A Bogan Abroad: Enjoy Now, Think Later

Back home in Australia the word 'Glasgow' generally evokes three things: bad weather, casual violence, and for some, leading contemporary art. While the first two were enough to convince me to move here, I'm still struggling to come to terms with how the third fits.

This month's staging of Sonica gave Glasgow ten days of world-class sonic arts, presenting emerging British talent alongside exceptional international artists. My favourite show was Bluebeard by the Dutch trio 33 1/3 collective, which used sound and video projection to animate a large white cube on the stage. With a minimum of live performers, the cube seems to transform, vanish and reappear anew in an impressive array of audiovisual trickery. The effect was playfully ingenious and I was left with the impression that Douwe Dijkstra, Jules van Hulst and Coen Huisman are only just beginning to discover the potential of their methods.

Prior to the performance, I knew almost nothing about Bartók's opera and Duke Bluebeard's dungeon. Now, having seen this adaptation, I remain blissfully ignorant of the original story. Rather than present a linear narrative, Bluebeard felt more like a nightmare. As each scene transformed into the next without rational explanation I felt my guard drop and my senses quicken. Gradually I let fear take hold because that seemed to be the overwhelming intention of the show. Later I felt surprised that a contemporary art performance had delved into the arena of horror entertainment.

I’m guessing that when Sonica Director Cathie Boyd booked Bluebeard, the phrase 'horror entertainment' was pretty far from her mind – and it's not hard to understand why. A few days after the performance, I was passing The Edinburgh Dungeon, which, if you don't know, is one of those lowbrow entertainment venues that combines horror, humour and history into a big cheesy ball of family-friendly fun. ‘500 years of Edinburgh History’ boasted the sign, all for just £16.20.

I stood and stared with the pretentious amusement of a budding art critic, until I began to wonder, ‘what's the difference?’ Obviously Bluebeard should be praised for its technical achievements but the net result was essentially a bunch of people feeling frightened in an enjoyable kind of way. The Sonica programme describes Bluebeard as a 'gruesome, psychological fairy tale,' which, in retrospect, seems a nice way of saying, 'horror for smart people.'

Fear can be a base, reliable, even dumb reaction to stimulus and that's why horror is treated as a second-rate genre – but that doesn't mean fear can't be done in an intelligent and innovative way. After all, fear has many levels, from the external threat to the fear of oneself and one's own capacity to inflict horror. This was Bluebeard's greatest achievement, in that the male protagonist was transformed into a virtual circumstance, so the audience could experience the story as Duke Bluebeard. We experienced his destructive malice, not as an external Other but as ourselves. On this level, horror can provoke self-analysis and the kind of critical discourse that's supposed to be contemporary art's higher function.

It's possible that Bluebeard, being so entertaining, didn't actually provoke this critical reaction in its audience – at least not straight away. This might also be true more generally of the work presented at Sonica, most of it being pretty entertaining stuff. I wouldn't have said this before moving here but there's actually something quite intelligent about this kind of 'enjoy now, think later' approach, which trusts its audience to connect the dots if they so wish.

Post-performance, Boyd conducted a Q&A session with 33 1/3 Collective but they weren't giving much away. They seemed happy to let the work speak for itself, and comfortable in the knowledge that it did.