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/...

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/...