Review: SPLAT! by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein

by Mary Paterson

A figure roller-skates blindly across the stage, her vision obscured by a giant deer mask, her arms flailing at either side, her voice singing karaoke-style to a Disney ballad.  Half girl, half Bambi, the skidding ingénue slips and slides over tomato juice, topples, wavers and almost falls, before a team of assistants rushes to her aid.

This scene is one of a dizzying array of feminine stereotypes played outrageously  by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein in Splat!  Here, she parodies a cutesy cartoon princess, held up (literally) by an entourage who whose devotion simply highlights her dependence on others.   Elsewhere, the performer and her semi-naked, female assistants perform a range of roles including bad tempered porn star, mute doll, exploited sex object, fairy-tale narrator, murdered body and soppy victim of heartbreak.

For Lauren Barri Holstein, the acting starts before the show begins.  ‘The Famous …’  is, of course, a self-declared star.  What she is famous for is not important - her name, like the products of her visual metamorphoses, is both a statement and an ambition.  And, just like those visual changes, this declaration is less a form of identity than a claim to objecthood.  By describing herself as ‘The Famous …’ Lauren Barri Holstein sets out how she wants to be seen.  She’s not a woman play acting at celebrity – she is the very expression of  fame.  She’s not a woman who happens to be dancing (whether she’s performing in the guise of a Disney lead, a figure from an 80s film, or a demented R&B star) – she is the eternal dancing girl.

Even the artist’s desperation to be seen is a kind of parody-paradigm of femininity .  As John Berger wrote in 1976, “men act, women appear”, so controlling what other people see is, in a twisted way, how women can access the means of their own production.  Lauren Barri Holstein struts across stage like an early-80s Madonna, adopting a bossy demeanour (she orders her assistants around like slaves), an air of affected boredom (she moves between scenes as if it’s a burden to be there) and a casual, erotic awareness of her own image-making. 

But ventriloquism is a precarious kind of identity.  

As part of this image control, Lauren Barri Holstein forces her parade of underdressed assistants to film her travails, projecting a close up of her squashing tomatoes between her thighs, for example, to a large screen at the back of the stage.  But there is also a single, male, fully dressed photographer who lurks around the edges of the show.  This man does not seem to be under the star’s control.   He photographs Lauren Barri Holstein even when she asks him to leave, and his photos remain hidden inside his camera.   In a single moment, the iconic 80s Madonna becomes a vulnerable noughties Jordan, her picture taken and reused by those who don’t recognise her objecthood as power.

Indeed, it’s the relationship between objecthood and power that sits at the centre of Splat!   Or rather, it writhes around in a vat of tomato juice, either waving or drowning.  With each new identity that Lauren Barri Holstein shrugs on like an invisibility cloak, Lauren Barri Holstein herself disappears.  This is partly because of the dramatic pointlessness of the task –  it is of course a mainstay of feminism that a person cannot exist within a series of roles typecast from the outside.   But the disappearance is also because the accumulated effect of multiple identities breaks down the mirage of appearance itself.  Now a sexual predator, now a perpetrator of misogyny, now a fetish of desire, the variety of objecthoods Lauren Barri Holstein puts on display undermines any claims they have to representation.  If a woman is either a virgin or a whore, then what are you looking at when you see her slip gracelessly between the two?    

Another way of describing this variety could be as a kind of excess - Splat! is an excess of (tropes of) femininity, baring their bones until their guts spill, lifeless, onto the floor.   And excess is indeed the defining principle of the show: each scene explodes with more bodies, more representation, more confusion. 

But, inside Splat, excess becomes a kind of trope as well.  Or, more accurately, this excess is not so much excessive, as conventional – albeit conventional in an alternative, performance art kind of way.   The food-mess  poured over young bodies recalls the artist Carolee Schneemann’s seminal performances like Meat Joy (1964)for example, while Lauren Barri Holstein’s impatient persona draws obvious comparison to the artist Ann Liv Young.  Long passages in Splat are spent reading an alternative fairy tale in which a pliant female character explores the pleasures and dangers of her sexuality – a shadow, perhaps, of a revision by the feminist author Angela Carter. 

In this context, it’s unclear whether excessive behaviour is being parodied as one more feminine trope that has been normalised beyond meaning, or whether it’s appearance is a genuine grab for power.  

On one hand, these behaviours are now part of the encyclopaedia of voices available to women – identify with a pop star, or a princess, or a 1960s performance artist.   But, just like Madonna’s 80s attitude, their efficacy has been dulled by distance from the socio-political context in which they were conceived.  On the other hand, these devices of excess have a special status within Splat!: they define its structure and limit its content.  Food-blood-bodily fluids accumulate onstage throughout, the fairy tale pulls the only narrative thread, and each new scene adds to a catalogue of excessive representations.  As I watch the chaos pile up on stage, I wonder if  Lauren Barri Holstein is making fun of the styles of radical feminist performance art, with the same wide eyed cruelty she uses to pull apart Disney’s saccharine charm.  Or has she mistaken the tropes of stylistic excess for real power?

None of Lauren Barri Holstein’s relationships are simple.  She seems to hold genuine affection for power ballads, princess dresses and roller-skating Bambis, even while she squashes their dreams like melons dropped from a great height.   So perhaps it is only my prejudice that imagines she takes the sacred cows of performance art too seriously.  Unlike Disney,  I hold Carolee Schneemann to be important and admirable, and while I can laugh at Disney in almost any context, Schneemann commands a different kind of attention.  But I also know that what was radical in 1964 is not radical in 2013; the grandmothers (or even the aunts and sisters) of feminist performance art cannot be copied, only revised.  I long for someone with a name like ‘The Famous Lauren Barri-Holstein’ to tell me what feminism can be, what women can be, in the twenty first century. 

But of course, that’s not her job.  I’m sure if you asked her, Lauren Barri Holstein would say she’d rather hang upside down and eat a hamburger.  The show ends with what can only be described as a masterstroke of visual spectacle, and it’s at moments like this – brash, bizarre and fiercely independent – that ‘The Famous …’ lives up to her self declared name.

Open Dialogues at Samtalekøkkenet, Copenhagen

Open Dialogues was invited to give a presentation about our work and lead a two day writing workshop for Samtalekøkkenet (The Dining Kitchen) in Copenhagen, February 2011.

The Dining Kitchen is a monthly evening of performance art and conversation, which includes performances from international artists, debate between audiences and artists, and dinner for everyone.

Fragment from presentation prompt 'Purposeless Writing!' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Fragment from presentation prompt 'To Score!' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Mary spoke about the evolution of Open Dialogues’ work, which began as a response to a (perceived) lack of critical writing about performance art, and has become progressively more concerned with experiments in text and performance.

Fragment from presentation prompt 'How is not performance writing?'' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Rachel Lois took part in the presentation through a series of textual and/or grammatical interventions - a range of A4 sheets with words, phrases or symbols on them. Mary interrupted her own speech to walk to the other side of the stage and perform Rachel Lois’s contributions.

Samtalekøkkenet workshop

The Workshop

The Dining Kitchen asked Open Dialogues to put together a workshop for critics, academics and artists in Copenhagen. Over two days, Mary led a group of 10 people exploring different styles of writing in relation to performance, including: reviewing, reportage, eavesdropping, drawing, performing, listening, speaking, script writing, scores, live writing. The group has since been taking part in live writing sessions in response to Dining Kitchen events.

More on our critical model here

All material c. Open Dialogues 2011

WRITING LIVE - continues

Image by Ryan Tracy: l - r Rachel Lois Clapham, GINA PERFORMA, Mary Paterson. The Bronx Museum, Sunday 15th November 2009.

Performa 09 drew to a close last night, 22nd November, with Scratch The Grand Finale. On the previous evening, Saturday 21st November, the Writing Live Group held our Writing Live Symposium at the Performa Hub, 41 Cooper Square.

Keep checking the Writing Live site for responses to this and the rest of Performa, and experiments in writing on, as, with or for performance.

Writing Live will continue into 2010. For now, it lives on through:

Writing Encounters, textual transactions between the US-based Writing Live 09 Fellows (Rebecca Armstrong, Tyler Coburn, Patricia Milder, Ryan Tracy, Kenny Ulloa and Peter Walsh), UK artists (Emma Cocker, Marcia Farquhar, Claire Hind, Johanna Linsley, Ben Roberts and Simon Zimmerman).

York New York, a commission of 101 postcards from York New York http://yorknewyork.blogspot.com/

'Upside Down', directed by Alessandra Fel, Camden People’s Theatre, Tuesday 25th November 2008

Image: Upside Down (c) Alessandra Fel

‘How did we get here?’ asks the male performer at the beginning of Upside Down, lying on the floor with a chair, as if he is sitting down but subject to an unnatural kind of gravity. ‘From the table’, replies his companion, a woman clutching a suitcase who is also prone on the ground, but looks as if she is flying. In the long pause between his question and her answer, the couple are suspended in emotional limbo, caught in static and displaced poses of the everyday. Behind them, the table also lies upturned on the floor; it does not offer much of a solution.

Thus begins a 16 minute journey into the demise of an ordinary couple, as explained through the physical tics and patterns of their daily routine. They kiss, they touch, they sleep, and their movements slip into a familiar mould. But the mould itself is slipping: what begin as tender moments of physical closeness dissolve inexorably into the strained symptoms of two strangers uneasy in shared space.

Without losing the fluidity of their cyclical routine, these two performers turn sparky flirtation into weary habit, into resentful physical reflex. When they say 'I love you' for the fourth or fifth time, the words have become meaningless and mechanical. A few minutes later, the couple are on the floor again, and the male performer asks, ‘How did we get here?’ Because of the flow of the performers’ movement, and the inevitability of the couple’s decline, the audience finds no satisfactory answer to this question, even when it arrives for a second time.

Image Upside Down (c) Alessandra Fel

Upside Down was extended for the performance at Camden People’s Theatre, as part of The ScenePool festival of theatre. In the extended part, the performers lift themselves out of the visual echo of the opening scene – the two questions ‘How did we get here’ originally stood at the beginning and end – and spin into a more personal journey for the male performer. This means that the seam is easy to spot – the moment when the symmetry of the piece is broken. But what Upside Down loses in symmetry it gains in a kind of legacy: the second part extends the fantasy lives of the individuals involved, building thematically on the dreams the couple repeat while they still function as a unit. At first the performers speak their private lives as they go through the motions of everyday- the man dreamt about his parents, he says, as he swings his briefcase and marches to work. But later they stop speaking, and their movements become more abstract; the man lifts his briefcase onto his back, as if to symbolize burden. Fantasy and reality merge as the piece progresses, and the couple's relationship becomes inscribed in their dreams as well as affected by them.

Weaving sparse and repetitive language into skilful physical theatre, Upside Down is a melancholy fairy tale with an unhappy ending. As its title suggests, it displaces gesture and space so that normal relations twist out of recognition. In doing so, it coils away from cliché, even if it is built from an old fashioned male/ female standard – the man is driven by pressure and work, the woman dreams of escape as she waits at home. But as a whole, the work is drafted in fluid choreography that defines the effects of a couple’s relationship without explaining its root cause. The result is a compelling momentum that pushes the performers from romance to break up, and defines the natural divergence of separate lives. Like all misery, this couple’s unhappiness seems prosaic, gradual, and destined to come.

Written by Mary Paterson

Upside Down is performed by Alessandra Fel and Miguel Oyarzun, with music by Robin Holloway.

Alessandra Fel
http://www.alessandrafel.com/

The ScenePool was at Camden People’s Theatre, Tue 25 Nov 08 - Sun 30 Nov 08
http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/event_details.php?sectionid=theatre&eventid=265

Open Dialogues: Performance Saga, 3 – 6 December 2008

Open Dialogues: Performance Saga is a responsive writing project created for the "Performance Saga – BONE 11 Fesitval" in Bern, Switzerland, 3 - 6 December 2008.

Performance Saga - BONE 11 invites artists from different generations to respond to each other's work, and Open Dialogues: Performance Saga invites five writers to respond to these performances and associated discussions. Texts will be published in print and online, in English and German.

Read our writing online: www.performancesaga.blogspot.com, or look for the daily printed editions at Schlacthaus Theater.

Open Dialogues: Performance Saga is developed by Mary Paterson for Open Dialogues. Writers are: Mary Paterson (UK), Theron Schmidt (UK), Dagmar Reichert (CH), Chris Regn (CH) and Jana Ullman (CH). Translator: Almut Rembges (CH). Assisted by the graphic designer Nicole Boillat (CH)


PERFORMANCE SAGA FESTIVAL
Performance Saga Festival is curated by Katrin Grögel and Andrea Saemann, and organised in collaboration with Norbert Klassen, Peter Zumstein and Schlachthaus Theater Bern. Artists performing are: Alison Knowles (US), Irene Loughlin (CA)/Jorge Manuel de Leon (GT), Muda Mathis (CH), Die Maulwerker (DE), Sands Murray-Wassink (NL), Carolee Schneemann (US), Annie Sprinkle/Elizabeth Stephens (US), Peter Vittali (CH), Martha Rosler (US), et al.

Venue and tickets:
Schlachthaus Theater Bern, Rathausgasse 20/22, 3011 Bern, +41 31 312 96 47, http://www.schlachthaus.ch/sp/index.php
http://www.performancesaga.ch
http://www.bone-performance.com


PERFORMANCE SAGA DVDs
Performance Saga Festival also launches the publication of Performance Saga Interviews 06 - 08: Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler & Alison Knowles. The Performance Saga DVD Edition is a collection of interviews with 8 American and European women pioneers of performance art. The DVDs are published by edition fink - Verlag für zeitgenössische Kunst Zürich, and DVD 07: Martha Rosler includes an essay by Mary Paterson.

Vital; International Live artists of Chinese Descent

image; courtesy Chinese Arts Centre.


Chinese Arts Centre have just published Vital; International Live artists of Chinese descent. It is a collection of stories, ssays, reviews and pictures exploring Chinese live art with particular focus on the Vital International Chinese Live Art Festivals. The UK publication launch will be on 15 Feb 2009 at National Review of Live Art, Glasgow

This exciting new publication documents the two festivals through memories, interviews, essays, reviews and images which together form a comprehensive scrapbook of Chinese live art.

Contributors include artists such as Lee Wen, Becky Ip, Po Shui and Zhou Bin who ponder the issues surrounding the practise and nature of performance art. Their personal writings also look at the specific concerns of Chinese artists working in live art and scrutinise the need for the Vital festivals.

The individual artist responses are complimented by critical essays and reviews which contextualise the art practice within the wider cultural and political landscape. Reviews of the festivals come from live art writers Andrew Mitchelson and Rachel Lois Clapham. Artist and academic Lesley Sanderson and LA-based scholar Ming-Yuen Ma both look at the pertinent question of identity. Yang Zhi Chao's essay contextualises endurance performance work, Voon Pow Bartlett looks at the role of the audience while Yuen Yan examines the power and responsibility of the artists.

This mix of critical writing and personal artist responses is accompanied by stunning photography of the incredible performances of the festivals. The images capture moments from such performances as live art rebels JJ & Cai's unique take on the Monkey King legend, Marcus Young's very slow walk Pacific Avenue and He Chengyao's deeply moving hair auction performance at Vital 06.

Contributors include:

Lee Wen is an artist, political activist, festival curator and author whose work seeks to expose and question ideologies. He performed in Vital 07 and was a speaker at the Vital Bodies conference.

Zhou Bin is an artist living and working in Chengdu, China who has been working in live performance or action art since 1994. His processes often involve the using the limits of his body.

Rachel Lois Clapham was the Writing from Live Art writer who critiqued the Vital 07 performances and Vital Bodies conference.

Ming-Yuen S. Ma is a LA-based media artist, curator and theorist. For Vital, Ma presents two open letters to live artists Ma Liuming and He Chengyao.

Softcover, 205 x 205mm, 148pp
GBP 18.95
IBSN 978-0-9545440-6-5

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/

Responsible Criticism

Image: Open Dialogues. Design Jeremy Betchel.


This is a letter, forthcoming in AN Magazine September 2008, in response to Lara Farrar’s article Arts Criticism in Crisis

The recent debate on arts criticism in A-N Magazine July/August 2008 by Lara Farrar brought two very different types of arts criticism clearly into view. One is a mainstream, conservative mode of printed criticism, sanctioned by editors and written by authorised purveyors of taste who comment on, but remain distinct from, culture and their reading public. Farrar cites the advocates of this traditional form of criticism as Harold Hobson, Kenneth Tynan and Brian Sewell. In contrast, Farrar says, the other mode of criticism is manifested online. It is immediate, self- published criticism, written by people both educated in art history and those who aren’t, and beamed out globally to millions of potentially unknown readers. Farrar typifies this new type of criticism as the unedited online critical writing platform: An Interface, and my own work as a blogger who, as part of Open Dialogues, writes online and in real time during biennales and festivals. Farrars’ polarising of the debate - setting Brian Sewell as the traditionalist against myself as a blogger – is a useful outline but does oversimplify what is at stake in today’s arts criticism and its perceived crisis.

Farrar’s debate focuses on the impact of blogging and new media upon traditional arts criticism, and cites it as symptomatic of the current state of crisis in arts criticism. But new media- as Farrar knows - is not the underlying cause of criticisms’ troubles. The internet medium merely crystallises the crisis. It manifests the difference in responsibility, subject position and relationship to reader between emerging forms of criticism, or critical writing, and the traditional. In turn the internet brings to light the latent ideologies that are at work within both modes.

The practice of art criticism grew on Enlightment ideals, including the Kantian notion that the critic’s definitive and elevated subjectivity claims assent for all his/ her readers, and a belief in immanent meaning, universal reason and public consensus. In this model, which Jurgen Habarmas has described as the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, the critic is a kind of specialised everyman: he delivers meaning to people just like himself.

Blogging puts pressure on this enlightenment mode. It embodies a threat to such a bourgeois public sphere, and reveals it to be a closed, hierarchical space in which certain people endowed with extra ordinary critical senses write for the benefit of the un-educated masses; in practise these extraordinary senses are learnt and conditioned, and the masses stay homogenised and un-educated only in relation to the critic’s self-defined prowess.

In contrast, Blogging is mass communication based upon distinctly individuated critical reception, similar to the models of TV and Radio. It destroys the possibility of a reified public sphere. The variety of divergent content that the blogosphere allows disturbs the eighteenth century notion of a reasoned public consensus of opinion.With blogs, people can now shape their own critical encounter with art or at least choose how and by whom they wish to be ‘educated’. Moreover, they can publicly answer back within this online encounter instead of being rendered passive receptors or mere consumers of received logic.

As Farrar cites, Brian Sewell, Dr Ronan McDonald of University of Reading and the critic David Lee of The Jackdaw bemoan the uniformity and commodification of culture that ensues from the blogosphere’s eschewal of reified art ‘experts’ and the critics’ lack of authority over public opinion. But what they are really mourning is the loss of Enlightenment ideals that say that meaning can only be defined by specialists who bestow the benefits of their education on their peers.

In fact, the methodology of contemporary critical writing, which acknowledges the power of the individual, is not completely at odds with the discursive aims of traditional criticism like Sewell’s, which assumes that (educated) individuals will share an opinion. Nor is blogging a non-hierarchical, non critical pool of different but equal subjectivities. Hierarchy of voice remains online. But the autonomy and authority of the critic, and the attendant ethics of that particular subject position, is something a contemporary critical writer wrestles with in text, rather than cloaks in the myth of critical distance and transcendent meaning. Contemporary critical writing is an attempt to move away from criticism, beyond the knowing cynicism of critique, towards the critical; a more self aware and responsible mode in which meaning is indebted to the performative, and the writer and the writing are equally at stake as the subjects under discussion.

This focus on agency, contingency and the heightened sense of responsibility – towards subject, writer, writing and reader – results in a grey area compared to the judicial verdicts passed down to us by traditional, mainstream arts critics. But negotiating the safe passage of criticality in between the thorny aspects of authority, judgement and logocentrism is both the danger and the joy of contemporary critical writing.


Rachel Lois Clapham

Dinner with America

This article originally appeared on CultureWars.org.uk and is reproduced with permission.

‘Dinner with America’ by Rajni Shah, Pinter Building, Queen Mary University, London; March 29th 2008.

Image: Rajni Shah (c) Manuel Vason

Come and have dinner with America. Over the course of Rajni Shah’s durational performance, you are invited to witness American icons and ideals slip into one another, to hear Americans define their own patriotism, and to feast on the literal and intellectual fruits of this labour. Here, America is a bride in a shimmering white veil, a blonde 50s starlet, and a glamour model in Wonder Woman boots. America is the Statue of Liberty, Amazing Grace and Red, White and Blue. America is a series of symbols, a soundtrack of anonymous voices and a supporting cast of silent figures dressed in white.

Appearing as different types of all-American-gal (bride, starlet, model), and singing the chorus to ‘Amazing Grace’ Shah represents an idea of America. At times, the idea stands for liberties and freedoms – Shah repeatedly holds one arm above her head, like the Statue of Liberty. At others, this America is a land of exclusions and divisions. Recorded interviews with Americans play overhead, and one voice begins by staking her position as a ‘privileged white woman’, aware that her country holds different experiences for different groups of people. Each speaker’s reality collides with the American dream, which is rolled over Shah’s body in a repeated repertoire of gestures and moves. And Shah’s body also shows the strain: she gets tired; her voice wavers; her limbs begin to shake. Being America, it seems, is a difficult job.

It’s usually easiest to define things by what they are not, and these strains and exceptions are testament to an America beyond its own ideal. But it’s also the American dream that gives these doubts meaning. Silhouetted against the accessories of American patriotism (which comes with a flag, a constitution and an advertising industry), the shape of real life is defined by these ideals at the same time as it contests them. Melting between different symbols and their effects, in fact, Dinner with America does not hold each element of its America up for inspection, but suggests the ways that disparate parts congeal over time. Most noticeably, Shah traces a line from the mythological power of American ‘freedom’ – a story told so often that it seems like it’s true – to the consumer power that drives American society. As a beautiful woman with flowing blonde hair and shiny red lips, she stands for that elusive something that we all want to own – a role she acknowledges with a series of alluring poses lifted from every ad campaign you’ve ever seen. Moving between Statue of Liberty and Glamour Girl, Shah’s Miss America joins the dots between an individual’s right to freedom and an individualistic drive to consume. They are two manifestations of the same American liberty, and each idea provides the template for the other, just as, on the template of Shah’s body, each gesture dissolves inexorably into the next.

The fuel for both this individualism-for-liberty and individualism-for-consumption is neither liberty, nor capitalism – nor even a shabby looking American dream. Instead, it’s desire. Dinner with America vibrates with the anticipation of things to change, things to improve. Two women in white sweep and resweep boundaries of earth around the audience’s feet, with quiet industry but no clear logic; and Shah sheds her layers of costume at the sliding pace of the inevitable. It is this desire for change that feeds the myths of freedom and consumption – we desire more, we desire better. And it’s the desire for change that means today’s shortcomings can be overlooked. American life waits on the actors of tomorrow, and Shah’s female icons distil the American dream. Like a beautiful woman, America is a wonderful idea; it stays that way because it is always out of reach.

The momentum of change is also what turns the needs of the individual into something like a shared experience. When Shah has left the stage, the audience moves close together to watch a film projected onto a pile of earth. It is an intimate moment, and the flickering black and white film plays out like an old silent movie. As well as footage of preparations for the show, the film shows women passing earth to one another, gestures repeated by Shah and her helpers in real time as the film plays. These images are interspersed with prompts for what’s happening next – ‘The Feast is coming!’ Altogether, the film ushers the audience into a shared past (the nostalgia of the movie’s style, details of the labour that has brought us together), and it leads us into a shared future (the upcoming meal). What comes before melts into what is yet to come, so that the here and now has to take us there. This is how national identity is born. And this is how a community of America rises from the detritus of its symbols, however tarnished by testimonies (oral and physical) of real material conditions.

Dinner with America effects a poignant reconciliation between ideal and reality, by conscripting the audience into the promise of a shared future. But who is this America for, and who is recruited into the American project? By the time the film is shown, we have seen Shah stripped naked. She has removed her glamorous clothes, taken off her wig and peeled off the mask that turned her brown skin white. She has also been subject to the unforgiving scrutiny of light that is all red, then light that is all white, then light that is all blue – exposed as an impostor beneath the metaphoric gaze of the American flag. The performance I saw, moreover, was to a British audience in a London university; and Rajni Shah is British herself. It’s tempting to say that it’s American cultural imperialism that makes us all so interested in a country far away and from which we are excluded. But it is also the extraordinary effectiveness of America’s cultural message. Built on desire, the idea of America must always project the dreams of the people at hand – even if they step out of costume with a shaven head and dark skin. The American dream is only a dream of America – it is etched by the people who see it, and it belongs to anyone that looks.

And yet the real collective moment in Dinner with America comes with the feast itself. Here, food and thoughts are served up in equal measure – you’re encouraged to take a topic for discussion at the same time as a piece of fruit. But Shah’s model of communal feasting is very different to the cultural production of America we have all just witnessed. Up to now, ‘America’ has been a chimera of unfulfilled desire, which means it doesn’t have to define its goals. In contrast, Shah’s feast invites the audience to sate its desire – for food and for conversation – and marks the end of a shared event. If Shah’s America uses the rhetoric of the individual to dangle a united future just out of reach, Shah’s feast uses the rhetoric of a community to harvest different reactions to a past (the performance) that we all know: it turns the ideology of America inside out. Is this a new model for the land of dreams? It’s hard to tell, because one similarity remains – just like the idea of America, the content of the feast is up to you.

Mary Paterson

Original article
Rajni Shah

If you want to reproduce this article please contact editor@culturewars.org.uk and opendialogues@gmail.com

One or Two Things: Part Two

Claire Fontaine: Get Lost, South London Gallery, Saturday 28 June 7-9 pm

Get Lost, Claire Fontaine, courtesy the artist, Air de Paris & Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

The main gallery of the SLG is blacked out. Two monitors on opposite sides of the space flash intermittently with stills of tanned and glamorous fashion models with 1980’s hairdo’s - women on one screen and men on another. The two screens emit a dull flickering light by which the audience sees to move around. In the darkness, performers Douglas Park and Diletta Mansella are in no way distinguishable from anyone else. They are dressed casually in dark clothing and move slowly in amongst the audience. As they move they repeat the phrase “I did love you once” into handheld microphones. The sounds of these amplified declarations of one-time love mingle closely with the voices of the visitors, who are scattered around the space chatting freely. There is no apparent pattern as to who these two are engaged with or why. At times, they make seemingly sincere and lingering eye contact with the assembled strangers, clearly addressing their ‘I did love you once’, to individual visitors. At other times, they can be spotted in the darkness, standing in an empty corner at the far side of the gallery pledging their ‘I did love you once’ to a blank wall. Meanwhile, outside in the foyer, the video ‘Where are We’ (2004) screens Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s infamous ‘honeymoon’ home-movie that leaked onto the internet in 1998. The video’s visuals are blacked out, leaving only a blank screen with graphic subtitles and audio. With this, visitors are left to imagine what is clearly Lee and Anderson filming their own drug fuelled, porn style, nuptials in a moving car.

This is Get Lost by Claire Fontaine. The work is an examination of contemporary desire and liberal love within the context of capitalism; as such it is an exercise in intimacy feigned and at once rejected. The Shakespearean phrase ‘I did love you once’ is itself a complex rumination on love taken from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1, who then later in the same act seemingly revokes his declaration of love with ‘I loved you not’. But the real clue to the complex negation the work manifests is in its title: Get Lost simultaneously pulls its audience in only to push them away. The immersive environment, direct interactions and love utterings are engaging. But the monotony of the repeated phrase serves to distort meaning, leaving a hollow and insincere aftertaste. The empty gaze of the polished and perfectly re-touched fashion models on the monitor screens, further reinforce that Get Lost is a surface interaction on display. Add to this the apparent arbitrariness of Park and Mansella’s interactions - they could equally love you or the wall- and we are left in no doubt as to the intended in/sincerity of Get Lost. In short, what is created is a false intimacy, closeness or love made into public spectacle and amplified out to a paying crowd.

Looking through the lens of capitalism, spectacle and fashion, Claire Fontaine defines contemporary liberal love as commercialised, moreover contrary, fickle and empty. However, the work in Get Lost maintains a tantalisingly ambiguous position towards this shallowness. In presenting what is essentially a non-screening of Anderson and Lee’s sexual exploits ‘Where we Are’ leaves space for an alternate narrative to emerge; one that is not a banal critique of Western love in the form of a carnal, plastic Pammy and rock star Tommy Lee. The question that arises from between the blank screen and the subtitles is, bourgeois idealism, hepatitis infection, divorce and abuse allegations aside, who can say that Pammy and Tommy Lee’s is not a genuinely contemporary model of true love? Folding such critical questions back into the material of the work – both in the performance and the video - is how Get Lost teeters on the brink of critique.

In the same way love in Get Lost is performed as both simulated and real, so too Claire Fontaine herself can be seen to be a contradiction. Despite being described as singular and female in literature, Claire Fontaine is not a woman, nor is she a person; she is a Paris based collective founded in 2004 who describes herself as ‘a readymade artist born out of the standardisation of identities produced by contemporary capitalism’ . Claire Fontaine then, is a brand - an artistic pseudonym; she is the sum of an unknown number of anonymous parts whose collective anonymity is an attempt to embody the crisis of the singular - including singular artistic genius - and to critique sovereignty, production and commercialism in the art world.

Claire’s overt sloganeering on capitalism might be off-putting and heavy handed, thus leading to Get Lost being considered as banal agit-prop, but underneath the work itself manages to maintain its moral ambiguity and light touch. Conversely, Claire’s strategy of collective anonymity, instead of serving as an embodiment of anti-capitalistic endeavour, actually increases the possibility of artistic production, participation and networks. The ongoing commodification of these artistic and cultural elements affords Claire the opportunity to capitalise on the same art world commercialism she purportedly rallies against. Claire’s artist biography testifies to her success; it includes a string of shows in private, commercial galleries. Clearly, Claire Fontaine does not feel the need to be a poor artist struggling in her garret. This complicity with capitalism, when added with the subtle complexities of Get Lost as a piece of work, makes the artist’s bald political rhetoric read as all too knowing - and as such, empty, cynical and deviant on an entirely different level.

It is this inherent contradiction, the push and pull between sincerity and rhetoric, and the interesting grey area in between - that is at the heart of Get Lost. The work is contrived and a prick tease; it attracts and repels simultaneously, its intentions are equally in/sincere and not. Nevertheless, the underlying point is that genuineness and authenticity are of no consequence in this liberal model of love, since they can never be distinguished from simulation, appropriation or mere performance, nor should they be. The fun is in the flirtation and the chase, and to embrace Get Lost without reservation is to be gloriously cuckolded.


Rachel Lois Clapham

http://www.clairefontaine.ws/

http://www.southlondongallery.org/

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues, opendialogues@gmail.com

One or Two Things: Part One

Gail Pickering, 'Mad Masters', South London Gallery. 26 June 2008, 7 pm

Gail Pickering, 'Mad Masters', 2008, performance view, South London Gallery

The vast exhibition space of the South London Gallery was filled, for Gail Pickering’s ‘Mad Masters’, with large plywood structures draped in coloured material. Between and out of these strange shapes, young female dancers moved with a kind of exaggerated clumsiness, in distorted versions of military routines – like a march or a salute. They were accompanied by an energetic percussion, played on a range of instruments including cow bells and a violin bow, by the musician David Aylward; they were also accompanied by a young American woman who sat on top of the tallest plywood structure, and read a story.

I can’t tell you what the story was about, because the performance itself was so overwhelming that ‘Mad Masters’ seemed both greater than the sum of its parts, and weaker than them. It was an exhilarating explosion of sensory effects, in other words, that nevertheless rendered each effect impossible to understand.

This is partly because each element in Mad Masters had been abstracted from the world. The material draped over plywood, for example, suggested the structures were flag poles, or sailing ships, or ceremonial buildings; in the end, they were none of these things. Sufficiently formless to become simply forms, the structures were just physical obstacles in the dancers’ way. Likewise, the music was like nothing I have heard before – a syncopated disharmony that was both compelling and unrhythmic. The dancers moved in irregular patterns that were impossible to pin down, and even the narrative was incomprehensible. The narrator sat far away from the other performers and spoke in a monotonous, US drawl. In the context of this reduced and distorted reality, her words floated above the action, and remained untethered to what was happening below.

Gail Pickering, 'Mad Masters', 2008, performance view, South London Gallery

And yet, amid this confusion there was a strong sense of purpose. In keeping with its title, the constituent elements of ‘Mad Masters’ seemed to comply with a logic that was both external to the performance itself, and impossible to ascertain from watching it. The wooden structures were complex and looked like they were difficult to build, even if their function was unknown. The dancers, moving with severe precision and blank faces, looked like puppets controlled by hands we could not see

In Pickering’s current solo show at Gasworks (12 June - 27 July 2008), two video pieces also explore the implications of a common – and perhaps arbitrary – purpose. In‘Hungary! And Other Economies’ (2006) a group of porn stars is transported around rural France, dressed in geometric costumes and reading passages from a play about the Marquis de Sade. It is never clear whether or not the actors’ flirtations with each other are for show, which of their words are their own, or indeed why they have been instructed with this strange accumulation of tasks in the first place. Similarly, at the start of ‘Dissident Sunset’ (2007) a gathering of would-be revolutionaries searches for a movement to follow. ‘Like something to put on a T-Shirt?’, one of them suggests.

It is humour like this that gives the audience access to Pickering’s bewildering circus of effects. In ‘Dissident Sunset’ one-liners make the audience smile, in ‘Hungary!’ the actors’ laughter shatters the brittle incongruity of the tasks they perform, and in ‘Mad Masters’ the sheer exuberance of the percussion rippled through the audience as we stood in single file against the walls. The result is a kind of communal ‘punctum’ (to use Roland Barthes’ term), which pricks the bubble of individual allegiance, and joins the audience and the performers in a moment of cathartic unity.

The title for ‘Mad Masters’ in fact comes from an ethnographic documentary by the filmmaker Jean Rouch, who made ‘Les Maitres Fous’ in 1954. His film shows a Ghanaian ritual that was designed to exorcise the violence of colonialism, and Pickering’s piece was a restaging of this film. In other words, Pickering re-presented Rouch’s representation of a Ghanaian rite, which represents European invasion. This makes ‘Mad Masters’ a representation of performance itself, and of the echoes of performance performed ad infinitum. In this light, it’s not surprising that the purpose of the work was so distorted that it seemed arbitrary – purpose had become performance itself.

Energetically combined, the confusing and abstracted forms in ‘Mad Masters’ suggest that performance is more than a social ritual; it is a social need. The piece is one link in a chain of events, not concerned with the masters at the start of that chain but with the waves of influence that they set off. In this piece, as in other works by Pickering, the performers seem locked into a gesture of representation. They are compelled to perform, and exist only inside these layers of performance. Do they submit to this regime voluntarily, or is it the only way to survive? And is the audience really being drawn in through moments of cathartic release, or are we already involved? Perhaps those moments are our reward for compliance.

At the end of ‘Mad Masters’, nobody knew if the performance was over –the audience waited in silence to see if something else would go on. Normally when that happens it’s because the artwork lacks impact, but in this case it suggested the opposite. In the aftermath of this theatrical display, everything could have been part of the performance; everything, in other words, was twisted out of line with reality, as if performance was the only reality left. Personally, I was drawn into this half-sinister world. Like the revolutionaries in ‘Dissident Sunset’, we all need something to follow.

Mary Paterson

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues, opendialogues@gmail.com

Live Art Almanac

The Live Art Almanac is a collection of 'found' writing about and around Live Art, recently published by the Live Art Development Agency.

In early 2006 an open call announced:

What articles have you read, what emails did you receive or forward to a friend, what blogs have you visited, what texts crossed your path? Did they engage you, amuse you, or make you rethink Live Art? If it caught your eye and had something interessting to say, then we want to know about it.

Over a hundred articles, reviews and interviews were submitted from sources that ranged from mainstream newspaper articles to text messages, and from these recommendations the Live Art Almanac was compiled.

Joanna Loveday, a Yorkshire based performance writer who participated in Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin, has written a comprehensive review of the Almanac. You can read Joanna’s review in its original location, on the Institute of Ideas online platform for debate and critical writing, culturewars.org.



Live Art Almanac contributors: Tim Atack, Madeleine Bunting, Barbara Campbell, Simon Casson, Brian Catling, Rachel Lois Clapham, Helen Cole, Stephen Duncombe, Tim Etchells, Ed Caesar, David Gale, Lyn Gardner, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Daniel Gosling, Leslie Hill, John Jordan, Nick Kimberley, Adam E Mendelsohn, Alex Needham, Sally O'Reilly, Mary Paterson, Will Pollard, Chris Riding, Nick Ridout, Ian Saville, Theron Schmidt, Rebecca Schneider, Rajni Shah, Mark Wilshire and John Wyver.

The Live Art Almanac is available to by at £5.00 (ex p&p) from Unbound, the Live Art Development Agency online store, or to read in the Live Art Development Agency Study Room - www.thisisliveart.co.uk

The Open Dialogues Live Review was held on Saturday 7th June.

Open Dialogues: Live Review. 7th June 2008
Choriner Str, 85/ Berlin Mitte. Photo: Christina Irrgang
l - r: Doreen Mende, Martin Rosengaard, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson

The Live Review came slap bang in the middle of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin, which is a two-week writing programme taking place as part of the New Life Berlin festival of participatory art. Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin brings together 20 international writers to write about the festival on the project’s blog (www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog), in self-generated, fast turnaround printed publications (‘Issue One’ was published on 7th June), and through a series of workshops, discussions and debates. For the past week, the writers have been swarming across the city - meeting artists, getting involved, becoming participants in artistic projects, and publishing their thoughts.

The Live Review was a public event and an attempt to discuss, evaluate and showcase the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin model, and to ask some difficult questions about how critical writing works in relation to participatory art.

Guest speakers included Cartographer 1, from ‘30 Days of New Life Berlin’, a project that sets out to map the cultural life of Berlin; Tatjana Fell and Lisa Glauer from Arttransponder, a Berlin- based non-profit collaboration that supports artistic production that reflects on its broader context; Doreen Mende, speaking as one of the co-founders of General Public, a Berlin-based network of artists and arts professionals that organises irregular cultural events; and Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Neilsen, who spoke on behalf of Wooloo Productions, the organisation behind New Life Berlin itself.

There was some heated debate about the definition of terms – What is a critic? What is an artist? What is the point of definition at all? – and questions about the power of the written word, the ethics of using national languages, and the role of criticism in relation to the practice and production of art.

There will be more room for my reflections later. But first., Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin writers will be airing their views on our New Life Berlin blog: www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog

Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin programme
31st May, 10.30am – 5.30pm Writers’ Workshop
2nd June, 2.30pm – 5.30pm Writers’ Meeting
5th June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique
7th June, 5pm – 7pm Live Review
12th June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique
15th June, 11am - 1pm Plenary Session

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