded on Reich's theories of the social and political effects of sexual repression during his lecture, in a long, meandering manner that became a bit tiresome after 20 minutes. While essential to a proper understanding of McCail's work, this part of the talk would have benefitted from a more concise and focused outline of Reich's theories. The gist was to comprehend the overwhelmingly detrimental effects of psychological repression, especially sexual repression, and how this conditions our ability to form intimate bonds, and ultimately our ability to develop cohesive, cooperative communities.

The work on display as part of "01 Collective Effort," a series entitled Food Shelter Clothing Fuel, consists of more than a dozen full-color reproductions about 2' high by 3' wide. The black-and-white drawings are made by hand, then scanned into a computer and color is applied in Photoshop, giving them a slightly cartoonish look that recalls the style used in children's schoolbooks, or the familiar "What to if someone is choking" posters seen in restaurants. It's a very clean style with heavy outlines and sharp contrast.

The drawings portray idealistic scenes of an imagined future, where social relationships are healthy, money is burned, school is not compulsory (hommage to the Summerhill program), and, as the title of one piece puts it, "People have relaxing orgasms." Having thought intensely about the hopelessness of his earlier work, McCail uses Food Shelter Clothing Fuel to depict a future in which the individual is liberated, and society is organized by cooperative activities and sharing of responsibilities. The work is instantly engaging, but stands up to closer examination. The subject matter, made evident by titles like "soldiers leave the armed forces," or "land is shared," is supported by even the most innocuous aspects of the drawings, inviting the viewer to study further and discover subtle supporting details. Consequently, the work is appreciable in an immediate manner, but has enough depth and variety to allow it to be enjoyed once the initial impact has worn off. This sort of attention to detail is often lost in "political" art, which favors the immediate propagandistic effect at the expense of complexity.

The artist used the remainder of his time to offer a step-by-step exposition of a more recent work, called "Snake." The series (originally presented in large format, 7-foot tall prints) tells a lengthy narrative in simple, almost pictographic manner. The series uses a complex metaphor of "snakes" -- depicted as physical reptiles wrapped around our bodies, but representing a vaguely-defined "life force" (like Reich's "orgone" energy) -- to demonstrate examples of both healthy development from childhood to death as well as the grim alternative society in which children develop into either zombies (lower class workers) or robots (middle class managers) at the service of the "wealthy parasites" through a series of repressive conditioning passed on from parent to child. The work is difficult to summarize, as it requires a complete involvement in the narrative to follow it, but every detail in the drawings lends itself to the point of the work, and the non-linguistic nature of the medium allows significant interpretive input by the viewer, which allows it to avoid a strictly pedantic tone.

McCail's work brought mind similiar art by the Beehive Collective,, who create poster-sized drawings focused on a particular political theme (Plan Colombia, FTAA, etc). In similar manner to McCain's robot-like individuals, the Beehive Collective uses insects to represent people and roles in society, and within a single work we see both ants working collectively as well as the spider "extracting natural resources as it decimates the land, consuming forests with chainsaw teeth." I was also reminded of Larry Marder's excellect Beanworld comics, which used a similar graphic style and also offered a lengthy, narrative metaphor that required full immersion for true appreciation.

The question-and-answer session after the talk was not particularly engaging. McCail had very little to say about the actual production of his work, other than the fact that working on the colorizaton in front of a computer was mind-numbing. He also expressed no particular interest in the output methods of his work, saying that it was produced on inkjet printers, and that "as long as it was clean and legible," it was good enough. I noted that it had been written that he was a "self-described anarcho-syndicalist," and asked how that informed his work. While he was obviously not the source of the actual "anarcho-syndicalism" description (he had acquiesced to the description, but could offer no explanation of its meaning), his response was nonetheless in keeping with the most basic of anarchist tenets -- a society organized according to non-hierarchical principles, resistant to repression and based on collective effort, would be a better place to live, no?

"01 Collective Effort" is up at the BMA through March 28, but another Cram Session ("02 Dark Matter") follows in the Fall. Check the BMA listings for more information.