Vanessa Bartlett: Artist & Curator

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.

I have been keen to start my blog for a while now and have been writing a load of stuff speculatively with a view to adding it later. This means that my next few posts will be retrospective and probably at odds with the whole ‘live’ ethos of blogging! Ooops.

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!