Image credit: Susannah Hewlett, 'It's Not You'. Courtesy the artist.

Susannah Hewlett
It’s Not You
Arnolfini, Bristol 17/02/08

Time was, a man knew where he stood, especially on national television. Your role was plain, your moment defined. No one was under any illusions how it would play out. If you were Joe or Jane public, the man-in-the-street, the girl-next-door, and you found yourself on TV… well, you’d be famous for approximately ten to fifteen minutes and within that time there were rules that everyone knew, and you’d either win or lose.

Game shows, most likely, that’s where it would happen. Talk shows were home to the properly famous; but it was game shows for the random punter, hoisted up by the scruff of the neck and plonked beneath the studio lights, left there for just about the right length of time to memorise items on a conveyer belt, or to guess how much the toaster was worth. The star of the show? The smiling host, of course, and don’t forget it. Closely followed by YOU. And if not actually you, then a person could always imagine themselves up there. Naming that tune. Whatsing that line. Here was the original arena for everyday fame, tea-time fame, hello mum fame, innocent and fun; and when you left the studio the cameras didn’t up sticks and follow after. They didn’t miraculously multiply with every hastening step down the high street. They didn’t park outside your house at night and call your name.

Times change, though, innit? Back in the day, you’d be playing for cars, holidays, fridge freezers and cold hard cash – it used to be about the money, dammit. Now it’s all about the spotlight… and the money is just assumed to follow on.

Susannah Hewlett takes this notable shift in popular culture as a springboard for her live art work It’s Not You, riffing on themes from the cheesier, fluffier era of TV light entertainment when primetime was about the permanent grin rather than the permanent fear of dismissal. In the concourses and stairwells of Arnolfini, a troupe of consummate performers silently act out random moments from an invisible game show, all sequins and high heels, blue suits and orange skins. They drift from space to space, taking the unheard applause and glitzy bonhomie with them, appearing amongst families dining in the café bar, bursting unannounced into the bookshop. Gallery-goers emerge from an exhibition to be confronted by an immaculately coiffed hostess presenting a pillar to them as if it were a sun lounger or a microwave, her face frozen in a wide rictus grin, disconcertingly dead-eyed. Meanwhile, in the building’s elevator: the lift doors open and a gentleman of Dale Winton hue stands blocking your exit, statue-still, arms flung wide in the familiar pose that proclaims “Hey, you guys! The fun we’re going to have right here!” and he doesn’t move. You wonder whether to get out of the lift or not.

Over two days these showbiz throwbacks traverse the building, ‘presenting’ anything that moves to unheard oohs and aahs, and also an awful lot that doesn’t… signs, books, leaflets, doorways, baby buggies, tables, walls, and, in one bizarre instance, a gentleman’s crotch. Lipsticked ladies recline on the reception desk as erstwhile Arnolfini staff attempt to ignore them. Depending on where and how precisely you stumble across these glamorous weirdos, their static poses provoke very different reactions, despite a basic uniformity of content: the two suited hosts side by side on a balcony, proffering a “Step into the light!” hand to the punters below sparks up images of Gilbert and George, living sculptures; a hostess in a ridiculous wig, leaning over to grin mindlessly at the doorjamb to Arnolfini’s archive room, appears remarkably like a woman mid-collapse, on the cusp of insanity; another hostess gesturing towards thin air in the dead centre of the bar area. Amidst diners and scrapping kids, she seems to me like an alien, freshly descended from the stars and making a heroic but fundamentally misinformed attempt to blend in.

The repetition and brain-dead glee of it all is, of course, funny. It’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. But there’s also something else present. Maybe because we know these particular clichés to be dead or dying, maybe because we know what eventually became of them in the overall evolution of the game show, there is a tangible sense of unease to the whole exercise, sometimes even an undercurrent of menace. A sense that the professed inclusivity of these gestures is, and always was, bullshit… leading you up a blind alley… preparing you for an era when bad-mouthing and ramped-up false drama openly form the backbone of primetime TV, when a racist insult or a full-blown public breakdown fill more airtime and column inches than a Brucie Bonus ever could. In It’s Not You, we’re looking at ghosts. Echoes from an era when you were met with a smile and a twirl, when the audience were rooting for you, when everyone was said to have done “very well,” even if they had fucked up royally.

At least, that’s what I carry away with me when, their work done, the performers pull off their wigs and stilettos, washing away the blusher and tan. I’m sure the broad strokes of a work based upon such familiar popular territory will mean many things to many people, and wonder whether Susannah Hewlett is concerned that any particular message or concern is communicated. It seems that, refreshingly, she’s happy for the experience simply to be engaging and funny. “I really believe that if it’s funny, it doesn’t mean the work isn’t conceptually strong,” she says. “You know when people say, ‘I like to add a bit of humour into my work?’ I’m not ‘adding’ anything! It’s just there. That’s what I’m interested in.”

I suggest that whilst audiences often can’t help grinning back at Hewlett’s performers in their showbiz tableaux, there’s still something sinister at work. She nods. “Something funny, becoming nauseating. That’s the TV I like, as well… Chris Morris, for instance, stuff that might make you feel a bit sick. All these things in popular culture, I’m completely drawn to them: the familiarity, but the frustration of it. Say I really fancy a bit of Saturday night telly, that’s all I want, but it sickens you, and you’re shouting at the TV, you can’t bear it, but it’s comforting. I genuinely enjoy the darkness of that.”

It certainly seems as though Hewlett has put some serious research into the generic techniques of light entertainment, both ancient and modern: the title It’s Not You is inspired by the long, drawn-out moments preceding an eviction or dismissal in more recent game shows, the slow-motion fall of the guillotine. Hewlett has been watching lots of Dancing on Ice or Big Brother and counting these critical pauses. “It’s normally 12 seconds,” she says. “So, Strictly Come Dancing: the couple will be shown in the spotlight and their names are announced, ‘JULIE AND MICHAEL…’” [pauses for 12 seconds] “‘IT’S NOT YOU.’ And the spotlight goes out.”

I suggest these moments sometimes resemble a form of torture, citing the example of brother / sister duo Same Difference on the last series of The X Factor: during the cavernous, doom-laden pauses leading up to the voting off, contestant Sarah Smith looked as though she was being electrocuted, spasms of fear racking her body, mouth clenched shut but twitching uncontrollably. It was a moment she had to endure every week, for almost two months. “They [the TV producers] know exactly what they’re doing,” says Hewlett. “Building the tension… the lighting, the sound, the slightly too-high chair…”

There are also undercurrents of torture to another element of It’s Not You, in which Arnolfini’s auditorium is filled with the solemn tick-tock of a musical ‘countdown’ which never ends, and a single black swivel chair is spotlit in the dead centre of the space. Areas of the seating rake are randomly, briefly, illuminated. It turns a vague mock-up of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire studio into something redolent of the horrendous techniques used to ‘break’ prisoners in Guantanamo bay; incessant noise, isolation, a big empty room with unpredictable shifting lights. Here, though, the volume of the music is pretty moderate and I wonder about the effect it would have were it pumped out at the decibel level of a basement nightclub: Overpowering. Unavoidable. Painful.

Other aspects to the work one might stumble across include a busker outside Arnolfini’s main entrance, rattling through theme songs like Snookering You Tonight; a cheesy jingle schmoozing from the tannoy which announces the venue’s current programme à la Leslie Crowther; and a series of images which use actors to depict varying states of pre-dismissal nerves, spliced into the display units behind Arnolfini’s reception desk and run as screensavers in its archive room.

But, to be honest, it’s the production line of showbiz poses that grabs and holds my attention. Within these simple, superficial actions alone there’s enough to contemplate, enough to surprise. This might be because not only do the performers have an ‘on’ state, they have an ‘off’ as well, a neutral smiles-gone shoulders-down blankness in between the grandstanding. As they journey from place to place the men squeak their teeth, pat back their hair; the women check their heels or adjust their cleavages. The backstage mode before the roar of the crowd begins is, of course, another cliché in itself… watch pretty much any film from the last 20 years which features a game show host character, and you’ll see him behaving like a bastard in the wings before blossoming into the life and soul of the party once the camera settles on him – sure, we know that. In It’s Not You, though, that on-camera moment comes suddenly, unexpectedly, almost violently. One hostess switches her grin on and it’s like being hit by a bus. A host clicks his fingers and suddenly an entire roomful of glammed-up ghosts is beaming directly at you. Equally, the Arnolfini foyer can be populated by performers switching in and out of la-la-land at random, bored in the foreground, happy to see you in the distance. And it goes on, and on, and on, inexorably… like watching a player piano at work, each passing dot in the service of something mechanical, something bigger, something that probably isn’t equipped to explain itself: your entertainment. Your escape. Your fun.

Glamour model and author Katie Price, AKA Jordan, visits Cribbs Causeway mall in North Bristol. She’s signing copies of her new book, Andy Warhol-style. A conveyor belt of star-struck norms wends its way around the shopping complex, and regional news programme Points West is there to ask of them: why do they love Jordan so? “She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her,” says one kid. “Yeah,” enthuses another, “She don’t care.” It’s a recurring theme amongst the assembled teenagers. In their eyes, Jordan is a celebrity because she doesn’t give a monkey’s.

I’m not, to put it bluntly, sure that they’re entirely correct in their assessment. But it’s fascinating that amidst a modern entertainment culture obsessed with dramatising acts of public approval, Jordan’s fans rate her apathy so highly. Maybe they’re just in teenage denial, fighting against what they know to be true: that of course celebrities care what other people think, that no-one wants to be voted off first, that raw popularity is now considered the biggest prize of them all. It’s much more likely that what their heroes hope for more than anything else is that constant round of applause, following them everywhere they go.

Written by Tim Atack

Image Credit: 'Office Party Xmas 2007', Featuring Amanda Hadingue with audience members. Photo by Steff Langley

Office Party Xmas 2007
Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez
12 – 29 December 2007
The Pit, Barbican

See http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=6068&pg=766 for details.

Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.

The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.

This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.

It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (aka Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.

These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the rest of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.

And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.

Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desperation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.

Mary Paterson

The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007
La Pocha Nostra
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/11/07

The last time I got a severe case of the shivers during a live art show was thanks to Goat Island’s ‘When will the September roses bloom / last night was only a comedy’. In it, whilst the bland, treacly tones of James Taylor oozed from the PA, Litó Walkey stood still on one leg for a good seven or eight minutes. One song ended, another one began (as if the sound op had dozed off, leaving the whole CD playing unintentionally) and Walkey simply stood centre stage, one leg raised, in a crepuscular half-light.

I’m no particular fan of James Taylor (or indeed of standing on one leg for any length of time) but after about three minutes into ‘When will the September roses bloom....’ I suddenly realised I was shaking. At first I thought it was in sympathy with the performer, or maybe even because of the cold, but I quickly discounted these theories and yet still couldn’t stop myself wobbling… and that wasn’t particularly good news as I was behind a camcorder at the time, filming the performance. Despite everything, despite the formality of Goat Island’s house style, despite the fact that the immediacy of the event was being filtered through a viewfinder before it hit me, I was being consumed by something unnameable and shaking like a leaf.

I mention this because it happened again during La Pocha Nostra’s The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007, in a similarly unquantifiable way. Rajni Shah had been parading spider-like up and down the fashion show runway for some time, naked but for a black choker, with an animal snarl and dark arterial blood smeared across her face. Slowly, quietly, Sarah Jane Norman – similarly unclothed except for various thin black trusses dissecting her body and a rubber mask of what looked like Condoleezza Rice over her head – made her presence known at the opposite end of the catwalk. I can’t even remember what was playing on the soundtrack at the time because by then the entire experience had battered me into a helpless submission. 90 minutes of noise, fury and fashion, culminating in La Pocha Nostra and their associate artists making me vibrate with the heartbeat regularity of a quartz crystal… and by means that couldn’t have been more different from Goat Island’s.

Days later, details of New Barbarians are still repeating upon me like snatches of a half remembered dream, sneaking up, unexpected and often unwelcome, triggered by some innocuous element of my daily life. BAM! There’s Alex Bradley, hauling himself the length of the catwalk by means of the connecting spars of two lighting clamps, the metal props attached to his wrists, instruments of torture, clunking painfully into the wood of the runway. BAM! Roza Ilgen, her form entirely covered in human hair, short-arsed, sporting breasts and a beard like some long lost evolutionary byroad: Captain Caveman, Morlock, Bigfoot, arms splayed out, a perverse Christ, the audience cheering her enthusiastically. WHOOSH! The sound of a mad Mexican woman jabbering away down a telephone line, unintelligible, distorted, insane. BOOM! BANG! Guillermo Goméz-Peña suddenly breaking into a native American chant, all the while pouting ridiculously like Derek Zoolander. GO!

Presented in the mode of a fashion show, New Barbarians keeps all the rituals, bluster and bombast of such events intact. The audience have been told to “dress for the catwalk” and most have obliged. There’s a foyer preview, free drinks, a rat pack of photographers (all uniformly name-badged “PAPARAZZI SCUM”) and once we are led inside the auditorium there’s VIP seating at the runway’s edge, a hammering soundtrack, plus Folake Shoga’s disjointed and deliberately mashed-up films projected onto a screen above the throng – cutting rapidly and queasily between ethno-geographic documentaries, rehearsal footage, adverts, military recruitment films and middle east news stories. There’s the obligatory show manager hustling models to and from the stage with a constant air of unflappable yet pissed-off efficiency. Goméz-Peña, founder member of La Pocha Nostra, holds court on a platform opposite the runway, freezing the noisy proceedings regularly in order to deliver verbose treatises in a patchwork of languages, physically inhabiting a space somewhere between a Hopi tribal chief and Klaus Lagerfeld. His consort is a snappily-suited female announcer who gives voice to the catwalk at random, speaking over the soundtrack in measured sing-song tones, offering performers for sale, encouraging the audience towards acts of rebellion or cultural vandalism. It is relentless, and total. It also has that single most important clash of textures prevalent in the world of fashion: the constant, repeated intertwining of the profound and the utterly meaningless, holding the event together like warp and weft. There’s the all-pervading sense that what we’re witnessing is the creators throwing a huge amount of stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks. It’s exuberant, funny, unapologetic… and occasionally feels as if it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

La Pocha Nostra have spent much of the last fifteen years conjuring up and making flesh this world of border and hybrid cultures, building a creative lab where cultural phenomena undergo a type of rapid, barely controlled fission. The forms (it doesn’t feel right to call them ‘outfits,’ somehow) on the runway tonight are the gene-spliced bastard children of the communications satellite and the nightclub, bearing the family traits of hip-hop, sado-masochism, youTube and airport terminals, cheap handguns, DVD boxsets, protest marches and internet porn, speaking cross-Phillipino-Icelandic with a Brazillian / lowland Scottish accent, listening to klezmer-grindcore on their iPods and spending their holidays on the fucking moon.

As they tour the world, Goméz-Peña and a crew of three or four permanent cohorts ‘collect’ associates, throwing further spices into their melting pot. The diverse bodies are all artists, all complicit, all having made themselves beautiful in their own eyes, no doubt via some mediation on the part of their hosts. As a result of this diversity it’s unsurprising that many fascinating socio-political concerns are manifest in each model parading back and forth before us: power play appears to be a fundamental building block of their interactions; gender is not so much bent as blended, a thick chromosomal soup; and the models borrow ‘clothes’ from every religion and religious impetus that crawls beneath the sun. BAM! Harminder Singh Judge, gas-masked and with the multiple arms of a Hindu deity, strapped to a crucifix CRACK, THWACK a Nike swoosh on a stiletto-heeled terrorist’s hijab BANG! Jiva Parthipan performing an exuberant, grinning Kath kali dance with a handgun stuffed into his crotch.

The crossbreed cyber-sexual rebellion of New Barbarians might sound disconcerting, but it’s not what gave me the shakes. It wasn’t even the implication that somewhere beneath the fashion show there was a bubbling bloodbath of righteous violence. What I was watching, after all, was a distillation of a million things, people and places that already exist, active, actual, accessible either physically or technologically, far from alien or inhuman in any conceivable way. The danger wasn’t in the shapes, nodes and ideas.

I certainly wasn’t shaking with indignation, as I loved the damn thing: feeling oddly, happily at home. I’ve heard since the show that some people actually found New Barbarians offensive, but it’s completely inconceivable to me why. I can’t understand how anyone could be offended by such a vivid celebration of the possibilities of human synthesis. Sure, there was plenty of perverted religious imagery; much nudity (some of it in the areas euphemistically and uselessly described as ‘graphic’); and little, if any, explanation of what you were seeing and why it was there – only a sly announcement before the catwalk burst to life that the audience shouldn’t take all they saw “entirely seriously.”

But still, what’s offensive about that? La Pocha Nostra’s magpie tendencies are wonderfully indiscriminate, irreverent in equal measure towards male, female, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, left, right, rich, poor. Basically, if you’re human, you’re fair game. To me, being offended by New Barbarians is about as logical as being offended by Rio De Janeiro, Singapore or Los Angeles – all of them by no means short of culture clashes, bastardized religions, ridiculously beautiful people and plenty of senseless violence.

And maybe that explains why I was shaking. It was like an overdose. Perhaps if you can picture the entirety of Singapore, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, New York, Paris, Milan… imagine every last inch of them crammed into a hypodermic and injected forcibly straight into the base of your spinal column. An instant download of more dirt, glitz and mixed messages than you could possibly handle.

Tim Atack

www.pochanostra.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk