National Review: Day One
It’s a tough job serving two muses, especially when they’ve both been denied funding from the Arts Council of Olympus for three thousand years. And they rarely agree on anything: one is all artifice, surface and humour; the other is abstract, intellectual and serious. I am split between cabaret and live art, and the clamour for my attention is exhausting me.
Fortunately, The National Review’s genial host, Ian Smith, seems familiar with the problem. His strategy, to lead the audience deeper into aesthetic mayhem with a cheeky wink, is being mirrored by Richard Dedomenici and Ian Hinchchliffe, who mix equal parts humour and intensity. Dedominici is depreciating his own NRLA archive, which comes complete with theme tune and handy pocket sized booklet. Hinchcliffe is like one of Beckett’s tramps who has noticed the absurdity, and decided it is quite funny.
The acts of endurance, the relentless soul-searching, the desperate seeking of new forms: Live Art, like cabaret, tends to be a youngster’s game. Hinchcliffe is a proper veteran. His hour muses on senility and his obsession with fishing is punctuated by what my parents call “senior moments”. Timothy Leary, High Priest of LSD, welcomed old age as being the sort of psychedelic state he once had to pay to achieve. Hinchcliffe’s gentle ramble has that hallucinogenic quality, where names become lost and the simplest act, like taking off boots, become a battle.
What both Hinchcliffe and Dedomenici achieve is balancing a serious intention with belly laughs. Dedominici directs much of his irony against his own pretentions, and thereby his criticism of other artists become less stinging. Hinchcliffe self-consciously notes “this is the artistic bit”, before losing himself in another meditation on angling, sweetening the underlying sense of disorientation and dissolution.
The first day and a half have been gentle – keeping off the drink last night was probably a sensible way to start, and it allowed me to meander around Lei Cox’s video triptych with patience. Featuring a desert landscape, interrupted only by the occasional visit of a speeding car, a leaping man or, more frequently, wind-up toys, the footage seemed lost in its own private vocabulary. Eventually, a toy spun across a screen that I recognised: a monkey on a bicycle. I had once owned this very toy, and spent hours on the floor with a lover, laughing at it. Perhaps Cox wanted me to remember the fragility of this relationship, a metal chimp circling in a desolate waste: another image caught between the muse of vaudeville and Live Art.