The 2010 edition of the bi-annual Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art has been notable this year for the amount of performance-related work on offer. The centerpiece of such activity was post-punk collagist Linder’s 13-hour epic on the tarnished magic of fame, The Darktown Cakewalk, while Angus Farquhar’s NVA Organisation took to the streets with a re-enactment of 1960s Dutch anarchist action, The White Bike Plan.
Elsewhere, Raydale Dower’s Le Drapeau Noir – an adhoc café bar opposite Stereo hosting a rolling programme of bands and art-house cabaret – has by all accounts proved to be the best show in town. Stereo itself hosted an evening of performances under the banner of Social Landscape, while at Tramway the Mary Mary gallery presented a one-off performance of The Party, an absurdist style play conceived by American artist Alexis Marguerite Teplin.
This week Tramway features This Time With Feeling, a new work by former director of Suspect Culture theatre company, Graham Eatough. Part video installation, part interactive live performance, This Time With Feeling continues Eatough’s exploration of the spaces between the visual and performing arts he began with Killing Time, a collaboration between Suspect Culture and artist Graham Fagen at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Where Killing Time took iconic scenes from four classic plays and re-contextualised them in as sculptural setting, This Time With Feeling is an even more deliberate attempt to utilise theatre making processes in a more recognisably visual art context.
To accompany the show, this coming Sunday afternoon Tramway will host a symposium that brings together practitioners and producers from both artforms to discuss recent developments between the two that may end up making such generic distinctions redundant. If, that is, outside of the media and funding bodies, both of whom prefer to define by demarcation, that isn’t already the case. It’s only a few weeks ago, after all, that veteran avant-garage band Pere Ubu performed their own musical version of Alfred Jarry’s proto-absurdist play they took their name from. With projected animations provided by The Brothers Quay, Long Live Pere Ubu! – The Spectacle, was presented as part of Glasgow International Film Festival.
Prior to Pere Ubu came the appearance of Wall of Death, artist Stephen Skrynka’s fan-boy reimagining of a fairground motorcycle stunt show under the auspices of the National Theatre of Scotland. For Eatough, all this is a telling indicator of where things are heading.
“There’s all this talk about theatricality in the visual arts,” Eatough points out, “and about how theatricality has gone from being a dirty word to something that’s now acceptable. There seems to have been an antipathy to theatre and pretending from visual artists, which ties in with visual art’s idea of authenticity and expressing themselves. There’s also a really interesting difference between the spaces, and this idea of a gallery as a white cube or a laboratory. Laboratories are all about truth and testing things. Theatre’s not like that at all, and is much more about presenting work to an audience. Rightly or wrongly, theatre cares much more about what the audience thinks, so for someone from a theatre background to do something at GI sets up a whole different series of expectations. But in all honesty, I think the only thing the differences between artforms matter to is us. To the public I don’t think it matters.”
Eatough’s talk of art galleries as laboratories nevertheless ties in with his own work with Suspect Culture, who more than any other theatre company explored ideas of form and content, both in their productions and through their series of Strange Behaviour events. Eatough himself has been able to follow his own line of inquiry thanks to a bursary supported by the Scottish arts council and Federation of Scottish Theatre which has fed directly into This Time With Feeling.
As a co-production between GI, the National Theatre of Scotland and Tramway, the venue that during its twenty-year existence has arguably done more to blur boundaries between art-forms than anywhere else in Britain, panelists are suitably diverse. With artists such as Linder, Fagen and Skrynka taking part in one session, a panel featuring GI’s Katrina Brown, NTS director Vicky Featherstone and Tramway’s Sarah Munro may be able to shed light on how their programmes are decided. For Eatough, however, keeping a foot in both camps can be a confusing business.
“It’s not a duty that we have to understand each other,” Eatough points out. “I just think there might be something quite rich there about the connections and spaces between the different artforms. Visual artists have been quick to pick up on performance and incorporate into their practice in a way that I’m not sure theatre artists have. It’s quite funny with This Time With Feeling, because it’s in what I know as a theatre space but which in GI is being used as a gallery. It’s strange, because it feels like a Suspect Culture show, but it’s being seen as a piece of visual art.”
The This Time With Feeling symposium is at Tramway, Glasgow as part of GI on Sunday May 2nd, 1-5pm. The exhibition runs until May 1st.
www.tramway.org
www.glasgowinternational.org
The Herald, April 29th 2010
ends
Elsewhere, Raydale Dower’s Le Drapeau Noir – an adhoc café bar opposite Stereo hosting a rolling programme of bands and art-house cabaret – has by all accounts proved to be the best show in town. Stereo itself hosted an evening of performances under the banner of Social Landscape, while at Tramway the Mary Mary gallery presented a one-off performance of The Party, an absurdist style play conceived by American artist Alexis Marguerite Teplin.
This week Tramway features This Time With Feeling, a new work by former director of Suspect Culture theatre company, Graham Eatough. Part video installation, part interactive live performance, This Time With Feeling continues Eatough’s exploration of the spaces between the visual and performing arts he began with Killing Time, a collaboration between Suspect Culture and artist Graham Fagen at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Where Killing Time took iconic scenes from four classic plays and re-contextualised them in as sculptural setting, This Time With Feeling is an even more deliberate attempt to utilise theatre making processes in a more recognisably visual art context.
To accompany the show, this coming Sunday afternoon Tramway will host a symposium that brings together practitioners and producers from both artforms to discuss recent developments between the two that may end up making such generic distinctions redundant. If, that is, outside of the media and funding bodies, both of whom prefer to define by demarcation, that isn’t already the case. It’s only a few weeks ago, after all, that veteran avant-garage band Pere Ubu performed their own musical version of Alfred Jarry’s proto-absurdist play they took their name from. With projected animations provided by The Brothers Quay, Long Live Pere Ubu! – The Spectacle, was presented as part of Glasgow International Film Festival.
Prior to Pere Ubu came the appearance of Wall of Death, artist Stephen Skrynka’s fan-boy reimagining of a fairground motorcycle stunt show under the auspices of the National Theatre of Scotland. For Eatough, all this is a telling indicator of where things are heading.
“There’s all this talk about theatricality in the visual arts,” Eatough points out, “and about how theatricality has gone from being a dirty word to something that’s now acceptable. There seems to have been an antipathy to theatre and pretending from visual artists, which ties in with visual art’s idea of authenticity and expressing themselves. There’s also a really interesting difference between the spaces, and this idea of a gallery as a white cube or a laboratory. Laboratories are all about truth and testing things. Theatre’s not like that at all, and is much more about presenting work to an audience. Rightly or wrongly, theatre cares much more about what the audience thinks, so for someone from a theatre background to do something at GI sets up a whole different series of expectations. But in all honesty, I think the only thing the differences between artforms matter to is us. To the public I don’t think it matters.”
Eatough’s talk of art galleries as laboratories nevertheless ties in with his own work with Suspect Culture, who more than any other theatre company explored ideas of form and content, both in their productions and through their series of Strange Behaviour events. Eatough himself has been able to follow his own line of inquiry thanks to a bursary supported by the Scottish arts council and Federation of Scottish Theatre which has fed directly into This Time With Feeling.
As a co-production between GI, the National Theatre of Scotland and Tramway, the venue that during its twenty-year existence has arguably done more to blur boundaries between art-forms than anywhere else in Britain, panelists are suitably diverse. With artists such as Linder, Fagen and Skrynka taking part in one session, a panel featuring GI’s Katrina Brown, NTS director Vicky Featherstone and Tramway’s Sarah Munro may be able to shed light on how their programmes are decided. For Eatough, however, keeping a foot in both camps can be a confusing business.
“It’s not a duty that we have to understand each other,” Eatough points out. “I just think there might be something quite rich there about the connections and spaces between the different artforms. Visual artists have been quick to pick up on performance and incorporate into their practice in a way that I’m not sure theatre artists have. It’s quite funny with This Time With Feeling, because it’s in what I know as a theatre space but which in GI is being used as a gallery. It’s strange, because it feels like a Suspect Culture show, but it’s being seen as a piece of visual art.”
The This Time With Feeling symposium is at Tramway, Glasgow as part of GI on Sunday May 2nd, 1-5pm. The exhibition runs until May 1st.
www.tramway.org
www.glasgowinternational.org
The Herald, April 29th 2010
ends
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