Sparking Debate. Stimulating Conversation. Supporting Artists. Taking Live Art Seriously.

'We Need to Talk about Live Art' is a daily flash publication, by Writing From Live Art writers Tim Atack, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt, that was printed daily and distributed at the Tramway Arts Centre, Glasgow during the National Review of Live Art(NRLA) 6- 10 February 2008.

We Need to Talk about Live Art responded to the work seen at NRLA. We were not affiliated with the National Review of Live Art. The project was conceived of to start conversations with NRLA artists, audiences and readers and support the work shown. Comments cards were also made available for audience responses and feedback during the course of the festival, which were then integrated with the daily NRLA publication.

The writing is enclosed in its original flash publishing format and the PDF's represent the quick turnaround of the writing, complete with the occasional typo. You can download the PDF's from the links below. A selection of this writing is also published in print and online in RealTime Magazine 84 April-May 08,2008.

'We Need to Talk About Live Art was a writer-led initiative with support from Live Art UK, the national network of Live Art promoters.

If you have any comments or queries about the writing please make a comment here on the Writing from Live Art website, thankyou. Thanks to everyone who made NRLA 08 and We Need to Talk About Live Art an enjoyable experience.

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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: Uninvited Guests, 'Love Letters'. Courtesy the artists

Uninvited Guests
Love Letters
Tramway, Glasgow, 09/02/08

This first one is dedicated to Uninvited Guests. It’s been a long hard road, and I ought to confess it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. Your systematic use of mediated or found text. The considered performance style you had, with its strange amplifications, intensities pitching like a boat in a storm. My unreasonable suspicion of anything that laid out its stall so simply and openly in the way that you did. Offline was the first time we met, remember? Happy days. Your show about love on the internet, a lover’s stroll which ambled along to a soundtrack of schmaltz played by the cheapest general MIDI sounds you could find. And I couldn’t ‘get in’. I couldn’t engage. It wasn’t going to happen on the first date. But I spent longer with you – literally, in the durational version of that same project, and I was happier. It seemed more human, more vulnerable, and that made me think that maybe there could be something between us: if I let my guard down, and if you did the same.

So here we are then, many shows, many years later, and it’s the second time I’ve seen Love Letters. The first time was funny, beautiful… the second time, magical. Such a simple idea: trap a whole bunch of people in a room full of other people’s song dedications, with all the images, memories, stories, hopes, dreams and regrets that come spilling from the music. Because unlike dedications of the type heard daily from the radio station of your choice, these cannot be switched off – you can’t be doing the washing up, you can’t answer the phone. The audience form part of the process, witness to each announcement, be it a shout out to a friend or a eulogy for the dear departed.

So here we are then, and it’s about music, and about how the most saccharine piece of crap translates into the most evocative of symphonies for someone. So here we are, and it’s about standing up for the song you believe in, not being ashamed by it or what it says. So here we are, and Richard Dufty has begun shouting at the top of his lungs as Kate Bush’s The Hounds Of Love thumps from the speakers, shouting about missing you so much, and missing you so much, missing you so much, his voice rasping and cracking under the strain. The audience member next to me is suddenly in floods of tears, uncontrollable, patting her clothes for a handkerchief she can’t find. I know it’s the first time she’s seen this show, so I know it’s not just me. I know it’s not just because I’ve grown up with you, Uninvited Guests, just because I’ve become accustomed to your wily ways. Because along the way I’m sure we’ve both changed.

So this is a thankyou. And as for the song I’d like to dedicate to you? Well, I thought it appropriate that it should be a cover version. And probably my favourite cover version in the world is “Women of the World” by Jim O’Rourke, from Ivor Cutler’s original. It’s deceptively simple, repetitive… but it gets there, and it gets to you. In the end.

Women of the world, take over
Cos if you don’t the world will come to an end
And it won’t take long

This next one is dedicated to the audience. Go, team. Some of you I didn’t get to see around much; but as we were sat at two long tables, wedding / seminar / board meeting style, a good half of you I was able to watch intermittently throughout the show. The mottled burnt orange wall behind you, glitterball reflections twinkling in your green / blue / black eyes: god, you guys were beautiful. I’d particularly like to mention the good-looking bloke with the cheeky smile with whom, a few minutes into the show, I was asked to lock eyes for the length of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as sung by Johnny Cash. Sorry, mate: I’ve seen the show before. I knew it was coming. I was well prepared. You seemed a little more fazed.

As I set my face into something that I hoped was approaching the approachable (as opposed to what I fear it was; a pervy smirk) everyone around us was doing the same, gazing into the eyes of the person opposite. Some found it easier than others. Little bursts of laughter interrupted Johnny Cash to my left and right, like birds sounding off in a dark forest.

Our hosts knew what they were doing. The rules of engagement were laid out clearly: we, fair audience, were fair game. Later on, we’d be asked to scramble around the perimeter of the space after one of the performers in a playground kiss-chase (which some of us did suddenly, and unexpectedly.) We’d be asked to stand as if the dedication were ours, even when it wasn’t, representing a stranger’s memories. We’d be told “If this song means something to you, feel free to stand up at any time.” It was “Heroes” by David Bowie, and I jumped to my feet as if prompted by a pistol shot. Yep, that was me. We were plied with alcohol and party poppers; we were asked to throw flowers onto two lovers as they rolled about between the tables; we were asked to slow-dance at the end of the show. But mostly, we were asked to listen.

I wonder which dedication struck you the hardest? For me, it was Lady In Red. What a song! Chris de Burgh’s whiny, sexless vocals. The dying robotic twitch of its drum machine. The dull mush of its faux-string synthesisers, the useless twunk of its rubber-band guitar. All in all, an appalling piece of simpering bullshit, almost apocalyptic in its awfulness: but it was dedicated to someone’s Grandmother, and the accompanying homily ended with the words “Every day without her in the world is the less for her absence,” and suddenly… how could I have hated this song so much? How could I when somehow, somewhere, it channelled a sentiment like that? And what’s more, I knew the way the show had been compiled: this was a dedication by one of my fellow viewers, present, somewhere, in the room. Sorry, whoever you are. Are we still friends?

Presenting these pop vagaries requires no small amount of subtlety. Theatrical tricks can’t get in the way. The performances by Jess Hoffmann and Richard Dufty were remarkable in this respect; for the much of the opening five minutes of the show, they simply sat behind their apple macs, at opposite heads of the table, mixing love songs at each other in a sort of DJ tennis, saying absolutely nothing and letting the music tell its many tales. Their faces were quietly mischievous, flirting, each track a chat-up line. “Yeah!” shouted Dufty as the guitar solo in I Believe In A Thing Called Love kicked in. He ramped up the volume. Hoffmann looked at him with the quiet tolerance of a lover, a patience many years in the making. Later, the songs shifted, a romance gone awry. Love Will Tear Us Apart. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

So, comrade audience, our own story… well, it’s done. It was a one-night stand, I see that, in retrospect. And as for my dedication? In the spirit of songs which may mean one thing to you and another to me, I’m going to chose a track by that most marmite of vocalists, the love-her-or-hate-her Björk. And a remix, to boot: the Plaid mix of All Is Full Of Love, new chords snaking about Björk’s original melody, messing with its DNA.

You’ll have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the direction
You are staring at

Bit of a curveball, this last one. But bear with me.
This is to the man who I first remember speaking of those sweet, meaningless songs, wafting up the stairway. The bittersweet melody lilting from the scratchy gramophone. This is to the man who gave those cadence-like memories their own, unique dramatic shape. To the man I think of as I leave Love Letters, as I recall the line from The Singing Detective, spoken by his character Phillip Marlowe: “Those songs. Those bloody, bloody songs.”

I’d like to dedicate Eyes by Alex Glasgow to Dennis Potter. Eyes, a piece of music I discovered when morosely leafing through my departed grandfather’s record collection. “Take whatever you want,” my Grandma had said, in her usual brusque Yorkshire way. “I’m not likely to listen to any of it.”
And Alex Glasgow’s strange warbling voice over a bed of keening strings lifted my spirit, and made me twice as sad, all at once. A bit like Love Letters, truth be told: it spoke of the persistence of memory, and of the fading light… both of how terrible and beautiful it can be.

Eyes look kindly on me
Eyes of thine look kindly on me
Thine eyes
Mine eyes
Tell me no lies and look kindly on me

Written by Tim Atack