Shunt Live Art Weekend
ICA
It’s been three years since Ekow Eshun, ICA’s former Director, declared live art to be lacking cultural urgency. The ICA has been in dire need of rethinking its dialogue with contemporary culture, and under the new directorship of Gregor Muir and the hands of Jamie Eastman, Head of Live Performance, it seems that process is underway. This year Live Art Weekends are back with more cultural hunger and capital than ever, with guest curators such as Catherine Borra, Sally O’Reilly, Will Dutta and the Shunt Collective, amongst others.
The format is open to any curatorial strategy, which means the building morphs and shifts to adapt to a cross-section of contemporary performance arts. Catherine Borra’s Against Gravity weekend brought art forms in a constant collision and dialogue, both in content and in presentation. Sally O’Reilly’s The Last of the Red Wine focused on opening doors to process, in this case, the making of the first sit-com of the art world with the help of an eager audience over the course of five days. In Notation and Interpretation, Will Dutta Lucy Railton and Joana Seguro created a dialogue around the creative possibilities of notation within music, both classic and contemporary. Finally it was Shunt’s turn to bring a flavour of the new, the quirky, the odd and the wonderfully bizarre to the ICA.
Shunt’s Live Art Weekend was a cabinet of performance curiosities, from automata, installations, wandering dog heads and a live art tattoo parlour. Over twenty performances in five days, from midday until midnight, complete with Shunt’s very own listings blackboard. The foyer was host to a series of site-specific performance-manifestoes, most notably Mandado’s Gazpacho Unlimited, a hyperphysical intervention unmasking the evil- and madness- behind political candidature. At eleven o’clock at night, amongst layers of sweat and shouts, there was a manic energy to the piece that congregated the late night audience into a deconstructed political rally. Although the ending left the piece hanging mid-air, the journey entailed some powerful games with the conditions of political thought.
If the Gallery was home to talking automata, a variety of gigs and installations, it also hosted Mamoru Iriguchi’s This Headlight Is The Only Hope In the Dark and Bang Bang. A wonderfully cynical piece in which the artist invites one audience member to play a shooting old-fashioned video game projected on his white suit. If you missed him at Shunt, do try and catch him during Camden People Theatre’s Sprint Festival with Projector/Conjector. Iriguchi has a sangvine sense of humour that he skilfully blends with regurgitated pop culture.
Other highlights included Simon Kane’s performance art piece Jonah Non Grata, in which he places the problematic of the contemporary individual in the free society on a plate, and spices it up with a series of candid and morbid acts, from a sermon to a language lesson on a tape and an intimate moment with a giant candle. This is chaos theory wrapped in the playful confines of a one man show, a man confident in the futility of societal clichés. With another hefty dose of religious cynicism, Ark Animalium, by Ivan Thorley and Gareth Martin, brings a clash of Darwinism, Bill Withers, a Noah puppet and two beautifully tacky horse heads together. The performance holds a light, hilarious and eerie quality, and provides a fifteen minute journey where surprise and play reign.
What Shunt succeeded in was bringing a huge crowd of art-lovers at the heart of an institution, and paved the road with some great work. The ICA was packed and there was not a moment of stillness. Yet the quality of work really ranged from the mediocre to the spectacular; what was positive in this was the clash of loud intellectual work witty, playful performance art as well as street art and installations.
What is so full of potential in the format of the Live Art Weekends is the capacity to create a panoramic view, a map of a current landscape, whilst focusing on the peculiar, the experimental and the fringe. The ICA can be a unique platform for live art and contemporary performance that brings a discursive context in relation to the work. What remains to be seen is how far this structure will be pushed; at the moment, Live Art Weekends have brought a feast of performances, workshops, ideas and discussions to the foreground, yet most of these are merely scratching the surface of the edges of the contemporary. In the same way that some of the ICA’s recent contemporary art programming has been imbued with talks, discussions and seminars, whilst attempting to rethink models of presentation, it is in the capacity of the Live Art Weekend, as seen in Against Gravity or Notation and Interpretation, to do the same.