The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, March 17-21, 2004.
It takes place over five days at about this time each year and it really is a unique jewel in the crown of European performance art. It has been going since 1979, and been through all sorts of changes of format, location, and even name, but since 1984 it has been blessed with the indefatigable Nikki Milican as its Artistic Director, and has, for the past few years, been based in a place called The Arches a vast sprawling underground network of spaces beneath the Central Railway Station in Glasgow, Scotland. It has been the starting point for the careers of generations of British performance artists, and acts as a yearly magnet for artists, curators, promoters, and critics from all over Europe and beyond. It is Britains National Review of Live Art.
There are a number of reasons why the NRLA is unlike any other festival that I know, but its key characteristic is its deliberate combination of the work of long-established (indeed often celebrated) international artists, with mid-career artists and companies who are at the defining edge of contemporary performance (and with whom the NRLA has often developed a continuing relationship) and perhaps most importantly - with the carefully curated Elevator programme of mostly unseen pieces by young artists near the beginnings of their careers. And this is why the NRLA perennially insinuates itself as an event of such importance into the psyches of these artists: for many of them, this will have been the first time that they have found themselves taken seriously by, and as something like the equals of, artists whom they might previously have idolized.
This year the roster of well known artists was particularly impressive, as it included the remarkable British performers Richard Layzell, Franko B., Liz Aggiss and Billie Cowie; Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci from Paris, France; Lee Wen from Singapore; Daniel Lveill and his dancers from Qubec; and Brooklyns own Tehching Hsieh.
Liz Aggiss and Billie Cowie have worked together as the company Divas for rather longer than twenty years, specializing in live performance and dance for camera. They have had a long and fruitful association with the NRLA, and this time around they acted as Artists in Residence to the festival. They appeared late on the Thursday and Friday afternoons in the thick of the NRLA's densely-packed programme, and it really was a delight to see Ms Aggiss and Mr Cowie working at the peak of their considerable powers. At a more personal level it was a real fillip to see my contemporaries working with such focus and passion to present pieces that were not only full of intelligence and wit, but with a grasp of current technologies that probably outstripped anything by the younger artists in whose company they found themselves working. As its title hints, their performance Scripted to within an Inch of her Life provides a consideration, remarkably both ironic and virtuosic, of the performing body approaching the outer reaches of its own possibilities while making new allegiances with sound and video technologies. It really is a quite special work, and very much of a technical and intellectual piece with the 3D, four-screen video installation, The Men in the Wall that was Ms Aggiss and Mr Cowie's other offering here.
Saturdays Elevator program began at around lunch-time with a remarkable piece called One Step At A Time by a young woman from Nottingham by the name of Sharon Hatton. A shallow wooden tray, about ten feet long and three feet across, sits in the centre of a small space, and by its side are four heavy plastic bins. A couple of technicians enter the space and, donning heavy industrial gloves and safety masks they empty the contents of the bins into the wooden tray. It is broken glass, and its shattering green shards crackle and split as they are poured out of the bins and tamped down more or less even by the technicians. Then a man and a woman enter the space. They are dressed in black leotards and sweat pants and, alarmingly, they have bare feet. They stand at each end of the tray and, with a horrible inevitability they step forward into the glass. Once again it lets out its sickening crackling as it is crushed beneath their feet. They walk slowly towards one another, with understandable, almost exaggerated, care each time they put a foot down. Rather remarkably, they appear to be able to walk in the glass without the soles of their feet being slashed to ribbons. They approach one another. They embrace. They kiss. The tenderness of their movements and actions seems pointed up by the hideous soundtrack provided by their feet in the glass. Then they part, and return still ever so slowly to the ends of the wooden tray where they began. Slowly, carefully, they step back out of the glass-filled tray and brush away with their fingers whatever fragments of glass have adhered to the soles of their feet. Somehow, neither of them has a single cut on their feet. The audience seems to let out a collective sigh of relief, and then breaks into noisy applause, which Ms Hatton and her accomplice acknowledge with rather shy smiles.
Later the same afternoon, Jacqueline Mann, an artist just graduated from art school in Dundee, Scotland, performed a mesmeric little piece called Looped? Her upper body hidden from view by a plastic enclosure, she stands on a square patch of grass seemingly cut from someones lawn and brought here to this brightly lit underground art space. In front of her is a supermarket shopping cart full of large bottles of clear liquid. She seems to be wearing a formal cocktail dress and high-heeled shoes. She begins to run. She runs on the spot as though the weight of the shopping cart prevents her from moving. Quickly the grass under her feet is chewed up by her high heels that gradually sink further into the gash of soft brown mud that they reveal. She runs and she runs. She gets nowhere. Two video monitors stand on each side of the enclosure. One shows the image of her feet running deeper and deeper into the mud. The other shows her face as it reddens and she gasps for breath. She runs pathetically until she is exhausted and can run no further. Looped? is a delightful and eloquent piece about futility.
And there are always surprises at the NRLA. Imagine this: you enter a long, low-lit room. At the far end stands a bearded man (his name, it turns out, is Zoran Todorovic, and he is from Serbia & Montenegro) and beside him there is a water bowl on a stand. He invites you to wash your hands in the bowl, and as you pick up the cake of translucent soap that sits by the bowl, he pours water over your hands from a heavy pitcher with an action that seems somehow ancient. It is perhaps at this moment that you see that, in the gloom, one whole wall of this room is covered with large scale, rather violently coloured photographs. In the first few, some sort of surgical procedure is being conducted. From a mans belly a thick heaving disc of yellow fat is being cut, slopping bright red blood behind it. The fat is then subjected to some sort of chemical process. You realize that the soap that you are washing your hands with is indeed the result of that process. Mr Todorovic smiles benignly as he continues to pour water for you. That is the sort of performance that makes you think again about things.
Or, one afternoon I wandered into a room where the simplest video installation was being presented: just one looped single screen with a soundtrack. It was Halbeath by the Japanese-Korean team, Takuji Kogo with Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and it focused upon the sad tale of a microchip manufacturing plant that was begun at Halbeath in Scotland by Hyundai in 1996, and which, after the Asian financial collapse, was taken over, and then abandoned, by Motorola. It is the shell of a huge factory, never completed and now being eroded by the harsh Scottish elements. So far so depressing. But what made Halbeath almost magical in its poignancy was its soundtrack: an old song of blighted love, with traditional instruments accompanying it, that was, apparently, a favorite of Japanese soldiers during the occupation of Korea during the Second World War. Very simple, but all the more effective for that.
So, these are just a few impressions from this years NRLA. Of course, I have hardly scratched the surface of the event as a whole. It starts on the Wednesday evening, and is then programmed from lunch-time until after midnight each day right through until the Sunday night. This year I counted ninety-eight performances, installations, screenings, talks, presentations and other events. It is literally impossible to see everything. I have not even mentioned for example some of the things that most excited me: the seven hour performance made by Kate Stannard with white bread and red sewing thread; the pair of riveting pieces by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris; Goat Islands Mark Jeffreys huge, indisciplined, and mysterious performance featuring a lot of falling down and a truckload of coal; the deeply upsetting piece Airplanes and Skyscrapers by Parsons graduate, Ricky Seabra; Yann Marussichs creepy installation that was pretty much summed up by its title Self-portrait in an ant-hill; Essi Kausalainens piece for an audience of one that took place in a strange red nest that she had knitted; or Lisa Wesleys heroic and profoundly depressing Goin Gone in which she relates tales of wild, drunken nights out in Glasgow while scarfing chips and peanuts that she sluices down with a pint glass of her own piss.
I suppose it goes without saying that I am a huge fan of the National Review of Live Art. Indeed, since its inception I have only ever missed it once, and I certainly regard being there worth far more than the trip through five time zones that it requires. Each year I see work that I could never have even imagined before I got there, and each year my sense of the shape and direction of performance art is refined, and my faith in its importance revivified. And each year I come away exhausted, wanting to sleep for a week, but with a pocket full of peoples business cards, or their phone numbers or email addresses scribbled on scraps of paper. It is, in other words, a crucial social nexus for the international community among whom the worlds most stimulating and pertinent contemporary art is being developed.
Robert Ayers is an English-born performance artist, critic and academic who lives in Manhattan and works internationally.