Ten seconds into Linder’s new performance creation, and a baby starts crying. It’s Saturday afternoon in Mount Stuart House, the gothic country pile on the Isle of Bute, and the storm outside has already provided a dramatic backdrop to A kind of glamour about me and its accompanying exhibition, which sees Linder drawing from Victorian photographs of a family dressing up for some kind of Alice in Wonderland cosplay. The title comes from Walter Scott, who wrote how ‘There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc, in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand.’ Such notions chime with Linder’s own mystical fantasias. For a moment at the start of the performance, one wonders whether the infant wail is being conjured up by composer Maxwell Sterling on his electric cello at the side of the stage. Either way, it seems to fit with the maelstrom that follows as a quartet of extravagantly cl...
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.