Performance
Saturday 9th June 2007
Bristol Arnolfini

"Ecstatic is a new piece designed for the context of Manuel Vason’s exhibition ‘Encounters’ at Arnolfini. Athey’s work explores the relationships between desire, sexuality, control and suffering, it challenges physical and emotional boundaries." (Arnolfini)

I feel it’s necessary to state where I’m coming from as a viewer because my own reaction to this work surprises me. I’m relatively new to performance, its history: I’ve read a couple of books, I’ve seen some iconic photographs, including one of Athey himself in performance, butt-naked and tattooed.

I vaguely knew he might do something extreme, something that took him to his limits – there was a lot of that kind of talk about – of something that would be from the ‘outsider’ place. Which in the context of that days Arnolfini’s ‘Encounters’ exhibition and symposium seemed quite like an insider place: all that power undressing; all that fierce physical control. In art, if not in life, you don’t haplessly wander up to the edges by accident.

We file into the dark theatre, dispersing across the floor around a large table. The artist crouches on the table under a warm spotlight. He is naked except he is covered in pattern and iconography, a lush severity of design. His head is bowed. He has a long blond wig on back to front, so the fringe is at the nape of his neck and the rest of the wig conceals his face. In front of him, vertical, a double pane of glass, transparent from one side but mirrored on his. A hairbrush beside him. There is an ominous low-key sound.

He began to brush the hair, quite hard. I wondered how come the wig stayed on. You still couldn’t see his face. A crouched anonymous figure, brushing its hair: strain was evident in the body, the skin of his thigh was twitching, there was trembling. The mirrors, the long blond hair, the blood which eventually poured from Athey; the pain, the strain. This particular enactment – embodiment ? – was interrupted by the Arnolfini fire alarm, which made the experience even more disorientating. When the audience returned to the performance the intensity of the action escalated, stopping, I suppose, once a limit had been reached. An assistant helped the artist from the scene, out of the light. A thick pool of blood was left on the table.

It’s what resonances with what happened (what happened?) that surprises me. When it comes to barrel-chested battle-scarred old codgers, minus the tattoos, I have one of those at home. I would not have thought to find my partner so graphically referenced in such a venue, in such a manner. Regarding pools of blood left behind in the wake of a body, well, that’s usually the result of significant transitional circumstances – woundings, deaths or births, except, of course, for every woman who wakes up on the first day of her menstrual cycle and thinks: damn. I am nonplussed and stunned that this very specific body, Ron Athey’s; a body that testifies to struggle, pain, love, representation and the self, could resonate so tenderly with what is routine and commonplace as well as what is heightened, expressionist and singular.

A drastic sacrifice; Athey takes the pain of living within himself so we don’t have to? He represents and we're the congregation? "This is my body which will be given up for you... This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be shed for you and for all (people), so that sins may be forgiven." I'm getting into contested territory. I think I'd better stop. Or could it be that I’m just not getting it?

Written by Osunwunmi

For more information on the Encounters exhibition go to http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/...

for more information on the artist Ron Athey see http://www.ronathey.com/

Saturday 9th June, 7pm
Artsadmin Bar
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season 2007

Artsadmin’s bar has been given a makeover. The lights are dimmed, the walls are covered in tacky decorations, and someone has turned the music up. This is the intimate setting for Wendy Houstoun’s ‘Happy Hour’, an hour-long performance that is part dance, part poetry, and part dramatic monologue.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Houstoun, here adopting the character of a barmaid, but she’s clearly distressed. Her body makes involuntary, repetitious movements – slamming her hands down on the counter, shuffling her feet, shaking her head – and she delivers a calm, casual monologue as if she’s not aware what her body is doing. Even the monologue seems meaningless – it’s filled with verbal ephemera, the kind of padding that people use to circle their point. She never really says anything, but skirts around an unnamed dissatisfaction with familiar phrases: ‘You need to let your hair down’, ‘What’s the point of it all?’

In fact, there is nothing and everything wrong with Houstoun. She repeats empty gestures from the edges of mundane experience – the things we say and do without thinking – and places them centre stage. Amplified like this, these gestures appear both meaningless and indicative of emotional distress. But by refusing to articulate what is at the centre of her character’s unhappiness, Houstoun involves the personal worries of each audience member - we all fill the gap with our own crisis. Houstoun’s disintegration, in other words, is happening to me.

The piece follows the chronology of a night out, from the urge to drink through the happy, morose and aggressive stages of drunkenness. At one point, Houstoun ejects herself from the bar in what seems like a metaphor for drinking culture - we drink to escape, but we don’t like who we become. And yet ‘Happy Hour’ is more than an indictment of binge drinking. In a series of drunken toasts, Houstoun lists Gucci fashion and Saddam Hussein in one sentence, the tributes tumbling after one other as monuments to modern existence. Just like the familiar-made-unfamiliar gestures and phrases she adopts, Houstoun’s casual references render these facts empty and significant at the same time. Their value seems to lie in the fact of their cultural prominence, not the reasons that put them there.

‘Happy Hour’ is humorous, poignant and affecting in turn, and Houstoun develops an emotional credibility that supplants any initial disbelief at her disjointed movements. Her prose is largely elegant and immediate – rolling between concepts and scenarios so effortlessly that it’s easy to forget she has nothing definite to say. The story ends as ordinarily as it began, with one person’s quiet, persistent discontent disappearing into the night. It’s time for the audience to finish their drinks and follow her.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more information on Wendy Houstoun see http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...

Artsadmin Summer Season
Toynbee Studios

Screenings 1
5-7 June 2007

Monitors Programme 1
5-10 June

Charlie MurphyThe Artsadmin summer season launched on the 5th June with Screenings 1 and Monitors Programme 1. The two programmes were presented in different areas of Toynbee Studios with Screenings 1 in the Steve Whitson Studio and Monitors Programme 1 in studio 3. The fact that the two programmes are separate begs the question - Why? One answer is that the distinction between Monitors and Screenings could be a curatorial decision, reflecting the once prominent cultural and social difference between the different mediums of film and video. However, it could also be a presentation method borne purely out of logistical necessity. Whichever it is, locating a divide between film and video across these two programmes is difficult. Curatorially, it is much more productive to see Monitors Programme 1 and Screenings 1 as distinct programmes representing screen works that deal overtly with the specifics of their physical and live modes of presentation.

Within the Monitors 1 programme, Lucille Power’s Table Dance, 2002 openly utilises the physical confines of the TV Monitor in which the work is housed. On screen a woman is depicted writhing on a table whilst pressing against the edges of the monitor as a constrictive boundary. The small size of the TV and its awkward position on the floor stress the monitor as physical object from which the woman cannot escape. The monitor lends the work an abject quality that a large film screen could not. In addition, the format of Dan Saul’s video Landscape with Flowers, 2005 utilises the specific TV format of a frank ‘fly on the wall’ documentary in order to profile the work of artist Jyll Bradley. The seemingly casual filming style and intimacy of the ‘overheard’ conversations adopt a reality TV format that contemporary audiences are best placed to translate. However it is Katherine Hymers that best depicts the monitor screen as site, as well as location for video work. In Untitled (Frame), 2006 a woman stands in an overgrown garden staring unflinchingly through a window in the direction of the video camera. The camera lens in turn steadily reflects the woman’s gaze back through the frame of the window-pane. Framing both the woman’s unsettling stare and the direction of the camera’s eye in this way highlights the dual role of the TV monitor as video camera lens. It is this duality with which Hymers situates us as viewers, our bodies, not only in the act of looking but of actively participating and recording. In this way Hymers transforms the video and surrounding lumpen TV monitor into an experience of live exchange. It is a deceptively simple idea for a piece of video and a highly effective one-to-one performance it is hard to break away from.

As part of the Screenings 1 programme David Blandy’s The White and Black Minstrel Show, 2006 is presented to good effect on the large screen in the Steve Whitson studio. The life-sized scale of the screen, lighting and auditorium style seating of the studio mimes the cinema context of Blandy’s on-screen minstrel performance. In this way the mode of presentation of the film creates the re-enactment of an early 20th Century minstrel show, one with us as the live audience. Blandy’s minstrelsy is potentially dubious and so too is our involvement in it as audience. However, it is important that Blandy’s contemporary blackface is painted both black and white, representing a racially inverted ‘Black and White Minstrel’. Blandy, it seems can be neither black nor white enough.

Also part of Screenings 1, Bernd Behr’s Hotel Palindrome (before R.Smithson), 2006 revisits Robert Smithson’s 1972 slide lecture on the Mexican ‘Hotel Palindrome’. By focussing acutely on the original scene of Smithson’s lecture; the stairs Smithson once climbed, the podium he once stood at, the soundproofed walls that may contain trace of the artist’s voice, Behr’s series of stills examine the site of Smithson’s lecture as if performing a memorial tribute to the dead artist. Behr uses the site of Smithson’s landmark lecture as vehicle in which to explore the performativity of both architectural space and absence. Meanwhile, the specific performance of Behr's video, with its large scale, lingering and glossy scenes of the empty tomb-like auditorium enacts the same macabre sense of desire as when glimpsing crash sites marked with floral tributes or chalked outlined scenes of death. As viewers we gawp and willingly succumb to the potency of Behrs visuals and the erotics of the big screen. It is these erotics that ensures the on-screen performance will far outlast the tentative audio commentary that accompanies it.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

Artists in Monitors Programme 1 were Jyll Bradley, Katherine Hymers, Charlie Murphy, Edith Marie Pasquier, Lucille Power, Aura Satz and Grace Surman

Artists in Screenings 1 were Bernd Behr, David Blandy, Katherine Araniello and Hayley Newman

The next programme in the series, Screenings 2 and Monitor Programme 2 starts on 13 June 2007. For more details see http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/summerseason