REVIEW: I Am Not Here To Entertain You: Live Art / Performance at the Bun House

I went to the the recent exhibition “I am not here to entertain you” upon entering this very traditional East End boozer in Peckham, I didn’t expect to find a small gallery out the back. The Bun House Project Space is an unconventional gallery that challenges artworks to react directly with it’s local environment and offbeat audience.

Image: Photo-montage for I Am Not Here to Entertain You, Vanessa Mitter

The exhibition “I am not here to entertain you” operated under the curatorial pseudonym of ‘Karl Weill’ a fictional male performance alter ego of Vanessa Mitter (curator, artist & writer). Within the  fictional press release it states: “What is the performative tactic if it is not a calculated assault on the audience? It is forbidden to forbid. I want you to imagine, for a moment, an audience who are not entertained.” This exhibition appears to explore the confrontational role of performance, Is this title knowingly contradictory? Virtuosic performances such as these require and necessitate an audience in order to exist, If they are not here to entertain us, why are they here and what are they here for? What is the dynamic between audience and work? I began to question the very dynamics of what we want and expect from performance.

Image: Doric Dick, 2011, concrete & plaster, 100 x 40 cm

Scattered within the space and pub were Doireann Ni Ghrioghair’s monumental and phallic sculptures comprised of plaster and concrete. Ghrioghair subverts these monumental structures through her use of gregarious pastel colours. The sculptures toy with our conventions and ideologies of the monument and take the form of architectural follies. Which brought an air of frivolity and playfulness to the pub, something which felt unexpected within this environment. The arrangement and impermanence of the sculptures were in keeping with the curated night of short performances that were about to take place.

Image: Nicola Ruben Montini’s “Italy needs a Revolution”,  photographer Leo Koivistoinen

The first performance to appear was Nicola Ruben Montini’s ”Italy Needs a Revolution” performed by Nicole Moserle. The performer appeared at the front, in silence, staring intently at the room of people watching her. The tension between what to expect and whether we should expect anything at all was paramount. The duration of the performance, 2 minutes, ending with a climatic and forcefully iterated statement “Italy Needs a Revolution” within this brief utterance, the audience were left with no long lasting product, merely a fleeting statement for change, or was it fleeting?  Montini’s work often deals with his sexuality and the attitudes of his homeland (Italy) this piece can be read as a more generic socio-political statement of todays climate. A powerful and highly topical piece, especially given Italy’s current political instability. Can words provoke reaction?  Does performance have the ability to affect and provoke and audience into action, or are statements such as this knowingly rhetorical?

Image: Vanessa Mitter’s “I am not here to entertain you” photographer Leo Koivistoinen

Vanessa Mitter’s piece was performed at the back of the pub within the small courtyard and gallery space. The audience were invited to adjourn to the courtyard area and watch through a small window. With only the glass as a divide this performance was intimate and raw. Because we were invited to move and watch from an unsafe position and leave the conventional spot an audience takes, this made for a more heightened performance. With her back towards us, she loudly shouted “I am not here to entertain you” (the title of show) “I am here as a messenger”. She delivered her monologue faced away from the audience which it made it intensely confrontational.  Half way through the performance she turned to face us with a candle lighting her face, revealing her white painted face.

This piece didn’t tolerate the indifferent viewer we had to enter the mise-en-scène in order to engage fully with the performance. She moved from the gallery area out to the courtyard and stood on a platform towering above us. With the candles placed in each hand, her eerie white face glimmered. The performance ended by Mitter blowing the candles out and saying “you and me are ridiculous”. I am not sure whether this monologue was autobiographical or perhaps fictitious but it felt hugely emotive like a ghostly apparition.

Image: “EVP” by Phill Wilson-Perkin with Samantha Taylor, photographer Leo Koivistoinen

Another immersive performance was “EVP” by Phill Wilson-Perkin with Samantha Taylor. EVP (Electronic Voice Transmission) is static, stray radio transmissions and background noise that has become associated with paranormal activities. For this piece the pub was darkened and a plume of smoke engulfed the room bridging the gap between audience and performer, immersing us within a dark, foggy and supernatural haze. Her glasses flashed with intensity and the plume of smoke continuously filled the room. Distorted and random sounds began to blast from the microphone screeching a loud, static stammer. As the haze began to clear I could faintly see a recording device or speaker pressed against the microphone which would explain the scratchy sounds.

Suspended again in a foggy haze with the continuous flashing and blinking coming from her circular glasses I felt like I had entered a vortex into another world. The recording uttered “Are they in the trees” a response “Yes”. This stuck with me. Perhaps they were referring to Sweedish painter and film producer “Friedrich Hurgenson’s” and his recordings of bird songs made in 1959? Upon playing the tapes later he heard what he interpreted to be his dead father’s voice and the spirit of his deceased wife calling his name. This was a surreal and compelling performance that intertwined the phenomenological experience of Electronic Voice transmission and suspended the viewer within a theatrical hoax.

Other artists that performed were Jack Catling, Leo Koivistoinen, Robin Bale, Lennie Lee, O. B. De Alessi & James Gardiner.

Image: Robin Bale, Rehearsal at Colonus, photographer Leo Koivistoinen

Other highlights for me were Robin Bale’s narrative based, spoken word performance “Rehearsal at Colonus” where we followed the death of a man three paces long. And James Gardiner’s sonic sound assemblage “Life Without Plastic” encompassing everyday sounds, within this collage, everyday rituals and routines could be heard from the abstracted harmonics.

http://podcast24075.podomatic.com/

The imagined press release statement fictitiously stated by the pseudonym of Karl Weill promised everything it intended, the audience fell silent, the crowd heckled, we felt fear when we outside, but were we entertained? Under the over-arching narrative the short performances extended beyond the boundaries of the individual acts that took to the stage into the wider context of exhibition making. The fictitious narrative added to the mythology of the overall exhibition and created a propositional, allusive and suggestive context. The possibility of performance and it’s reach were explored.

Thinking to Paolo Virno’s description of a virtuosic activity. A “virtuosic activity is any activity that, firstly, finds its own fulfilment and its own purpose in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product. Secondly, it is an activity that requires the presence of others; it exists only in the presence of an audience.” (Cited by Raunig, Artforum, 2008).

For this night there wasn’t an end product in the functional sense we weren’t encountering a static piece of artwork. With the spirit of Fluxus and Situational International, the curated night was experiential, and created a reciprocal relationship between performance and audience. We were not just passive recipients of entertainment, are engagement here was demanded and this felt confrontational, provoking and intense. But were we entertained? I am unresolved on this, it seems the contradiction here works to challenge the hegemonies surrounding the function of performance. As long as curated shows such as this exist we will continue to push the boundaries between audience and performer and create further situations for proposing the breadth of performance.

To find out further information, please visit the artist’s websites:

Nicola Ruben Montini | O. B. De Alessi | Robin Bale  | Leo Koivistoinen | Phill Wilson Perkin | Lennie Lee | Doireann Ni Ghrioghair | James Gardiner | Jack Catling | Vanessa Mitter

Review by Chantelle May Purcell

Raunig, G., 2008, Modifying the Grammar. Paolo Virno’s Works on Virtuosity and Exodus, Artforum  [online] Available at http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200801&id=19145