1. Then
On August 13th 1970, artist Joseph Beuys and avant-garde impresario Richard Demarco travel to Rannoch Moor, the fifty square mile expanse that straddles Perth and Kinross, Lochaber and Argyll and Bute. On this boggy site knee-deep in mystery and symbolism, and described by Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘Kidnapped’ as ‘A wearier looking desert a man never saw,’ the German icon championed by Demarco since the pair met in Dusseldorf two years before performs ‘Action on Rannoch Moor,’ in which open space and artist became one.
Ten days later and throughout August, Beuys exhibits and performs as part of ‘Strategy: Get Arts,’ an exhibition of contemporary German art curated by Demarco at Edinburgh College of Art as part of that year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Beuys’ contributions to the show are ‘The Pack,’ made up of a Volkswagen van with twenty-four sledges tumbling from its rear door, with each sledge containing a survival kit; ‘Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony,’ an action performed by Beuys with three tape operatives; and a series of photographs documenting Beuys’ sculptures and actions, and which is the first version of what would become ‘Arena - where would I have got if I had been intelligent!, 1970-1972’, which will be revisited and revised with each subsequent showing.
On the same day, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, English avant-rock band Soft Machine, named after William Burroughs’ 1961 cut-up novel ‘The Soft Machine’, are preparing to play live as part of that year’s BBC Proms. With the same line up who appeared on Soft Machine’s ‘Third’ album released in 1970, this is the first time contemporary avant-garde rock music has featured in a Proms programme, making it something of an epochal event. The concert features three tracks, ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous,’ ‘Facelift’ and the four-part suite, ‘Esther’s Nose Job.’ A record of the show was released on Reckless Records in 1988, and in 2007 was a bonus disc with a remastered edition of ‘Third.’
Between June 3rd and July 20th 1969, an exhibition by Mark Boyle and former Edinburgh College of Art student Joan Hills, who would later produce work with their children Sebastian and Georgia as The Boyle Family, takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ features a 360 degree projected environment, and on June 24th, two films by Boyle and Hills, ‘Beyond Image’ and ‘Son of Beyond Image,’ are premiered at the ICA. To accompany the films, Soft Machine perform live in the projected environment.
Between May 16th and July 12th 1970, ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ is repeated at Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, and again in Oslo in February 1971. Soft Machine again perform live at both events. In 1973, ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ is seen at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, and at the MacRobert Arts Centre at the University of Stirling. By this time Soft Machine have ceased collaborating, and it seems neither party will be seen or heard together again.
Rewind to 1963, and Mark Boyle’s ‘Erections, Constructions and Assemblages’ appears at the Traverse Theatre Art Gallery in Edinburgh throughout August and September. Boyle also reads poetry with future Blurt saxophonist Ted Milton behind the paperback bookshop – the first of its kind in Britain – run by Jim Haynes, one of the driving forces behind the Traverse. On September 7th, towards the end of the Edinburgh International Festival Drama Conference at the university’s McEwan Hall, Boyle, Hills and others including American theatre-maker Charles Marowitz, who directed radically reassembled collages of Shakespeare, took part in ‘In Memory of Big Ed,’ a Happening on the McEwan Hall balcony which attracted press attention primarily due to the appearance of a naked young woman.
Jump-cut to 1965, and Boyle has organised a benefit show for the ICA. One of the performers is poet and artist Jeff Nuttall, who in 1966 would co-found the UK’s premiere live art troupe, The People Show and go on to document the era in his book ‘Bomb Culture. On June 11th 1965, 7000 people attended the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall featuring Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Alexander Trocchi, Tom McGrath and others.
Zoom to December 23rd 1966, and Boyle and Hills perform ‘Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water’ at London’s premiere underground club, UFO, after which they provide light-shows for the club’s live acts, including Soft Machine, on a regular basis.
Cross-fade to 1967, and, shortly after the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream event at Alexander Palace, Boyle and Hills provide light installations for Soft Machine to play in France in an elaborately structured dome created by Keith Albarn, who a year later, with the counter-culture’s revolutionary ferment at its peak, will father future Blur and Gorillaz singer Damon Albarn.
In August, again in France, Boyle, Hills and Soft Machine score a production of Pablo Picasso’s play, ‘Desire Caught by The Tail.’ Back in Edinburgh the same month, all three parties collaborate with choreographer Graziella Martinez, and create a sound and light show for a Traverse production of Alfred Jarry’s play, ‘Ubu In Chains.’ In December, Soft Machine play a closing concert for the old site of the ICA, with projections by Boyle and Hills.
Of course, all of the above is the stuff of legend. All we have are the pictures.
2. Now
Fast-forward to July 25th 2010, and Tessa Lynch’s ‘You Are Here’ is going over old ground.
‘You Are Here’ is happening in Festival Square, a public space tucked off Lothian Road’s busy city centre thoroughfare. With arthouse cinema Filmhouse next door, and both the current home of the Traverse Theatre and the city’s equivalent to the Royal Albert Hall – the Usher Hall – opposite across the main road, this is what City of Edinburgh Council like to think of as a ‘Cultural Quarter.’ Set to one side of the square close to the road is what looks like a seriously oversize TV screen.
In the centre of Festival Square, three dancers aloft various size platforms are acting out some kind of public ritual via a set of physical tics that mirror their own images captured on the screen facing them, while trippy music pulses them along. Onscreen the dancers filmed movements are more or less the same. The only difference is the projected backdrop they’re playing against.
Look, there’s Rannoch Moor in boggy living colour, and see, there’s something that looks like Ferdinand Kriwet and H.P. Alvermann’s contribution to ‘Strategy:Get Arts’. Now wait, there’s the triumphalist Folly on Calton Hill. And the music? Why, that’s Soft Machine at the Proms, wigging out for all they’re worth in the pillar of the British establishment’s locked groove they’ve just unpicked.
Knitted together over the next twenty minutes and repeated four times, ‘You Are Here’ is a gloriously impressionistic pick and mix collage of the iconic artistic history on its own doorstep. It continues a rediscovery of the 1960s and 1970s by a younger generation of artists weaned on name-dropping counter-cultural legend and who perhaps want to get to the heart of the matter beyond the fetishised mythology of love and peace.
Lynch did something similar with ‘Alexandrite,’ her Collective Gallery commissioned large-scale performance piece at Edinburgh International Climbing Arena in Ratho. Here she referenced everything from Francis Picabia to the theatrical illusion of Dr Pepper’s Ghost, a shtick that gives the appearance of two things happening simultaneously.
It chimes two with other off-site works from The Collective, from Jenny Hogarth’s large-scale reimagining of the Covenanters 1666 Battle of Rullion Green at Midlothian ski slope in 2004, to Henna-Rikka Halonen’s ‘Commonwealth Suite,’ which in 2009 restaged and filmed Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Russian constructivist satire on state bureaucracy inside Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Pool utilizing a cast drawn from Edinburgh Diving Club.
The Commonwealth Pool, incidentally, opened in 1970, the year Edinburgh hosted the Commonwealth Games as well as ‘Strategy: Get Arts.’
‘You Are Here’ may be just as impressionistic, but it is categorically not a re-enactment. Rather, it is an inquisitive forage through history en route to becoming something else.
3. Then Again
Rewind to April 30th 1971, and verite documentary film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, who captured Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour in ‘Don’t Look Back,’ is immortalising an event that would eventually be released in 1979 as ‘Town Bloody Hall.’ Bearing witness to a debate on women’s liberation in New York Town Hall before a packed audience of liberal intellectuals there to watch radical feminists Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Caballos tear chunks out of bullish novelist and Chairman of the event, Norman Mailer, ‘Town Bloody Hall’ documents a brilliant piece of real-life theatre that captures the volatility, naiveté and passion of the post 1960s era when some kind of idealism was still in the air. ‘Town Bloody Hall’ is thrillingly compulsive viewing, and in terms of drama, is hard to better.
Fast forward to April 2009, and theatre artist Nic Green and her company are performing as part of the Behaviour festival of devised experimental work at The Arches in Glasgow. The piece is also called ‘Town Bloody Hall,’ and forms the second part of what will eventually become ‘Trilogy,’ which looks at the female experience today in relation to its past. The third part will culminate in a mass choir of women volunteers singing William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as they liberate themselves, 1960s style, of their clothes until they are naked. And they dance.
The original idea for ‘Town Bloody Hall,’ the performance, Green explains during it, was to do a complete recreation of the film, line by line, gesture by gesture, tic by nervy tic. Then they show an excerpt, and it’s clear that if they had pursued with a total re-enactment, having already learnt it off by heart, they would have been upstaged at every turn by the sheer bombastic fly-on-the-wall charisma of the real thing.
Instead, Green and her cast use Pennebaker’s film as a springboard to explore what feminist ideas might or might not mean to women – and men – today. The end result is as deeply personal as it is appositely understated compared to the verbal bruisings doled out in the film. It is also quite quite beautiful.
4. Now Then, Now Then, Now Then
Back on July 25th 2010, the same evening as ‘You Are Here’ is being performed in Festival Square, across town in a nightclub called Cabaret Voltaire, Japanese vocalist and former member of German band Can Damo Suzuki is playing. Suzuki is a legend, who joined Can some time in 1969 or 1970 after being spotted busking by bass player Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Leibezeit, who were in a café in Munich. Suzuki added freeform vocals to crucial Can albums before retiring from music in 1974, only to return as a solo artist in 1983.
Cabaret Voltaire the club is named after the Dadaist Zurich nightclub opened in Zurich by Hugo Ball in 1916, and which featured artists experimenting with performance via a cross-fertilisation of spoken-word, dance and music. The Cabaret Voltaire name is more recently associated with the electronic band from Sheffield, who pioneered sound collages derived from William Burroughs’ and Brion Gyson’s experiments with tape recorders that were a pre-cursor to sampling. In this way, Cabaret Voltaire pre-dated Techno and all of remix culture’s magpie tendencies in search of the perfect beat.
Accompanying Suzuki is a group of locally sourced musicians he dubs ‘sound carriers.’
Sound carriers can be anyone who contacts Suzuki, either through local promoters or by emailing him via his website, expressing a desire to play with him. The idea, on what judging by the extensive tour dates looks like a restlessly nomadic never-ending tour, is that every show is brand new every time.
This of course depends on the quality of the ‘sound carriers,’ and how they respond onstage to Suzuki’s vocal whims. Suzuki’s Edinburgh four-piece who’ve only just met may be young, but they’re inventive, and they certainly have a few Can records in their collections. What emerges over an hour –long improvised set is a form of fantasy-wish-fulfillment homage that is the closest the sound carriers will ever get to being Can without ever actually sounding like them. Because, while the band will never in a million years be Can, they are becoming something else. This is the sound of their future. Suzuki on the other hand, is the one repeating himself, caught up in his own moment of former glory, a tribute band re-enactment to himself.
Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it.
In his 2001 critique, ‘Art and the Degradation of Awareness,’ Jeff Nuttall echoes his sentiments in his 1968 frontline dispatches, ‘Bomb Culture,’ when he suggests that any revolution that came out of the 1960s had been misappropriated by capitalism as artistic and political ideals were reduced to sex, drugs and decadence.
There is a photograph by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins of the editorial board of counter-cultural bible International Times. There they are, beaming beatifically with possibilities. Nuttall’s in there, so is Jim Haynes, Barry Miles and all the boys. Captured like that, they don’t so much look as thought they’re going to change the world as fuck it for everything they could get. Take that, Germaine.
5. Now, Then, Always and Hereafter
On April 21st 2007, for one night only at the ICA, Joan Hills and Sebastian Boyle remixed ‘Beyond Image’ and ‘Son of ‘Beyond Image’ first seen at the ICA as part to a live recording of Soft Machine from the same era.
The event is part of a series of re-enactments, most famous of which is German industrial iconoclasts Einsturzende Neubaten’s ‘Concerto For Voice and Machinery.’ This event was originally commissioned by the ICA as part of its George Orwell referencing Big Brother New Year Rock Week, and was performed on January 3rd 1984. This became notorious after the band attempted to drill a hole in the ICA floor allegedly to expose secret underground tunnels in the Mall, close to Buckingham Palace. ‘Concerto For Voice and Machinery 2’, performed by Jo Mitchell on February 20th 2007, would be more likely to reference reality TV than Orwell.
In May 1988, Test Department, British contemporaries of Einsturzende Neubaten who’d performed their politically motivated post-industrial ‘metal-bashing’ in railway sidings, used iconography from Russian constructivist art and who released a record with a Welsh choir of striking miners, reconstituted the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Based on an ancient Pagan Mayday rite, the Beltane Fire was a politically motivated re-enactment that was in part a response to the draconian legislation that outlawed open-air raves by way of the Criminal Justice Bill, and involves May queens and blue, red and green painted dancers processing around the hill prior to a ceremony atop the Folly that looks like film director Kenneth Anger’s idea of some underworld version of Nuremburg.
Beltane became a spectacle that continues today as an annual fixture of Edinburgh’s civic calendar. With Test Department, who morphed into site-specific environmentalist collective NVA Productions, no longer at the helm, today’s Beltane is arguably a re-enactment thrice over. The Criminal Justice Bill, however, is long gone.
But some re-enactments are accidental.
Rewind to 1981, and Edinburgh post-punk band The Scars filmed a video for their song, ‘All About You,’ in and around the city centre. One of the locations was Calton Hill, where from one of the towers a man with blue body make-up and Medusa-like snakes for hair terrorised the band like some spectral arbiter of Beltanes future as well as past.
Zoom to 2010, where The Pineapple Chunks are an Edinburgh band with connections to Edinburgh College of Art and the artist-run SunBear shop-front gallery off Leith Walk. The Pineapple Chunks guitars are spiky and their beats, played by a drummer who would probably quite enjoy being behind Robert Wyatt’s stool with Soft Machine at the Proms, are bouncy. At times they sound like Rough Trade associated post-punk noiseniks Swell Maps. Trey telling them that, though, and they look at you like your mad. Their starting point was Huey Lewis and the News.
Freeze on 2010, where Paul Rooney’s pre-recorded lecture, ‘Thin Air’ outlines the history of a former Fine Art student’s sonic study of an about to be demolished building during the 1970s, and his meetings with fellow students, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside in particular. Jeff Nuttall, a lecturer there in the 1970s, is quoted from his ‘Performance Art – Memoirs’ in a work that is reimagining, re-enactment and stranger than fiction memorial.
Once again, this is the stuff of legend. Things never turn out quite like you meant them to.
All of which brings us back to the wide open space of Beuys’ ‘Action on Rannoch Moor’ in August 1970, and to ‘Strategy: Get Arts.’ Even the palindrome of the name points to an ability to look backwards and forwards simultaneously.
So rewind. Fast forward. Rewind some more. Pause. Reflect. Take stock. Now remember. You Are Here. Repeat to fade ad nauseum.
Written in August 2010, this text was commissioned by the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, for a publication to document You Are Here, a performance by Tessa Lynch that took place in Festival Square, Edinburgh, on July 25th 2010
ends
On August 13th 1970, artist Joseph Beuys and avant-garde impresario Richard Demarco travel to Rannoch Moor, the fifty square mile expanse that straddles Perth and Kinross, Lochaber and Argyll and Bute. On this boggy site knee-deep in mystery and symbolism, and described by Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘Kidnapped’ as ‘A wearier looking desert a man never saw,’ the German icon championed by Demarco since the pair met in Dusseldorf two years before performs ‘Action on Rannoch Moor,’ in which open space and artist became one.
Ten days later and throughout August, Beuys exhibits and performs as part of ‘Strategy: Get Arts,’ an exhibition of contemporary German art curated by Demarco at Edinburgh College of Art as part of that year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Beuys’ contributions to the show are ‘The Pack,’ made up of a Volkswagen van with twenty-four sledges tumbling from its rear door, with each sledge containing a survival kit; ‘Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony,’ an action performed by Beuys with three tape operatives; and a series of photographs documenting Beuys’ sculptures and actions, and which is the first version of what would become ‘Arena - where would I have got if I had been intelligent!, 1970-1972’, which will be revisited and revised with each subsequent showing.
On the same day, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, English avant-rock band Soft Machine, named after William Burroughs’ 1961 cut-up novel ‘The Soft Machine’, are preparing to play live as part of that year’s BBC Proms. With the same line up who appeared on Soft Machine’s ‘Third’ album released in 1970, this is the first time contemporary avant-garde rock music has featured in a Proms programme, making it something of an epochal event. The concert features three tracks, ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous,’ ‘Facelift’ and the four-part suite, ‘Esther’s Nose Job.’ A record of the show was released on Reckless Records in 1988, and in 2007 was a bonus disc with a remastered edition of ‘Third.’
Between June 3rd and July 20th 1969, an exhibition by Mark Boyle and former Edinburgh College of Art student Joan Hills, who would later produce work with their children Sebastian and Georgia as The Boyle Family, takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ features a 360 degree projected environment, and on June 24th, two films by Boyle and Hills, ‘Beyond Image’ and ‘Son of Beyond Image,’ are premiered at the ICA. To accompany the films, Soft Machine perform live in the projected environment.
Between May 16th and July 12th 1970, ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ is repeated at Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, and again in Oslo in February 1971. Soft Machine again perform live at both events. In 1973, ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ is seen at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, and at the MacRobert Arts Centre at the University of Stirling. By this time Soft Machine have ceased collaborating, and it seems neither party will be seen or heard together again.
Rewind to 1963, and Mark Boyle’s ‘Erections, Constructions and Assemblages’ appears at the Traverse Theatre Art Gallery in Edinburgh throughout August and September. Boyle also reads poetry with future Blurt saxophonist Ted Milton behind the paperback bookshop – the first of its kind in Britain – run by Jim Haynes, one of the driving forces behind the Traverse. On September 7th, towards the end of the Edinburgh International Festival Drama Conference at the university’s McEwan Hall, Boyle, Hills and others including American theatre-maker Charles Marowitz, who directed radically reassembled collages of Shakespeare, took part in ‘In Memory of Big Ed,’ a Happening on the McEwan Hall balcony which attracted press attention primarily due to the appearance of a naked young woman.
Jump-cut to 1965, and Boyle has organised a benefit show for the ICA. One of the performers is poet and artist Jeff Nuttall, who in 1966 would co-found the UK’s premiere live art troupe, The People Show and go on to document the era in his book ‘Bomb Culture. On June 11th 1965, 7000 people attended the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall featuring Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Alexander Trocchi, Tom McGrath and others.
Zoom to December 23rd 1966, and Boyle and Hills perform ‘Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water’ at London’s premiere underground club, UFO, after which they provide light-shows for the club’s live acts, including Soft Machine, on a regular basis.
Cross-fade to 1967, and, shortly after the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream event at Alexander Palace, Boyle and Hills provide light installations for Soft Machine to play in France in an elaborately structured dome created by Keith Albarn, who a year later, with the counter-culture’s revolutionary ferment at its peak, will father future Blur and Gorillaz singer Damon Albarn.
In August, again in France, Boyle, Hills and Soft Machine score a production of Pablo Picasso’s play, ‘Desire Caught by The Tail.’ Back in Edinburgh the same month, all three parties collaborate with choreographer Graziella Martinez, and create a sound and light show for a Traverse production of Alfred Jarry’s play, ‘Ubu In Chains.’ In December, Soft Machine play a closing concert for the old site of the ICA, with projections by Boyle and Hills.
Of course, all of the above is the stuff of legend. All we have are the pictures.
2. Now
Fast-forward to July 25th 2010, and Tessa Lynch’s ‘You Are Here’ is going over old ground.
‘You Are Here’ is happening in Festival Square, a public space tucked off Lothian Road’s busy city centre thoroughfare. With arthouse cinema Filmhouse next door, and both the current home of the Traverse Theatre and the city’s equivalent to the Royal Albert Hall – the Usher Hall – opposite across the main road, this is what City of Edinburgh Council like to think of as a ‘Cultural Quarter.’ Set to one side of the square close to the road is what looks like a seriously oversize TV screen.
In the centre of Festival Square, three dancers aloft various size platforms are acting out some kind of public ritual via a set of physical tics that mirror their own images captured on the screen facing them, while trippy music pulses them along. Onscreen the dancers filmed movements are more or less the same. The only difference is the projected backdrop they’re playing against.
Look, there’s Rannoch Moor in boggy living colour, and see, there’s something that looks like Ferdinand Kriwet and H.P. Alvermann’s contribution to ‘Strategy:Get Arts’. Now wait, there’s the triumphalist Folly on Calton Hill. And the music? Why, that’s Soft Machine at the Proms, wigging out for all they’re worth in the pillar of the British establishment’s locked groove they’ve just unpicked.
Knitted together over the next twenty minutes and repeated four times, ‘You Are Here’ is a gloriously impressionistic pick and mix collage of the iconic artistic history on its own doorstep. It continues a rediscovery of the 1960s and 1970s by a younger generation of artists weaned on name-dropping counter-cultural legend and who perhaps want to get to the heart of the matter beyond the fetishised mythology of love and peace.
Lynch did something similar with ‘Alexandrite,’ her Collective Gallery commissioned large-scale performance piece at Edinburgh International Climbing Arena in Ratho. Here she referenced everything from Francis Picabia to the theatrical illusion of Dr Pepper’s Ghost, a shtick that gives the appearance of two things happening simultaneously.
It chimes two with other off-site works from The Collective, from Jenny Hogarth’s large-scale reimagining of the Covenanters 1666 Battle of Rullion Green at Midlothian ski slope in 2004, to Henna-Rikka Halonen’s ‘Commonwealth Suite,’ which in 2009 restaged and filmed Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Russian constructivist satire on state bureaucracy inside Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Pool utilizing a cast drawn from Edinburgh Diving Club.
The Commonwealth Pool, incidentally, opened in 1970, the year Edinburgh hosted the Commonwealth Games as well as ‘Strategy: Get Arts.’
‘You Are Here’ may be just as impressionistic, but it is categorically not a re-enactment. Rather, it is an inquisitive forage through history en route to becoming something else.
3. Then Again
Rewind to April 30th 1971, and verite documentary film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, who captured Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour in ‘Don’t Look Back,’ is immortalising an event that would eventually be released in 1979 as ‘Town Bloody Hall.’ Bearing witness to a debate on women’s liberation in New York Town Hall before a packed audience of liberal intellectuals there to watch radical feminists Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Caballos tear chunks out of bullish novelist and Chairman of the event, Norman Mailer, ‘Town Bloody Hall’ documents a brilliant piece of real-life theatre that captures the volatility, naiveté and passion of the post 1960s era when some kind of idealism was still in the air. ‘Town Bloody Hall’ is thrillingly compulsive viewing, and in terms of drama, is hard to better.
Fast forward to April 2009, and theatre artist Nic Green and her company are performing as part of the Behaviour festival of devised experimental work at The Arches in Glasgow. The piece is also called ‘Town Bloody Hall,’ and forms the second part of what will eventually become ‘Trilogy,’ which looks at the female experience today in relation to its past. The third part will culminate in a mass choir of women volunteers singing William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as they liberate themselves, 1960s style, of their clothes until they are naked. And they dance.
The original idea for ‘Town Bloody Hall,’ the performance, Green explains during it, was to do a complete recreation of the film, line by line, gesture by gesture, tic by nervy tic. Then they show an excerpt, and it’s clear that if they had pursued with a total re-enactment, having already learnt it off by heart, they would have been upstaged at every turn by the sheer bombastic fly-on-the-wall charisma of the real thing.
Instead, Green and her cast use Pennebaker’s film as a springboard to explore what feminist ideas might or might not mean to women – and men – today. The end result is as deeply personal as it is appositely understated compared to the verbal bruisings doled out in the film. It is also quite quite beautiful.
4. Now Then, Now Then, Now Then
Back on July 25th 2010, the same evening as ‘You Are Here’ is being performed in Festival Square, across town in a nightclub called Cabaret Voltaire, Japanese vocalist and former member of German band Can Damo Suzuki is playing. Suzuki is a legend, who joined Can some time in 1969 or 1970 after being spotted busking by bass player Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Leibezeit, who were in a café in Munich. Suzuki added freeform vocals to crucial Can albums before retiring from music in 1974, only to return as a solo artist in 1983.
Cabaret Voltaire the club is named after the Dadaist Zurich nightclub opened in Zurich by Hugo Ball in 1916, and which featured artists experimenting with performance via a cross-fertilisation of spoken-word, dance and music. The Cabaret Voltaire name is more recently associated with the electronic band from Sheffield, who pioneered sound collages derived from William Burroughs’ and Brion Gyson’s experiments with tape recorders that were a pre-cursor to sampling. In this way, Cabaret Voltaire pre-dated Techno and all of remix culture’s magpie tendencies in search of the perfect beat.
Accompanying Suzuki is a group of locally sourced musicians he dubs ‘sound carriers.’
Sound carriers can be anyone who contacts Suzuki, either through local promoters or by emailing him via his website, expressing a desire to play with him. The idea, on what judging by the extensive tour dates looks like a restlessly nomadic never-ending tour, is that every show is brand new every time.
This of course depends on the quality of the ‘sound carriers,’ and how they respond onstage to Suzuki’s vocal whims. Suzuki’s Edinburgh four-piece who’ve only just met may be young, but they’re inventive, and they certainly have a few Can records in their collections. What emerges over an hour –long improvised set is a form of fantasy-wish-fulfillment homage that is the closest the sound carriers will ever get to being Can without ever actually sounding like them. Because, while the band will never in a million years be Can, they are becoming something else. This is the sound of their future. Suzuki on the other hand, is the one repeating himself, caught up in his own moment of former glory, a tribute band re-enactment to himself.
Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it.
In his 2001 critique, ‘Art and the Degradation of Awareness,’ Jeff Nuttall echoes his sentiments in his 1968 frontline dispatches, ‘Bomb Culture,’ when he suggests that any revolution that came out of the 1960s had been misappropriated by capitalism as artistic and political ideals were reduced to sex, drugs and decadence.
There is a photograph by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins of the editorial board of counter-cultural bible International Times. There they are, beaming beatifically with possibilities. Nuttall’s in there, so is Jim Haynes, Barry Miles and all the boys. Captured like that, they don’t so much look as thought they’re going to change the world as fuck it for everything they could get. Take that, Germaine.
5. Now, Then, Always and Hereafter
On April 21st 2007, for one night only at the ICA, Joan Hills and Sebastian Boyle remixed ‘Beyond Image’ and ‘Son of ‘Beyond Image’ first seen at the ICA as part to a live recording of Soft Machine from the same era.
The event is part of a series of re-enactments, most famous of which is German industrial iconoclasts Einsturzende Neubaten’s ‘Concerto For Voice and Machinery.’ This event was originally commissioned by the ICA as part of its George Orwell referencing Big Brother New Year Rock Week, and was performed on January 3rd 1984. This became notorious after the band attempted to drill a hole in the ICA floor allegedly to expose secret underground tunnels in the Mall, close to Buckingham Palace. ‘Concerto For Voice and Machinery 2’, performed by Jo Mitchell on February 20th 2007, would be more likely to reference reality TV than Orwell.
In May 1988, Test Department, British contemporaries of Einsturzende Neubaten who’d performed their politically motivated post-industrial ‘metal-bashing’ in railway sidings, used iconography from Russian constructivist art and who released a record with a Welsh choir of striking miners, reconstituted the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Based on an ancient Pagan Mayday rite, the Beltane Fire was a politically motivated re-enactment that was in part a response to the draconian legislation that outlawed open-air raves by way of the Criminal Justice Bill, and involves May queens and blue, red and green painted dancers processing around the hill prior to a ceremony atop the Folly that looks like film director Kenneth Anger’s idea of some underworld version of Nuremburg.
Beltane became a spectacle that continues today as an annual fixture of Edinburgh’s civic calendar. With Test Department, who morphed into site-specific environmentalist collective NVA Productions, no longer at the helm, today’s Beltane is arguably a re-enactment thrice over. The Criminal Justice Bill, however, is long gone.
But some re-enactments are accidental.
Rewind to 1981, and Edinburgh post-punk band The Scars filmed a video for their song, ‘All About You,’ in and around the city centre. One of the locations was Calton Hill, where from one of the towers a man with blue body make-up and Medusa-like snakes for hair terrorised the band like some spectral arbiter of Beltanes future as well as past.
Zoom to 2010, where The Pineapple Chunks are an Edinburgh band with connections to Edinburgh College of Art and the artist-run SunBear shop-front gallery off Leith Walk. The Pineapple Chunks guitars are spiky and their beats, played by a drummer who would probably quite enjoy being behind Robert Wyatt’s stool with Soft Machine at the Proms, are bouncy. At times they sound like Rough Trade associated post-punk noiseniks Swell Maps. Trey telling them that, though, and they look at you like your mad. Their starting point was Huey Lewis and the News.
Freeze on 2010, where Paul Rooney’s pre-recorded lecture, ‘Thin Air’ outlines the history of a former Fine Art student’s sonic study of an about to be demolished building during the 1970s, and his meetings with fellow students, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside in particular. Jeff Nuttall, a lecturer there in the 1970s, is quoted from his ‘Performance Art – Memoirs’ in a work that is reimagining, re-enactment and stranger than fiction memorial.
Once again, this is the stuff of legend. Things never turn out quite like you meant them to.
All of which brings us back to the wide open space of Beuys’ ‘Action on Rannoch Moor’ in August 1970, and to ‘Strategy: Get Arts.’ Even the palindrome of the name points to an ability to look backwards and forwards simultaneously.
So rewind. Fast forward. Rewind some more. Pause. Reflect. Take stock. Now remember. You Are Here. Repeat to fade ad nauseum.
Written in August 2010, this text was commissioned by the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, for a publication to document You Are Here, a performance by Tessa Lynch that took place in Festival Square, Edinburgh, on July 25th 2010
ends
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