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/...