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Showing posts with label sadie edginton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sadie edginton. 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
Monday, February 3, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
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Performance art is often a bit of a mixed bag. Fortunately, my bullshit benchmark is set pretty high, and I usually more or less like most things I see, if only because I appreciate that it takes a certain amount of guts to put yourself in front of an audience. But just 'liking' something isn't why I attend these things: occasionally you get a dizzingly great artist who knocks my socks off (perhaps literally!). Conversely you also encounter the crushing lows - egotists with self-serving, poorly thought out performances that leave you praying for a gas main to randomly explode, saving us from our misery.
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| Chris Woltman |
Things at Lab 451 don't start particularly promisingly. My least favourite musical sight in the world is a lone, youngish guy perched on a stool clutching an acoustic guitar. Seeing this makes my heart drop quicker than even seeing a pair of bagpipes sitting just off-stage. Before even one note is played a visual warning is blaring out that we're about to have to deal with someone plucking their way through awful aching heart poetry - most likely with their eyes closed and a gormless expression on their face. Chris Woltman not only provides this, but he provides it badly: the singing off key, his lyrics contrived and his guitar playing objectively pretty crappy. There's a suspicion at these sorts of things that the crapness might be on purpose - maybe this is a commentary on emotional honesty or something? Then again, whether it's crap on purpose or crap by mistake, ultimately it's still crap. The best we can hope for is that this was either Woltman's first time performing or that he's a beginner on the guitar.
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| Ivor Lloyd & Jake Harrison |
Thankfully the next performer took things up more than a few notches with a spot of morris dancing. Given my innate suspicion of morris dancers, that's a sentence I never thought I'd write. When I saw Ivor Lloyd and Jake Harrison emerge with bells attached to their knees and an accordion in tow my heart sank a little bit more, but I very quickly warmed to them. Standing atop a blue stool Ivor delivered a neatly clipped and vaguely Pythonesque treatise on "The Influence of West Northumbrian Morris Dancing in Popular Culture" interspersed with snippets of dancing. Two things made this unlikely setup work; firstly was that both Ivor and Jake are actually damn good at what they do; the sound of the accordion nicely evocative of old-fashioned entertainment and the dancing planned and executed smoothly. Any bozo can flail their arms wildly in the air, but there was control and method to this flailing - adding a nice sense of ritual to the piece.
Continuing the musical theme was Joanna Houghton playing her oboe. I know bugger all about oboing and oboists but I liked what I heard - a nicely experimental piece of music that eked every possible sound from the instrument. Even within the depths of my oboe ignorance I still appreciate virtuosity, and I think the crowd did too, standing hypnotised in rapt silence until she'd finished.
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| Geraldine Gallavardin |
I'd last seen Geraldine Gallavardin at 55 Gracechurch Street in October where she got into my good books right away by doing a great performance that concluded with her giving me a load of potatoes (which I later ate for dinner). No potatoes this time, but the performance was no worse for it. Gallavardin stalks the space enveloped in an intense, almost suffocating aura of theatricality. She moves like there's high voltage cables running through muscles, throwing herself against the walls and snarling at the audience rather intimidatingly. This (slightly scary) stage persona is softened a little by the way she asks us to contribute to her piece by flapping paper with pictures of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground's first album and other things on them, or asking us to talk to each other through part of her performance. In all honesty I'm not quite sure what she was getting at, but she radiates a supreme confidence that papers over any cracks - even if I didn't get what it meant, at least I felt that there was something to get.
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| Sitron Panapoulos |
We were on a nice little roll by this point, and not even the appearance of another a stool-squatting acoustic guitarist could dampen my mood. Fortunately he was only the backing guitar for Sitron Panapoulos, who sang wonderfully evocative songs about the myriad pleasures of life in London. The closest I've ever come to any form of patriotism is to feel vaguely proud of this city, so it's a subject close to my heart. With a lilting, clear-voiced passion he spun lyrical tales of a London where you can be, see and achieve anything. My favourite was a romanticised song about Whitechapel, replete with lovely rolling lyrics and soaring choruses. I got pleasant little tingles up and down my spine it was so good.
After that blissful reverie it was a bit of a shock to be plunged straight into the dark heart of emotional fascism. Calum F Kerr (who I'd previously seen as part of the excellent Lonesome Cowboys from Hell), performed 5x451, taking satirical aim at selfie culture and wider issues of narcissism. Dressed in all black with 'NARC' written on the front of his jumpsuit he gave us an overbearing, authoritarian lecture from a quickly sketched yet well thought out dystopian future where creating images of yourself is illegal. This segued into a miniature detective story where he explored five 'partial' selfies that just showed an ear and some background. The highlight was when he instructed us to take out our own phones and take a selfie of our own ears and whatever's behind us, nicely drawing us into his world.
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| Live on a Stick |
Next up was Sadie Edginton and Leonora Aumstrup with Live on a Stick. Cards on the table, I know Sadie pretty well so my objectivity is a little shaky on this one. Having said that I've always had a soft spot for performances where I get to eat the art. Sadie and Leonora draped the gallery in home-made breadsticks, hanging them from wires and placing them atop people's shoulders and heads. There was a pleasing analogue chaos to the breadsticks, reminding me of microscopic views of chromosomes or bacteria writhing around in a petri dish. After the gallery was pretty much saturated with breadsticks, the two delivered the coup de grâce: plastic cups of home-made hummus. I've interpreted most of Sadie's performances as physically realising the invisible bonds that tie a crowd together; (age, class, friendship etc) and this piece felt like a logical evolution of that, bringing us together in that most basic of human acts - snacking.
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| Tex Royale |
I said earlier that I've got a pretty high tolerance for bullshit. Not high enough apparently, as the next artist, Tex Royale, wasn't only the most pretentious git I've had the misfortune to encounter in a very long time, but one of the most boring. Things actually looked promising to start, he was dressed in a pretty cool outfit - kind of a cyber-dayglo version of Sun Wukong from Journey to the West. Outfit aside he didn't exactly endear himself to the crowd even before his performance: ordering Sitron Panapoulos to sweep up bits of breadcrumb from the floor as if he was the damn janitor.
But this was nothing compared to what we were about to be subjected to: namely the aimless ramblings of someone with their head jammed right up their arse. Sitting on a mat with bleepy bloopy synths behind him, Royale smugly delivered a huge turd of a word salad. Dropping meaningless buzzwords like "sunconscious" and wittering on about alchemy, Philip K. Dick and Sun Ra he sounded disarmingly like Stewart Pearson from The Thick of It - mangling together ideas he obviously doesn't understand. And it went on for an hour. A fucking hour. I've seen some crap performances in my time, but this takes the biscuit. Usually I feel bad about criticising artists - after all at least they're doing something creative - but not this time. This was an hour of pure, undiluted shite - like being haunted by the ghost of Nathan Barley.
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| Oberon White |
With the hell of Royale still ringing in my ears and a warm pub beckoning just down the road I really hoped that the final performance of the night was worth hanging around for. Mercifully it was. Oberon White more than lived up to both halves of his name, dressed in a white jumpsuit with white face paint and acting like some ethereal vaguely supernatural being. He pulled tape from his mouth and then sang opera in German, his bass voice reverberating off the walls, shocking the audience into hypnotised, like cavemen frozen before a tiger's roar. He filled the space brilliantly, capturing everyone's attention with a combination of singing skill, precise movement - basically just being interesting as hell. The best compliment I can possibly give White is that it was well worth sitting through the last hour of rubbish to get to his performance.
So a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a successful night. The Camden Image Gallery is friendly and welcoming - the people running it open and friendly and obviously eager to put on an interesting programme for the evening. Most of the artists performing were sincere, intelligent and achieved their goals - though frankly if I never have to encounter Tex Royale ever again I'll consider myself blessed.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Friday, October 25, 2013
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There comes a time when galleries begin to feel all a bit samey. Hard wood floors, plate glass window, blindingly white walls are getting kind of dull. Working within something designated as an 'art' space can have a mild numbing effect on both artists and audience. So when I walked into 55 Gracechurch Street, an office building plumb in the centre of the City of London, I felt a rare tingling of novelty. This was something new!
The art I like tends to hang out to somewhat grimy post-industrial areas, something that's as much to do with the monoculture as it is with the generally precarious financial situation of young artists. It's striking then, to stride into an office space in the beating heart of the City of London and find it invaded by the bright young avant garde. This is the belly of the beast, and we are an arty little tapeworm setting up home in the gut of a gigantic, rapacious financial monster. The attendants and participants stand in stark contrast to the besuited and neatly coiffed City traders that wandered past, gawping on with a condescending bemusement like a faint echo of the reaction to the Occupy camps.
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| Clench 2 - Neela Basu |
A golden thread of cheeky playfulness runs through almost all the work on display. There's the cheeky Clench 2 by Neela Basu, a pile of pink whoopee cushions primed and ready to emit an operatic 'bronx cheer'. Louise Ashcroft's Avatar mocks health and safety practice, precariously perched on a stepladder balanced upon a shopping trolley, the legs disappearing into a ceiling cavity. Steve Hines' Pole repurposes a supporting pillar into an makeshift maypole, the ribbons replaced by stripy hazard tape. Modern art has an often well-deserved reputation for disappearing up its own arse, but the work here avoids the trap by being consciously absurd and self-deprecating. And so, as the art plays the clown the corporate environment finds itself forced into the role of unwilling straight man.
The performances extend this lighthearted, comedic atmosphere. The first I saw was Marcus Orlandi's Two Reeler. With a television in front of him and two speakers on a table, he mimes various actions with the speakers providing the appropriate sound effects. So for example, he picks up a speaker and shakes it a spraycan rattle plays, when he saws a table with the flat edge of the speaker, it makes sawing noises followed by a wooden bonk as the invisible piece hits the floor. Throughout these actions he wears a constant Buster Keatonish deadpan expression. Orlandi's stated inspiration is old black and white comedies, here he perfectly captures the low-tech creativity you see in Georges Méliès experimental shorts from the 1900s, or perhaps the modern work of Michel Gondry.
Straight afterwards is Hannah Catherine Jones' Punperforming and Sex Cymbals. Dressed like a refugee from Chicago, Hannah sits on a red chair, two cymbals clamped to her knees and her legs spread. She begins to clatter them together, snapping her thighs open and closed like a Venus Fly Try. After a few minutes of this, she simply says "sex cymbal". Ah, the joy of puns. After this she picks up the Collins Dictionary of Puns and begins to read a ridiculously comprehensive list of pun-based puns. After 7 minutes of puns I got a bit bored, but perhaps the monotony was the point.
Scattered over the floor in the centre of the room were a load of potatoes and black and white pictures. This was the setting for Geraldine Gallavardin's L'origine du monde. Placing an electric guitar on the floor, she threw a load of butter knives down and invited us to carve up a spud and participate in a chaotic soundscape. Never one to be left out I grabbed a knife and began hacking at a potato. Soon my hands were covered in starchy viscera, quickly drying in cool white clumps on my palms. I'd carved the potato into a ridged, spiky thing and began wailing on the fret board of the guitar with it. It's good fun making a racket at the best of times. At the end of the piece the artist gave me a rolled up cornetto of potatoes which I later cooked and ate with some baked beans.
Though Gallavardin's performance was participatory most people seemed content to watch. The next, Sadie Edginton's I want you to, dragged people in whether they wanted to participate or not. Taking a huge roll of paper she walked around the gallery, looping it in a long line around the crowd. This was a sizeable roll of paper, so even though we were in a big room she corralled just about everyone. The art community is notoriously incestuous, everyone here connected to each by two degrees of separation or less, and Sadie's paper trail literalises this connection. Once the whole thing is stretched out, she asks us to twirl on the spot, winding the paper around us like the reels in an old school projector. It's a neat way of emphasising community, people being drawn into conversation with each other as the paper wound them closer together.
One of the more visually striking performances was Cradeaux Alexander's Untitled. With a rubber pig mask on, the artist moved around some apparently random props; a stuffed rabbit; a high-heeled shoe; a pink flamingo; and a banana, solemnly intoning the name of each through a distorted voicebox. The whole thing was rather sinister, reaching a peak when he opened a pet carrier to reveal a very much alive rabbit. A chorus of "aahhhs" echoed through the crowd, tinged with a faint fear that this rabbit might soon be sacrificed in the name of art. As Alexander began to intone the word "death" over and over I feared for the future of the bunny. It's easy in retrospect to see that the rabbit was quite safe, but the leering pig mask gave off an undeniably psychotic serial killer kind of vibe.
Unperforming was a very cool night, with much more on show than what I've described. There was an embarrassment of riches here, my other favourites being Charlotte Hailey Watts' frantic drawing and subsequent collapse; the playing of the brilliant short Object v Subject by Samantha Thole and Mette Sterr; the time I spent staring until my eyes burned at an unflinching Gerald Curtis in Broken Neck Blues 2; and especially the very bad karaoke I performed to a David Cameron speech. It struck me while watching that this is probably the most interesting thing that's ever happened in this space. I wish the workers who doubtless toiled their souls away piece by piece could get to see the ways in which even this unfriendly, standoffish space can be filled with a loving, dynamic creativity.
I'm not sure how something like this came about, I'd imagine most office owners in the City of London would laugh in your face if you asked to use their space for a bizarro art show. Credit has to go to whoever allowed this to happen, they're responsible not only for a uniquely subversive experience but for a really fun one.
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| Avatar - Louise Ashcroft |
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| Two Reeler - Marcus Orlandi |
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| Sex Cymbal - Hannah Catherine Jones |
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| L'origine du monde - Geraldine Gallavardin |
Though Gallavardin's performance was participatory most people seemed content to watch. The next, Sadie Edginton's I want you to, dragged people in whether they wanted to participate or not. Taking a huge roll of paper she walked around the gallery, looping it in a long line around the crowd. This was a sizeable roll of paper, so even though we were in a big room she corralled just about everyone. The art community is notoriously incestuous, everyone here connected to each by two degrees of separation or less, and Sadie's paper trail literalises this connection. Once the whole thing is stretched out, she asks us to twirl on the spot, winding the paper around us like the reels in an old school projector. It's a neat way of emphasising community, people being drawn into conversation with each other as the paper wound them closer together.
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| I want you to - Sadie Edginton |
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| Untitled - Cradeaux Alexander |
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| Pole - Steve Hines |
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