An essay by Mary Brennan, 2004.
Given that live art still has a whiff of underground subversion about it, theres a lovely appropriateness to the location used annually by the National Review of Live Art: a dark, slightly dank warren of subterranean spaces, known as The Arches that runs underneath the main railway station in Glasgow, Scotland.
So, at regular intervals the booming, brattling thunder of trains passing overhead acts as a curious counterpoint to the work being shown, and though some might feel theres a destructive edge to this noisy intrusion - especially when performers have conceived of a piece as being presented in silence - by and large this reminder of everyday traffic is often a provocative foil, or a symbolic complement, to the event as a whole.
You could even tag the clattering as a kind of anchor, because once you step in off the city street, the NRLA is like a world apart. The five days of non-stop activity - beginning this year on March 17 - really do alter ones perception of time, not least because daylight never enters into any of the spaces. Its a freefall environment where you choose your own schedule and draw your own conclusions, before leaving with your thoughts in fruitful turmoil and a renewed sense of wonder at the complexities of ordinary routines and commonplace objects.
In the course of a twelve-hour day-pass to this Aladdins cave its possible to witness the gradual evolution of a site-specific installation that assails all the senses because of the (decaying) materials it uses, while also chalking up one-to-one encounters with artists who have stories to tell, or scars (physical as well as internalised, metaphysical) to show and share. Between times there are looped videos to scan, interactive sites to engage with, illustrated lectures to attend and physical theatre or dance works to watch. Some pieces have spoken text as a starting point, some are computer-generated, some involve nudity and the body itself as the source and locus of the art.
The one thing you wont find here is niche categorisation: strict or limiting definitions of genre and practice are irrelevant, non-existent - what you will find, however, are questions. Questions about art and creative process for sure but, in the main, questions about being - a topic that took on new and thought-provoking resonances, thanks to contributions by visiting artists from India, Singapore, Taiwan and Eastern Europe. Their very presence added immeasurably to the underlying element of cultural debate that operates formally and informally throughout the event.
Its worth mentioning, I think, that recent years have seen NRLAs artistic director, Nikki Milican, moving well beyond the usual confines visited by her programming counterparts elsewhere in the UK. She has forged strong bonds with Canada and Australia - making Glasgow, not London, the premier point of entry for radical dancemakers and performance artists from those countries. Her long-standing links with avant-garde practioners from Eastern bloc enclaves have led to rarely-seen work from Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro being staged alongside offerings from both established and emerging UK practioners. Audiences are not the only beneficiaries of this span of action. The artists themselves look on the five days as an oasis, a chance to meet with others who create work on the margins - often beyond the comfort zone of subsidy or general approbation. The students who crowd into the Arches find an almanac of live art in all its multi-faceted guises, with the added bonus of being able to have immediate dialogues with people theyve read about in text books.
Imagine, then, the importance of input from artists who have a completely different cultural background from that of the Western world. With the value of difference and diversity in mind, Milican invited Varsha Nair (from India, now living in Thailand) to take part in NRLA 2004. She also invited Baiju Parthan (India) to return with some of his new work - his interactive video works had been enthusiastically received during his first showings at NRLA 2002. Then, as now, Parthans visionary deployment of (enviably accomplished) computer programming skills deftly teased and coaxed those who clicked with his on-screen projections to consider not just the outcomes of their own actions but to reflect - perhaps in new and unexpected ways - on what is real and what is virtual in life as well as art.
Parthan recognises our meddlesome curiosity: we are unlikely to walk past any button that can be pushed, or any unattended mouse idling beside a keyboard. He understands, too, our drive towards narrative connections and our need to know longing for the kind of information that will give us a context, a sense of identity even - and above all, proof that we do exist. So when he constructs interactive diaries featuring mythic creations - such as the virtual personna of Orpheus in The Diary of the Inner Cyborg - he bridges ancient and modern methods and concerns. He makes it such fun to access the inner thoughts of an unseen being who increasingly seems real to us. But as these thoughts veer towards questions of transience, mortality and the nature of time itself, the person merrily clicking away is confronted by the kind of issues that modern society prefers to push to the back of its mind... so as to go shopping instead, adopting the consumerist mantra of I buy, therefore I be.
It was during one of the lunchtime discussion forums between artists and audiences that Parthan, reflecting on the 2004 NRLA programme, contributed a comment that proved as far-reaching and unsettling as his own installations.
Now Nikki Milican never deliberately themes her selections, but because the work she chooses is current and attuned to the times we live in, certain attitudes and approaches recur and become almost like a sub-text. One of those strands focused on the body as an instrument of witness, or as the physical material of performance. Franko B gave an illustrated lecture about his work, the slides charting episodes where - like a penitent for world sins of discrimination, even as he was a reproach to bigots everywhere - Frankos naked, bleeding body was the external badge of deep inner wounds.
Zoran Todorovic, a gentle bearded giant from Serbia & Montenegro, invited us to wash our hands with him - literally, because the soap was made out of his own body fat. A wall of photographs detailed the surgical procedures and subsequent manufacturing processes that rendered Todorovic into an emblem of cleansing and a kind of communion across boundaries of nationality, religion, sex and politics. Elsewhere Yann Marussich (Switzerland) lay naked and motionless in a glass case containing an anthill. Headphones and mini-cameras afforded close-ups of the insects seething, busy behaviour - the amplified sound made even the slightest motion seem cacophonous - but Marussich stayed immobile, unflinching. The wincing and marvelling was all done by us, the onlookers who watched and imagined and recoiled at the nipping, itchy thought of ants attempting to colonise our flesh, our most intimate body parts.
Then, in the midst of so much work that hinged on the variable fragility and strengths of the human body - and indeed the degrees of control that minds could have over such matters - Parthan pointed out that, in his homeland, there was a completely different way of relating to life, death and the mortal casing we inhabit in such a temporary way.
He was courteous, gently amused perhaps - but his words jolted many of us out of what might be described as a complacent state of assumed iconoclasm. So much of what was happening around us, in the Arches, suggested that artists - and yes, onlookers - were putting themselves on the line. Chivvying and challenging the received sensibilities and values of the world that was so noisily on track just above our heads. Parthans comments didnt diminish any of that work, not in the least. But they radically expanded the field of vision. Pointed up the possibility of other ways of looking, and of reading those works - maybe not with the commonly-held Western assumption that one life/one body is all you get....
Afterwards, seated in front of his FLOW - Instant Karma Algorithm, the casual act of clicking on the on-screen video had a darker edge to it. The little red dots that joined up into trickles of blood, running down the projected body - and the adjacent images of a water flow, washing a pair of hands - were even more infused with the onus of accountability, but now there was an added sense that the outcome of our actions didnt end when the game was over.
Meanwhile, in another space, Varsha Nair touched hearts and memories with In-between places, a durational construction/destruction about roots, displacement, home-making and belonging. Using brown, corrugated cardboard cartons that she assembled on-site, Nair built structures that echoed the domestic layout of a house but also conjured up a three-dimensional townscape. But - like the old Roxy Music song - in every dream home a heartache and here, the ache came via images pasted inside the cartons, little glimpses of where Nair grew up. The Baroda she knew no longer exists, indeed Nair herself is no longer boxed in that space. But her rituals of assembling and then dis-assembling the cartons catches, in a profoundly moving way, the whole business of how we hold onto our past or try to take it with us and rebuild it elsewhere - and yes, the packing and home-making does emerge as womans work. Luckily Nair is a woman who can see art and heart in the commonplace. Suddenly as the trains clanked above, gearing up for the business of separating or re-uniting their cargoes of travellers, it seemed as if all roads led to NRLA 2004 - with India now a meaningful part of the live art family.