If Only…! There and Back Again - The Bluecoat

I believe I did say If Only…! would return and here it is, tonight we are promised be taken on a journey to the centre of the stage and back again. So set the controls to the centre of the stage. After been given an alternative ticket, listing a series of instructions we enter the performance space. To be greeted by a confusion of chairs, people quietly take their chairs and nothing happens. While I sit there in the dim light I begin to wonder if it's already begun, did that man standing up take off his coat in a way that seems stylised, is that woman two chairs away politely smiling putting it on? Then it all goes black. A spotlight picks out the person in the sit in front of me, he jumps onto his chair and begins to recount a story about gender and sexuality, he is quickly joined by another at first I attempt to pay attention to what they're saying. I quickly give up I listen to the overlapping rhythms of their speech, just as well as they are joined by three others recounting stories.

What is happening in front of me is a sound collage (similar to The Dreams by Delia Derbyshire and Beryl Bermange http://youtu.be/WCF_mHKBH3k that's a good thing) a sound collage which utilises one of the most versatile instruments we have, the human voice. In this piece we can hear the natural rhythms in the voice its inherent musicality and also how we listen. The piece is also a reminder that often quite complex ideas can be express and explored through quite simple means.

As the final words fade into the air on the lights come back on, we are split into groups according to our colour coded tickets. I am in the pink group. The group is ushered to the Bluecoat's hub where a rough and ready structure of tarpaulin and nylon rope awaits us. We dutifully line up, I am informed I am about to enter an imaginary Mariana Trench, before I do so I am handed a pair of headphones and a blindfold. Strangely I am in familiar territory having experiences of having my senses removed for the sake of art. See http://confusedguff.blogspot.com/2011/03/symphony-of-missing-room-lundahl-seitl.html . This is INARI DIVE a underwater adventure, though if I am honest I get no sense of being of underwater rather what I get is the sensation that I am moving quite gracefully responding elegantly to the sounds in my ears. This illusion is quickly shattered when after leaving the space I witness the stumbling shifting actions of people undergoing the same experience. For me this is the most interesting aspect of the piece the difference between the perception of ourselves and how we appear to others. Maybe this would be the focus in future showings.

The group is on the move again this time to the Vide space. Where are given a lecture about a work of Danny Heyes, which is suspended in the vide space. It's a difficult one to speak about is it a piece about how we treat art breaking down the individual elements of the work and the artist space in an attempt to find a nugget of meaning. Or was it a piece which tests the audience's commitment, are we listening because we want to learn something new about the human condition or are we there because it ticks off some cultural checklist. Or neither… either way the lecture is cut short for time reasons.
The pink group is now in the garden. In the garden is a 'Street Artist' I assume he's a street artist he has spray cans and he's using them. I'll be honest my interest in this kind of thing in barely there I stand there for a bit…then go the toilet in order to avoid the interval rush.

When the interval official happens, there's a moment of embarrassment where I have to recuse my drink from the performance space, sorry. Interval over where back in the performance space, in its more traditional format, a row of flowers lay in front of the tiered seating. There's a man standing there occasionally offering to hug people (not me) this is Alex Scott is ranting. Well he doesn't really seem angry (I've had angrier rants over the match.com ads, ukulele playing cock) as he lists his targets Cameron, the cuts nothing that the majority the audience already agree with. He only seems animated when recounting someone else's speech.

On to the stage comes the clicking heels of (I don't know it's a failing I know I'm sure someone can tell me). Whoever she is aligns herself with the flowers, and 60s pop-folk, and begins to jump on hers heels, then hops backwards stumbling when the lyrics of the song mention falling. It appears to be a naïve expression of the intent of the song, which is compounded by her frantic hammering of the floor which accompanies Dolly Parton's Jolene. Is it naïve, there is something childlike in her actions, childlike in the sense that the actions she undertakes seem the most oblivious but like the sound collage from earlier it is its simplicity which makes it effecting. Especially during the final movement she lifts her dress, exposing herself to the audience as Peter, Paul and Mary sing 'Where have the young girls gone?/ Taken husbands everyone/ When will they ever learn?' making it a moment of naïve knowing.

She is replaced by Mandy Romeo who takes us through a 'remix' or recounting of the night. Like this blog its bias the phrases and actions which must of stuck in Mandy's mind come to the fore, as see re-enacts her experiences they become mixed, the experiences so vivid moments before quickly merge and fall into memory. I wonder about how different or similar our experiences of the night are and maybe it should be a requirement of the events like these for audience member's to re-enact what they've seen, well maybe. Finally the violinist Laura McKinlay takes the stage to play us out.

Like last months If Only…! we have the collection of artists using this a platform to experiment, to test but I begin to wonder where it goes from there. Where and when will we see the expanded versions of what we've seen at If Only…! surely one of benefits of such a platform is the possible creation of other similar events in The Bluecoat and beyond? Perhaps these concerns will be assuaged by the festival that this round of If Only…! events will climax in.

Here's a link to an article I've written for new website The Double Negative, its related to the Republic of the Moon exhibition currently showing at FACT Liverpool.

http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2012/01/the-stars-our-destination/

Keep watching this space.

Republic of the Moon – FACT, Liverpool

A couple of days ago I visited the Republic of the Moon which currently occupies the gallery spaces of FACT. To this new Republic I am taking lots of expectations and a head full of Space Junk. So if I am honest any notion of addressing this exhibition on a solely artistic level is going out the airlock.

As I enter Gallery 1 I see the Mission Control for Agnes Meyer-Brandis's The Moon Goose Analogue and I brush pass what is the primer for the piece. I already know that this piece was inspired by Francis Goodwin image of a Goose driven chariot being flown to the moon. Once through the door I'm met by large screen feeding me important data regarding the Moon Geese, data echoed by smaller monitors set into a control desk. It's like being on the set of a cheap sci-fi, I mean that in a good way; remember I'm a big nerd.

I find myself becoming quite excited; I'm trying not to giggle like a child hopped up on sugar. I take one of the seats in front of the control desk and fight back the urge to start Techno-babbling. You know to start saying things like 'Goose-Com 1, we are Go-No-Go for Launch'. I pay attention to the poetic images displayed on the screen in front of me, which deserves my attention. What I assume is the artist leading a gaggle of geese with a shining moon on a stick. It's an image which is both beautiful and full of humour as is image of a lone figure sweeping a crater.

The whole piece is a collision between the poetic and pragmatic, like the original race to the Moon where the dream of going and living on the Moon was backed up by the practicality of solid fuel rockets.

I drag myself away; there are other pieces to see. Awaiting me in Gallery 2 is another set of doors, or rather an airlock in which to enter WE COLONIZED THE MOON's Enter at your Own Risk. Once through the airlock a circle of moon rocks sitting in a circle accompanied by a white stool and a spray can. The objects sit there in quiet expectation, like the spacesuit in storage that seems to be waiting, waiting to be animated. I wonder if this is a reflection of the idea that the Moon is quietly awaiting our return. Also it maybe the fact that this installation is the stage for a performance that feeds into this sensation of expectation.

Opposite Enter at your Own Risk is Andy Gracie's Drosophila Titanus an experiment to create a Fruit Fly which can survive within the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. It's the most scientific, or scientific looking, of all the pieces the in the exhibition and it's the piece I feel that I'll have to do some homework on and return to.

Sharing the space with Drosophila Titanus are two incredibly poetic pieces. In the space wisps of fog drift over an overhead projector while it throws a watery Moon against the wall. This is Sharon Houkema's M3 an attempt to make the intangible, tangible by using the means, OHP, water, is that a photocopy? at your disposal. Of course this pursuit of the intangible leads only to more intangibility but that's not the point, again there's a parallel to the Moon Race to be made here, where the want and the need to go to the Moon is as important as going there.

Another artificial moon awaits us in the images of Leonid Tishkov, where in a series of photographs Private Moon details one man's individual relationship with a crescent moon. These images reflect our relationship the Moon, a private, yet shared relationship. An individual relationship which is shaped by our cultural notions. The still image is accompanied by a video in which Tishkov in a boat on a lake casts a net in order to catch a floating moon. Within this video there is captured the longing of half remembered fantasies of plucking the moon from puddles, perhaps every time we look towards the moon we are plucking it from its original site and placing it within private sky of our imagination.

Finally there is Moomeme by Lilliane Lijin which details an incredibly ambitious proposal to use a laser to project the word SHE onto the surface of the Moon. At one point Lijin puts forwards the suggested use of orbital stencils. I can't but think about an episode of The Tick comic where one of the villain's is thwarted in their attempt to laser etch their name in the Moon leaving the letters CHA for generations to ponder about. I am not compering Lijin with cartoon supervillians, but the piece requires us to reflect on the possibility of the misuse of the Moon. If it became possible to turn the Moon into a floating billboard surely that would destroy millennia of romantic notions of the Moon.

Maybe the Moon deserves some protection from the corporations, who see the Moon as another asset. Part of that protection must come from an imaginative and poetic reengagement with the Moon to remember its intangible value, its influence. This is the aim of the artists in the exhibition to ensure that the Republic of the Moon is populated by people who dream of the desolate beauty of a new space home a quarter of a million miles away.

http://www.fact.co.uk/about/exhibitions/2011/republic-of-the-moon

http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/detail/republic_of_the_moon

 

 

 

Gina Czarnecki – The Bluecoat, Liverpool

To paraphrase Charlie Brooker '…you are a farting stumbling skittle' you are a mass of flesh, one of billions shifting and moving in this sea of humanity. You are composed of a biological history of viruses, genetics and pumping hearts.

We are our bodies, life and consciousness is withheld in the body, somehow. Don't ask me my knowledge only goes so deep. Perhaps there lies somewhere within this collective and yet individual experience of the body the drive to attempt to understand the baffling operations it undertakes, operations which are at one vital and yet alien.

Is then this pursuit of biological understanding an element of wider understanding of our existence here, as our position as the smartest lumps of flesh on the planet?

These are the thoughts which travel through the grey mush I refer to as my brain well looking at the Gina Czarnecki retrospective at the Bluecoat. An exploration into the augmentation of body through science and technology, which questions the affects that this exploration can have on society.

I find myself inside an installation, sat in front of a piece called Cellmass. A figure smears across the screen, her limbs twisting into evolutionarily dead ends. The fading trails of her movement speak of the memory of movement of lactic burn. Other figures begin to merge into her path, bodies forming a tumbling flailing mass. An orgy of genetic memory, retracing actions, paths, until they compress and reform into something new. Their collective actions have sparked the creation of a new organism, evolution in action.

What is driving this evolution? The tooth and claw of Darwin's theory or some need to circumvent nature. To provide that we are masters of our own biological destiny and not merely meat puppets controlled by deep animal urges.

Cellmass forms part of a trilogy of sorts, three parts of a whole, three organs acting as one. It's easy to read them as parts of a whole thanks (in part) to the booming blood in your ears hum provided by Christian Fennesz. It creates the sense of being enclosed within a body or having your internal sounds being amplified and projected into the space surrounding you.

The middle piece, which would be the first you would encounter (it will make sense when you visit the Bluecoat) is Infection. Features a figure trapped inside what looks like a petri dish. Within this space the figure undergoes a digitally edited evolution, using video editing techniques Czarnecki forces an evolution. As a genetic smear grows limbs and begins to fight against its confines to breakout and complete its genetic destiny. There's a point when I put my hand into the shallow waters that Infection is projected into and the figure retreats from this intrusion. I know that this isn't happening that it was just a coincidence, but it makes me think wonder if I'm no longer just experiencing this and have become part of the piece.

Then onto Spintex where the surprise of the red light of dusk awaits me. For a moment its strange to see something which is outside of the body. Though the rolling heartbeat of the score act as an bodily reminder as it washes into me. The screen fades to black and out of the darkness looms a face, ghostly with the look of being on the edge of something, some kind of revelation. It becomes apparent that this face is part of an moving mass, swaying to some primeval hearts to a greater rhythm. The pulse of music recalling the beat of the heart the flow of blood.

While in this space I can't help but relate it to my experiences of nightclubbing. Specifically that point where you've stopped hearing the music, or stopped trying to hear the music and everything becomes a thudding rhythm that seems to glue the sweaty mass you're in together. To continue this allegory it also feels like the morning after where your body still reverberates and the blood in your ear still keeps a 4/4 beat. The sensation you put your body through something that you responded to some pre-programmed urge to be part of some unknown viral mass.

This has focused on three pieces and I haven't touched on the other themes inherent in the exhibition or spoke about the spectral figures or the collection of teeth moulds that haunt part of the gallery.

 

http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1126

 

 

If Only…! On Parole – The Bluecoat

If Only…! The Bluecoat's experimental live art cabaret makes a welcome return after a year away. Whatever it's been up to in that year I am not sure, making trouble for itself as the On Parole subtitle suggests.

As often happens at these events the whole thing already seems to be leaking out from the Bluecoat's performance space, what looks like a strippers pole has been set up in the landing. Also what are those guys in helmets and Hi Viz jackets doing making their way through the gathering crowd and disappearing into the performance space?

Entering the performance space members of the audience are approached by 'officials' ,all lanyards and clipboards, who subject them to baffling searches, ensuring that mobile phones are collected into plastic bags, for our own protect of course. The two security guards seen earlier are flanking a tent laid out on stage.

Already I have the sense of an event on the defensive, but from whom? It begins with the two officials ensuring the correct space has been allocated while a figure dressed in prison fatigues sets out what will happen. Marking out where things will happen and the correct contextual statement for each piece. This echoes the pragmatic way artists are expected to lay out their intentions in order for their worth to be judged. Of course events like If Only…!, which focus on experimentation and incomplete work can be seen as a luxury in the face of cuts.

Anyway on with the show, one of the officials enters the tent accompanied by glacial winds and a musical duo. The people in the tent begin to play with newspaper, rustling, crushing, ripping it and throwing it around the tent giving it the impression of a self-creating snow globe. Above them a screen splutters into life and gives a view from within the tent, where paper landscapes appear and tumble and spin weightlessly through space given us access to a wold of impossible movements. It's what I would guess the point of view of a dancer to be, there is a giddy sense of movement throughout the piece.

Once the piece is other, the officials simply leave the tent and kick it out of the way. This continues the theme and also neatly conceals the necessary scene change.
Next the security guards take to the stage and begin to perform acoustic versions of popular songs. Is this an attempt to remind us that behind the plastic visors of authority are human beings? I don't know, throughout the performance I expect something violent to happen… it doesn't.

One of the officials gives us a breakdown of the next performance, or rather what seems to be a collection of key phrases which seem to have little to what actually happens next.

As what happens next is magic! The man in prison fatigues returns as magician adorned in a high Fez and has a be-sequined assistant (as is tradition). The assistant is laid across a plain wooden table the magician whips out a saw and begins to saw away at the legs of the table. The audience gasps and coo's and the assistant finds herself in an increasingly precarious position. I can't help but think about the relationship this relationship between magician and assistant where no matter how lethal the actions of the magician appears the assistant much take the risks with quite grace. Almost like every human relationship… though I maybe overthinking it.

As the magician struggles with a particularly though selection of the table, an official address the audience to gather feedback. After gathering the data she decides to configure the data to her own ends and pass the magic act.

The magician swaps place with the duo Graculus who deal with the echo of wood being thrown away as they begin; the main thing I take away from Graculus is simply that improvised music can be unexpectedly beautiful.

Its interval time, crowded bar, confused shuffling. Eventually from outside the performance space there comes a sleazy guitar riff and from the stairwell comes Mickey Mouse who proceeds to pole dance, grinding and spinning around in that way that is physically yet not sexual. It's strange this piece as a begin to wonder if Mickey Mouse is a spent symbol, his ironic cache used up and therefore his appearance as pole dancer, for this viewer at least isn't surprising. Also it's not as funny or sinister as being in a lap dancing club where my one and only visit to such an establishment involved the use of the phrase 'Do you want these in your face'.

My dodgy past aside, where back into the performance space for the trio Eyes consisting of guitar, drums and poet. They make a likeable post-something noise while the poet barks his poetry into the riffs. Eventually the poet ends up taking the traditional frontman role screaming at the audience and rolling around the floor. All good clean fun.

Before the final act the officials go through the information gathered so far ensuring that not only we have the correct performance but we have the correct audience.

On to the closing act of the night, a tango performance, this is almost upstaged by some comedy bickering from Graculus. That aside this is the act that is received warmly by the audience it also serves as a reminder that the platforms like If Only…! are really open to a range of artforms and practitioners.

Before will leave we are given a brief PowerPoint presentation which takes us through the people involved in producing tonight's event. Throughout the night I have had the sense of artists on the defensive, of people expected to justify ideas which sometimes cannot be justified beyond their own existence. Which, to repeat myself, could become more difficult in these times of crisis. That aside what If Only…! provides is an platform for a number of performers from different disciplines to experiment, to strengthen themselves to ensure that we have an on-going creative exchange.

The next If Only...! will take place... http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1190

Father – Wolstenholme Creative Space, Liverpool

Laying my cards on the table, this is based on what turned out to be a very brief visit to Wolstenholme Creative Space. I had intended to spend some time getting to 'know' the work as it were. Well that was plan, after arriving at the WCS and surveying what was on offer things changed. At a glance the exhibitions feels slight but never judge an exhibition on quantity alone.

I look at a double buckled belt on a plinth, its well-made, I perhaps lazily think that it has something to do with the authoritative figure of the father. It doesn't inspire me to explore further into it.

Then on to a series of large photographs in which a grotesquely swollen headed figure sits in a pile of debris. Though the grossness of the image is strangely appealing, I get the impression that I'm looking at documentation of something else. Where the unease suggested by the images manifests itself into something more visceral.

Opposite these there are five printed letters, something to do with a paternity test? I don't know I begin to read them but begin to lose interest especially when it turns out all five framed letters are the same. Expect for one which read something like 'stop sending me letters'. I don't know what the point was here nor do I care. If it were to bombard someone with these letters I hope you sent more than five.

In another space there is an old school style arcade machine which has been farting out its 8 bit music since I've been in the gallery. For some reason I don't play the game.

What else is there? Well there are tiles of jet carefully etched with things like 'The Tree of Life'. The seductive materially surfaces of these objects, well remains on the surface and I feel that I've seen this kind of thing before. Occupying the same space are banners on which has been printed a poem, I like the poem but when presented in this manner the words feel flat. Behind that there's a suit on a plinth.

The overall sense I have about the exhibition is my inability to engage with it. In an exhibition whose underlined theme is the father figure, that figure seemed absent. Maybe a better understanding of the individuals context and the process might filled this gap but you still need to engage the audience in order for us to want to delve a little deeper into the work.

http://wolstenholmecreativespace.com

Frakture presents: Combine - The Bluecoat

For what promises to be an event full of noise the hub of the Bluecoat feels very quiet (though Calexico appears to be drifting from the tannoy), maybe this is the quiet that prepares us for what's to come, a sonic sorbet of sorts. Soon enough people arrive and find themselves in the intimate space of the Sandon Room. Which has been laid out in a rough and ready, freewheeling nature manner familiar to anyone who has attended a Frakture gig before.

We are introduced Combine as a first of a new platform combining music, sound and art which will consist of three acts. The first act is Takahashi's Shellfish Concern who have set up in the corner of the room, Angela Guyton beckons the audience nearer or they'll miss out. She and the audience are gathered around a blank canvas and she begins to mark the canvas. This action is accompanied by a roaring crushing sound it's apparent that the canvas and Angelas herself has been transformed into an instrument. Of course associations with action painting spring to mind and Harold Rosenberg's ascertain that art lies within its creation rather than with the final product.

What also comes to mind is the almost synesthetic nature of creating art, how the sound of pen scrapping across paper, brush across canvas even your own breathing become somehow part of the process. Takahashi's Shellfish Concern have created a piece which amplifies these private moments into the public realm providing us the audience the opportunity to consider the creative process and the production of art.

For the second act we swap the Sandon Room for the Garden Room where an orchestra of sorts awaits us. They even have a conductor of sorts; a man sits at a trestle table and before him is laid a number of fluorescent cards. He selects one and raises it above his head and it begins. Though it becomes apparent that he is not in charge as members of the 'orchestra' are communicating with the conductor and each other through a series of coded gestures.

To be honest I missed the intro to this piece and I am a little lost to the importance of this arcane signals or the role that wearing hats has. It feels like I've wandered into a private joke and being on the outside of that joke it's hard to so what's so funny. Though there is certain pleasures to have seeing the musicians interact with each other passing on musical phrases. On the whole it gives the impression that this is a piece for musicians, rather than an audience but that's the risk you take with modern composition.

Afterwards I learn that this is a version of John Zorn's 'improvisational game piece' Cobra and it make a little more sense.

Then it's back to the Sandon Room for the final act of the night which consist of Dave Birchall and Bekke Platt a duo comprised of dancer and guitarist. In the middle of the room the dancer (Bekke) sits on the floor with her back to the audience while the guitarist (Dave) sits on a chair facing the audience, facing the dancer. He begins to play in the traditional juttering, plucking free/improve style (he appears to be using a fir cone as pic) the dancer slowly begins to move just her hand at first and then her whole body. Eventually she is rolling around the floor tumbling and sliding nowhere. My focus shifts to the guitarist contorting in his chair and it strikes me that he seems to be lost in the moment while the dancer is not.

Her moments feel planned and of course they are, but as an improvisational piece I want a sense of spontaneity. To see that her movements are plucked from the guitar, to see that there is interplay between her body and the sound around it. This is a little unfair of me as it's difficult to judge something as ethereal as spontaneity from my position in the audience. As a piece I get the sensation that this is a work in progress, of a dancer discovering the extent of her body.

As a whole the night has the feel of a work in progress, in part it like attending a crit session at uni. This may be due to the informal setting and the focus on experimentation. After all this is the first night after all and I think that Combine has the potential to provide a platform for collaboration and experimentation, to celebrate the fluid nature of live performance.

http://www.frakture.org/

http://www.takahashisshellfishconcern.com/