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'About Cages' is a simple but emotional and therefore extremely eloquent installation about power and powerlessness, oppressors and the oppressed. This extremely compact installation consists of a single monitor, two loudspeakers and a cage of birds. Downey conceived the original idea for 'About Cages' after a visit to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. At the same time he was reading the confessions of a Chilean secret agent who had been active in the 'dirty war' still going on against the democratic aspirations of the Chilean people. Sections of the 'Diary of Anne Frank' and extracts from the confessions of the torturer issue from the loudspeakers on each side of the installation, while the monitor shows the jittery hopping of a caged bird. The isolation of the little creature, its frantic efforts to bite through the bars of its cage, and its desperate-sounding singing, agonisingly reduced in speed, all contribute to an unmistakable sensation of helplessness: a helplessness which is emphasized and embodied by the real birds in the cage under the monitor. The monitor itself can also be seen as a cage: television - the media - as a prison for the free intellect. Using as his chief weapon the stylistic device of exaggeration, Downey intends to suggest that there is no difference between political oppression, the imprisonment of wild animals and the encaging power of the media.
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Erik Quint
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