Inbetween Time 2010 |
Festival of Live art and Intrigue: 1 - 5 Dec 2010 |
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<p>The Democratic Set Inbetween Time Festival from Back to Back Theatre on Vimeo.</p>
Back to Back Theatre's wonderful film featuring the lovely people of Bristol...
Realtime, Australia's leading arts magazine came along to review Inbetween Time Festival 2010, here's a selection of reviews by their correspondent Osunwunmi:
Zoran Todorovic: Warmth
Sarah Jane Norman: Take This, For it is My Body
THERE’S A BIT IN BARBARELLA WHERE A SPRAWL OF STONED WOMEN SURROUND A LIQUOR-FILLED GLASS GLOBE THAT HAS A YOUNG MAN SWIMMING AROUND INSIDE OF IT. HE LOOKS A LITTLE BIT HARASSED. THE WOMEN SUCK ON HOOKAHS ISSUING FROM THE GLOBE. “WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?” BARBARELLA ASKS, INNOCENT AS EVER. “ESSENCE OF MAN,” COMES THE REPLY.
I walked into the room and made a beeline for the rectangular piles of felt that looked like folded blankets. Heaped on pallets they extended upwards to just the right height for me to finger them, and to get my nose down in there. They smelt clean. Matted fibres, mostly bear-colour. Some lighter strands, some white.
I’ve noticed elsewhere that European hair-colour averages out to brown, even in Scandanavia. So the blankets default to a brindled dark mass. Mounted on the gallery wall, monochrome videos on fast-forward sum up the process of making at length. The hair is cut at the barber's, mostly into a far-from-pretty no-frills back-and-sides. So seldom does the camera peer over the subjects’ shoulder to spy at a face in the mirror that when it happens, it comes as a shock. The backs of so many heads presenting! It’s like forming an impression of personality from the look of a person’s arse. Not that that can’t be done.
Blunt, defended scrubby heads. Utilitarian, no-nonsense settings. A couple of women are fleetingly glimpsed amongst those who do the barbering. For the rest it’s all men. In the video the shorn hair is gathered up, emptied on to tables and sorted by hand. Tissues and other detritus are picked out of it. The clumps of hair are teased and dried out in heaps on the floor and then shredded (a little) and carded in big industrial rollers, washed and felted in the steel machines. Blokes in heavy boots and overalls deployed in utilitarian structures of concrete and steel wield brooms and black bin liners under a fluorescent flicker. All the dander and the smell, the shed organic dirt that the hair must have collected is sifted out, washed off, got rid of. The blankets have been passed through an industrial process, they have been standardised and homogenised and, to a degree, purified, all obtrusively particular matter has been removed. Yet the gallery is somehow humming with essence of Bloke: hardy, gruff, obtuse, stoic.
There is no smell beyond the suggestion of a smidgeon of grease—I daresay human grease smells awful to other mammals but not to us. Just as well—I’m asthmatic, me, and have to be careful with fibres. These fibres are contained. Then I catch myself wondering what kind of garment one could make from this material, that one could bear to wear. A heavy skirt perhaps. I can picture being wrapped in this dense prickly insulating shield. For an hour or two perhaps it would not be insufferable. Perhaps.
I know that there is an ideology that determines the course of this work. I know there is a brooding, a nationalism and an exclusivity. But the de-naturing of this material, this organic remnant, renders it general. What remains is the implicit presence of hundreds and hundreds of men, their tangible residue rendered down and processed, ranked and arrayed, stacked on its pallet, ordered by the machine. The installation simulates a stack of commodities ready for some Spartan, barrack-like environment: a trading post, a quartermaster's store.
The artist further makes use of the context of the gallery to hammer home his point about commodification: the blankets are for sale in the Arnolfini shop. Paradoxically the narrative and ideology of the work is pervaded by a seductive tenderness, the ‘warmth’ of the blankets, and by a sense of brotherhood, of community. The iconographic referencing of the major European trauma of the 20th Century, the Holocaust, I needed to have pointed out to me before I saw it, and it still jars.
“This work deals with the generations of ‘half-blood’ Aboriginal children, including the artist’s own mother, who were affected by the government’s regime of ‘assimilation’.” Inbetween Time Festival program.
There’s a woman in an old satin slip welcoming me into the Dark Studio. It’s the sort of thing you wear when you’re slopping about the house getting on with something that’s needed to be done for a while. A garment that used to be glamorous and is now comfortable—that you feel self-indulgent in however shabby it gets. She has bare feet. There is a wonderful smell of bread baking.
Before I came in here I had to sign a disclaimer: “Please be advised that the ingredients include the blood of the artist. Please understand that you are not obliged to eat or accept this offering. If you choose to do so this will be entirely at your own risk.”
It’s like a dare, isn’t it?
She greets me. We are on either side of a long table. There’s a small industrial oven behind us in the corner. There’s another table parallel to this one, a couple of floury baking trays on it, three or so loaves proving under a cloth. To the side against the wall is a table set for one with fine linen, plain crockery, a pat of butter and a butter knife and a napkin-covered basket. There’s an area on the floor with towels, a jug and a bucket of water, and there are black bags of supplies against another wall. It’s like a cottage production line, some kind of back-country industry the farmer’s wife fits in with her other duties. Stylistically there’s something about the combination of the efficient and the genteel that reminds me of the 50s.
There’s a large mixing bowl on the table, a sieve, small bowls of ingredients, a plate covered by another napkin, all different shades of white. The woman sieves the flour into the bowl and adds two desert-spoons of sugar. In answer to my question she names the ingredients: "this is baking soda," "this is buttermilk." She lifts the napkin to reveal another dessert spoon. It contains blood, scarlet, with a darker line of clotting sunk to the bottom. So, the colours, glowing under the lights, are: white and cream ingredients, solid old-fashioned silverware, white crockery, white melamine tabletop, white linen, the woman creamy human in her creamy slip, one splash of red in the matt black surroundings of the Dark Studio.
Sarah Jane Norman pours the blood into the buttermilk and stirs. That turns it a dense pink, like Angel Delight. She pours this into the flour and mixes. The pink persists as the mixture starts clumping, darker material from the clot streaking through the dough. Amazing that such a small amount of blood has such a strong effect. She turns out the dough, kneading it, shaping it, slashing a cross into the top. She takes it to the next table to sit and prove with the other loaves (which show that definite tinge of pink as if they were special party bread). She goes to wash her hands in the bucket over by the towels.
The oven pings—the loaf that was put there before I entered the room is ready. Norman places it to cool by the proving loaves.
She invites me to sit at the place laid for one. Lifting the napkin from the basket she uncovers a rough, warm loaf, no longer pink. She cuts me a good slice, making eye contact all the time. It’s crusty, slightly bitter—that could be the baking soda—a bit heavy. I help myself to butter. If I’d tried to eat a whole slice we’d have been there for ages.
Succinct, earthy, confrontational, full of confidence, giving. Personal, not industrial, locating the political in the heart of family and domestic life, where it can do the most damage. About survival, not victimhood. Two very contrasting approaches to discourse about ethnicity and the threat of genocide.
Realtime, Australia's leading arts magazine came along to review Inbetween Time Festival 2010, here's a selection of reviews by their correspondent Osunwunmi:
Hancock & Kelly Live: Iconographia
Teresa Margolles: 37 Cuerpos
Teresa Margolles: Aire
It was here that Richard Hancock lay on a plinth, at the height of a kitchen worktop, spooning a dead pig. The pig was already in rigor with his legs stretched out, a slight twist cocking his body askew. The man and the pig were the same colour.
Traci Kelly stalked round him purposefully. She was dressed in a black ball gown, a black pillbox hat with a small veil over her eyes, black gloves. Her tools were a block of gold leaf, a folded card to tweezer up each leaf, and a large soft brush, like a make-up brush, to fix and burnish. She would pick up a square of gold leaf delicately, angling it in the breeze of its own movement to minimise creasing and doubling, lay it on one of the bodies and smooth it down with the brush.
By the time I got there, one hour in, the feet and hindquarters of both bodies were covered, and Kelly was moving to the front of the hybrid to pay attention to hips and ribs. Music played: Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. Shreds of gold leaf escaped from the block, from under the brush, from the bodies, fluttering to the floor round the plinth or sticking to the black gloves and having to be scraped off. Where gold leaf sealed the gap between bodies it kept breaking down and having to be replaced. I kept wanting the process of gilding to be perfect. It stubbornly continued to be messy, very far from perfect.
Hancock held the pig tenderly, one hand resting on its chest between its front trotters. Its legs lay between his and he rested one knee insecurely on its narrow hip. It was a young pig, and thus about one third the man's size. At all times the combination of genuine gold and glitter, of bourgeois formality (the hat, the gloves, the heels), of the representation of high culture, Purcell, to guarantee of the seriousness of the occasion, threatened to topple over into vulgarity. Which indeed is the case at all our most solemn social rituals, weddings and funerals, where the popular, the profane and the high-minded collide.
The man was breathing, the pig was stiff. Both were sinewy and heavily greased with Vaseline. The gold around their nether regions caught the light in a more sparkly, less dense way than did their glowing naked orange-tan-pink skins. The pig had a bruise on its forward ham. The man did not. The man trembled with the cold, or the strain of holding the pose, or because all warmth was being leached out of him into the block of dead meat he cradled.
I had been told the pig still had the grass of its previous happy existence between its toes; I walked round to scrutinise. The long cut that had gutted it formed a tightly sewn, corded seam up the length of its body. Its tongue protruded between its teeth, curving up towards its snout. Smears of blood had been mostly wiped away, leaving only traces under the layer of vaseline. It was clean. Its eyes were half open—it seemed to be looking up. Hancock lay with his own face directed towards it. He would meet its eyes if he opened his own. Then he did so: they were blue, the same colour as the pig's. There the two were, in affinity.
At this point I surprised myself—for I don’t have that culturally specific Western sympathy for livestock—by feeling sorry for the pig. Then I felt the ways in which Hancock stood for the pig, and the pig for him, and both of them for all of us, tied to a hunk of dead meat and an inevitable end. The realisation was awful. I had to retreat. I went and sat up in the gallery where all that could reach me was the spectacle. I felt like howling.
Although I can recall it to memory it was not a repeatable moment, since it was triggered by physical presence. Occasionally I went down to stand in the same place and feel the same thing, drawn by the intensity of it—we don’t face such raw perception very often. Kelly inexorably and gently covered the intertwined bodies, stroking and burnishing as she obliterated them with splendour. Hancock breathed, and trembled under her touch. The music broke down and destabilised with every repetition, imperceptibly; yet by the end it seemed a distorted, reverberating howling played on a disintegrating instrument. The tension as Kelly moved the gold leaf closer and closer to the two faces was painful, yet when it happened, the end was not so dramatic. She smoothed the last gold square over the diamond-shaped fragment of face that remained of Hancock. Then she took care to remove pieces of golden film from within his nostrils. Pig and man now were covered, grafted together, shiny and perfectly inert. Kelly left the area.
More people had come into the church and become slowly rapt, standing closer to the plinth, drawn towards it, fascinated. The golden object, the glittering remnant, was to remain displayed for another half-hour. But I left, not caring to watch Richard Hancock shiver for that length of time. While Kelly was there, she was responsible for the work. But once she had left, audience complicity came into play to give us all control of the spectacle.
It seems logical to me to compare Iconographia to Teresa Margolles’ work, not least because the spectacular aesthetic in which Iconographia wallows is so at odds with the minimalist aesthetic of Margolles.
In 37 Cuerpos a gallery space is bisected by a thread running from wall to wall. It is a little below waist height. The room has four entrances/exits, a pair on each side of the cord, at right angles to it, and an adjacent pair in one of the walls to which the cord is fixed, opening into a corridor. The lighting is subdued and the gallery’s plainness underlines the clinical air of the installation.
Closer inspection of the thread reveals details. It is composed of many lengths of a waxy, cat gut-like material knotted together. The sections vary in the degree of blemish they have picked up: rust-coloured, grimy-looking stains. The knots are angular, giving the thing a look of organic barbed wire. The program notes explain each length was used to sew up a body after autopsy. A couple of lengths are heavily stained indeed: that person’s end must have been grisly.
Nobody who ventures into this room steps over the thread to get to the adjoining gallery, although it would be easy to do so. Instead they walk down the line to where the two doors open into the corridor; exit from one, take two paces and re-enter from the other. Then they walk up the line again.
In Aire, Margolles’ work in the adjoining gallery, disinfected water collected from the washing of bodies humidifies a room. Those who walk there breathe it in and feel it cooling on their skin. I got to the entrance, hung with a heavy plastic strip door, where I caught a hint of pleasant coolness, as enticing for someone from the tropics as the smell of fresh bread baking. I noticed the industrial humidifier on the floor. I did not go in.
It is the spectators’ responsibility to pay attention, to leave themselves open to engage with the work. That may be all that is required, or they may be challenged by the artist to be complicit in what takes place; or they may be placed in a compromising position without their consent. However, in offering attention, the spectator also claims the freedom to refuse to take part. Once the artist asks for engagement they must also be ready for and accept refusal. Otherwise the quality of the encounter they have arranged is in question (what is real and what is not is always an issue in live work): their request is a sham, an underhand attempt to force a result using the contextual authority of the gallery.
Something more interesting is going on with Margolles, who uses not only the authority of the gallery but the entire machinery of prestige and commodification driving international high culture to draw attention to real lives and deaths in Mexico. As a conscientious spectator I could accept complicity, but I don’t: I am not part of that high culture machinery and I don’t think InBetween Time is either. Nothing could compromise me more in this situation than pretending to be so sophisticated that the idea of touching the paraphernalia of death doesn’t horrify me. A value system is being critiqued here, among other things: my naive reaction acknowledges horror at the base of it.
International Symposium: What Next for The Body
Sat 5 Feb 2011 10.00 – 17.30
Arnolfini, Bristol
As part of the Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Inbetween Time Productions, in collaboration with Arnolfini, will be holding a symposium on Saturday 5th Feb 2011. The symposium will discuss the themes emerging out of the international programme of work and the main curatorial strand of the Festival, What Next for The Body, which aims to explore the conditions and outcomes of the contemporary body breaking down.
From the 1-5 Dec 2010, with the exhibition at Arnolfini continuing until 6th February 2011, the Festival presented over 75 events involving 130 artists from Mexico, Australia, Austria, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, USA and all over the UK in a breakneck programme of live, digital, sound, sculptural, architectural, dance, theatre and guerrilla works across the streets and arts spaces of Bristol.
The symposium will allow delegates and artists time and space to reflect on the work presented during the festival and its wider context. The morning session will place artists together with curators and social researchers to explore the idea of death as a visceral presence in the experience of the living. The afternoon will locate artists and scientists together to reveal the body in flux, as an evolving organism in the face of emerging scientific discovery and medical ethics.
Speakers include; Kira O’Reilly, artist and AHRC creative fellow at Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London; Jennifer Willet, artist and Assistant Producer at the University of Windsor, Canada; Dr. John Troyer, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath; Dr. Muireann Quigley, Lecturer in Bioethics, The University of Manchester; Jordan McKenzie, artist; Richard Gregory, Artistic Director, Quarantine; Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency; Martin Hargreaves, Editor, Dance Theatre Journal and Dr Paul Martin, University of Bristol, School of Biochemistry.
Please visit www.inbetweentime.co.uk to sign up for the newsletter and keep up to date with additions to the full Symposium schedule. To book tickets please contact Arnolfini Box Office on 0117 917 2300 / 01 or visit www.arnolfini.org.uk
Sat 5 Feb 2011 10.00 – 17.30
Arnolfini, Bristol
£30/£20 Includes lunch
Realtime, Australia's leading arts magazine came along to review Inbetween Time Festival 2010, here's a selection of reviews by their correspondent Tim Atack:
Jones and Llŷr “A Mouthful Of Feathers” Arnolfini
Search Party “Growing Old With You” Wickham Theatre
Action Hero “Frontman” Circomedia
Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido / Campo “Still Standing You” Arnolfini
Amongst the throng of wine-glass clutching aficionados at Inbetween Time’s launch party, two slight young men are sat opposite each other at a table, dressed as playtime Red Indians: white vests, shorts, a crown of primary coloured feathers. A glass jar of peanut M&Ms (colours corresponding with their feathers) sits between Jones and Llŷr, and in turns they suck, chew and spit out the sweets, facing each other directly, their gaze sometimes a challenge, sometimes an invitation, but always a joint enterprise. They drool residue onto the white table, making a gloopy multi-coloured patina. Occasionally they attempt to spit confectionary from one mouth to another; failed launches are met with wry smiles. This silent flirting with revulsions and bodily etiquette is youthful and funny – but at the same time suggests a strange entropy, dissipation and doubt. As the evening grows older, discarded chocolates scatter across the Arnolfini floor, as if the performance has a radiation, a half-life, particles falling away like petals from a flower.
The push-me-pull-you of partnerships is explored by several other performing duos at Inbetween Time, in forms that vary from fragile, stately propositions, to noisy creative-destructive acts, to sheer animal glee.
The fragile and stately first: Search Party are real-life couple Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips, who we learn met in their 20s. Their show is a love letter to each other, but… wait, no, come back! Somehow Growing Old With You manages to circumnavigate the cloying neediness of a bad wedding ode. It doesn’t feel like a renewal of vows, though that’s essentially what it is: a ceremony, a statement of intent, occasionally demanding the patience you’d give such a thing. But its glacial pace and quiet repetition proves meditative, its moments of emotional beauty dotted about an arid landscape of salt and smoke. Phillips and Hawkes slow-dance across a carpet of salt that crunches beneath their feet like glass. They walk forward, Hawkes having some sort of unspoken problem with reaching a certain distance, Phillips carrying her to the threshold in a variety of ways, each time failing to convince her to stay. They hold private conversations in inaudible whispers, discussing what to do next, checking their progress with each other in gazes, glances, frowns and smiles. Eventually, they each record a message to camcorder for the future, telling the story of how they met, of how their daughter was born. This is the start of a process wherein Search Party will record such messages every ten years, for as long as they’re together, or until they’re no longer able to. The inevitability of human decay hangs heavy in the room, announced and committed to tape… but Search Party are carrying that knowledge, that destiny, together. I once heard the artist Franko B wonder at how audiences rarely have a problem with the sharing of pain, but no sooner does an artwork express overt sentimentality, its integrity is doubted. True love is sometimes a dirty secret in live art. This show, unashamedly, reeks of it.
Smoke is also filling the room at Circomedia, but this time it’s rock gig smoke, drifting over a raised stage and guitar amplifiers, shot through by spotlights. Action Hero are premiering Frontman, their lament for the egos of petulant musicians throughout the ages. Previously Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have appropriated and assimilated texts from westerns and daredevil spectaculars, with a style that sees them rope the audience into the proceedings – shooting down the hero in a hail of imaginary bullets, cheering the motorcycle jump, or going silent when the stranger walks into the room. Tonight is slightly different; no less urgent, but another kind of energy, because it centres upon what happens when the contract between audience and performer falters or fails. Paintin holds court in spangled hot pants, making her way through various on-stage crises: hubristic, chaotic, physically destructive, confrontational. It’s a catalogue of ineloquence made either comic or distressing by its amplification. Then, when she finally gives up the ghost and crumples, hands over her ears, the soundtrack takes over, eliminating her, a wall of intense electronic scree with frequencies so violent we’ve been handed earplugs before the show begins.
Stenhouse is also on stage throughout, a gangly roadie in rabbit ears, operating technical equipment, untangling cables in a hilariously slow and straight-faced manner. He’s heckled by Paintin and they physically fight on stage. She hides in the shadows and accuses him of ruining everything. It’s exhausting, and you feel for the performers, Paintin especially. Action Hero themselves are a company in the spotlight, their shows the subject of great acclaim. You wonder how much this show is actually about them, about their mercurial creative processes, its negotiations, cul-de-sacs and unpredictable life force.
And speaking of untameable life forces: the audience for Still Standing You is assembling. It’s 11am. Guilherme Garrido is on stage, precariously sat upon an impromptu stool made of his colleague Pieter Ampe’s legs. Ampe’s back is flat on the ground. He seems stoical about the situation. “We’re just waiting for a few more people to come in,” says Garrido, “Then we can begin this breakfast buffet of contemporary European dance.” And my god, I haven’t been this excited by a dance work in years.
I’d love to be able to describe Ampe and Garrido’s performance in intricate technical detail but I’m afraid I watched much of it through gasps, stifled giggles and tears of happy laughter. There’s no music, no set, nothing on the well-lit stage bar our odd couple: Garrido a swarthy Portuguese chatterer; Ampe a wiry, wordless, ginger-haired mega-bearded Belgian. The show is about them working out what they ‘mean’ to each other, and what this means for us is an extraordinary celebration of all the stupid, joyful, hilarious, loud and unlikely things that two human bodies can do to, at, for and with each other in one hour. Ampe and Garrido hurl one another around wrestler-style, make human climbing frames of themselves, play dangerous games of physical one-upmanship, snarling throughout in ridiculous thrash metal vocalisations, gurning, spitting and croaking. Then they finally rip each other’s clothes off, flapping nude about the stage like distressed fish, yanking at each other’s penises as if they were plasticine and locking around and upon one another to make half-men forms, strange animals with human skin, a being made entirely of legs, Siamese dancers, noisy molluscs.
Easily my favourite experience at Inbetween Time, it’s almost easier to describe what Still Standing You wasn’t than what it was. For a show with explicit nudity it wasn’t remotely sexual (despite, for instance, a moment where Ampe opened up Garrido’s foreskin and screamed into it from the top of his lungs. Yep. Read that again. That’s right.) It didn’t feel like a masculine initiation rite, because it was so personal to the two individuals before us, rather than existing in a specific cultural place and time. And it wasn’t random and unfocused, because the dance proceeded from one crazy move to the next with a logic that carried the audience with it, making us laugh or wince in anticipation. What it was, at heart, is best expressed by paraphrasing the late great Pina Bausch: not interested in how these two people move, but in what makes them move.
Realtime, Australia's leading arts magazine came along to review Inbetween Time Festival 2010, here's a selection of reviews by their correspondent Tim Atack:
Jo Bannon, “Foley” Arnolfini
Alex Bradley “Day For Night” Colston Hall
Rod Maclachlan “Exchange” Arnolfini
Teresa Margolles “Aire” Arnolfini
What next for the body asks Inbetween Time’s central curatorial question. To which Jo Bannon answers: bones snapping, violent drowning, and grisly death! (Plus party poppers. Lots of party poppers.)
Bannon’s Foley takes place at a table amplified by microphones and cluttered with vegetables, water bowls, metronomes and raw meat, a toolbox which the artist treats – and mistreats – to produce sound effects. Audience members are prompted to join in, providing footfalls, smatterings of applause, and gunshots (hence the firecrackers.) This is Bannon’s tribute to the pernickety and vaguely comic world of foley artists, where grown adults pretend to be foraging animals, a corkscrew doubles as a sonic screwdriver (true story, Doctor Who fans) and trudging through custard powder is the only thing that properly sounds like footsteps on snow. No animals or snowdrifts here, though: Bannon’s audio landscape has an urban film noir vibe, which she narrates in deadpan received pronunciation. It’s a tale of mysterious dames and shady customers lurking in alleyways that recalls the mischievous tone of Godard’s Alphaville, generic elements peppering the storyline simply because they must; people get beaten up because, in a noir, that’s what happens. The femme is fatale because, well… what other kind is there? In Bannon’s world everything is, deliciously, at the service of the sounds. It’s also intriguing that for all of her flailing around – screaming into a bowlful of water, repeatedly slapping a slab of rump steak into the microphone – Bannon maintains a clinical detachment, a procedural poise. The artist appears to be asking us to conclude our own story, to fill in our own gaps, the sound alone is what she provides. These are the components she’s willing to give us… no more, no less.
There are several other works at the festival distinguished by starving one or more senses so as to expand others; sparse experiences where the viewer’s own body is the catalyst, the storyteller, the conduit. In Day For Night by Alex Bradley you sit on a bench in a basement of the Colston Hall, faced with nothing but an opaque half-moon window. A surround-soundtrack of treated guitar noise (barely recognisable as such) comes and goes in long washes of frequencies both within and beyond hearing range. The sub-bass pulses occasionally send Geiger counter crackles through the bench, and vibrate your backside and spine in a disconcerting way. But the principle requirement is that you must watch, focussing patiently on the window as it shifts, almost imperceptibly, from bright daylight to night-time gloom – complete with projected streetlamps and car headlights peeping through the venetian blinds – and back again. It’s accumulative, a little urban tone poem that condenses the day and speaks of roadworks beyond the bedroom window, wasted hours and cold evenings hidden inside the house, spoilt for me only by the over-effusive explanations of the venue staff: “You sit here. It’s 17 minutes long. It’s a loop. You watch it go from day to night. It’s dark now but it’ll get light later. It’s about bunnies.” (Well, maybe not the last one, but you get my drift…)
Exchange by Rod Maclachlan is similarly concerned with light and dark. A pair of participants are sent into a large space wearing flexible bands around their ribcages; the rise and fall of their breathing alters the light levels in the room. In this incarnation Exchange features an impressive rig of blazing hot lights (and the angry buzz of resistors is a powerful additional presence) but the full effect suffers by not quite responding with the symbiotic speed or precision you’d hope for. Even so it’s great fun, and the lights I’m linked to project directly out of the windows on Arnolfini’s upper level, adding a pleasingly extrovert edge to the experience, announcing your respiration across Bristol’s Harbourside.
But for me the most affecting of all these engineered, ‘heightened’ spaces is Teresa Margolles’ Aire, a room that, on first sight, looks like an empty gallery where Arnolfini staff have accidentally left two oversized humidifiers hanging around. These devices are, in fact, circulating a very particular type of water vapour around the room – a clue to its provenance lies in the ominous legend printed next to a clear plastic curtain isolating Aire from the rest of the exhibition: “THE AIR IN THIS GALLERY IS SAFE TO BREATHE” which, as a friendly reassurance, ranks right up there with “YES! OUR RESTAURANT IS NO LONGER INFECTED.”
Margolles has, in fact, infused the room with water used to wash corpses prior to autopsy at a morgue in Mexico City. It’s been disinfected, of course… but that simple information, that implication of death, hangs in the air. Now – you can approach this with disgust, or reverence, or any number of fleeting feelings, and I spend a lot of time in Aire shifting from emotion to emotion. There’s so much to do in this empty room. What do you feel? You can consider the sheer number of bodies that pass through a Mexico City morgue (largely thanks to drugs laws that future generations will point and laugh at, much as we point and laugh at the Elizabethan’s attempted cures for the plague) and the stories that this vapour transmits, the curtailed lives it has touched. You can picture those bodies, en masse, standing in the room with you, blank-eyed, naked, vaguely perturbed by being asked to participate in an artwork, pissed off at not being allowed to truly rest in peace. You can imagine that you smell the queasy cleanliness of a hospital (which is ridiculous, but smell it I surely do) and recall every time you’ve hung around waiting for a friend or loved one in some green-tinted ward. You can think of the journey that liquid has taken, the unlikeliest hop from a Y-section on a Mexican corpse to the cosy middle class milieu of a Bristolian arts centre. You can fight off superstitious revulsion at the molecules fizzing in your lungs, and where they’ve been. You can breathe in and out, deep and protracted breaths, communing uselessly with the dead, because they are dead and gone, and what good can you do for them now? You can look out of the window at the dark street beyond, perfunctory mechanical traffic on a frosty West Country night, feeling what a morgue worker feels when they emerge outside on a fag break; marvelling at the tiny differences between the living and the dead. For something so simple, Aire is a truly complex thing. It’s a quantum piece of work, gloriously indeterminate – in that depending upon how you look at it, it completely changes its behaviour.
Big thanks to all who commented and contributed to the festival as a whole!
Circomedia Circomedia
NOTES FROM THE READING ROOM
Day 4 (And a bit)
'A (scribble) cold (scribble, scribble) curatorial in (scribble x 3) a (scribble) dead winter'.
'Got a police escort in to see Hancock and Kelly...'.
'Pain does not automatically make it legitimate'.
From the 1-5 Dec 2010 Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue will be pervading streets, sites and art spaces across the city of Bristol. Over 75 events involving 130 artists from Mexico, Australia, Austria, Germany, Kurdistan, Belgium, USA and all over the UK will make up a breakneck programme of live, digital, sound, sculptural, architectural, dance, theatre and guerrilla works across the five days.
With a curatorial theme of What Next For the Body? all the works have been commissioned or will be specially presented for Inbetween Time Festival 2010 - from intimate one-on-one performances and significant international premières, to modest early ideas and ambitious curatorial pieces. Inbetween Time collaborates with the most innovative contemporary artists, encouraging them and their audiences to do things they haven’t yet imagined.
Inbetween Time festival is produced by IBT Productions in collaboration with Arnolfini
