Performance artists on Style.com

Here I am, minding my business, being a Style.com (that's Fashion, folks!) slave, checking out what's happening in the word of Style, as one does, and who do I find on Style.com's social pages ... MARINA ABRAMOVIC!!!

This is almost as good as Carrie Bradshaw going to an Abramovic performance, no? Except this is real life!!! OK, granted, the shot was taken at the opening of artist Terence Koh's newest show, but still ... STYLE.COM!?!?!!

I think this is brilliant and I'm super glad my love for fashion and performance has made such a tangible crossover. In layman's terms: Marina Abramovic = performance art, Style.com = fashion, therefore: MA + SDC = tangible crossover of fash and p-art! Now fashionistas across the globe can unashamedly show their true colours (i.e. that they 'like' fashion) when attending live art events! Yay!

Next thing Marina will be front-row at Marc Jacobs ... sitting next to Anna Wintour (talk about influential, iconic women) ... and we know what that means ... a Vogue cover isn't far off!

ALLRIGHT!!! CAN'T WAIT!!!Abramovic with Koh (pic courtesy of Style.com)

Read more...

Sydney Thursday

Thursday night, as Thursday nights tend to do, hosted a couple of interesting openings in Sydney. The first I attended was Artspace's Between Site & Space exhibition of six artists from Australia and Japan. The second, at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), showed Sandy Nicholson's 2nd Place and Denis Darzacq's Hyper, below.
Between Site & Space is a collaboration between the Tokyo Wonder Site (TWS) and Artspace, Sydney. Three Australian artists, Alex Gawronski, Gail Priest and Tim Silver completed residencies in Tokyo in 2008, and were exhibited with Japan's chosen artists, Exonemo, Paramodel and Hiraku Suzuki, at TWS's Diorama of the City show. This year, the exhibit comes to Artspace to symbolise an ongoing relationship between Tokyo and Sydney.

The works are different here than they were in Tokyo, as the brochure and Artspace website reveals, and the space itself suggests; they have been "elaborated". I wondered as I wandered through the space if they felt more cohesive in Tokyo. Because there is a certain sense of ad hoc-ness, perhaps even a sense of dislocation, here in Sydney. Maybe this was the intention, the paradigms of location/dislocation in relation to place were mentioned in opening speeches, but I felt overall a little lost by the lack of cohesion between works and the way they had been displayed.

This is not to say the works themselves aren't interesting. I found Hiraku Suzuki's silver wall-painted 'Road Sign' truly beautiful and Tim Silver's 'Shooting tadpoles at the moon', three screens playing slideshows of a series of Manga-esque horror-movie-like stills, a fascinating way to depict still image while imparting a montage-like effect upon the viewer (see install-shot below).


Exonemo's wonderful installation 'Supernatural' explores the concept of time as a construct and subverts the restrictions it has placed upon us all by live-feeding footage of themselves (Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa) at home in Tokyo alongside live-feed of the Artspace gallery in Sydney. The two screens are bisected horizontally (that is, through both countries) by a large spoon. I very much like this notion of spooning with people who are in another country. This work lifted the exhibition with its literal embodiment of the concept, claimed by the organisers, of "facilitating contact" between Tokyo and Sydney.

Though, I must note, this contact was achieved rather hilariously when I accidentally kicked one of Paramodel's installation pieces, a toy truck, and it went driving across the room. This certainly fascilitated conversation when I had to apologise to Paramodel's Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano for my clumsiness.

A still of Exonemo's 'Supernatural' installation:


Sandy Nicholson's 2nd Place at ACP was a lot of fun. His works show lightly ironic portraits of second-place getters beside images of them in action or close-up and large still-lifes of their trophies. The secondary 'portraits' contain printed text of a quote from the subject describing how they feel about coming second. These quotes shed insight onto the photo itself, which isn't often enough to decipher what the competition in fact was. For example, Bryan Bennett (pictured below), who came second in the Rock Paper Scissors World Series, says, "I knew I had lost before the final throw".


The juxtaposition of humorous competitions such as world gaming championships (that is, video gaming), hot-dog eating and nail-painting championships, with the serious demeanours of many of Nicholson's subjects creates an amusing and affirming exhibit of the people who aren't winners, something I think we can all relate to in one way or another.

Denis Darzacq's Hyper is a much more concise exhibit. It depicts young people hovering mid-air in public spaces such as supermarkets. Their bodies seem to hang as if by invisible string or by superimposition. But a video documenting Darzacq's process reveals it is all 'real', these young men and women are experts of the sport called Parkour or Free Running. Their immense physical skills, the ability to throw themselves into the air, flip, land in unusual ways and live to tell the tale, is diverted in Darzacq's photos, however. His images show only one moment in the intricate parkour move. So what we see, more than examples of astounding physical ability, is what looks like human helplessness in front of bright, shiny consumerism.

This reading is perhaps deep, but for me these limp, seemingly out-of-control bodies, hanging lifeless or possessed in shopping aisles, is representational of our overall lack of control, lack of escape-route, when it comes to consumerism. As a result, these images are incredibly powerful.

Three exhibits, three very different approaches. Another Thursday.
Read more...

Framework Art Collective

While at the performance arts festival Experimentica, I met one of the performers, Adele Vye and was invited to Swansea to check out her interdisciplinary performance group, Framework.

Framework is an art collective based in Swansea made up of 6 artists whose common aim is to engage with the community through pieces which involve the public. They hold a social every first Tuesday of each month, where artists are invited to participate by performing or sharing ideas.

I went along one Tuesday and didn’t know what to expect, though I was told that I had to bring something to swap. I only remembered this during the train journey there, so proceeded to draw some tattoos on my banana, hoping it would pass off as clever and inventive.

It was held in a humble social club with a stage area, chairs and a bar. We were told to interact with each other by swapping our items, so I took a deep breath and approached various people, banana in hand. After much swapping, we had a game of bingo and watched a couple of films made by local artists.


It was an excellent way to spend a Tuesday evening, for a banana, some ink and a train ticket, I gained a mix tape, a skirt, half a carrot, plastic jewellery and was filled with the hope that there are groups such as these out there, where all sorts of artists can integrate in a supportive environment, where people are doing what they love.

I have been back there a couple of times since (the Christmas social was spectacular, with poets, performance artists, films and a dance) and hope to make it a regular “every first Tuesday of the month” thing.

Poster © Framework Photos ©
Yasmine Boudiaf 

www.myspace.com/frameworkswansea

Read more...

Experimentica '08

I was lucky enough to go to the annual performance arts festival based in Cardiff this year and here are five of my favourites:


Richard Bowers and Gwilly Edmondez – “Pandæmonium”
You can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your ears. Sonic art takes advantage of this; through sound, an atmosphere is created, it is translated in to a feeling within you, and in this case, it was the same feeling I got when looking at Francis Bacon’s ‘Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X’.
The use of a chair, the body positions and facial expressions silently projected on the wall conjured up feelings of panic and wanting to scream, but being unable to react physically.
The sound quality did this justice. Texture was created by recording sounds made by the performer, then digitally layering it, live. The sounds increased in intensity and layers as the performer became more frantic and physical; the addition of paper ripping and being crumpled, a typewriter, a pencil scratching and his blowing through a straw onto a microphone.
On the video projection, he was making violent gestures and clearly using his voice, but we could not hear it, only fragments of it were weaved into the background sound. Live, he became increasingly violent, as did the sound, then with a burst of frantic energy, he began jolting and created a new wave of hard, fast noise. Then he lay still and there was absolute silence.
I suddenly felt exposed. It all went dark and there was only silence, with some awkward shuffling. He was still lying on the floor.
I’m familiar with music effecting your emotions, where the subconscious attaches itself to a rhythm, but this wasn’t music, only a precisely layered collection of recorded sound played back. Wait – was it music?

Photo © Cathy Boyce 2008.

Tom Marshman - “Hello Sailor (Goodbye Heart)”
He saturated himself with all things sailor; your standard sailor’s outfit and handing the audience rum, but what shocked me was that he got an actual tattoo of a ship on his arm. This, unlike the sailor hat, is permanent. It raises the question:
At what point does commitment to your art become unreasonable? A performance artist relies on the aesthetics and functionality of their body. An act during one performance which permanently affects their body may hinder their next performance physically or limit their conviction visually.

Random People – “Versions 1-5” – Various artists
A very good example of collaboration; 4 different artists, each tackling a common piece of text, expressing it individually at the beginning of the piece, then bringing it together at the end as a group performance.
Because I had participated in the ArtsAdmin Summer School ’08, I was able to detect little performance techniques here and there (audience interaction, dealing with mistakes etc). At the same time, I was absorbed in the piece and constantly anticipated their next actions.
I wondered after the performance, whether being conscious of the process takes away from your experience of an art piece, like watching a horror film but constantly noticing that the monster puppet’s mouth can never synchronise with the sounds it is making, as it only has three basic moves which can never cover our lexical field. I then realised that unlike a horror flick, this performance never tried to dictate how I should feel or imposed any restrictions on what I should take away from it, so I was free to experience the enjoyment of a good show as well as have the satisfaction from my background knowledge.

Andrea Williams – “Car”
A five minute audio visual instillation of a view of the sky from outside the car and then a view across a road with cars driving past. These visual scenes are eerily familiar, I immediately recall them and realise how many precious minutes I have spent waiting to cross a road or falling asleep in a car. A major factor of this installation was its location; in the basement of a very small art gallery, G39. The space was dark and basic, with brick walls and room for only two benches to sit on. You enter through a small trap door in the floor, down steep makeshift stairs. There is nothing to distract you and no space to do quick floor exercises or a random dance if you’re the only visitor, so you are completely engulfed by whatever happens to be projected on the wall.

Adele Vye
She used the G39 ground floor space all night long and could be seen from outside putting on various outfits from her huge transportable cupboard and transforming into various characters. I saw many bewildered passers-by try to make sense of it, which was amusing, (also, it was Saturday night) but I eventually got too cold and went home.

http://www.experimentica08.blogspot.com/
www.richardbowers.co.uk/
http://tommarshman.blogspot.com/2008/06/hello-sailor-goodbye-heart.html http://www.artcardiff.com/website.cgi?place=artists&id=117

Read more...

It's all about Meees

‘Meees’ translated into English from Welsh means ‘Baaas’ – the sounds that sheep make – in Arabic it is ‘Maaas’. Meees is a Welsh children’s TV show, similar to the Tweenies or Teletubbies, consisting of colourful animatronic heads and costumes worn by trained actors enacting educational and often moral scinarios, with the aim of making the innocent ones of today the PC-minded citizens of tomorrow. Meees Takes this further; rather than hinting at racial equality and freedom of lifestyle by, say, pastel coloured outfits, or subtle statements such as the sex-less purple one sporting a red purse, Meees conspicuously has a dark skinned sheep as the mother (ethnic minority), a father sheep from Greece (immigrant) and a daughter sheep and her partner, who is step-dad to her 2 children.



The TV network Al Jazeera recently bought the first series of the show and is in the process of translating it into Arabic, to be broadcast to Arabic speaking countries. Tanya El Khouri is one of the vocal artists and is well aware of the radical cultural differences; “The show is very open-minded … they are not used to seeing this”.
Having watched Arabic channels via satellite over the years, I have seldom come across such forward-thinking concepts, perhaps they do exist and are just not openly broadcast. The reaction to Meees will be a good measure of tolerance in the Arab world (where it is allowed to be shown) and I will be keeping an eye out for further developments and reactions.


Read more...