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Showing posts with label jasmine lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jasmine lee. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Sunday, April 12, 2015
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As I watched a man beat himself over the head with a cymbal, I wondered just what the hell I'm doing here. Most people are probably tucked up on their sofas watching Masterchef or something, while I'm stood in the back room of a pub watching listening to a cacophonous atonal din punctuated by minor acts of mutilation. This, combined with beetle-ish paper scluttings, biorhythmic koto projects, lectures on injection moulding and freakshow prawn-stars (among many other things) comprises Cerebellum, a live art project that straddles London and Hastings.
Packed behind the red curtain of The Stag's Head was an tonne of fascinating art, not just the performances, but self contained exhibits and a plethora of displayed art on the walls. With this much on I can't cover everything - so here's my favourites.
Taking the prize for most cryptic use of materials was Sadie Edginton with room-spanning creative performance. Working with plastic wrap, a roll of paper, charcoal, water and a Styrofoam buoy her dog found on the beach, she explored the idea of 'artist-as-implement'. Dividing the crowd in two she rolled plastic wrap down the middle of the room and sprinkled water on top. Then she affixed a sheet of paper to her back and scuttled across the room, the white paper looking like an insectoid carapace as it unfolded behind her. Following that she worked back and forth, chipping charcoal on the floor, gradually creating a series of smudged black lines across the paper.
It reminded me of a performance of hers that I participated in about a year ago - I was wrapped up in paper and rolling around back and forth on the floor, repetition gradually destroying raw materials. A similar process happened here; the paper becoming torn and ripped, the charcoal ground into dust - even the artist herself getting grimy. I also enjoyed the idea of visually revealing a person's impact on their environment, grooves and erosion that could take years to be revealed happening in the space of a couple of minutes.
Next up was Hysteresis, who are event organiser Charlotte CHW and Jason Williams. The performance began with Charlotte emerging from a paper chrysalis while singing a creepily off-key cover of Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown. As weird as that was, it was nothing compared to what was to come. Taking to the stage, the two began viciously assaulting a variety of instruments and objects. An electric guitar got the worst treatment, emitting steady shrieks of pain as it was brutalised every which way by first Charlotte, and then Jason.
Things got increasingly more demented from then on. A gigantic lump of clay thudded rhythmically into the stage, knobs were twiddled and boxes were beaten. Some kind of gigantic home-made stringed instrument was produced from backstage and first played, then thwomped onto the stage in a clatter of bolts. It was at this point that heads began poking through the curtain, the pub locals wondering what the fuck was making such a din. This was capped off with Charlotte stumbling off stage, a hypnotic daze in her eyes. Jason had some part of a lamp attached to him and was beating his head with a cymbal - leaving a solitary trickle of blood down his face.
Despite all the mayhem, I found this performance quite relaxing. As with Sadie's performance, creation/destruction neatly dovetails into one another. Even as the objects on stage (and the performers) undergo violent transformation, fresh sounds and motions poke through like green shoots. It's also a pleasantly honest performance, both performers quickly transitioning into a reflexive, instinctive processes that're completely ego free. It got a deservedly impressed round of applause.
My favourite of the night was Eleanor Fogg's facial projection performance. Sat in front of a three panelled makeup mirror, she placed a miniature projector on the table and invited the audience onto the stage. To the sounds of what (I'm told was) a warped, time-shifted version of No Doubt's Don't Speak, we shuffled around, looking at the illuminated face in the mirror.
Then her features melted, shifted and rearranged before our eyes. It was an astonishingly effective and hallucinogenic performance: eyebrows becoming bushy, lips plumping to engorged redness, eyes sprouting from the side of her head, a beard morphing out of her cheeks. Using a projector in this fashion is a deceptively simple idea - a concept that must have been done before. But to see it done with such precision and artistry blew my mind.
At the core of the piece is an exploration of identity and gender in the digital age. As we blankly stare into our 'black mirror' screens we can become whoever we want - sultry vixen, bearded philosopher, old man, immature child, violent psychopath - the list of possible personae limited only to our imaginations. Here we see this process visualised; versions of the artist swimming in fluid motion across her face. Beautiful, moving and so damn good.
Those three were my favourites, though it'd be remiss of me not to mention Pulses, Michelle Lewis-King and Sumie Kent's collaboration. After taking pulse readings from six members of the audience (including myself) they were interpreted as beautifully improvised music by Kent. Watching someone so skilful at work is pleasure enough for me, the intense concentration and creative skill a pleasure to watch in a pub backroom.
Similarly enjoyable was Jasmine Lee's prawn performance.This cocktail of maternal/cannibalistic love is precisely as enjoyable as when I saw it at What the Fuck Is Love?" a month or so ago. Samuel Hailey-Watts also gave a masterfully dull slide-based lecture on injection moulding, achieving an almost transcendental level of perfect boredom.
By the time the night was up I knew exactly why I come to nights like this; because they're cool as all hell. Who on earth would want to be slumped over a ready meal, hoovering up crap TV when they could be out watching awesome people do awesome things? Boring people - that's who. And they were in mercifully short supply at Cerebellum.
Cerebellum continues in Hastings with:
12th April Exhibition continues 11am-5pm with an artist’s roundtable at 2pm
Friday, February 27, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
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Well, it's a combination of neurotransmitters, sex hormones and neuropeptides. When you spot an appropriate mate your subconscious zings, activating dopamine pathways in the brain. Vasopressin saturayes the ventral pallidum, as does oxytocin in the nucleus accembens. Meanwhile the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus mediates your attachment behaviour, making you go all gooey eyed as you lock eyes over a crowded dancefloor. This, in combination with a spritz of testosterone and estrogen (and trace amines phenethylamine and tyramine) powers lust. That giddy fluttering in the heart? A neat cocktail of norepinephrine and serotonin, also contributing to your restless and decreased appetite.
Well, that's one way of looking at it anyway. Cushion (pronounced K'Shon) Collective have a few others. Love is the pining of an endangered albatross driven to online dating. Love is the maternal cannibalism of one woman and her prawnchild. Love is the masochistic self-hypnosis of a moth caressing a flame. Et cetera.
Cushion Collective are; Sam Reynolds, Fauve Alice, Jasmine Lee, Scarlett Lassoff, Gerald Curtis, Felix Briant, Hannah Davis, Sophie Wakefield and Jessica McKerlie. I'm familiar with nearly all of these performers, am friends with a couple and have worked closely with at two of them. At last year's Hackney WickED Festival they packed out The Yard Theatre, putting on a show that was by all accounts pretty wonderful. I wish I'd made it, but at the time I was coated in raw egg and thus friend to no-one.
Last night, in the studio theatre of the Camden Roundhouse, the Collective struck again. Using the dual misery/cuteness of Valentine's Day as a kicking off point, the artists explorrf love through cabaret, performance, comedy and music. Our guide was Sam Reynolds, who took the stage to the trashy plastic pop beat of #Selfie. Clad in denim hot pants he cavorted around the stage lasciviously rubbing his selfie stick. It's crude, but as a distillation of 21st century identity masturbation, thrusting a telescopic cock substitute at the audience while taking photos of yourself is hard to beat.
With that we're off, each performer getting two or three quick segments within the show. There weren't any duds, but there were a few performers that stood out for me, memorable moments that stick to the mind like a chewing gum chud on the bottom of a bus seat.
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| From L-R Sophie Wakefield, Jasmine Lee, Gerald Curtis, Felix Briant, Fauve Alice, Sam Reynolds, Scarlett Lassoff, Hannah Davis |
This was a night peppered with fun costumes, twisted mermaids and feather-topped moths. Both were ace (the moth costume in particular), but the one that lodges firmest is Sophie Wakefield's albatross act. The conceit is that the problems of nature's loneliest bird can be solved with online dating. Taking the form of a cheesy infomercial, Wakefield (beaked, feathered and melancholy) mimed loneliness, brief happiness and breakup. It was goofy but unexpectedly touching, the naturally bird-like body language of the artist used to maximum effect.
Performances like this go a long way towards dispelling tired old performance art clichés. Rightly or wrongly, the general perception of performance artists is of pretentious, obscurantist and painfully self-serious metropolitan hipsters. I know bunch of people who fit this description, eagerly seizing any opportunity to vanish up their own arse (which would be a fairly typical performance). With that in mind it's refreshing to see this pomposity pricked by Scarlett Lassoff, with her pitch perfect piss-take of Marina Abramovic.
Lassoff as Abramovic takes us through her marriage 'technique'. Selecting two members of the audience she leads them through satires of famous performances. Wigs are bound together, eye contact is forced and the 'Great Wall of China' meeting is recreated in slow motion. Throughout we're beset by Abramovic-a-like buzzwords, stentorian commands and that holier-than-thou stare as if she's got personal enlightenment solidly locked down. Now, I kinda like Abramovic's work, but boy oh boy does she prove to be a ripe target for a takedown.
My favourite performance of the night was to come almost at the end. Jasmine Lee's strange, intense, scary piece appeared to take inspiration from the surreal end of cinema and photography. Emerging with a piece of paper with a grass design printed upon it, she proceeded to gradually strip back herself. Running fingers through her hair she pulled ragged chunks out and threw them onto the floor, before inviting me to reach up and remove a shiny chemical face peel. The transparent, plasticky surface distorted her face for a moment, stretching it outwards before springing back to recognition.
Then, as she beckoned to the ceiling we noticed a large pink model prawn dangling from a rope. As Lee leapt up to snatch at it, the prawn danced from her fingers. Eventually she retrieved it, cradling it like a mother and baby. It was almost cute, almost. Then she ripped out its wide, passion-fruit eyes and bit into them, crushing seed and pulp around her face.
I have no idea what the hell this meant, but I deeply dug the whole Lynchian Eraserhead mutant baby murder vibe, the creepiness of the giant prawn imagery combining with Lee's natural gravitas to create something next to impossible to pin down. Everything at What the F*ck Is Love was funny, some were funny and touching, but only Jasmine's was funny and touching and magnetic - sucking me in perfect creepy confident vibes.
So a good night. To appreciate performance art it's usually best to remember the maxim that the artist is under no obligation to entertain the audience. Having an enjoyable time during a performance is strictly optional, true success lying in meaning, aesthetic, form and a thousand other intangible factors. But What the F*ck Is Love was all those as well as being hugely entertaining, which made it a super enjoyable night that everyone involved should be pleased with.
What the F*ck Is Love featured several people I know well. Ticket bought by me.
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