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

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 first published in The Skinny 23rd August www.theskinny.co.uk

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.

This essay is an extract from a text that has recently featured in Liverpool Art Journal. It comments on the performances of Mexican born artist Coco Fusco and her critical opposition to notions of ‘disembodiment’ that were frequently touted in late 1990s digital theatre theory. Highlighting the subjugated female workers who manufacture the computer hardware that powers our digital age, Fusco raises questions about the industrialized processes that underpin our highly technologized society and about the role of women within them.

In her persuasive essay, At Your Service, Latin Woman in the Global Information Network, Coco Fusco recalls an indent from the history of performance art which serves as an allegory for her entire output on the subject of the interface between the female body, technology and performance.

In 1980 a male artist from Los Angeles subjected himself to an act of physical mutation at the hands of medical science. He had a vasectomy procedure that was videotaped for public viewing, prior to which he confessed to having ejaculated into the body of a dead Mexican woman as a prelude to the operation. He declared that this act of sexual deviancy had been committed inside Mexico, where he had gained access to the woman’s body on the condition that he made no visual record of his violation of the corpse. He did, however, make an audio recording that was played as a soundtrack during his time in the operating theatre.

Speaking in response to this work Fusco describes

An artist exhibiting a portrait of himself on the operating table willingly turning himself into an object of medical science to express his desire to detach himself from his body’s procreative function, playing the tape of his transgressive rejection of his generative capacities – a gesture that required that another place and another person serve him in silence and then, disappear. ¹

Through this allusion to the ‘disappearance’ of the dead Mexican woman, Fusco references the physical processes that facilitate the existence of highly technologized society. She imagines the dead Mexican as a prototype for the kind of servile, hierarchical relationships that are inevitable within all of humanity’s interactions with technology. The abused corpse symbolizes the thousands of workers employed in the maquiladoras where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled. In an interview with Juha-Pekka Vanhatalo, Fusco describes the maquiladoras in the border zones of Mexico where “female workers have no privacy, no time to go to the bathroom, no opportunity to talk during work, few breaks, and little control over their work situation”.² With no physical or social autonomy, these women represent the antithesis of all of the freedoms heralded by digital technology’s aspiration to ‘disembodiment’ and by the internet’s supposed ability to surpass physical and social boundaries.

Paul Virilio, in his book from 1991, The Aesthetics of Disappearance describes the link between manufacturing and the body as a corporal bond that can be observed as early as “Ford’s social project for the American Economy (that) announced already the synergy being formed between techniques of production, the manufactured object and corporeity itself.”³ Historically, mass production binds bodies and machines in a relationship of mutual dependency, which is as necessary now as it was for early Fordist production. In spite of the advanced state of modern manufacturing, machines still require operators and employers are at liberty to exploit bodies in sweatshops that we rarely see. Yet, as Fusco herself observes, the common supposition that globalized technologies such as the internet afford humankind the possibility of liberation from physical and social limitations, neglects not only the immediate history of the computer as a manufactured object but also the hierarchical relationships of exploitation over bodies that facilitate mass production on a worldwide scale:

The abundance of descriptions of net communication as structurally anti-authoritarian, decentralized, “rhizomatic,” open-ended, flowing, as if it followed some force of nature, are effectively diverting attention from the centralized economic formations that sustain it. In the same way that concentrating solely on what we see on the screen suppresses the status of the computer as a manufactured object, formalist fixation of the net we use as consumers or make a living off as designers obfuscates the political and economic realities out of which digital media and telecommunications emerge⁴

Dolores 10h to 22h: A Storey That No One Saw

In Dolores 10h to 22h, Fusco attempts to make the unseen realities of hardware manufacturing visible, by performing online, a story of exploitation “that no one saw.” Developed from a story about a maquiladora worker who was locked up in a small room at work without food, water or bathroom access and terrorized into confessing to trying to unionize her factory, the performance attempts to highlight the figure of the exploited female worker and her physical subjugation at the hands of her employer. Playing Dolores, Fusco was locked away under guard for a period of 12 hours consecutively; during which time none of her bodily needs were tended. She was denied food and bathroom access thus reaffirming the urgency of her bodily functions. Periodically her male guard, who relentlessly attempted to incite false confessions to fallacious crimes, subjected her to periods of physical abuse. Audience members witnessed Fusco’s gradual subordination to her guard: the manager of the maquiladora where her fictitious crimes had taken place. Events were filmed on four CCTV cameras positioned inside of her cell that streamed the images live to the internet. Here an online audience could observe the abuses in the moment that they occurred. Representing the habitual maltreatment of female workers that underscores the digital hardware industry, the performance was a very public manifestation of the virulent physical injustices that often underpin globalized mass production.

The internet user is confronted with the political realities that facilitate widespread use of the network in our global economy and with the figure of subjugated women who facilitate our ongoing consumption of this network. For most consumers who use the internet on a daily basis for working and socializing, the net may represent accessibility, visibility and freedom of information, yet as Fusco asserts:

In the recent rush to celebrate the expanded communication potential afforded by new technologies, we often assume that the increased circulation of information necessarily yields enhanced possibilities of substantive intercultural interaction. It is time to ask ourselves how much we want to know about what we ask to see.⁵

FOOTNOTES

1 Fusco, Coco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours p192

2 Vanhatalo, Juha-Pekka, Coco Fusco – Life Under Surveillance

http://www.kiasma.fi/www/viewresource.php?lang=en&id=3Lolv9aQpOfVH9Z0

3 Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, p86

I must stress here that in Ford’s system workers existed as worker-consumers, thus making their relationship to embodied labour different to that of the maquiladora worker. In Ford’s social project the workers who produced the objects also used their wages to consume the cars that they had produced. Thus this manufacturing system is structured differently. None the less, the co-dependence of mechanism and body remains the same.

4 Fusco, Coco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours p191

5 http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/disapwman.html

Andre Guedes Backyard of a building, 2005

I have had the pleasure over the past six weeks of helping to host Andre Guedes on his co-commissioned residency through the Bluecoat and Visiting Arts. Choosing to produce a project that evidences the present state of the institution by drawing a trajectory through its past, he has been trawling the archives of the Bluecoat for unusual documents, images and objects. Accompanying him to the Bluecoat’s offsite storage space in an empty warehouse in Liverpool’s old business district, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of exhibition catalogues, VHS tapes and random artifacts that we found from the Bluecoat circa 2004, prior to its redevelopment.

Andre’s exhibition and performative interventions will open at the Bluecoat in November this year. Watch this space for more blog posts on this topic - I am excited about it!

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.

Marina Abramovic Presents

Performance Art has always appealed to my sense of austerity. While gallery goers pursue white cube spaces at their own pace and are permitted to feel disinterested and walk away when work is not to their taste, performance traditionally demands that viewers are committed for the duration, with the typical theatrical configuration (rows of seating looking forward to the stage) making mutineers conspicuous should they loose concentration and wish to leave before the artists work is fully complete.

I needed no convincing then, when Marina Abramović opened her four hour production for Manchester International Festival with ‘The Drill’, an hour long instruction on how to engage with performance art. Asking us to spend 10 minutes drinking a tiny glass of water and 5 minutes making direct eye contact with the person next to us, these simple exercises were intended to induct us into the meditative, contemplative and committed approach needed to truly understand the performances that we were about to witness.

After the induction we were given freedom to navigate The Whitworth’s expansive galleries and enjoy the work of 14 artists. Being impatient I visited all of the rooms in around ten minutes, relishing the sense of discovery that arose out of encountering a new live performer in every empty room. I lay down next to Jamie Isenstein and her pile of sheep skin and animal rugs and was charmed by Eunhye Hwang’s engaging communications with members of her audience using only the movements of her body and the static from a badly tuned radio. Following the call of a heavy pounding that resonated from the lower floor of the building, I headed finally to Nico Vascellari’s performance at the end of a long stairwell. Gradually turning a rock into powder by hitting it with a piece of metal, Vascellari created a roar that was carried up through the height of the building by the dynamics of the space and a vibration that shook my internal organs so much that I felt physically connected to the performative act.

Yet this was an uncomfortable and demanding experience and I didn’t stay long, preferring to hang out next to the long tables that had been laid out with refreshments on one of the upper floors. The whole production ran on until 11pm, but by 9.30pm I have to confess that I had run out of steam and I left with a new awareness of how little my durational commitment had actually impacted on my engagement with each of the pieces. Marina Abramović proposal for this production, while admirable, is perhaps a little anachronistic in terms of the expectation that it places on the viewer. While the vanguard of 1960’s and 1970’s performance art often depended on duration to express its political stance in opposition to a developing culture of mass media distraction, performance in the present often successfully exists as a hybrid art form that incorporates a whole spectrum of technologies, contexts and approaches.

This was an interesting commission for an exciting festival, but perhaps not the first point of reference for the lowdown on what is cutting edge about contemporary performance!

Crome Hoof and Marcus Coates

I made a special trip to London for this because projects that put visual artists on stage always fascinate me. (See also II Tempo del Postino as part of Manchester International Festival for an even more esoteric helping of artists in the theatre).

Marcus Coates work is often presented in galleries and I wondered how it’s meaning might shift within the  context of a stage and a crowd of several hundred Friday night gig goers.

A performer by nature, Coates had no problem winning over the crowd, who after a period of initial confusion seemed willing to loose themselves in his ecstatic performance. Wearing a giant horse head and sliver suit, Coates manifested the animalistic behavior that is very familiar from earlier works, ramped up to fever pitch!

A project commissioned by Nomad the ritual was a response to the current redevelopment of Elephant and Castle and a bid to exorcise the area and provide a cultural platform for regeneration. In an interview for spoonfed.co.uk, Nomad’s Michael Smythe emphasizes their bid to interact with the community stating that ‘we also lived rough on the Heygate Estate, we slept rough in the derelict areas.’

In 2004 Coates made work in response to a similar issue when he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the  living rooms of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. Yet as I examined the crowd of gig goers from my spot on the VIP balcony, I could not help but feel that this was a unique event for a crowd of art elite, rather than an attempt to create a lasting connection to Elephant and Caste and its inhabitants.

Taken at face value however, this was a brilliant event. The Cornet theatre provided a spectacular back drop to a brave piece of artistic programming and a mesmerizing performance. I can’t wait for Nomad’s next commission!

Superflex Flooded McDonalds

My first encounter with Superflex was during a period of research for an undergraduate essay titled Can Art Change the World? This was my first experience of socially engaged art practice and as such, it planted the seeds of an ongoing fascination with socio-political art production.

While there are a multitude of artists projects in existence that aspire to instigate social transition, Superflex appeared uniquely successful with their invention of a series of ‘tools’ to empower users to alleviate problems in their community or independently influence their environmental context. See projects such as Supergas

I was immediately curious then, when I heard about Flooded McDonalds, a Superflex project that employed cinematic language to communicate its social message and marked a significant departure from earlier work. Set in a specially constructed facsimile of an early nineties McDonalds, the film shows water seeping into the set from an unseen source, filling the space, lifting and displacing empty food packaging and scraps of hamburger and eventually upending a sinister Ronald McDonald statue. Occasionally plunging underwater, the camera works cinematically to build tension, with whirling sub waterline sound effects creating unease and a sense of inevitable disaster. This is a film not only about subverting a global corporate institution, but also about the inevitability of climate change and society’s increasing powerlessness against the forces of nature, that are likely to destroy our homes and industries as we continue to consume at an unsustainable rate.

Yet while Suplerflex’s earlier projects also heeded this very serious warning, they also proposed solutions, a quality that is undoubtedly missing from Flooded McDonalds. The cinematic prowess and artful production of this film induces an effecting message, but with in an era where our media is saturated by warnings of imminent disaster caused by climatic change (see al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth etc), I may need some extra convincing that the energy consumed during the production and presentation of this work in the gallery hasn’t done more to exacerbate rather than alleviate impending environmental disaster. While I find both flooded McDonalds and Burning Car to be beautiful and powerful pieces of imagery, I can’t help but look forward to a return to Superflex’s engaged and practical approach.

This blog is here to help me document things that excite me (artistically, that is). I have always loved writing, but have recently become rather cagey and precious about going public with the fruits of my labor (its a dyslexia thing). So this is my outlet….. hope you enjoy it!