art
it felt like a kiss – part four
Sure enough, the next task involves a comb. As soon as someone in the group picks up the comb and applies it to a mannequin’s head, a dark figure bursts through the gloom weilding a loud buzzing chainsaw that he brandishes at us. We each have to make a dash for it past him, as he is between us and the exit. From then on, it’s chaotic. We pass through turnstiles that only let so many people through, so we’re split into smaller groups, each taking a different route through the maze. Another attack by a chainsaw weilder, then more filtering turnstiles, and suddenly I’m on my own, half walking, half running down a dark, twisting corridor. I feel a tap on my shoulder. I jump and turn round, to find a masked man behind me. I run. I have no clear memories of the remainder of the building, but there isn’t much more, and soon I’m outside, heart beating fast, breathing heavily and feeling slightly silly. One or two of the others in my groups are also outside, but we walk off in different directions, not acknowledging each other or what we’ve just experienced.
Around the corner, I pass Terry Christian. I don’t realise it at the time, but he’s probably on his way to see It Felt Like a Kiss, prior to his appearance on the Culture Show. Even more bizarrely, further down the road on the way to the train station (and remember, this is about 7.30 on a beautiful Sunday evening), I’m stopped by a long procession of hundreds of people in zombie make-up. Some have made only a token gesture, but a few have made a real effort and lurch appropriately. One person even vomits fake blood on the pavement in front of me. I think of all the blood I vomited for real last year and smile.
So what do I conclude about It Felt Like a Kiss? That, of course, is the hard part. I’ve been manipulated by the fast editing of the documentary, I’ve been herded by the carefully mapped out route and turnstiles. I’ve been subject to the same story-telling that the production complains of in America, and part of the effect is achieved through cheap schlock horror. So, yes, the reviewers who complain of this have legitimate grounds, but that, as far as I can see, is exactly the point of this production. One of the guests on the Culture Show said he felt it would have been more effective if he’d had a more passive role, but that misses the point too. We voluntarily enter the ghost train, we pay the theatre company to scare us, we allow the story-tellers to weave their fabrications, even if we don’t always realise how much of it is lies. Who is lying to us now?
it felt like a kiss – part three
People leave the cinema when the film reaches the point where they entered (or, presumably, when they’ve had enough), so from that point on, you’re on your own, wandering through less specific scenes – a hostel for homeless people, streets piled with rubbish. Then things turn really bizarre.
There’s a recording studio leading to a huge model village where tiny lights come on as the sun sets, and a hospital ward with very dated décor. You’re given a clipboard and some questions to answer. The first sheet asks for personal details, while the second gives two options for each question. Presumably you’re supposed to choose whichever you agree with more, but to me many of them seem equally inappropriate, so I scribble, “I refuse” across the sheet. The third page has a logic problem, and states that only independent thinkers can solve it. I’ve seen this one before, so it doesn’t take me long to work out the answer.
After a while, someone comes along to take the clipboards away, and leads you off in a small group again. We’re told, “for health and safety reasons”, that we must at all costs stick together from this point on, so even though the group is entirely new, we start to co-operate, waiting for people to catch up and talking to each other to solve problems.
For we are now in a huge dark room, converted into a labyrinth with head-high walls of steel mesh so that we can see beyond our current position. There are no junctions, just a twisting route. A small sign is flashing up ahead and a buzzer sounding. They stop, just as we reach the sign which says, “Pick up the phone”. One of our group does so, but there is no sound. Another sign starts to flash further on and the buzzer sounds again, so we hurry towards it. The sign says, “Don’t press the button”, so we don’t. Another sign starts to flash and the buzzer resumes once more, so we hurry towards it. “Swallow the pill” – nobody dares. “Read the script” – we would if the light hadn’t gone out just as we reached it, just like all the other tasks. Someone in the group has a mobile phone with a light on it, so they peer at the pages, which say, “The next task involves a comb. You are all going to die.” We look at each other. Even though we know it’s not real, we start to worry.
To be continued
it felt like a kiss – part two
(Part One)
We enter an office, with desks and filing cabinets full of reports of surveillance. By this stage, we’re catching up with the previous batch of audience members, who are examining evidence even more thoroughly than my group, and the groups blur and overlap.
There’s an interrogation room, what might be a torture room, a television studio, make-up room and film set, all eerily empty apart from the occasional mannequin, all with bulging eyes and often in strange poses, sometimes lying collapsed on the floor or waiting expectantly in the corner of a corridor. Many rooms have screens of one kind or another, showing loops of film – a close up of a woman with someone’s hand squeezing her cheeks, scenes from a beauty contest or a napalm victim burning to death.
Finally we enter the cinema, decorated like a cabaret theatre. The film on constant loop tells us of America’s interference in international politics – the various bizarre attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, giving arms to Saddam Hussein to set Iran and Iraq against each other, a coup in Africa, Nixon visiting Moscow, bin Laden’s early days, the forming of Lee Harvey Oswald’s character and the assassination of Kennedy, the jumping of the HIV virus from ape to human in Africa. The editing is fast, sometimes too fast to get more than a vague impression of violent images. I’m automatically suspicious of fast editing, because it relies on generalities rather than coherent argument, so I feel removed.
Interspersed with all of this footage is film of Americans dancing and the explanation of the production’s title, which comes from a song by Carole King, who discovered that her boyfriend had been regularly beating up their babysitter, leading to the lines, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss. He hit me and I knew he loved me”. The babysitter’s name was Eve, and she later released a song of her own, The Locomotion, under the name Little Evie. Hearing it brings a shiver to your skin. Ambivalence abounds.
To be continued
it felt like a kiss – part one
I very nearly didn’t go to Manchester last week. The Sunday train service coupled with track repairs requiring replacement bus service between Stockport and Manchester seemed such a hurdle, but I’d paid for my ticket to ‘It Felt Like a Kiss‘ and I was reluctant to waste the money. I am so glad I made the effort.
Lots of people have been talking about the production: The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, and The Guardian. So too Music OMH and the Epoch Times. The Guardian, as is its want, tries to sum it all up in a slightly self-satisfied way. There is a snippet on the director’s blog on the BBC website, and, from today, the full documentary by Adam Curtis at the centre of the show is available on the BBC website. Perhaps the guests on the Culture Show put it best when they likened the show to a ghost train.
It’s a week now since I went to see it, and the crazy jumble of impressions and emotions has subsided into a more coherent view. Very few people read this blog, but even so, I haven’t felt right until now about describing the production in detail, because I didn’t want to spoil it for anyone, but the Festival finished yesterday, so I feel free to tell all.
The show is a promenade production through an empty office block in central Manchester that Punchdrunk have taken over temporarily. There are tight controls on how many people can enter at any time, with batches of ten people being dispatched at ten minute intervals after strict warnings about footwear, low lighting, flashing lights, uneven surfaces, nervous dispositions, pregnancy, heart conditions, not touching the stewards, no more toilets, and escape routes should you change your mind or in case of fire.
You ascend to the top floor in a tiny lift that requires two trips to ferry the group, so the first half wait nervously in the reddish gloom for the others to catch up. From that point on, it’s up to us to fumble our way firstly through a huge cut-out fairground clown mouth then along and round dark, twisting corridors of black walls and floors. The lighting levels really are low, so sometimes it’s not clear where you’re supposed to go, but we become accustomed to the context and stop feeling quite so ill at ease.
The introductory talk explained that the theme of the production is telling stories, particularly that of America when it thought it was the most powerful country in the world. But it also explained that when power wanes, the stories become fragmented. There will be a small cinema half-way through the building, with a film lasting about thirty-five minutes, and after that, well, who knows? There will be clues, apparently, which my fellow participants, all of whom are complete strangers to me, decide to interpret as an instruction to read all pieces of paper carefully in case there is vital evidence hidden away.
This is why it is taking audiences two hours to work their way through the production instead of the planned seventy-five minutes. For there are many pieces of paper – letters on desks, reports in filing cabinets, notes and scraps on tables. Punchdrunk have certainly been thorough. Each room we enter, separated by more dark, twisting corridors, is laid out as a specific place. At first, they are from a 1950s house – a lounge with looped film playing on the television watched by a mannequin with bulging eyes, a child’s bedroom, a study, a dining room with food on the table, a garden with the remnants of a picnic. One room has a masked figure, just as motionless as the mannequins, but I’m convinced it is a real person. All the time there is loud music (written by Damon Albarn), sometimes discordant, sometimes melancholy. The phrase Grand Guignol enters my mind, even though I’m not exactly sure what it means.
To be continued
don’t view the review
I appear to have got my festivals and cities wrong this year. I’m currently in Edinburgh for a few days, arriving in the lull between the end of the film festival and the start of the main festival and Fringe next month.
Yet in to day’s newpaper, there are reviews of performances in the Manchester International Festival, much closer to home. I’d tried to get a ticket for the combined Steve Reich and Kraftwerk concert, two favourites of mine, but by the time I’d heard of the concert it was sold out. The review was full of praise, describing it as the hottest ticket in town.
Over the years, I’ve seen Kraftwerk in concert three times, and although they produce relatively little new music, their constant reworking of old material is fascinating, and this unusual combination of performers would have been a rare treat.
On the opposite page of the paper is a review of It Felt Like a Kiss, by Punchdrunk. I’m going to see this on Sunday, and I wish now that I hadn’t read the ambivalent review. I’ll still go, of course, but my attitude has been tainted.
after all
I very nearly didn’t go to see the Aftermath exhibition at the Nicholson Institute in Leek yesterday, but I’m glad I did.
All art can be analysed. Don’t worry, I have no intention of delving into deconstruction, semiotics or iconography, but a lot of contemporary art, by selecting from an infinite variety of media, provides more information than ever to pick over. It’s not strictly speaking conceptual art, since it depends on the physical presence of the work, but its emphasis on ideas and its deviation from traditional Fine Art techniques and materials mean that its success depends largely on how the viewer reacts. That, in turn, depends on his or her knowledge, experience, ideas and thoughts. I confess, then, that some of the art on show left me uninvolved, and that says as much about me as it does about the art.
I liked ‘OHP’ by Stuart Porter, one of the first pieces you see on entering the gallery: an overhead projection onto the gallery wall of a monochrome drawing of a hanging jacket. The light shines through gaps in the drawing, so the jacket takes on the colour of the wall, like a chameleon against its background, partly hidden, its presence in question, for of course the jacket isn’t there. It’s just a projection of light that bypasses shaded areas.
Other pieces were intriguing, playing with ideas – the reflections, transformations and parallels of Phil Rawle’s blackened wood and white-painted wood formed opposites yet weren’t, a yin and yang that didn’t contain the other and wouldn’t become the other. ‘Festival 86’ by Anna Francis was slightly creepy, with the distance of 23 years since the National Garden Festival (and the styles and ideas of the time) both elongated and foreshortened by the continuing existence of tacky souvenirs and seedlings growing in trays.
David Bethel’s pieces also intrigued me. ‘You are Starving Me’ consists of model houses placed in polystyrene and cardboard takeaway food cartons, surrounded by gardens and water made of jigsaw pieces, some assembled to provide pictures as scenery and others acting as parts of flower bushes or just the colour of leaves and plants. The boxes are interspersed among the other pieces in the gallery, some open, others shut (and who knows what might be inside those?). The juxtaposition of such disparate elements is interesting – subverted chocolate box tweeness in throwaway containers, a lack of nourishment that is more than just physical.
‘I Know You are Always There’, also by David Bethel, hinted at the separate existence of breath or words once they leave our mouths, twisting in the air like a game of Snake on mobile phones. Is the title reassuring or frightened? Was the frequent, muttered repetition of the word “breathe” over the headphones an attempt to calm down or encouragement to stay alive? Was the piece referring to the things we say on the spur of the moment then immediately regret but can never take back? Do we continue a form of existence in other people’s memories when we are apart? Through its display on a television screen or computer monitor, perhaps it referred to the continuing existence of ephemeral things on the Internet, cached in Google or other archives and beyond our control? Perhaps it was referring to the endless existence of the atoms that briefly make up our bodies and then take some other form once we die.
I recently worked with Katie May Shipley, so I may be accused of bias, but I found her piece, ‘For Losing Yesterday (3)’, to be the most moving in the exhibition. A piece of embroidery lies on a chair, with a bag on the floor beside it. Has the person working on it merely put it down temporarily while they left the room? The image on the embroidery is so abstract as to appear random, though it may just be unfinished. If that is the case, though, why is it the same as the pattern lying to the other side? Has the embroiderer abandoned the piece, or are they trying to create an image based on an imperfect memory? Why is the phrase ‘What time is it?” repeated on tape spilling out of the bag? Is someone unable to remember what the time is? Our pasts are nothing but memories, and if we can’t rely on them, how much do we have left? Is it better or worse to be aware that our memories are imperfect? My father had Alzheimer’s Disease for many years, and gradually became a shadow of his former quick intellect before he died, so, for me, these are important questions.
The notes supplied to viewers in the gallery provide more material for the process of analysis and understanding. They explain the theme of the exhibition, so loose a link as to be discernible only after the event. Some notes, such as those for David Bethel, are so terse and mispelled as to be unhelpful, presumably deliberately. Others are interesting, providing useful information, and some offer context for the artists’ themes.
In the end, however, the art that has the most impact is the art to which viewers bring their own ideas and emotions. Give me hints and suggestions, choose and place symbols in my mind, and leave me to make my own connections.
the wire
Katie showed us how to make wire figures the other day, and has posted the results on her Wire Sculpture Workshops blog. We’re doing some fun stuff at work just now, but that was particularly enjoyable. Thanks Katie!
here comes the sun
It’s spread across the internet, and was on the front page of yesterday’s Times. What is it? It’s a photograph of the space shuttle in front of the sun. It’s a powerful and exciting image, but I find it unsettling.
The shuttle is tiny against a quadrant of the huge yellow star behind it. A filter has removed all solar flare, so the sun looks more like a planet. The optical trick played by relative sizes and distances makes the image look like countless establishing shots in science fiction films and programmes of a space craft in orbit around a planet where crew members have landed, though normally the spacecraft would appear larger.
Our familiarity with such shots means that it’s easy to misinterpret the image. The shuttle is not near the sun at all. We are not close to travelling to other planets. The headline in the Times, “Set your controls for the heart of the sun” is not meant to be a suggestion that the shuttle will travel to the sun. It refers to a track by Pink Floyd on the 1968 album, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’, written at the time of the Apollo rockets and shortly before the first moon landing.
Perhaps all the recent discussion of space tourism, including Richard Branson’s talk of space flights for £10,000 within ten years, together with NASA’s desire to resume manned flights, contributes to an excited feeling that we are on the verge of a new era. Yet if air travel is a major cause of environmental damage, why are we even contemplating extending it with completely unnecessary leisure flights to the edge of the atmosphere?
But that feels like a curmudgeonly attitude. When I was growing up, like many others, I wanted to be an astronaut, and believed that space travel would soon be commonplace. Why should we voluntarily give up that dream, just because it might cause harm to our planet?
There is no claim that the photograph of the shuttle in front of the sun is art, but my troubled response to it makes me willing to consider it so.
coping strategies
I went to see ‘Trying to Cope with Things that Aren’t Human: Part One’ at the airspace gallery the other day. It was the first time I’d been to the gallery, partly because I’ve not been able or wanted to go to a gallery for a long time but also partly, I’m ashamed to say, because the outside looks so forbidding, but I really enjoyed the exhibition. It was funny and clever and, yes, thought-provoking.
It’s good to have a gallery like airspace in Stoke.
going underground – p weller
My curiosity was piqued by an article in yesterday’s Guardian. So, presumably, was everyone else’s, because Tunnel 228 is now fully booked, but I followed up a brief reference at the end of the Guardian’s editorial, and bought one of the few remaining tickets for Punchdrunk‘s forthoming production of It Felt Like a Kiss in an empty building as part of Manchester’s International Festival. On 12 July I shall therefore be wearing sensible shoes and claiming that I am not of a nervous disposition…
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