Kill Your Patriarchal Assumptions

I was recently reminded by my publisher that The Skinny is an “entertainment and listings magazine”. I was in the process of defending an article about speed dating, a flimsy excuse for more public self-humiliation. “It’s more about where you get that entertainment from,” I countered, before penning a piece that my mother will show to her friends with the warning “he was okay until the Jesuits got hold of him.”

Now I am out of my central belt comfort zone. I am in Dundee for Kill Your Timid Notion. I have booked a room in a hotel that offered me an hourly rate. I watch a video of a clock face for eleven minutes and laugh at sly humour that depends on knowing, vaguely, what Walter Benjamin had to say about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Later, Taku Unami will play metal guitar with a cardboard box over his head, in darkness. Then my neighbours in the hotel will groan their way through to dawn. It’s more about where you get your entertainment from.

The final event – if we exclude the in-hotel adult soundtrack – was, by traditional standards, a massive failure. Emma Hedditch, Anthony Illes, Mattin and Howard Slater joined a few selected cohorts in what appeared to be a group therapy session, excluding the audience with some lovely passive aggression.

But failure has no meaning in an experiment: KYTN was trying to find out what happens when you invite artists to collaborate with audiences. Hedditch and the gang exposed themselves as authoritarian, demanding safety as performers but giving nothing in return, and through Sunday’s programme this tension, between the liberal, inclusive language of artists and their dogmatic insistence on the audience’s complicity, posed enough questions to fuel Arika’s next fifteen years of festival curation.

It was the simplest videos that worked best: taking a single idea and pushing it, pieces like Chapters 1-12 of R.Kelly’s Trapped in The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously or Meanwhile (a film consisting only of those place names and times that Hollywood movies insert for the hard of understanding) or juxtaposing concepts – 10 Mins turned the kitchen timer into a symbol of sexual slavery. By doing so little, the videos allowed the audience to imagine their own, internal movies: the fourth wall was genuinely breached, both entertainingly and intelligently.

When special guest Morgan Fisher mumbled about disliking the formal aspect of an artist’s screening, it seemed as if he was nodding towards egalitarianism. His films, however, were demanding, asking the viewer to stare at a clock, listen to his thoughts on film – as they faded in and out of sound and vision, demonstrating his lecture’s assumptions – and carrying on like an patriarchal school-teacher.

It might have been frustrating, but the clear fault line that runs through experimental art was damningly exposed. The artist claims to be radical, but still clings to the authority given by their status. Back to Hedditch and Co: despite the informality of the environment, the artists could not help but indulge themselves. I far preferred Jarrod Fowler’s response to the experiment: he let everyone have a chat, and gave out free CDs.

There is a trend in modern performance – and its funding – that demands a community aspect to the experience. Research suggests that art has a clearer impact when it engages socially, but KYTN has exposed the flaw in this admirable aspiration. A week of radical thought and bracing experimentation? It all depends on where you get your entertainment from.