Archive for Ramblings

REVIEW: Two Degrees Festival @ Arts Admin 12-18 June 2011

January 29, 2012 Environment, Participation, Performance, Ramblings No comments

Published in this is tomorrow

The Family Cut Out The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

The Family Cut Out The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

In his short contribution to the closing discussion of the Two Degrees Festival, filmmaker John Jordan offers a neat analysis of the difference between art and activism. Art he says is a form of acupuncture, a way of making individual aesthetic pinpricks into pressure points in the public consciousness. Conversely activism is a prolific mass movement that seeks to reproduce its key messages virally and inclusively, without preciousness. For him this renders activism a superior tool for educating a wider audience about climate change and the negative impact of global capitalism.

Held only a week after government adviser Tim Oates made a public recommendation that climate change should be removed from the national curriculum and replaced with ‘real science’, the Two Degrees Festival offered a timely opportunity to reflect on a diverse range of tools for creating and maintaining a sense of relevance and urgency around radical politics and climate activism. Established in 2009 and held biannually, Two Degrees has expanded its remit after it’s first incarnation, to respond to world events such as the financial crisis alongside its perennial theme of climate change. Produced by Artsadmin, an organisation with a successful track record of supporting artwork that slips between conventional genre definitions of theatre and visual art, the festival is well positioned to galvanise perceived differences between art and activism and imagine new forms of public engagement.

In a conversation with Two Degrees programmers Mark Godber and Sam Trotman they define the festival as a site for the production of human collectives that instigate new forms of participation. Their primary example is The Haircut Before the Party an artwork situated in a local shop that will remain on site for six months and offers to restyle participants hair in exchange for a conversation about the impact of government cuts. In terms of its duration, the project makes a more long-term commitment to its audience than we might expect from a conventional relational artwork or from a flash mob style anti-cuts demonstration. As with most participatory projects, its success will depend upon its ability to create genuine engagement with users from its local community, rather than brief moments of novelty for art audiences on whistle stop visits to the city.

Often programmers and artists are guilty of affording the promise of collaborative experience or mutual exchange a little too liberally, as a result of their need to conform to the Arts Council’s instrumentalist agenda. Activist groups can also tend to idealise their organisational structures, which often contain hidden hierarchies or power imbalances. As an example of a human collective, The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home is perhaps the most unique collaborative grouping in the Two Degrees festival programme. In their performance The Family Cut Out, father Gary reads out a summery of recent government cuts to benefits, education and other public services, while mother Lena and her three children hide under a white bed sheet that is gradually torn away by members of the audience as each new cut is announced. While the content of the work is not specifically radical, the extension of contemporary art making to an entire family is more rare. As an artist collective, each member donates ten percent of their earnings to the institute, including all three children who invest a portion of their earnings in child benefit. Borrowed from the historical tradition of the tithe where one tenth of income would have been gifted to the church, the institute invests this money back into the creation of contemporary art. Not specifically an instance of art or activism, but more of a way of life, this unique human collective is a fascinating means of experiential education for the family’s young children. Undoubtedly though, it also incorporates the inherent possibility that these children might undergo a teenage rebellion that ends in adulthood as a corporate banker! The outcome is subject to the project sustaining relationships out with the bounds of this seven-day festival.

At lunchtime on the final day of Two Degrees, a debate focusing on the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen Summit on climate change takes place in the cafe at Toynbee Studios. For activists who attended the summit, its memory appears to trigger recollections of police brutality and the beginning of a slow fragmentation of key figures from climate activism into other political causes and issues of social justice.

At a time when individuals across social groups are preoccupied by the task of negotiating the economic squeeze and parliament appears too embroiled in it’s loyalty to big business to instigate change, it is more important than ever that reductive distinctions between art and activism are abandoned in favor of a collective commitment to new ways of working. As a festival, Two Degrees is uniquely positioned to be a useful part of this process.

FEATURE: The Virgin’s Release: A (bitchy) argument about art and feminism

January 28, 2012 Feminist, Performance, Ramblings, Sexual identity No comments

Live Artist Bryony Kimmings. Image by Christa Holka

In February 2011 I wrote a light hearted feature on Live Art and female sexuality for new performance magazine Bellyflop. The theme of the issue was Virginity, so I responded with an article titled: The Virgin’s Release: Women, Sex and Live Art. The piece was well received by many of my female peers and by the lady artists who featured in it.

I was pretty surprised (and oddly delighted) to see that the subsequent issue of Bellyflop featured a stinging critique of my arguments in a reader’s letter from Phoebe Collings-James, who was unsatisfied by my ‘vague’ arguments and my ‘liberal lefty’ opinions. The thrust of her argument seemed to be that my dislike of Sex and the City and other aspects of female popular culture defined me as a die hard elitist. An assumption that I countered fiercely in the following issue with my article More Women, Sex and Live Art that attempted to highlight the negative impact of Capitalism on feminist thought.

I’m still waiting to hear whether Phoebe Collings-James has more to say in reply. While I enjoyed the debate, the fact that our exchange became so heated made me think seriously about the implications of bitchy infighting among feminists. While a spirited argument is great fun, I wonder if serious cat fighting should be put aside for the sake of the collective aims of the sisterhood? (Whatever that might mean)

FEATURE: Leading or following? Social engagement and mass participation in the Cultural Olympiad

November 6, 2010 Arts Funding, Participation, Performance, Ramblings, Video and film No comments

A feature length article on visual arts bids competing for 2012 Cultural Olympiad funding. Published in artartart issue 7 December 2009. Download article here leadingorfollowingfinal2

Michael Pinchbeck. Sit with us for a Moment and Remember

REVIEW: Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth @ Edinburgh Festival 30 Jul–15 Aug 2010

August 25, 2010 Edinburgh Festival, Participation, Ramblings, The Skinny, Video and film No comments

Published in The Skinny

Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth, Press Shot for Staged at the City Observatory
Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth, Staged

The title of Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s new Edinburgh Festival commission might suggest a work that is rather spectacular. ‘Staged’ is a term often used to allude to all that is amplified, visually seductive and riddled with exaggerated fakery. Likewise press releases for the show describe a project that seeks to document the ‘human drama’ that invades the city every August.

Yet sitting quietly at the summit of Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill, ‘Staged’ uses a mixture of live feed CCTV and pre-recorded footage to chronicle the 2010 festival with a lightness of touch that is almost imperceptible. Projected floor to ceiling onto every wall of the small, sweltering box that is The City Observatory, many of the images depict Edinburgh in the abstract, focusing on the pattern of light on rooftops in a way that feels more referential of the visual history of painting than the rampant cavorting of theatrical display.

For centuries the human race has been compelled to recreate its environment via art and the production of imagery. What began with cave paintings and experiments in pinhole photography, now finds form in reality TV and the popularity of camera phones. What Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth have understood about the 21st century manifestation of this phenomena, is that as our access to digital image media increases, so does our tendency to record the painfully mundane. While trying to concentrate on out of focus CCTV images of an empty city bar at lunchtime, it’s impossible not to wonder if all of this voyeurism is really as entertaining as we think.

Back outside on Carlton Hill the air is fresh, some kids are running about playing football and an American tourist is bitching at his wife about the fact that their dog has just taken a shit in the grass. It’s a human drama all of its own and its only a matter of time before someone takes a photograph of it.

REVIEW: One On One Festival @ BAC 6-18th July 2010

July 31, 2010 Performance, Ramblings No comments
Postcard received from Emma Benson after Me You Now

Postcard received from Emma Benson after Me You Now

We live in an age of increasing social isolation. Communication technologies and globalisation are causing us to live and work in a way that is more mobile, yet more solitary. The gradual decline of organised religion has yielded an absence of ritual and communal experience for many social groups, while more and more people conduct their most meaningful relationships online.

For several decades there have been artists and writers who have craved refuge from isolation in the potential intimacy of theatre. Peggy Phelan’s book from 1993: ‘Unmarked: The Politics of Performance” interrogated the workings of psychic desire within theatre. She called the relationship between audience and performer “the always already unequal encounter (that) nonetheless summons the hope of reciprocity and equality.”

It is therefore not surprising that the past ten years have given birth to the ultimate quest for theatrical intimacy: theatre for an audience of one. Evolved out of experimental practices pioneered by companies such as Ontroerend Goed, theatre for an audience of one has been sparking discussion among international producers about how to overcome the obvious economic and logistic challenges posed by such singular viewing experiences.

Luckily BAC have risen to the challenge and allowed theatre for an audience of one to attain a national profile for the first time in the UK. In an interview with festival producer Sunita Pandya, James Cowen calls this work that “questions and transgresses the boundaries between audience member and performer in the most personal and intimate way, leading to truly unique experiences that invite the audience to question the ways in which we interact as human beings.”

Intimacy is a complex emotion that often requires the yielding of power by all participants. It is in the giving of weakness that most of the works in the festival hold the possibility of achieving intimacy, or being eluded by it. In Ed Rapley’s work ‘The First Thing’ participants are invited to take a seat opposite Rapley in a large empty room. He has his eyes closed. When he opens them, he says the first thing that comes into his head about the person that he sees before him. With little chance to retaliate (participants are asked to vacate the room as soon as Rapley has made his judgment) this work does little to overcome the division of power between audience and performer. It rather calls to mind the way that we might relate to someone in the street, making an instant judgment based on race, gender or even more subtle nuances of a persons appearance. In Villanella and Hanneke Paauwe’s work ‘Rendez-vous’ participants are taken into a small antechamber where they are asked to remove their shoes and then move to a warm dark room to lie down in a coffin. Once inside they are visited by a woman dressed in white, who plays the part of a slightly saucy guardian angel, forcefully posing questions about the quality of life lived by the participant and how many tears are likely to be shed at their funeral. There are no pauses in the monologue for the participant’s answers and as such the work feels more like an aggressive ordeal than a tender exchange. In Ansuman Biswas work’2free’ participants are invited to “a face to face encounter with the nature of social and personal boundaries.” Equipped with a lantern in an otherwise dark room, participants are confronted by a naked performer who has his feet, hands, eyes and mouth bound with black cloth. A participant can only remove the ties once they are also fully undressed. In my case this process lead eventually to being showered, dried and smothered in sweet smelling oil by the performer, whom I kept blindfolded throughout. For the first time my own vulnerability was matched by the physical responsiveness of the performer grappling with the uncertainty of an erotic encounter in which he could be seen but was unable to see. In Emma Benson’s ‘You Me Now’ participants are invited to sing a favorite song in unison with the performer, who encourages, cajoles and instructs as required. An imperfect but joyful singer, Emma Benson made my heart glow with the simplicity of this shared activity where we made bad harmonies and bum notes in unison.

One on One work can create a space where a performer is willing to risk vulnerability. It is in this moment that the giving of weakness becomes a mutual act of intimacy and “summons the hope of reciprocity and equality.” Not all of the works in this festival were successful in transgressing the boundary between audience and performer in a radical way. But taken as a whole they offered participants a rich playground for different forms of engagement and experimentation that was both refreshing and exhilarating.

REVIEW: One minute on each of the four days before her death, part of Apocalypse Now @ Red Wire Gallery. Until 08 Aug 2009

August 2, 2009 Exhibition, Liverpool, Performance, Psychology, Ramblings, Video and film No comments
Sarah Harbridge One minute on each of the four days before her death

When Josh sent me an excited email a couple of weeks ago,  to ask if he could borrow four of my flat screen monitors for Red Wire’s next exhibition, I was happy to oblige, particularly as he was insistent that the work he was putting on them was of mind blowing quality. Great I said, what is it?

Sarah Harbridge’s four screen installation ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’, consists of individual 60 second video pieces that play on a continuous loop. The ‘her’ as referenced by the title is the artist’s Grandmother. Josh gave me the link to watch it on youtube and I followed it to find a row of twisted and contorted manifestations of an old woman’s face, gasping for breath, wrestling with some moment of indecision between life and death. Even at low resolution, the images were so tightly and unscrupulously framed that every last tortured detail was visible.

By convention, sculpture is the art of the dead. In order to preserve lost loved ones, we memorialise in stone with statues and monuments. Immovable and atemporal these objects are created to immortalise, often portraying whole heads or full bodies with an air of distance, dignity and grace. While they remember death, they do not evidence its processes or its tendencies toward degradation, decay and suffering.

In her essay ‘Infected eyes: dying man with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The view from here’, critic Peggy Phelan recounts the story of film Silverlake Life, in which aids victim Tom Joslin’s gradual death from the disease is documented on film in collaboration with his partner Mark Massi. She asserts in her essay that  this film “resolutely and imaginatively re-examines the link between the temporality of death and the temporality of cinema,” with her argument pivoting on the fact that film can be rewound and replayed, allowing dying on screen to be reenacted infinitely. On film she asserts, the dead can live again. Silverlake Life is a monument to Tom Joslin that allows the viewer to relive his death with compassion and empathy.

Shot in the early 1990s, this film belongs to the preinternet age of filmmaking, when dissemination of the moving image, although widespread (people could watch movies on VHS at home) was vastly different to the post cinematic, networked age of digital image making that we inhabit at present. Watching ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’ over youtube, I was struck by the overwhelming melancholic sense that in an era of happy snapping, vimeoing and facebooking, not even the dying moments of an aged women are too sensitive to to be filmed, cropped, edited, disseminated on youtube, exhibited in a gallery, photographed and then blogged, reblogged and critiqued here by yours truly. This is the moment at which death becomes transient and timeless, available to be relived and replayed by gallery visitors and net users at their own whim.

Challenging and in tune with the current state of digital dissemination, this makes for a fascinating piece of work that mixes the banal with the sensational and provokes a thousand unanswered questions about the life story of the artists Grandmother, why she died and why her death merits such lucid and invasive documentation.

Apocalypse Now runs at Red Wire Gallery until 8 August.