ARTICLES: NATIONAL REVIEW OF LIVE ART

4 February 2006

© MARK FISHER published in The Scotsman

LIVE ART

Preview

WHY DO we have such a problem with live art? It's been around for over 40 years this avant-garde/performance art thing, and yet still we approach it with fear and suspicion.

The performance artists themselves, meanwhile, are more active than ever. This month they're everywhere: at Glasgow's Tramway for the National Review of Live Art, at Edinburgh's Royal Scottish Academy for Body Parts II and, most unexpectedly, at Leith's Ocean Terminal shopping centre for Transit Station.

You can guarantee, though, that half the population, without seeing anything, will write the lot of it off as a load of pretentious indulgence.

Is this just ignorance fuelled by journalistic myth-making? Perhaps so. Even in its low-key inaugural weekend last year, the Body Parts festival attracted 1700 visitors, some travelling from as far as Inverness and Aberdeen, and that to a gallery hardly known for wild experimentation. One elderly woman wandered in by accident and liked what she saw so much she returned to see a different performance by the same artist the next day. She was heard to whoop with delight.

Meanwhile in Glasgow, the National Review of Live Art - the longest-running festival of its kind in Europe - has shifted camp from the Arches to Tramway because it was finding it increasingly hard to fit in the audience.

So why does the impression persist of an inward-looking world where abstruseness is considered an attribute and only the initiated need apply?

"That image is just so hackneyed and untrue," says Nikki Milican, director of the five-day NRLA and its sister festival New Territories. "Live art in the UK right now is one of the most popular artforms. It's on a real high. I just look at the audience coming through the doors - it's extremely popular. Our move from the Arches wasn't taken lightly, but we do have to be responsible about growing audiences, which contradicts people saying this is a minority artform. If people want to believe that, they always will."

Their prejudices are fuelled, however, by the way live art is sold. So much of the writing that accompanies it is appalling. Art schools encourage their students to justify themselves in the most hollow language and that language duly finds its way into the brochures that the rest of us have to make sense of. This is made worse by artists failing to realise that what interests them - for all the right reasons - isn't necessarily what captures the imagination of an audience.

For this reason, sections of the 50-page programme for the combined NRLA and New Territories festivals might have been designed to put people off. What are we to make of the Polish performers who lament the passing of "art whose main value lies in a modernistic background or Dadaistic perfidy"? How about the artist who claims to achieve a "simple outward aesthetic as well as unconsciously confronting his id"?

Can no one tell us if we'll actually like it? Although the writing is obscure, the work itself might be perfectly thrilling and a few clues would help.

Read between the lines, for example, in the blurb about the NRLA's FrenchMottershead, an ever-expanding exhibition of photographs of local people, and it sounds as if it'll be quite interesting - as does having your own photograph taken to be added to the display. But do you care that you and your fellow spectators will be, in the words of the programme, "equally present and equally participating" in the event?

Of course you don't - the idea is too abstract to mean anything. It's the same when Natalie Bikoro tells us that her show in the Transit Station weekend is concerned with the "misconceptions about the role of the viewer and the performer". Scrub that line out and her video-based performance about the mystery illness encephalitis lethargica sounds a lot more intriguing.

To be fair, the Transit Station information generally takes a "less is more" approach, tantalising us with the straight-forward promise of "airborne sculpture" and "live analogue synthesisers".

That's the way curator Rosemary Strang likes it. "Jargon is off-putting," she says. "It makes it a closed world and it's one of the things I particularly dislike. Words like "inter-territorialisation" don't need to exist at all. It's really off-putting."

If live art has a reputation for being inaccessible, it's nothing to do with Strang. This weekend, Leith shoppers have a straight choice between a multiplex movie, a walk round the HMS Britannia and two 12-hour sessions of live art in a top-floor storage room. Forty artists from 18 countries will stage everything from electronica to fashion in a travelling "international exhibition and event" that has previously touched down in London and Berlin.

"The idea of making it an event helps with the problem of it seeming pretentious or inaccessible," says Strang. "We're hoping to put poetry readings over the Tannoy after 8pm when customers will still be coming into the cinema. The work does include things that you have to think about, contemplate and find the meaning for yourself, but the context means it's fine if people want to come along and have a laugh."

Colin Greenslade, exhibitions coordinator at the RSA, explains that his three-day Body Parts event focuses on the work of visual artists and is consistent with the gallery's broader programme of more traditional work. "People assume the RSA building to be a museum of historic art, and they don't expect to see something so avant garde," he says. "Some of the work is difficult - there's a lot this year that deals with fear and violence - but none of it is frightening or dangerous and a lot is very gentle."

Everything in the sphere of live art, the three curators agree, is up for grabs. "The beauty of live art is you can't define it absolutely," says Milican whose NRLA includes lectures, dance, theatre, exhibitions and DJ sets. "And the beauty of the National Review is that it refuses to define itself. The umbrella allows me to do anything. There are no rules."

Transit Station, Ocean Terminal, Leith, 4-5 February; National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, 8-12 February; Body Parts II, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 17-19 February.

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