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The first edition of VIDEO CAVE, a new series of one-off video essays and films exploring the sublime and the ridiculous in true Platonic tradition, presents its first transmission - The Institute, a new work by The Constructivist (aka Brian McCaughey).

Blending video and text, The Institute transforms the gallery into an active diagram of institutional life amidst its bureaucratic systems. This new installation doesn't intend to critique institutions, it merely models them within the frame of institutional bureaucracy. As such, directed by your perspective, it may even be regarded a celebration.

The video work is structured in ten chapters, each revealing another layer of what McCaughey calls "the bureau of process." From the bureaucratic thrum of registration desks and branded buses (Chapter 1: The Cave), to the sacred liturgy of spreadsheets, art installations, fashion templates and KPIs (Chapter 2: Production), to the PowerPoint homepage as digital tabernacle (Chapter 8: Monuments), the viewer is asked to swipe in and stand in line.

BIOGRAPHY

Brian McCaughey was born in 1984 in Belfast, a city he often describes as "the crucible of my cultural distrust." Operating under the nom de guerre ‘The Constructivist’, he fashions himself less an artist than a "discursive engineer of systems". He prefers the term "cultural surgeon," a term he coined in 2012 during a residency in Carlow. In relation to art production, McCaughey states: "Ambiguity is the salt for the Sirloin."

His work lies somewhere between Christian Marclay's bricolage, the monologue-over-collapse style of Adam Curtis, and the smudged margins of Roland Barthes' annotations. There’s a knowing nod to Elizebeth Price’s collage and a coquettish wink to Duncan Campbell's baroquely recursive, epistemologically disobedient videoscapes - but McCaughey amplifies his own tone, he's his own ‘Assemblagator’. He describes contemporary art production as "a bourgeois indulgence, meaty and sweaty". Mc Caughey maintains "we live in the afterimage of dis-intention".

He works primarily in video and installation, though he insists his medium is "systems of meaning." His 2019 piece Everything / Me, a durational performance/installation ran for 127 hours and included audio samples of Cold War broadcasts, a woman reading Derrida in the shower and footage of a fire alarm malfunctioning in a Dunnes Stores storeroom. Critics called it "maddening," and an Arts Council officer marked it a 2 for social engagement, Mc Caughey wore this as a badge of honour.

Major exhibitions have included:

Signal 253 (2018, Belfast ICX): a hybrid installation of chopped-up Cold War transmissions, numbers stations with ambient lounge jazz. Critics called it "punishingly clear" and "surgically precise with calculated sincerity."
Monaghan No.3 (2017, BAC Belfast): a triple screen projection of CCTV loops, footage of alcohol commercial's and texts critiquing partition narrated in a Beckett-esque voice-over about property development.
Knot 2M (2003, Shankill Baths Gallery): an exhaustive 73-hour hybrid read-through of Barthes’ Mythologies against a montage of Swedish minimalist design catalogues collapsing into white noise.