Posted by ‘Anon’
Sheffield based artist Tim Etchels is well-known for his concerns with the mechanics of the live event and questioning or disrupting conventions associated with theatre performance.
Penny McCarthy as the host cleverly introduced guest artist and old friend Tim Etchels in a written letter style, though speech kind of form. The sense becoming one of two friends [not sitting side by side, on the stage tonight] but communicating by letter, email, from different parts of the world. Emotionally moving elements, disabled, isolated situations and circumstances. There is a kind of sad, lonely, private ’missing you Dear Taeo’ – ’Dear Penny..’ thing going on.
And was praised, thanked, later, for it by Dr Sharon Kiveland. “Thankyou, that is the first time anybody has actually made an art-work especially for one of these lectures”. And it was, both a performance, and a lecture. A purposefully, extremely dull presentation used as a tool to empower the emotive content of its subject matter. Positive use of negative sensations and circumstances making us feel something. Spectators in dimmed lights for long periods of time, very little in the way of visual stimulation (slide changes few and far between) analogies made to journeys made through long, dark train tunnels in quiet, low, droning, slow voices. A can move/ can’t move claustrophobic situation. A trapping. An attempt to ‘close the gaps’ indicative of a situation of bringing closer that [which in this sense] you do not wish to particularly want any experience of. In this, its capacity of enforced communication and transmission of the unwanted, it became oppressive.
‘Afterwardsness’. Doubly trapped by the early [pre-introduction] words and directions of uber-host, Dr Kiveland ”this is a taught element of the course, you may not leave… until the end”. I presume, because the presentation needed to be experienced in its entirety, to act, by its design – function following form – apparently very dull and slow to start, with the cognitive answers coming later. Maybe even ‘in the bar kind of later’. Or ‘at home in front of the telly later’. Afterwardsness.
Analepsis.
The ‘now’. The affect is this ‘doubly trapped’ pinned down, controlled, depressed, audience situation.
The effect is that the oppressive atmosphere, induces, almost ‘resentment’. With serial group coughing and shuffling throughout. As with Mathew Barney’s ‘Cremaster Series’ the work becomes an art-form that actually induces a physical response in the viewer. But this through a long drawn out performance, rendition, and close physical relation of the artists, their manner of presentation, timing, actions, almost overbearing presences and performativity. The audience is both spectator and participant as opposed to viewer, like it or not. Malleable material. If this was its intention, then it was successful in comparrison to the idea of a passive viewer off on his/ her own, away in a silent gallery somewheres. Left to their own thoughts and devices. Uncontrolled, as such. Also away from, perhaps, as Francis Bacon may have had it, the story as ”conveyed through a long diatribe through the brain” who sought “the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance”.
The slides of the dislocated shards and remnants of old documents and maps which spoke of time, were, adequate as visual ‘tools’. Further distressed and torn they offered a leap back in time to those of Bourges’. I have not read Bourges’, therefore I had difficulties and appreciated the illustrative history of his life and work that had been put in place. This too managed to ‘fit’ the dark aesthetic of the performance. Again presented in a depressing, nauseating [Etchels own words] manner. The artists conveyed a simulacra of claustrophobic, potentially empty worlds, where you could experience separation through both time and space.
Like Bourges who after losing his sight, still coveted his private collection of books and employed a personal reader, ‘my imagined elsewhere’ became of importance. If this was its intention, then it was successful.
‘Anon’.
