Been looking at the most recent issue Christopher Hewitt's liveartwork DVD
which features video documentation from contemporary live art and
performance art. Issue Five has great material from Gary Stevens,
Stuart Brisley and Goat Island.
Another
good place to look for fragmentary Live Art remains these days seems to
be YouTube. I guess everything will be there before too long, at least
in more low-res/ stuttering form. I wrote here about a great John Cage clip
involving a performance on a 50's game show. More recently came across
three very smart and short videos by Swiss artist Raymond Signer, two
of them simple and funny interventions in landscape culled from a film
by Peter Liechti. You can see them here, here and here.
"Signer has been making his "temporary sculptures"--actions that
he documents with film and video since the 1970s. These events, which
can involve anything from amplified snoring to small rockets, are
usually short-lived, often funny and always cathartic..."
The rest of this article on Signer from Art in America by Gregory Volk here.
Visiting the hospital for blood tests. At a junction in the
corridor which somehow the flourescent lights don't seem to reach, the
lit up PEPSI drinks vending machine bears a handwritten sign that
reads:
OUT OF ORDER
SMELLS OF BURNING
*
A friend writes, describing a recent open-air gig/performance:
Sweaty. Hopelessly messy, I couldn't even recognise some of the
songs till we were well into them, strange feeling of ploughing on with
singing through the noise on trust that somewhere, somehow it can be
heard. We got good reactions.
I've been working on project in collaboration with the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. It's called Drama Queens and will be shown in Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 next weekend. Performances are on 16th June at 17:00, 19:00 and 21:00 in the Münster City Theatre.
Michael and Ingar proposed to make a performance without actors, in
which a group of famous Twentieth Century sculptures hang out on stage
and chat (via performers on voiceover) - making some small talk,
boasting about their respective places in art history and bickering
about their possible worth at auction. They invited me to write the
text which by now is finalised and recorded.
As we've worked on it the piece has developed into a preposterous
object-drama in which (amongst other things) Jeff Koons' Rabbit falls
out with Giacometti's Walking Man, Hans Arp's Cloud Shepherd falls in
love with Barbara Hepworth's Elegy III, and the whole scene is observed
with conceptualist wit from Sol Lewitt's Four Cubes and with outspoken
rage from Ulrich Rukreim's Untitled (Granite). There's a great sense of
fun in the piece but at heart it's pretty sad too. Maybe there's always
something melancholic about objects that start to talk.
Initially E&D planned that stage-hands dressed in black would shunt
the sculptures around the stage as they talked but in the final event
the sculptures (slightly larger than life, and replicas of course) will
be motorised and radio controlled from the wings.
A couple of weeks ago when we were in Berlin the kids and I went out to
took a look at the guys amazing new studio (an old pumping station
that's very much under-reconstruction) and at the sculptures for Drama Queens
lying prone, or bubble-wrapped and awaiting
electrification. I think the performance is going to be pretty
interesting.
Rabbit: They said I was a nothing, an empty gesture, a
superficial if kind of clever decoration. Others said that I embodied a
devastating critique of the economy of the superficial. They said that
from the tips of my ears to the ends of my feet I was a dazzling attack
on a whole culture’s obsession with wealth, glitz and easy pleasures.
Still others thought that I was genuinely charming, that I showed a
real and honest sense of fun – a kind of joy without irony that has all
but vanished from the world.
Elegy III: And, what’s your own opinion?
Rabbit: I am a silver rabbit, based on the form of a cheap but
colorful plastic toy and I am approximately 104cm high. I just reflect
reality on my beautiful skin. That’s all there is to it girl. What kind
of opinion do you expect me to have about those big questions about
symbols and meaning?
All yesterday afternoon an email list that I'm on (usually a quiet
backwater of the internet) went into total tailspin as one person's
email auto-reply (triggered by a conference announcement) spent hours
and hours endlessly auto-replying to its own auto-replies, flooding the
list. As afternoon turned to evening new messages continued to arrive
at two minute intervals, with additional waves of auto-response
triggered unwittingly by frustrated mails sent by people complaining
about the deluge.
Kind of beautiful coming back to the hotel at one point to find 434 new
messages, all with the same text, the subject line just getting longer
and longer. This lonely machine talking to itself in a public space,
the rest of us looking on powerless to do anything except delete its
plaintive utterances.
Best line overheard on the street this week:
'but you were kissing a girl, you were kissing a girl, I saw you kissing a girl'.
*
"I want you to slow it down... Everything slower, much much slower.
As slow as it can be. In fact you should hardly move at all."
Seems like I've been endlessly recommending Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder
to people that I've bumped into, so now I'm extending that process
here. The narrator is a man made super-rich overnight with the
compensation pay-out that follows an accident involving "something
falling from the sky". He soon puts his fortune to work orchestrating
re-enactments - initially of banal scenes from his own past. The
reconstructions change shape, scale and ambition but often involve the
purchase, alteration and re-decoration of entire buildings, as well as
the continuos employment of many actors/re-enactors, and technical
people, on call 24 hours a day to (for example) be 'the lady that
passes him on the stairwell whilst taking out her trash', or to be in
the team shoving reluctant cats out of cages onto a neighbouring roof
at particular moments to complete that all important detail in the
picture.
There's some Ballard in there (= obsessive slow motion and staring
at the texture of concrete) but also an enjoyable reminder of what I
liked about Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang - a kind of boisterous but somehow deadpan approach to narrative, full-on absurdity in no-nonsense prose. Like Fischer's book Remainder
is good in the plot department (which Ballard never was/is) and Tom's
book is great on people too - the narrators enthusiastic
facilitator/assistant Naz is a terrific foil to the protagonist,
comical and otherwise.
You're never quite sure what the narrator is chasing in Remainder
but whatever he seeks to reconstruct it's not long before his interest
moves on. I'm still haunted by the image of him ordering one complex
re-enactment in a warehouse, with three teams working shifts around the
clock, so that he can visit it any time day or night. He drops by a few
times and is pleased with the work but soom gets preoccupied and
somehow neglects to stop the warehouse. It's weeks later that the
ever-efficient Naz reminds him 'The warehouse.. The warehouse is still running'. Very nice.
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Another
good place to look for fragmentary Live Art remains these days seems to
be YouTube. I guess everything will be there before too long, at least
in more low-res/ stuttering form. I wrote 
I've been working on project in collaboration with the artists 