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/...

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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/