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