These modest challenges embody the paradox of seeming epic on a very personal scale. As a series of actions, they become a method of relating to and negotiating the broader environment in its physical and social aspects. As such, they fit the description of Michel de Certeau's tactics-improvised actions that are practiced by the 'weak', the underdog, the individual, in opposition to larger scale strategies used by the prevailing institutions of power. Tactics are thus discreet, subversive, empowering actvities:

It [the tactic] operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of "opportunities" and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives the tactic a mobility to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment…

This description evokes the provisional nature of Duggan's enquiry and its continually adapting 'rules'. The creation of such rules could be seens as more creative than the destruction of them, since creation arguably demands a higher level of reasoning and draws connections between cause and effect. The 'best' rules are never stable or permanent, but evolve naturally according to the context or need. According to artist Andrea Zittel, "What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves." The tactics used in the creation of the videos have their own formality and inventiveness: Duggan uses rules not as constricting limits, but rather as parameters within which extensive experiment and improvisation becomes possible. This is a discipline that can offer a certain kind of freedom, an empowerment through both the setting of the test and its accomplishment.

De Certeau's language of the tactic finds diverse echoes in contemporary culture. For example, although the ideas behind Duggan's work are quite different, it is worth looking to the words of Sebastian Foucan, co-founder of the art of Parkour. "It is not just a game… it is a discipline because it is a way of facing our fears and demons that you can apply to the rest of your life." These words are used to describe an exercise that is essentially the art of navigating and moving through the city, creatively turning the manoeuvring of obstacles into stylistic flourishes. This practice necessitates commitment and training, and is consciously presented by its practitioners as a practical, physical mediation technique for the navigation of daily life. What is noteworthy about all this is that it is a practice that evolved as a direct creative response to the Parisian urban/ suburban landscape in the 1980s. Duggan's work, exhibited at Pallas Heights, display a related though distinctly different tactic in response to the contemporary urban landscape and its large-scale power structures. Notably more physically limited in its objectives, and lacking in contrivances of 'style', at times it undercuts grand spectacle in favour of challenging real problematic situations. These formidable though small-scale tasks sometimes result in the bruising of the ego or the body.

It's easy to identify with the decidedly ordinary protagonist (the artist) who performs the tasks in the videos. He seems familiar but anonymous enough, and displays no acrobatic feats of grace or agility. There is no spectacle of strength or machismo, quite the opposite in fact-our 'hero' is humble sometimes almost to the point of abjection. Neither are there any of the feigned theatrics of reality TV show challenges (Fear Factor, you've been framed, I'm a Celebrity…) and the tasks are serious if sometimes carried out with an appreciation for a sad kind of slapstick. He tries to walk in a door (upside-down); falls off a makeshift tightrope; progresses up and down stairs on his hands; performs 71 jumps on the top of a mountain, (and edits the piece to show only the airborne portion of the adventure). The work could be read as a critique macho performance and its grand gestures. The whole ordeal sometimes seems an exercise in pointless, exhausting, comic effort.

The locations in the videos, like the protagonist himself, share paradoxical qualities of particularity and vagueness. The work made on the stairs of the flats-the camera picking up on a rich territory of patterned lino, painted boards, white walls and the occasional glimpse of a discarded biro-provides an intimate portrait of a particular place, and is exhibited within it. Yet it also provides a jumping off point to remember or imagine countless other similar places. It's the same with the other locations (the Dublin mountains, the Burren Co. Clare, and other sites around the city): the character of each place is familiar but elusive. The location where the video is shot is treated as a backdrop to enact certain personal tests, replete with their particular and sometimes obscure controls.

There is a recurring theme of containment, both physical and mental. Stress, gravity and pressure (traditional sculptural qualities, perhaps a legacy of Duggan's original training) are there too, but these are external factors. It's the internal character of the subject in these video works that is most striking, and is compacted indeed: this drama is carried in the mind/body of the artist as events play out again and again and again. Rural locations and wide open spaces make no difference to him, even in the Burren he finds himself constricted within the stone walls of a ruined door, similar to how he was contained in the stairwell at the flats. There is a lot of walking upside down-Door, 104 stairs, and Moon. There is also a flurry of desperate jumping, in works such as 36 seconds, 71 jumps, and Breaking a Trampoline, where a domestic trampoline, along with the artist, are pushed to their respective physical limits.

The work is pared down to a handful of simple elements: 1. the body (the artist); 2. the location; 3. the 'rules' / task (self-determined and faithfully followed); 4. the witness-a video camera. The installation in the space is similarly spare and encourages a comparable economy of experience.

It would be a mistake to think that the artist is isolated in his psychological intensity, absorbed in his strenuous and often futile tasks: the installation is a pointed attempt to involve the viewer in the work. The exhibition is a particularly physical and tactile experience, unusually so for digital or lens-based work. The videos are installed in a variety of ways, using projections and monitors with various conflicts of scale and location-works are presented on a stairwell and wardrobe as well as more conventional projection-room formats. The use of the space is intimate and involving, and the works evoke a dialogue between themselves that includes the person in the room with them. This is achieved through the use of simple devices such as works being installed at different levels and at different scales-for example Stresshead, a small LCD screen with a close-up of the artist's eyes while performing a handstand, that is inserted into the wall just above eye level. In other cases Duggan has made incisions into the building to position monitors or cut a hole in a wall to project through, which further causes the viewer to bend over, stretch up or stand up awkwardly on a step to see the work. A physical investment is invited and expected of the viewer.

Most prominent among these 'viewing' triggers are the swings installed in various rooms (the artist providing the viewer more comfort than he has afforded himself). This at once involves the 'viewer' in a physical as well as a mental capacity and perhaps aims to subtly needle the viewer-body into some kind of awareness of their physical state. Thus, these 'viewers' of Duggan's work are not conceived of as passive consumers. It is this facet of the work that most clearly distinguishes Duggan's practice from the kinds of recorded behaviour (challenges and stunts for TV) mentioned above. Clearly there are different intentions and production values, and as already discussed, Duggan's actions are stripped of both machismo and finesse. However, aside from the cultural streams these diverse productions have ended up in-television/ art gallery-it is the intended relationship with the viewer that truly marks them apart. Duggan's work lacks the sadistic undercurrent that characterises these activities and attempts a more empathetic engagement.

Duggan's particular attention to the installation of the works is the mark of his gentle but insistent attempts for participation rather than spectatorship. It's implicit in the work that the 'viewers' could become 'users', and would see fit to carry out tests, experiments, or other activities of their own. As viewers (consumers), we could become producers. This invitation from the artist is sincere and not without challenge.

Sarah Browne
(c)published exhibition catalouge 2006, Pallas Projects

De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1984, p.36. He defines strategies as " the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated."

Ibid, p.37.

Prestel Verlag, Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, Munich, 2005. These two statements are numbers 9 and 10 in 'These things I know for sure,' p.14.

De Certeau also discusses how a degree of freedom or independence can be developed through the 'inhabitation' of rules. He describes how, "carried to its limit, this order would be the equivalent of the rules of meter and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays." De Certeau, op. cit. p. xxii.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-fre1.htm, site accessed 18/01/06. For a history of parkour, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour, site accessed 02/02/06.

Parkour has an underlying philosophy that evokes a meditative state of mind where physical tasks can bring about a union of body and mind, a state of greater awareness and heightened perception. This clearly references classical and contemporary Eastern philosophies of the 'body-mind', particularly martial arts and spiritual practices such as Zen Buddhism. For a contemporary reading of these ideas, see for example Beyond the Body/ Mind? Japanese Contemporary Thinkers on Alternative Sociologies of the Body, Chicako Ozawa-de Silva, Body & Society, vol.8 no.2, p.28-32, 2002, SAGE Publications.

This runs counter to how consumers (including of images and texts) are often assumed to be inherently passive, conceived of as a voyeur in a "showbiz society": Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, 1995 (first published 1967, French).

De Certeau recognises a potential for agency on the part of the consumer, who does not simply act as a 'pure receiver', but has the capacity to creatively use and inhabit the products owned, consumed, or imposed on it. De Certeau, op.cit., p.30-31.