MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL BLOG
Day 7: 11 Rooms & The Influence Machine
There is definitely a ‘generic MIF-goer’, and he wears tight fitting denim ‘skinnies’, a light grey suit jacket, winkle-pickers and a casual-formal salmon coloured shirt. Despite this however, the festival is going out of its way this year to be accessible to the broader public, and involve as much of the Mancunian masses as possible, and thus compliment the international following the MIF has accrued to create a socially holistic fan-base that will provide the springboard for its attack on the Edinburgh Festival.
Today I worked at two of the flagship ‘free and accessible to the public’ shows; the ‘performance art’ (or in the words of one of one German, “it’s NOT performance art, it is simply ART!”) group show 11 Rooms, and the night-time projection-bombardment The Influence Machine. The former in the day and filling the top floor of the Manchester City Gallery; the latter during the dark side of the evening and taking over Whittworth Park.
11 Rooms is a divisive one, with each room truly offering something unique, thus detracting from generalisability. The only blanket observation you can really make is that each room is white, blank, and wholly non-descript, while also containing a person (or people) playing out defined roles continuously. Some push vague, ambiguous and shallow (whilst pretending to be penetrative and profound) ‘meaning’ within their human exhibitions to astoundingly hard to value levels, while some genuinely prompt interesting questions. Examples:
Ambiguously pretentious bullshit:
- - Mirror Check: originally envisioned by Joan Johns, this naked woman gradually examining herself through use of a pocket-mirror is meant to question ‘how we see ourselves and what mirrors REALLY represent: a fragmented sense of self?’ In a word, no.
- - Can’t remember the name, but essentially, a man with a personality disorder in a bed wearing nothing but boxers and reading from a book with most of the text whited out and replaced by statements about wanking. Leads to him wanking amid pondering over the topic of ‘saints’. After so many runs, the word ‘masturbation’ looses all meaning, along with the piece itself.
Everything else had something to it, but my favourites were the room in which you were confronted by a girl of about nine years looking glazed and talking to everyone/no-one about topics such as dark matter and sense of self. It’s actually chilling, and when you’re asked questions as the audience, all of sudden you have no idea what she’s talking about or where you are and are completely caught in her icy glare. She seems mechanical and cold. It’s truly an amazing performance. Another particularly good one is that featured as the photo in the Guardian’s coverage of the show. Under a severely lowered ceiling, a crippled man lies, motionless and staring into a lamp that dimly glows in the centre of the room. The artist behind it comes from Rio, and thus this piece throws up questions of poverty, glass ceilings, social disability and much else.
Another room that was completely interesting is the room reserved for John Baldessari, for which he wanted a dead body in order to recreate a live version of Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. This wasn’t able to be completed in time for the festival, but the room contains a narrative of documents that outline the philosophical and legal practicalities involved in attaining a corpse for live public exhibition, and how the MIF went about the task. Insightful.
And so we move on to Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine.
Imagine Whittworth Park (the park beside the gallery). Now imagine in with floating, talking heads projected onto trees, smoke being pumped into the air and projected upon, the side of the gallery hosting a holographic fist smashing against the brickwork, and a man head butting a tree. Is was psychedelic, surreal and a bit up-it’s-own-arse, but the underlying idea of projecting film-reels and images onto natural surfaces and public spaces simultaneously to throw up combinations and collisions of ideas and words is a brilliant one, and it shows huge potential. But the majority of the people I spoke to about the show thought it alienating and confusing, as any common theme was abstracted, and purposefully ‘difficult’.
Both worth investigating and both with good and not-so-good bits: that is my lifeless and written-at-1am conclusion to this update.
