9/27/2008

Not I

Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan, photo by Tristram Kenton, courtesy of the National Theatre

Juliette Binoche is the epitome of French charm for the Brits. She has it all: self -assuredness, natural beauty, intellectual aspirations, cheeky candor and charm to spare. It didn't really come as a surprise to hear that she was invited to choreograph a dance with masterful dancer Akram Khan for the National Theatre. With the financial backing of the prestigious Fondation d'entreprise Hermes to seal the deal, In-I looked like cultural history in the making.
I gladly signed up to review it, expecting to be dazzled by a show of Franco-British magnificence. Yet, there is a true risk involved in juxtaposing amateur and professional dancers on a stage and I have to admit that In-I was a great illustration of that danger. Amateurs, no matter how revered in other areas of their lives are just not in full possession of their body the way professional dancers are. Last night, as I was watching actress Juliette Binoche clumsily plowing her way through the show, as heavy as Akram Khan was weightless, as clumsy as he was graceful, I felt real annoyance. I felt, unfairly perhaps, that Khan's animal grace was held back by his partner.

I made my way home mulling over the review I would write the following day. This morning I was still thinking about it as I was making my way to ballet class. Should I focus more on the narrative aspect and treat it as a play? Perhaps I could simply present it as an interdisciplinary project aiming to offer Akhram a platform to act and Binoche a chance to dance, regardless of the outcome. Then I caught sight of my face in the mirrored wall of the rehearsal studio. My, do I look angry when I'm focusing on achieving the correct form of a plié! Maybe I should start by relaxing my face in class so the teacher doesn't think I'm about to scratch her eyes out. The essential quality that brutally separates the pros from the amateurs is the ability to make it all look effortless which can only come after decades of excruciating daily training. Suddenly, I felt a surge of sympathy for Juliette Binoche who was exposing her incompetence as a dancer to hundreds of people every night, angry face, clumsiness, excessive sweating and all. I certainly would not be willing (or invited) to do a similar thing but if she is, who am I to judge?

9/05/2008

Local Time


After a restful holiday, I took a flight that lasted a little over 6 hours, a train ride of about twenty minutes, a tube journey of half an hour and then I sat on a bus for another thirty minutes to arrive home bleary-eyed and feeling as if had been run over all these vehicles. Although I was greatly tempted to drop my bags and to jump under the duvet for a much deserved snooze, I followed the advice dolled out by all good travellers: get in step with local time as soon as you land and the jetlag will magically evaporate (or last less than a week). Muttering away, I started unpacking but just transferred all the content of my bag to the bed, then I started making breakfast but left my eggs in the pan while I sorted through the mail and ran a shower that I didn’t get into right away because I had started too many things and suddenly found myself trying to scramble eggs while folding clothes and looking for the shampoo.

Normally a powerful multitasker – yes I can talk to you on the phone while painting my toenails and watching a film – when in the grips of the effects of jetlag, I found myself utterly useless: a danger to myself and others. I came to terms with this fact in time to turn everything off, slip into inconspicuous sunglasses and head to the Turkish café around the corner. There, a lovely gentleman proudly wearing the thickest moustache I had ever seen promptly brought me a piece of cake (actually, two pieces separated by a mound of whipped cream) and a strong coffee. I was saved. What with the coffee being a much needed source of fog dissipating stimulant and cake being such a good source of… cake, I was able regroup long enough to make a list: Top-up Oyster for public transport journeys of the upcoming week, buy fruit and vegetables at the market (still not bored with my market…) wash holiday clothes, mend jacket for meeting tomorrow. One by one, I tackled these apparently mundane tasks, abnormally proud to tick them off my list. By about 5h I was more or less back on London time, but only thanks to a few Turkish minutes.

8/02/2008

Veggie Heaven

To say that I am not a vegetarian would be understating how much I enjoy the primal satisfaction that I get out of consuming a mixed grill or a kebab at the Turkish restaurant up the road. Although I would not be considered a raging carnivore as I don't even eat meat every day, I find that I am truly satiated only after a meal that includes a good piece of iron rich meat. Anemic self-righteous vegetarians often annoy me and I get a smug pleasure out of scientific discoveries that confirm my views such as the research published last week linking soya with infertility. As a friend once said after a talk I organised on the subject of meat, “these people don't smell right and they tend to pair off.” I wouldn't go that far and I do know a few people who are non anemic, non self-righteous vegetarians and I like them in spite of their choices. I am open minded in that way. I just don't invite them over for dinner as I can't fathom the thought of serving a big salad followed by a piece of fruit... I've always enjoyed my vegetable side dishes but they don't make for a meal now do they?
Since I've moved close to one of London's biggest/cheapest/most chaotic outdoor food market though, I've had to come to terms with a new frenzied consumption of fruit and vegetable. For instance, this morning I left the flat with my little cloth bag to pick up milk and paper but I came back with a dozen courgettes (which I will grill with lemon juice, olive oil and garlic for dinner), three gigantic avocados, half a dozen lemons, a pound of satsuma oranges (so sweet and seedless!), a pound of tomatoes (which I will turn into sauce) and a box of litchis. Yes, a box that could easily fit a pair of shoes, full of litchis. All this set me back less than a fiver...

Of course, all that is delicious and healthy and I get to cook and prepare it while I'm writing which fills my little doll's house of a flat with lovely smells but what really gets me to fill my little bag with vegetarian goodies every time I leave the house is the market itself. It's the perfect cross between my memories of living in Congo, my souvenirs of traipsing through Istanbul and a typical London outing. I ask you, where else could you get a “Ta, love!” for buying a big stinking durian fruit and plantain? What's more, the displays are stunning in a mouth-watering way. It's all so colorful: the stalls, the stall owners, their language when they curse at people who haggle. Why wouldn't I want to bring a bit of that home? The vegetables, that is, not the stall owners or their colorful language.

Well, I might eventually get used to it and be able to resist the siren song of this vegetable paradise but right now, I have courgettes and tomatoes to process...


7/28/2008

Bring in the clouds


Have you ever noticed how certain cities don't fare very well in extreme weather conditions? As I sit at my computer in my bikini, refusing to stray more than a few feet away from a whirring fan, I'm thinking more specifically about London in the Summer heat.

If London were a person, it would be a city banker. A youngish man, still hungry for recognition but not yet sucked dry by the long days at a stressful job and the short boozy nights. Good looking in an angular, slightly rumpled way, London is both attractive and distant, as if it were withholding the best it has to offer. It needs a bit of a cloud cover to mask the edges and the dirt. Yet when it gets too sunny and hot, London becomes overbearing like an old sweaty uncle wearing a scratchy, ill-fitting polyester suit. It smells and it sticks to you with clammy paws. You want to get away from it but wherever you turn, there it is.

If you think you will have a picnic in the park and get a bit of fresh air, there it is in the form of loud, overweight half-naked sun bathers guzzling cider. Try and get out of London and just entering the urban inferno that is the tube during heat waves will send running to your overcrowded local lido for a dip in lukewarm water or any cinema showing a longish feature (I recommend the latest installment of the Batman franchise: two hours and a half of dark action. Not a minute of onscreen sunshine) for the air conditioning.

People can complain all they want that it's never warm or sunny enough, but I still think London is most agreeable in the Spring and the Autumn. At the moment, I'm secretly wishing for a nice Summer storm followed by a few gray days to cool everything down and get London back to its louche/aloof best.

7/17/2008

Park life of luxury

Hyde Park, Summer Pavilion by Frank Gehry in construction, July 2008


If you call yourself a londoner and you don't live in the vicinity of Hyde Park, chances are you visit the place only on the odd sunny Sunday when you didn't have enough faith in BBC weather to plan a trip to the country or to the sea side. Once in a while, I take a walk through the park just to remind myself of the first impression I had of London when I got here over four years ago. It's orderly, pretty, clean. Nothing bad could ever really happen in Hyde Park, except when it comes to art... Indeed, no walk through the park is complete without a visit of the Serpentine gallery.


Each year, the Serpentine commissions an architect or an artist to design a temporary pavilion that will house the events of the season. The gallery itself being quite small, this serves the practical purpose of an enlarged capacity during the tourist laden Summer months. When the Autumn comes around, the small building (bigger than most two bedroom flats in London) is sold to a private collector who no doubt has a huge garden or an aircraft hanger to house it.


This year the pavilion was designed by American architect/occasional jewelry designer Frank Gehry who says of his construction: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate.” As I walk by, builders are still working on it and the thing looks a lot like chaos: a mess of timber, steel and textured glass sticking out at odd angles. I don't quite see an urban street, I certainly fail to see an amphitheatre, but this is one rare building that is more or less exempt of the dictates of practicality. It is art, it is the talk of the town, it is vanity project. Actually, it is ornament. Like a shiny piece of jewelry that has no purpose other than to attract attention and admiration. It's doesn't really come as a surprise that Tiffany&Co. should sponsor it then.




There has been over the recent years a growing number of art projects funded by luxury labels. To see another example, I needed only to step inside the Serpentine where the Richard Prince show is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. Just like Takashi Murakami before him, Prince has appropriated the legendary Vuitton logo to produce very expensive bags. Is that art? I never quite know what is art and what isn't with Richard Prince. His tongue-in-cheek references to popular culture are easily accessible: car culture, pornography, romance novels, great American myths. Mostly based on found images, they are sometimes slightly tweaked, like the naughty nurses with their exposed lingerie and paint dribble eyes, or just made bigger than life such as the enlarged photographs of cowboys and actresses.



Richard Prince
Student Nurse, 2005
Acrylic and inkjet on canvas193 x 137.2 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince

Yet, the resulting works are so often (voluntarily) poorly executed that it's hard to take pleasure in their sheer superficiality. They are fun to look at but empty and redundant. We get that naked chicks and cars have a long standing partnership in the average pantheon of male fantasies but to plaster the naked chicks on the car is perhaps a bit literal and lazy no? A car plastered with vintage pornography makes for a funny sight in a highbrow gallery, but that's about it.


Richard Prince: Continuation

Serpentine Gallery, London (26 June - 7 September 2008)

Installation view© 2008 Richard PrincePhotograph: Jerry Hardman-Jones


The combination of the Tiffany pavilion and the Vuitton art left me thinking that art is perhaps more than ever perceived like a luxury good. I would be hard pressed to try and differentiate the handbag from the print: the price is similar, it is signed by the same artist, it's just as aesthetically pleasing. What's the difference? Oh, yes, the handbag has a purpose...

7/13/2008

That's what intermissions are for

The view from the Riverside Terrace

It is now a commonly accepted proposition that our characters are formed of a combination of innate traits and acquired characteristics over which we have variable degrees of agency. Frozen, a Fresh Glory Production of Bryony Lavery's masterful play currently on at the Riverside Studios, asks what should be punished as pure evil and what should be treated as illness?


When a pedophile kidnaps and kills her daughter, Nancy's life comes to a standstill, revolving around the possibility that she might still be alive and then the need to confront her killer. All the while Agnetta looks at Ralph as the object that will verify a scientific hypothesis: some people are genetically predisposed to violence and can therefore not be held accountable. First performed in 1998 and then revisited at the National Theatre in 2002, the play deftly explores both the emotional impact of violence as well as the rational explanations, deconstructing dichotomies of good/evil, abused/abuser, rational/emotional.


This production uses spare set, lighting and sound to focus on the writing which seamlessly intersperses the gut wrenching testimonies of loss with the manic delusions of an addled mind and the scientific discourse. Quite a challenge for the actors who nonetheless deliver powerful performances. Jack James is especially potent as Ralph, the psychotic killer who oscillates from moments of pure mania to candid regressions on a troubled childhood.


A bit like a kick in the head that leaves you, once the shock has worn off, with enough material to really think, Frozen is a rare theatre experience. I suggest you visit the lovely Riverside terrace during the intermission just to drink in the sunset with a glass of wine and remind yourself that life is not all horrors... Now that's really what intermissions are for.

7/09/2008

Looking up

Five days of rain and more to go, I miss seeing that lone little cloud from my window...

7/04/2008

Where is God when you need him



If you have been experiencing difficulties getting through to God these days, it might be because he is trying his holy hand at hairdressing in Dalston. Who knew?

Questions I never thought I would ask myself (but did)

What does one wear to a dinner party if the other guests are magicians?
Can I still eat that cheese if I take off all the green fuzz?
Why don't people answer my emails while I'm online?
Why does the weather not care about my deadlines?

7/01/2008

Things to do (that can't be planned for...)



Finding ducks in a swmming pool.

Falling asleep to the sound of the rain's pitter-patter on the roof above your head.

Getting lost.

Meeting a friendly fox on your way back home after a late night out.

Failing at something you should be good at.

Discovering that you can do something you never thought about (like putting your foot behind your head or solving riddles)

Forgetting your underwear in the morning and smiling secretly all day.

6/25/2008

A.

Have you ever stood by, helpless, while what you thought were the central features of your life just slipped, disappeared into the bottomless pit that lies beyond the limits of the earth as it was thought of before Columbus? Home, relationships, dreams and ambitions plummeting towards the open mouth of nothingness... The void is a scary thing, paradoxically full of emptiness and possibility. Quite a sight that! Some people would say it's one of life's formative experiences but I'm ready to bet all I've lost that the very same people pray they never have to go through it.

Of course, you'll try to clutch at straws, attempt to preserve whatever you can because these things define you, or so you think. Yet, aspirations and dreams are slippery little buggers. They will not be held and so down they go with the love that you had for people you didn't quite know and the desire you had for a future that didn't quite suit you and the hope you had for a life you couldn't quite envisage.

Only then, slack-jawed and bug-eyed, do you get to scream, shout and curse until your lungs are empty and burning. Only then do you get to cry until your eyes are raw and your whole body shakes with the pain of trying to keep what must be lost. Only then do you see that you have been stripped of protective layers of affection, belief and trust. Only then can you see that you're still there, blurry and sad, but still there.

Still there, faced with all that emptiness, all that potential. Still there, lighter of all these expectations; preempted regrets, really. Still there, capable of looking into the void and seeing that you will not fall after all. Still there, capable of knowing people you have not yet loved and finding a future suitable to your desires and envisaging a life filled with hope.

Your life, the aspirations and dreams that you make out of what you once thought was emptiness.

3/24/2008

The Invasion of the Pet People




Flop dominating an Easter bunny



Have you ever been in the presence of a truly smug pet owner? You know the kind. The ones that can't seem to have a conversation that doesn't relate to how cute or clever their pet is. Try and tell them that your 10 year old son is reading law at Cambridge or selling crack on the playground and you'll still get the same pet oriented response: “Oh yes, I know what you mean. Buffy is so clever she prefers to chew on The Economist.” or “If you think that's bad, you should see Buffy trying to hump the Irish Wolfhound at the park!” I even have a (distant, by marriage only) relative who would speak of nothing but his dog's ability to run in the woods at night without hitting trees.

I used to think there was something wrong with these people. They had no interests or achievements of their own and therefore projected all their desires and delusions into their dog/cat/goldfish. That is, until I came home one day to find a quivering little ball of fluff peeing on my sofa. The thing had a head so big compared to its little body that it looked permanently poised to topple over. It also had long droopy ears, big feet and a little tail in the shape of a cotton bud. Its fur was a mesmerizing array of grey, caramel and white tones. I automatically didn't care that the little rabbit was soiling the furniture, she was just the most perfect bunny I had ever seen and I was smitten. She was promptly named Flop and, without even realising it, I started taking pictures of her and showing them to whoever would look. I think it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen when she jumps/sneazes/grooms/tries to seduce my guests by peeing on them/eats wires and clothes. I even have to confess to the ultimate Pet Person crime of having a picture of her as the wallpaper for my mobile. Not to mention that I refer to her rather than it...

Well, I had asked for it. Literally. I had half-jokingly been annoying Andrew about getting me a monkey/bunny/goat for months and I have to admire how practical he was in his choice of pet. The goat might have proved problematic in a central London flat. Still, be careful what you wish for because you might get it (if you have a lovely boyfriend who can see past your nagging yet has a limited tolerance to it) and there might be consequences. Yes, I have become one of the Pet People.

Is there such a Thing as a Visual Culture?

Short of going through life with our eyes closed, we cannot avoid road signs, advertising, maps, artworks, posters, graffiti, television and computer screens. They all present us with images that are an integral part of our lives to a point where we decode them in a quasi-automatic manner. Yet, we have been trained to recognize and understand representations of all kinds. From the very moment we are presented with associations between pictograms and words as an early approach to learning vocabulary all the way to graduate academic disciplines such as art history and semiotics, we become unassuming experts of the visual. Maybe this widespread and inevitable familiarity with the visual explains the fact that there is no one discipline that can pretend to encompass all that constitutes "the visual". Or is there?

With The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn, Margaret Dikovitskaya aims to demonstrate that Visual Studies have emerged in American academia as the ultimate distinct field for the study of visual culture over the last decades. This is no small task considering that, although this interdisciplinary area of research splicing various aspects of anthropology, art history, film studies, linguistics and comparative literature has existed since the 1980s, it has yet to be the object of a consensus regarding its objectives, definitions and methods. What's more, its applications vary from one institution to the other and, in spite of a growing number of adepts, it is still more often than not aggregated to aesthetics or cultural studies.

The author, far from being deterred by this state of affairs, sees these discrepancies as an incentive to develop a common ground for working in the field of the visual. To be exact, Dikovitskaya aspires to shed new light on this area of study by looking at the way in which an intersection of art history and cultural studies has generated new ways to consider the visual. Her starting point is the hypothesis according to which deconstructionist criticism is responsible for a cultural turn that has helped redefine the status of culture. Where cultural phenomenon was previously seen as the mere response to social, political and economic processes, it has now come to be perceived as their cause.

In order to get the lay of this as yet unexplored theoretical land, the author embarked on an extensive series of interviews of faculty members attached to various American universities. Among the academics who have collaborated to the project, some are established authorities such as Douglas Crimp, Anne Friedberg, Nicholas Mirzoeff. In order to get a range of theoretical standpoints, the academics were divided into three representative clusters: those who believe visual studies to be an appropriate extension of art history, the proponents of a new focus independent of art history but related to digital and virtual technologies and those who view visual studies as a threat to art history. Considering that an academic field is defined by the object of study, the basic assumptions underpinning the methodology and the history of the discipline itself, it comes as no surprise that the author should consider this epistemological effort as a pioneering attempt to present a historiographic account.

The structure of the book is quite straightforward: an introduction followed by a bibliographical essay, two chapters, a conclusion and a substantial appendix. The introductory bibliographic essay retraces all American publications pertaining to visual culture and provides succinct analyses of each tome's specific contribution. If this first part of the book reads more like an attempt to gather the preliminary material from which an analysis could eventually be derived, the second part provides some insight into the turn that seems to have brought about this new field as well as concerns regarding potential theoretical frameworks. This chapter aims to determine what the potential objects and methodologies of this emerging discipline could be, but the focus remains on art history, its methods and its objects of study. Indeed, the resulting concluding remarks serve the purpose of asserting the importance of visual studies by suggesting that they have come to subsume art history: "Given that visual studies treat all images as worthy of investigation and implicated in relations of power and history, from the perspective of proponents of the new field, art history is encompassed by visual studies and becomes, in effect, part of this new field's own history."

For all the material gathered, Dikovitskaya is left with a comparatively flimsy conclusion: visual culture is in the making. Pointing more to the need to redefine art history on the basis of new objects of study -- such as virtual reality and video art -- than to the legitimacy of a brand new field of research, this book still has the merit of being an exhaustive account of the various forms of engagement with visual culture. The collection of interviews alone is of great interest for any graduate student concerned with visual studies and its potential objects. It is also likely to be of interest for academics involved in researching and teaching such matters as it is an informed point of view on the way disciplines have the potential to evolve.

3/07/2008

That Crusty Corner of the Sandbox

Doris Salcedo Shibboleth 2007 Photo: Tate

It's amazing the things you can find at the end of something else: home at the end of a journey, a fish at the end of your line, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Yesterday, I found artist Richard Dedomenici at the end of the Turbine hall's crack. Equipped with a coffee and a hot chocolate, we headed for one of the windy balconies. I'd come more or less prepared to discuss the place of avant-garde in his work but instead I got to see the smallest gallery ever to be worn on a wrist and was introduced to the progress of his new year's resolution to make bad decisions. So far, smoking, flying and watching a lot of Eurovision seem to indicate success.


But a quick look at his work indicates that although he's not always been an adept of the well assumed disastrous, he's often voluntarily privileged the unexpected and the absurd. I would say that forming a boys band with asylum seekers, signing the 80s success 99 Red Balloons while inhaling helium and embracing failure are a fairly good indication of his propensity to create unsettling experiences. Although some of them are no less than giggle-worthy, it's serious work to faze people enough so they're able to consider their world from a different vantage point.

As the conversation veers to Richard's works in progress and my coffee gradually gets cooler , I can't help but think that if there is any chance that art can accomplish what politics can't – significant changes in the attitudes of people regarding the various unpleasantness otherwise known as “social issues” – it's via works that jostle people out of their comfortable preconceived ideas. Some of these works are notably uncomfortable to engage with, but some of them present themselves in the guise of a game which is much more efficient. As you all know, whoever doesn't want to play is left to sulk in the crusty corner of the sandbox. And since nobody wants to be left alone in the sandbox, being playful about important issues is serious work.

Finally, we've run out of coffee and hot chocolate when we get around to the avant-garde. In all honesty, Richard is not sure whether his work is neo-avant-garde, post-avant-garde or plain avant-garde but he knows he's an artist. I tend to believe him and promptly commission The Forum's first avant-garde self-portrait. Result soon to be posted...

This entry was first published on The Forum

Encounters with the Iconic

Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/Paris and DACS, London 2007

When visiting the Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia exhibition opening this week, it occurred to me that there is something mind-boggling about encountering an iconic work of art in the flesh. It is indeed flesh that we are referring to because the combination of paint, marble or any other material the artist might have used has become so familiar that it echoes the jolt of recognition usually associated to a friend's face. You feel that you know them if only for having read about them and for having seen reproductions.

But as I discovered when I came face to face with Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and the Fountain signed R. Mutt, encounters with the seminal works are akin to bumping into a famous actor. There is first a sense of recognition that lingers as you stare at the individual. You recognize him yet you can't quite recall the details of this familiarity. Did you meet him at an opening or was it at your cousin's wedding? What's more, there is a slight sense of inadequacy in this recognition. You know this person, yet they should be taller, slimmer, younger. While all of these thoughts are racing through your mind, he will most likely have the time to walk right by you, not even glancing in your direction. The recognition is unrequited and you're left with the impression that you were snubbed in some obscure way.

The infamous Duchamp works credited for an irrevocable change in the production and understanding of art are quite recognizable, even in a room laden with other works by Man Ray and Picabia. They're familiar because such a cult has been built around them over the years that you've most likely encountered some version of them, and that might also be why the experience of actually seeing them leaves a bit to be desired. Is that urinal really what changed the course of history? Well, not exactly because the Fountain that you can see at Tate is actually a reproduction made in 1964 rather than the 1917 original and because it's not so much the object itself that has changed our understanding of art but rather the surrounding debates it generated.

So here you find yourself, in the presence of what looks like the famous actor without the costume, lighting, make-up and applause that contribute to elevate him above and beyond a mere human status, but it's in fact his stand-in. Where did the illusion go and why is the encounter so disappointing? Is that what Duchamp meant when he stated:
'The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.'
Marcel Duchamp, from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957

Is art powerful only if we invest it with the knowledge of its history and with symbolic transformative powers? If, like myself, you have no answer to these questions, perhaps the Against the Avant-garde? Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia study day on the 8th of March will be a good platform to discuss your beliefs or disbeliefs in the power of art. I will certainly try to challenge my visions of the not quite sublime encounters with the icons of the avant-garde.

This entry was first published on The Forum

Being Cadmium Red

Last Monday, I danced in front of a Pollock, moved around a stark room as if I was melting and attempted to embody the matte maroon of a Rothko by rolling around on the floor of a gallery. That was quite a start to the week! Why was I not unceremoniously thrown out of the museum for aberrant behavior?


Long gone are the days when I could get away with that kind of conduct in public with a gap toothed smile and a twirl of the pigtails. I am not even part of the ilk that is expected to disregard such petty considerations as socially acceptable conduct for the sake of art: the performance artist. My frenzy of non-verbal expression was legitimized by the context of the Physical Thinking course led by visual artist Liz Ellis and Suzy Willson, Artistic Director of the Clod Ensemble. They take it upon themselves to teach something simple, so simple in fact that we rarely ever think about it: movement. Liz and Suzy are offering a platform to question the fact that the way we move in galleries has very little to do with the way we are moved by the art we encounter. Actually, they skip the questions, the qualifications and the descriptions in favor of physical expression so the participants move, run, jump, crawl, twirl and leap their interpretation of art.

Chances are, you haven't had such an experience of the museum in a few decades yourself because this is just not usually behavior expected from your average museum audience. What's more, if we were all to launch in spontaneous arabesques in the middle of a crowded gallery, chances are some people might be left with the scarring experience of a crushed foot rather than the elating feeling of expression freed from analytical constraints. But, other than that, who's to say the physical response would be less valid than silent contemplation or a comparative analysis between the work and the information related in the exhibition catalog?

Although I spend most of my time doing the latter, I sometimes find that whatever I might read or say about a work doesn't come close to expressing all that I feel about it. So next time you see someone looking weighted down in front of a Judd or shimmying in front of a Vasarely, just know that it might be me, at a loss for words.

This entry was first published on The Forum