Performance
15th June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of Artsadmin Summer Season

Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight, Richard Dedomenici is going to be full of strange information. Some of it will be useful. And some of it will not be useful. And some of it will just be strange.

Sat in a gaffer-tape-and-string mock-up of an airline seat and adjacent windows, Dedomenici rambles through a collection of anecdotes and observations, turning to speak to a camera that relays his big cheeky face onto a hanging screen which faces the audience. As a result the whole piece is literally delivered as an aside - albeit one transformed into an open and intimate monologue to the room. And what an odd room to deliver it in… wood panelled, parquet floored, musty… as if Dedomenici were briefing, say, the Joint Intelligence Committee somewhere in Whitehall. Now there’s something I’d like to see.

Why would I like to see it? Because it would be hilarious. Dedomenici is a mess. He’s a fucking disgrace. Under-rehearsed and forgetful, he’s reading his half formed script from the inside of an airline safety instruction card. Some of the notes don’t even make sense to him (“What? Eh?”) He’s using a recalcitrant remote control to operate / not operate the surrounding technology (“come on, come on, work. Play the clip. Play the clip. Just this once.”) Anecdotes trundle to a halt, having gone nowhere. It’s all in-jokes, gas and filler. He’s crap, and it’s great.
Yeah. You heard me. Great.

“I know some of you paid 12 quid for this, which is appalling, quite frankly,” mutters Dedomenici at one point. “Like I say this is a work in progress. It’s going to be better when I do it properly,” he claims, before pointing out that the eventual staging of the show ‘proper’ and its specific circumstances (in a small flat, to a largely invited audience of British Council reps during the Edinburgh festival) will probably preclude us ever seeing it. What we’re getting is notes for a possible show; a flight plan, a forethought.

What’s the show about? Oh shut up, who cares? Apparently it’s ostensibly something to do with aeroplanes. Dedomenici’s usual preoccupations with the absurdities of modern politics appear to have taken a seat in economy class just for this trip, and instead the journey is largely a personal one, illustrated by stories about school crushes and arguments on holiday. Occasionally the Dedomenici of old, the artist who produced Political Top Trumps or attempted to impose a congestion charge upon pedestrians during the Edinburgh Fringe, makes a brief appearance: he throws us some interesting titbits about depleted uranium being used to weight the wings of 747s, cracks wise about the airline industry being susceptible to three types of strike - lightning, bird and industrial. But the stream of consciousness is what engages, not the thematic unity of the material.

The port window behind Dedomenici relays jittery home videos of past airline flights (oddly affecting in their amateurishness) switching now and then to other archive footage, morphing at one point into the prompt from a karaoke machine so that young Richard can sing along – with no apparent purpose, as per usual. He performs in the mode of stand up comedians such as Stuart Lee or The Iceman (the latter often known to protest “it’s not comedy! It’s art!”) but without the club comic’s basic aim of prompting a constant hilarity. This is something of a relief, in that you are allowed frequent moments of quiet reflection; at one point Dedomenici tells a lovely story about being berated by his ex for leaving a mobile phone on during a flight and feeling, just for a moment, “as if we were back together again.”

It’s this sort of blurring of parameters that live art allows for so well, and the reason why Dedomenici is here before us at Toynbee Studios rather than spouting forth from the Jongleurs or Comedy Store stage. Superjumbo is not necessarily comic, not necessarily politically active, not necessarily even value for money, but there’s still something to be said for the simple skill of being an engaging and instinctive communicator. Even in his pauses for thought, as he reaches for the next cue or tangent, Dedomenici has that skill in spades, allowing the audience to reach for their own cues and tangents. And in that sense I’m pleased to report that he’s still an artist, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Written by Tim Atack

Richard’s website is …. http://www.dedomenici.co.uk/

Gary Stevens 'Ape'

24 June 2007
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season at Toynbee Studios.

Performance written and directed by Gary Stevens. Performed by Amanda Hadingue, Julian Maynard Smith, and Gary Stevens

Two men and a woman talk about Gary Stevens’s Ape:

Did you like the show? The show? The show? Did I like the show? Sho-o-o-ow. The performance. Did you like the performance? The piece. The piece of. The piece of performance. Yes. Yes, I liked the show. I liked the performance. I loved it. I loved the piece. I loved it! Yes! I loved the show! And the actors. The actors? The act-ors. The performers. Yes, I liked the actors. They were so-o-o-o. They were so-o-o-o. They were so… funny. Yes, they were funny. And they must have practiced a lot. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they must have practiced a lot. Full marks on practice. Full marks? Yes, full. Oh, full. Yes, they were funny. Full marks on funny.

And also sad. Sad? Yes, they were also sad. Yes, I thought they were rather sad. Yes, I too thought they were rather sad. And funny. Yes, funny and sad. Yes, they were rather sad. Oh, very sad. Like, you know, the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers? Yes. The Marx Brothers were sad? Yes, very sad. And also funny. And also brothers. Yes. No. Not really. Not really brothers. No. But full. Full Marx? Yes, they were so. Yes, they were so-o-o-o.

Not sure about the point, though. The point? The idea. What’s the point? Exactly. No. Not exactly. Yes, that’s the idea. Ide-e-a-a. The point. What’s your point? What I’m trying to say. Yes, what you’re trying to say. What I’m trying to say is. The point. It’s this. It’s what? What is what? The point. I’m not sure. No, I’m not sure either. Sure. You got it. I got? You got the idea. Ide-e-e-a-a. That’s the point. I’m not sure. Yes, that’s it. It? This. Yes, I think so. I think this is it. Yes. This is it. Ah. Ahhhh. Ha.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Read more about Gary Stevens: http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...

Read more about Artsadmin Summer season: http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...

Steven Cohen/Manuel Vason

Encounters
Performance, Collaboration, Photography: Manuel Vason
Editor: Dominic Johnson
Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007
£19.95
ISBN 978090773842

Encounters by photographer Manuel Vason reproduces 162 images created in collaboration with 36 solo artists and artist collaborators working within performance and live art. As Dominic Johnson describes in his introduction, these images were created with a collaborative approach specifically for the camera – though usually based on the artists’ live performance practice.

It’s difficult to generalise over such a broad range of images, but for the most part the images present the variously altered bodies of the artists, framed clearly with little extraneous clutter. They are bold and striking images, showing bodies in states of extremity or with extraordinary appendages or costumes. They seem designed to have an immediate impact: I am compelled to linger over each one, because they take time to process the emotions and connotations they evoke, but almost always the information of the image is completely available at first glance.

Like the work of the artists represented in Encounters, the images range widely in style and setting. Some depict interactions or interventions in specific environments, while others are set against neutral backgrounds. Some artists stare directly at the viewer, and others are depicted in mid-action. In all of them there is a clear interaction between an artist’s sense of performance and the photographer’s sense of composition. This interaction between the composition and the represented action creates a beguiling paradox of reality and artifice. It’s hard for me not to feel as if the power of these images comes largely from the reality of the unusual and often extreme acts which they portray: yes, those feathers go completely through Kris Canavan’s arms; yes, that’s real wreckage of a real building within which Veenus Vortex is intertwining her real body; and so on.

But although the strength of these images derives partly from the power of the events they document, they are not the same as those events. In looking at this collection of images, I also think of the images photographed but not reproduced in the book – the number of approaches, angles, and photographic adjustments that were tried in the production of each image. The image I am seeing on the page is the one which is most sharp, where the lighting was most effective, where no one blinked or there was no unwanted interference, and so on.

In other words, the real and presumably often painful acts notwithstanding, these images are fabrications, even simulations*. I know this is, of course, the paradox of the photograph itself – it resembles the real so well that it is no longer real (even though we usually prefer it to the real). And I’m not suggesting that there’s any unacknowledged duplicity in these photographs – they are very aware that they are constructed. But the way the images in this book work with the tension between reality and artifice makes me reflect on the way this happens not only in the photographic image, but also in the live performances of these artists.

Most of the works in this book address the nature and vulnerability of the body, and an obvious interpretation of these works might be that they affirm the reality of the artists’ bodies, and of “the body” itself. But what if we instead think of these works as challenges to that apparent reality? For even when the bodies are really in the room with us – bleeding, breathing, contorted, exposed – they are carefully planned fabrications. The images in Encounters might be seen not as presentations of the reality of these bodies, but of the ways in which we represent them – and, less obviously, the same thing might be said about the work upon which the images are based.

Along these lines, some of the pieces I like best in this collection are those that rely least on the extremity of what they represent, but instead those that question the processes of representation and seem most aware of themselves as photographs. The way Stuart Brisley is concealed and revealed within the site of fabrication, his studio. The way Miguel Perreira, his body obscured by black tufts of something animal, seems also to have been scratched into place from the border of the page that holds him. Or the way the image of Steven Cohen in costume atop a giraffe’s head seems simultaneously to both claim and refuse the authority of an anthropological document. These images reject any potential truth-value of the image (and of the body), and instead seem to embrace a value that derives from artifice, from simulation, and from everything that surfaces when we encounter the bodies and lives of others.

*Dominic Johnson makes a similar point in his 2005 article on Vason’s work, “Geometries of Trust: Some Thoughts on Manuel Vason and Photographic Conditions of Performance”, Dance Theatre Journal, 20, no. 4 [April 2005].

Written by Theron Schmidt

Related links

Encounters is available from Unbound: http://thisisunbound.co.uk/

Manuel Vason’s website: http://www.manuelvason.com/

Niko Raes

Performance
8 June 2007
Arnolfini, Bristol

Niko Raes’s performance of Shattered Dreams at the Arnolfini in Bristol accompanied the launch of Manuel Vason’s book Encounters (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), a collection of photographs Vason created in collaboration with a wide range of artists working within performance and live art. Shattered Dreams has only been publicly performed a handful of times, in 2001 and 2004, so most people familiar with his work (myself included) would have encountered it through images of it – including those created with Vason. The photographs of Shattered Dreams in Encounters present the image of Raes’s naked and painted body suspended in mid-air to be considered as image. But the live performance is quite a different experience in which, as a spectator, I am inevitably aware of not only the image being presented but also the act of presentation. For me, this live event is an opportunity to question not only the meaning of the images themselves, but also what it means to present these images to a collected audience.

As I enter the theatre, the room is dark. There is ominous music. There are no seats, and everyone is gathering in a circle around Raes’s body crumpled on the floor. His body is naked, covered in white paint, and attached by ropes to a frame suspended from the ceiling. The lights dim even more, the music swells, and the frame from which Raes’s body is suspended is hoisted into the air. Each of his arms is attached to each leg by a rope through a pulley so that, with effort, he can raise one limb by pulling down on another. For about twenty minutes, Raes creates images in mid-air with his contorted, straining body. They become increasingly difficult to create and sustain as his body becomes exhausted. Eventually, he can no longer move; the frame is lowered to the ground where he lies exhausted; the music stops; the audience applauds and leaves; and Raes remains exhausted on the floor in the empty room.

My most basic experience of this piece is of being part of a group of people gathered around the image of a naked, muscular body suspended and twisting in the air, made anonymous and aestheticised by the paint covering the body. For me, there is something disturbing about this experience, not because I find the image of Raes’s body to be disturbing but, quite the opposite, because it is so beautiful. This collective celebration of the beautiful has uncomfortable connotations for me, as it resonates not only with entertainment, athletics, and fashion, but also with fascism, in both its both popular sense (as in body-fascism) and political sense. For me, a culture that celebrates beauty as an end in and of itself is one which is dangerous, violent, intolerant, destructive… so gathering in a room to praise the beauty of a muscular body under stress is for me a suspect cultural practice.

But as Raes’s body tires, I feel as if the suspect beauty of the piece works productively against itself. The piece becomes less and less able to manifest itself, less and less a triumph of the body-as-object. I’m no longer (worryingly) admiring the beauty of the exertion, but instead watching that beauty consume itself. It’s possible to regard this exhausted body, as it is lowered to the floor, as a continuation of the celebration of the body-in-extreme (Christ/sport/pornography). It’s also possible to regard this exhaustion as the cost, undesirable but necessary, which must be paid for the attainment of beauty. But I think the piece asks us to regard it in its entirety, in which the images of beauty which it produces are only part of a longer arc which works both to produce and to undermine that beauty.

In this way, the piece doesn’t end when the music stops and collective applause (somewhat disappointingly) recuperates that collapse into a nameable experience. The arc of the experience includes this applause, as a figure lies unable even to stand, but also includes the room slowly emptying while he is still lying there, and then the room being empty, and him able to stand, and showering, and putting on his clothes, and beginning, with every action he makes in every day, to prepare for the next performance, whether it is weeks or months or years away.

All of this is perhaps implied by the more widely experienced photographs of Raes’s work, but in the live performance these issues become acute. In a reversal of what might be expected, these performances, more seldom experienced than the photographs of them, work as a kind of reflective critique of the images of exertion and beauty.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Niko Raes’s website: http://www.bodyrefuse.be/

Battersea Arts Centre 7 Jun 2007
Shown as part of Brunel University's MA Contemporary Performance Making Showcase Festival

Like millions of women across the UK, Ellen Duckenfield has an unhealthy obsession with food. However, her obsession does not stem from a modern concern with organic produce, weight gain or calorie counting. Duckenfield realises that food - and eating- is one of the things every human needs to do everyday (the other being sleep). Food is the ever-present witness to the drama of our lives and is therefore a perfectly ripe subject for a piece of performance.

In The Ideal Recipe Duckenfield follows a specially made instructional recipe booklet, preparing real ingredients in her makeshift on-stage kitchen whilst telling autobiographical tales through food: how food has moved throughout the defining moments of her life, acting as the familiar backdrop to family gatherings, political protests, personal disasters and deaths. Duckenfield's stories of her own life-in-food serve as a clear reminder that the preparation and consumption of this seemingly benign substance is more than a necessary daily duty or domestic act. On page two of The Ideal Recipe booklet, Duckenfield mirthfully squeezes lemons for 'Lemon Drizzle Cake' whilst recounting a bitter story of sibling rivalry. Its not clear whether the sister ate the cake, and if so survived. On page 8, Duckenfield proclaims herself 'Queen of Dips', confessing she never fails to impress at parties with her home made Guacamole. In short, food in The Ideal Recipe acts variously, both politically and psychologically, as retreat, reminder, gift, fashion statement, revenge and even competition. It follows that each one of us has a story to tell both with and through food and The Ideal Recipe prompts us to recall these childhood vegetable aversions or adult dinner party traumas.

There is a disturbing objectification of the food that Duckenfield shares the stage with. For example, each carrot is lovingly chopped in a diagonal twenty first century style, not, you must believe, in a passé seventies straight chop. Then later on, the artist illustrates her complex extended family with vegetables and then proceeds to callously chop the items, including the red onion - her step sister - roughly in half. Something inside of all of us tightens at this point: Duckenfield can and will do harm to the food she charmingly personifies. As such it is all the more disturbing to see the TV monitor close ups of her chopping, slicing and boiling the items in question.

Every so often Duckenfield steps out of the kitchen to enact structural and narrative asides, recalling the life of her alter ego - a glamorous and would be deadly assassin- into a small voice recorder. These interior monologues are important; they represent the artist's urge to escape her womanly domestic food-hell, a desire many can and will sympathise with. But moreover, in contrast to the kitchen scenes, the dialogue in these soliloquies appears raw, un-rehearsed and spontaneous. Duckenfield herself seems surprised with what unfolds in her imagined adventures. The audience gets the sense that she is genuinely yearning and practising for another life, her fantasies unravelling before both her and our eyes.

The performance of The Ideal Recipe and its on stage set up clearly mimes the contemporary trend for on-screen cooking programmes such as Ready Steady Cook and Saturday Kitchen. In addition, the TV equipment on the counter top, the adjacent video camera and discarded cartons recall a rare behind-the-scenes look at what these messy TV studios might look like beyond the frame. It is also important to note that Duckenfield uses the domestic interior - particularly the kitchen - as site for the work. In doing so she references overtly feminist work of the 1970's in which women artists (in particular Martha Rosler with her 'Semiotics of the Kitchen', 1975) made this typically 'female' space political and deeply problematic.

However, the ultimate achievement of The Ideal Recipe is successfully transforming food into much more than simple nostalgia trigger. Duckenfield manages to perform food as physical or body-to-body memory; cooked and consumed as a loaded and tangible gift moving from one person to another, thus creating a network and community of its own. At the end of the performance the artist ensures the audience is complicit in this particular food gift economy. Leaving the stage she invites everyone to dine out on her wares, to eat the fruits of her labour. However, faced with Duckenfield's 'gift' of food we are left, mid bite of Guacamole, wondering what, or who, is passing between us. What elements of Duckenfield's life, her family, have we consumed?

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

For more information on the artist Ellen Duckenfield see http://ellenduckenfield.com/

For more information Brunel University's showcase go to http://www.brunel.ac.uk/...

Durational Performance/Installation
Sat 9 Jun
Arnolfini

“…a seductive exploration into the personal language of desire and the subconscious landscape of the skin. By gilding her own body, Veenus gradually covers the eroticised and private self…taking on an emblematic presence that draws on mythological representations…” (Arnolfini)

A woman lies on a bed of coal in the darkened studio; an ebb and flow of sound and longing, slow, harsh, distorted. A wall papered with torn fragments of verse singing poetic physicality, tailing away into an expression of alarm repeated. Written fragments such as “….what concerns me is that I am not worried by this…”

Burnt ships wash against her shores and are stranded. Dereliction.

Ebb, flow. A silent attendant. A satyr/a hoofed creature/a man with big boots on and a funny looking safety-wear jock strap/ huh. He breaks eggs on her body and strokes her thigh sticky with yolk, eggshells, ash, hard rocky coals. Pools of yellow mess. One sheet at a time he lays wafers of gold on her body, attempting to burnish them. The material is recalcitrant, it crinkles, it doesn’t lay as planned. Ebb, flow, harsh sound. The room is full of it. Discomfort.

Electric fans disturb the air

A half-gilded woman on dead embers, too bloody untidy with all that haphazard leaf stuck to her. Harsh, crunchy, dead ash. Painful to navigate. A golden woman on a bed of coal, an ebb and flow of sound, harsh, slow, distorted

A bank of woman washed up on the beach. Flotsam surrounds her.

There sits the fellow watching from a distance. (Has he hurt himself?) A sticky pool of raw egg seeping, a mess of broken shells. A golden woman spooning some shape there in the coal

Torn fragments, words, phrases. What concerns me is that I am not

A golden woman flung adrift against a black hoofed being emerging

subsiding

dormant

…shining…

Written by Osunwunmi

For more information on the artist Venuus Vortex see http://profile.myspace.com/...

This performance was part of the ‘Encounters’ symposium and exhibition at the Arnolfini, for more information see http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/...

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