National Review, Day Two
It’s day two, and the ugly sight of a performance critic boring performers with his dogmatic opinions is repeatedly noted in The CCA and Arches bar. I catch up with Amber Hickey and Stephanie Black, two of the stars of last week’s Into The New, and tell them where their art ought to be heading. By nine in the evening, I’ve have deconstructed Derrida, expressed my beliefs about the centrality of religion in body art, scared off two women who were chatting to Richard Dedominici and lost the next blog entry to a puppet in a game of poker. In between, I am disappointed by a reading of the book of Revelations- when the last days do come, I want to be scared witless- and impressed by Forkbeard Fantasy. I have also watched a man blowing up balloons in a glass case.
My vaudeville muse is feeling content. Although I have bottle a few shows- the photo display and video of an operation was a bit rich, even if the promised meal of human flesh was off the menu- Nikki Millican has programmed plenty of work that goes for humour over intensity. Forkbeard Fantasy’s The Colour of Nonsense may have been a brutal satire on the art world, a florid multi-media conceptual show that incorporated cartooning, film and radio-play inventiveness. Equally, it could have just been three funny guys riffing on ideas and punchlines. Bringing in Edward Lear’s poetry, a future world trapped in the North Pole and the world’s first Invisible Art Work, Forkbeard ran fast and frantic, tearing up the rulebook and hitting the funny bone at the same time.
The Live Art muses marched me to Tramway for Julia Bardsley, and then shouted at me for going. Andrew Poppy set the scene with doomy electronica, the four screens projected film of filthy lucre and body parts, the text was Nick Cave’s Biblical favourite. But Beardsley’s villain, half devil and half pantomime nightmare, didn’t scare me enough. An androgynous being, preacher and debt collector, reciting from Revelations and welcoming the credit crunch as the promised end? Add in half a bottle of absinthe, and it’s my bedroom on a Saturday night. Bardsley is ploughing an interesting furrow: there are hints of dagerous ideas, floating like flint on a flow of magma. It threatens to explode, lurking murderously. But I wanted to be led somewhere, do something destructive. I ended up being lectured. Perhaps this was the karmic payback for corning Amber Hickey and going on about the religious imagery of flowers.