Diverge Converge
Curated by the Chelsea MA critical writing student I believed I would be in for an evening of great performances. Sadly this wasn’t the case. Instead I was left with two hours of pretension and under estimation of an audience. While I love simplicity within durational art along with repetition the way in which it was curated left me felling trapped, irritated and frankly bored. It is the potential for something to happen within repetitive durational work that makes you want to sick with it and unfortunately what the pieces within this show lacked.
The potential in the way it was curated was indeed that; potential. Asked to interpret and excerpt from the text ‘Reading a Wave’ from Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar the performances took place on a left and right stage. The potential for pieces to overlap like the transference of energy in a wave would have shifted your focus and question your engagement within each piece, however the 15 minute blocks didn’t allow for this and made the necessity of two different stages useless.
The performances started with a lecture on waves which completely underestimated the intelligence of the audience. Alike my own work the artist (Taneesha Ahmed) was questioning the value of knowledge and common knowledge. Although originally intrigued by another artist response to this in my belief it took its self too seriously. The lack of humour made the work seam pretentious, dull and pointless.
The only other work that I found intriguing was an on going performance throughout the evening by Alice Brooke Smith. When catching your attention the artist would wave at you to greet you. Although at first this added humour to the event in a subtle and nonsensical way it began to get tiring as in your boredom of being trapped in a room you look around the room only to find you have been caught out and being waved at again.
The whole event reminded me of the importance of situating a performance correctly as being trapped with the pieces only made me irritated with the 15 minute durational aspect of them. It also made me question length of a repetitive performance in the way of how long and audience is expected to stay with a piece. In terms of endeavour 15 minutes isn’t long enough and yet the simplicity made the work understandable within minutes. In relation to my own work I now need to gain the answers to these questions as well as looking into the value of the information supplied in order to give a more rounded performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment