The "Double Agent" show at the ICA this month proved to be thoroughly entertaining, and well worth more than one visit. It was a collection of installations, photos, sculptures, films, and performance art, some of which had a few surprises...
Actors, or agents, were the theme of the show. Sometimes, the spectator/viewer/customer was employed as the agent. In "The African Twin Towers - Stairlift to Heaven," a film was showing on a large screen, and you could ride on a stairlift to get up to watch another film that was showing behind a black curtain. Hmm...
In the room next door, there was the writing of an "Instant Narrative." The spectator could also read the narrative, which would generally be about the people in the room. But what would be the effect if the protagonist of this narrative were to write another story, about the other writer, that the writer of "Instant Narrative" couldn't know about? I played with my own idea of assymetric narrative information while the "Instant Narrative" rambled on about the possibility that I might be thinking about what I had for lunch.
The film by Barbara Visser, "Last Lecture," was well worth sitting on a bench for. Somebody gave a lecture about 2 previous lectures, which had both been given by an actress who was receiving answers to questions (about another lecture?!) from the artist, through an earpiece. Visser instructed actresses in a way that made them seem slightly strange to the audience, as they would always be waiting for instructions, and easily confused. There were subtitles. When there was English voiceover and English subtitles, there were differences between the voice and the text. There were so many agents that it was impossible for me to tell who was who. As one of them said towards the end of a lecture: "We all seem to have big ideas about fiction, but none of us really seems to know what is real."
Lars Von Trier's latest film, "The Boss Of It All" was also on show. In this film, an actor is hired to act as President and sell a Danish software company to an Icelandic firm. The real President is too scared to admit that he is in fact the boss, because he doesn't want to face the consequences of his actions. The actor is given a small script to follow, but his interpretation and delivery of it leads to confusion and disaster at the first attempt to sign the contract. The sale process is delayed and the actor remains at the company as "The Boss Of It All," perfecting his performance in preparation for the next signing of the contract. And so the play unravels... The film is utterly superb.
The highlight of the event for me was the talk by the artist Donelle Woolford. Donelle had been working on a sculpture in a makeshift studio in one of the gallery rooms. I hadn't seen her work, or her performance in the studio, but I was keen to hear what she had to say. She started her presentation by talking about the studio in the gallery, and how she likes to question what's real. She then brought up the story that there is a made-up historic town in the United States where actors are hired to play the roles of the workers...
I found some of Donelle's ideas rather surprising. She put chairs and palm trees in the gallery with her work, and claimed that she liked the chairs because they represented "the new", and the trees because they represented "the old"... And she liked leaving the chairs and trees and other things in the gallery, because it was like a collage. I was a bit surprised by what I heard, and eager to hear her elaborate on these ideas. But she never did: after giving her talk and answering some questions from the organisers, Donelle Woolford revealed that she was in fact an actress, and that her real name was Abigail. The brochure claimed that Donelle Woolford had been "invited" by Joe Scanlan. As it turned out, Joe Scanlan had invented her. Donelle Woolford is actually a fictional character, played by various actresses, who are given a brief education in art and then given clothes chosen by Scanlan to make them look like artists... The sculptures on display at her shows are his work, and he wrote the questions that Donelle was asked by the panel. But the performance of Donelle is always left entirely to the actors who play her role.
Claire Bishop explained how one of the recent trends for performance art has been for the artist to set up a framework and then delegate the performance to at least one agent. Whereas previously the artist would take part in the performance, now the artist merely sets up the game. Scanlan's piece was highly thought-provoking, and the discussion that it spawned was very entertaining. The delegation of the performance was yet another ingenious twist of trickery at the ICA show, and once more I saw a thousand questions being asked as the fiction unravelled. Some members of the audience seemed very perturbed indeed by the questions they were starting to think of.
The exhibition was superb. "Outsourcing" and "offshoring" are buzzwords in the art world at the moment.
2 comments:
interesting, most interesting... this has got me thinking about layers of fiction again, something i've always been interested in from the fiction of Borges and Calvino and Auster. The idea that fiction is more convincing when there is a stepping off point from what is ostensibly reality (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Calvino's If on a winter's night) is very appealing, it's interesting to see how it is both brought into reality and subverted by these performance pieces.
Regarding Scanlan's work, how did you find the exhibit itself? I'm interested to know whether it was appealing sculpture which was enhanced by the "artist talk", or whether the artist talk was the only point of the work... in this I suppose one thing I really want to question is the worth of authenticity, is the work good regardless or did it require the framing device to become satisfying from its context... or is this a pointless question because the art is in the performance so it must be taken as a whole?
I wrote a huge response to this comment, then accidentally closed the tab and lost all of my words! Voici la deuxième version...
The work was satirical on an unbelievable number of levels. It's a shame you couldn't experience the whole show: the picture in the brochure of a very attractive black girl bending over the workbench, with her beautiful butt looking at the camera seductively, the proof that Donelle was an artist with the pictures of her at one of her exhibitions with a Sheik over in Arabia (the Sheik looked totally bored, but his men looked very enthusiastic), the pictures of her shows and her intriguing explanations of the art ("collage" is now so wide a definition that it includes collections of chairs and plants in a room...), the art itself: cubist collage sculptures made of wood, Donelle as she appeared (she looks completely different to the honey in the photograph - are you disappointed?)...
I think that the piece does still open itself to metaphysical and ontological enquiries à la Borges, but its focus is more contemporary. There was a focus on the visual aspect of the artist and the show, and the placing of the artist in the world of art. But who was the artist? The game was set up by Joe Scanlan, and the game was then played out according to his instructions, but the details were left to the actors.
This employment of actors to perform the piece ("outsourcing", or "offshoring") is one of the fundamental pieces of the work. As for the work on show at the exhibitions, I'd like to know if any critics reviewed it seriously.
Perhaps, then, the work was poking fun at the complete farce that is the business world: is all of the "outsourcing" and "offshoring", and whatever other business jargon, just a silly game which only exists as "truth" because it is so fully believed in?
It was a truly brilliant piece of art.
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