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A naked man on a swing, and other stories
I’ve just spent four days at the National Review of Live Art. It was quite a long four days, involving a lot of standing in dark rooms watching naked people doing not that much, extremely slowly. Here’s a glimpse of Postures A-M, one of several performances by this year’s artists in residence, Hancock and Kelly. Despite being a YouTube clip it’s just a series of stills with no sound, I’m afraid; to recreate the flavour of the performance, you’ll need to imagine that the man is gyrating his hips in your direction, play David Bowie’s Heroes in the background very slowly (it should sound like a demonic howl), then continue to watch the clip for several hours.
What does it all mean? According to Hancock and Kelly’s website, Richard Hancock is interested ‘in the performativity of representation, including the identification, articulation and representation of bodies; specifically in relation to questions of masculinity, whiteness and sexuality’. Traci Kelly, meanwhile, is interested in ‘the politics of vision, speech and audibility in terms of personal and public representation and the subsequent attribution of value within the production of Live Art’. They are, you’ll be unsurprised to discover, both academics.
The smell of academia at the NRLA is pretty pungent. Much of the programme is written in dense, near impenetrable language similar to the descriptions above. Its audience, as far as I can see, consists mostly of students and lecturers - large numbers of people aged between 18 and 22 (the students), with a few extremely serious people in their forties dotted among them (the lecturers) - who watch everything very earnestly, frequently taking notes. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone that much, since there are enough of them that the NRLA always sells out, but I sort of wish lots of other kinds of people would go too (there’s lots of nudity, if that’s an incentive!). I suspect the work would be better, and might make a bit more effort to communicate its intentions more clearly, if that broader audience did exist. At its best, the NRLA offers unforgettable, genre-straddling experiences that you’ll very rarely find anywhere else. But it also expects you to put up with a lot of unfocused, falling-badly-between-stools self-indulgence that you’d be unlikely to put up with anywhere else - the less said about the embarrassingly precious Leonard and Petra’s Pulse the better.
Luckily, there’s enough of the former to make up for the latter. I loved Rosie Dennis, for example, an Australian artist who seems to have found a fascinating niche between performance poetry, dance and physical theatre. Her show No Entry was just her, a spotlight and one costume change; it was all in the language and the movement. She talks in a torrent of words, repeating key phrases again and again as if she’s sampling her own voice and playing it back, while her arms jerk and gesture to drive images home. No Entry is, loosely, the story of two hard-working women who are, behind their professional masks, desperately isolated. Its exact meaning is elusive, but in the best way - her story dances gracefully between possible meanings the way Dennis dances gracefully between genres, and physically across the stage.
I also loved Lesley Yendell, from Spain, whose show Buscandose el Pan was a lovely example of living, evolving visual art. It involved her spending two days building a room-sized sculpture out of flour - a beach covered in the mundane objects people leave behind. Returning every few hours to watch this black-clad, sombre woman still diligently sifting her flour made me think of the mothers of the disappeared, guarding keepsakes of the presumed dead to preserve their memories. Wandering between other shows, it was inexplicably moving to know she was still there, in the Arches basement, continuing her ritual.
This, it seems to me, is what live art should be about - a genuine melding of different disciplines to create something unique, impossible to pin down but fresh, exciting and inexplicably beautiful. On the whole, though, live art seems to have become a genre in itself, which seems - to these non-academic eyes at least - to defeat the point. Every year there’s more nudity, more people doing not that much very slowly, and more ‘durational’ performances that are just boring rather than hypnotic. Can something that’s frequently so predictable really be that cutting edge? To me, much of it seems far too self-absorbed and self-referential for its own good.
But now, having said that, I’m going to contradict myself completely. My favourite thing at this year’s NRLA was, as it turned out, a naked man doing something very slowly. The man was Franko B, and he is famous for doing things like this (be warned: it involves blood, as much of Franko B’s work does)...
Franko B’s show this year was nothing like this at all. Instead he did something beautifully simple - he sat on a specially made children’s swing, smiling benevolently like a Buddha, a piano playing melancholy music in the background. And somehow, this poignant, dreamlike juxtaposition of childhood innocence (the swing) and hard-won adult experience (Franko’s body, brightly lit and on display, showing all the scars from his various blood-letting shows, as well as his many tattoos) was incredibly moving. There was very little to it, but it amounted to way more than the sum of its parts, and I’d never seen anything quite like it before. Like the best of the NRLA, trying to describe or classify it does it no justice, but it lingered in the mind long afterwards. Where else would you get people queuing for two or three hours to watch a man sitting on a swing for ten minutes? And then going back again later?
Andrew
