Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty…? Damien Hirst and the Art and Science of the Body

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Strebbing the Suburbs (Just like Quiet Riot did)

Two astonishing aerial dance events in ten days? It must be 'a summer like no other', as the Mayor of London's lackeys' t-shirts are saying. This time it was in the unlikely setting of Victoria Park, Finchley. Free to all and a huge crowd had turned out.

A green crane towered over the suburban trees and picnicking families. Indian string music began and a host of dancers took to the stage, a ballerina in a glittering red dress and Kathak dancers, the stage ringed with parasols and floodlit in red, purple, white. Masses of white balloons floated up and away over the dark-grey trees.

As it went on, the music and the not-quite synchrony of the dancers became trance-like, the taka-taka tongue-clicking and the tapping toes, the flicking heads and expanding, contracting circle of dancers, building into a transporting whole. Unlikely people were drumming their feet in the audience.

Seven giant white bells rose high into the darkening sky, releasing balloons as they went, and transformed into seven white angels in dresses who threw glitter into the wind. The trees sparkled. As the crane swooped and circled over the crowd, there was one breathtaking moment after another;  fireworks, flashing lights and powder unreal against the navy sky.

Traipsing home through the park afterwards, red streamers still hung in the trees where they'd fallen. I thought of the Mary Poppins books - the quiet, orderly park always the place where reality melted at the edges and other worlds could slip in. Where statues come to life and shadows escape their owners, and a woman with a parrot-headed umbrella floats down on an unexploded firework with her feet neatly turned out.
 

Bells is a collaborative spectacle created by Theater Tol (Belgium) and Akademi (London) combining aerial theatre and Kathak dance. It was presented by Artsdepot and is part of Showtime, presented by the Mayor of London.

The show will be on 2nd August in Lewisham and 4th August in Chiswick. I recommend it for a gentle blurring of the edges of the real.

Strebbing brilliant but...

Yesterday Elizabeth Streb’s action hero dancers from Brooklyn took over the monuments of London, working their way over from the City in the early morning to a spectacular finale on the London Eye late at night. The bits I managed to see – the Human Fountain in Trafalgar Square and the Speed Angels outside the National Theatre – were astonishing. However (and I want to get this out of the way first) the decision to brand the whole event as a ‘surprise’, meaning that even the date was kept a secret until the very last minute, and the locations and times of each performance were only revealed about half an hour beforehand, was a poor one.

Like many others, I read about Streb in the Evening Standard some weeks ago – death-defying dance stunts performed outdoors, one day this summer, free across London - and it leapt out to me among the Cultural Olympiad events as something I really wanted to see. I was slightly confused by the lack of any date mentioned, but assumed this was down to last-minute organisational issues. When I realised that this was in fact an intentional part of the event itself,I assumed that it would at least be essential to the performances. 

What happened in the end was this. Halfway through Sunday, with other commitments and plans in place, I realised on Twitter that the ‘One Extraordinary Day’ was now happening, and more than half over. In a rush, not ideal with a toddler in tow, I legged it down to Trafalgar Square in time to catch most of Human Fountain. A four-storey rig stood in front of Nelson’s column with platforms on three levels, and on these were a multitude of figures in bright red bodysuits, flinging themselves from the platforms in a variety of poses and combinations, landing on the floor with an almighty crash, then picking themselves up to run back, clamber up the side and do the same again. Over and over, red bodies falling, flinging, scrambling, crashing, an astonishing show of bravery pushing at the limits of human endurance. At times verging on difficult to watch,but more difficult to turn away from. Streb’s dancing is less gendered than any dance I’ve seen, with strong, muscular women and men performing the same incredible moves. 

Afterwards, I guessed that the next performance would be somewhere towards the South Bank, reasoning that they’d been moving westwards throughout the day, and it was obvious where  the last event, ‘The Human Eye’, would be. Hopefully I meandered down Northumberland Avenue and across the bridge at Embankment, eventually finding the embryonic event at the National Theatre, where a very very tall structure was being set up in the outside space. We camped out on a step, subsisting on very tasty hot dogs from the van parked nearby, and by 8pm had been in our almost front-row seats for over an hour when three dancers in vivid red came out. Streb has been quoted as saying that music is the enemy of dance but the soundscape here really added to the atmosphere. The dancer in the middle looked terrified as she was attached to her harness. 

Then they were winched into the air, where they sometimes posed like trapeze artists, sometimes flailed like puppets, up and down, sprawling red figures against a sky which turned from grey to white-scattered blue as the evening wore on and the sun lit the buildings. Planes and helicopters and birds flew past, seeming almost to touch the three red human marionettes who squirmed on their strings. Some of it seemed tightly choreographed – presumably it all was – but at other times they appeared lost, helpless, and chaotic, snatching at the air as their feet cycled madly. 

It was a great, eerie, performance, and I would have loved to stay for the late show, the undoubted masterpiece, but starting at 10.30pm with a one-year-old and no chance to plan in advance, it was off the cards. At least I got to see some of it, unlike the writers of the plangent messages on Twitter and Facebook, begging for a bit of notice to give them a fighting chance of getting there on time. The refusal to do that, to help out those who were desperate to see it with the basic information about when and where, just seems like a perverse way to treat your potential audience. 

I can see the idea in theory, that this was a shocking series of events where superhuman figures suddenly appeared out of nowhere, leaping across the monuments of London, but in practice it can’t work like this. In practice there are many people there for a long time in advance, rigging, planning, putting up crowd barriers, not to mention all of those ‘in the know’, the press, those who’ve just blundered along. By the time the event starts it’s very obvious indeed that it is about to happen – indeed there are huge banners proclaiming ‘Surprises Streb’ all around.  

So it’s hardly an instantaneous appearance, just a needless annoyance which makes it impossible for those with prior commitments to work, family or anything else to attend this once-in-a-lifetime event. Even worse, it makes it truly impossible for those with disabilities who need additional time to plan and make their journeys. Instead, this favours those who can drop everything in an instant, the able-bodied, the rich (who can jump in cabs, and probably know what’s happening weeks in advance anyway), tourists, and random passers-by who might well enjoy it, but not as much as those who would really have loved to see it and would have made the effort, if only they’d had the chance. Videos here and Guardian picture gallery here

Sorry that so much of this review is about the logistics rather than the performances, but art happens in the real world where people live. (And unlike all the Proper Reviewers, so do I.) In short, this is an amazing dance/action company whose performances stand up on their own merit and they don’t need gimmicks like this to impress anyone.

You Might Not Be Beautiful. Gok's Teen's: the Naked Truth

Gok Wan is on a mission.

“I don’t want any teen to go through what I did”. The How To Look Good Naked star reveals how as a 21 stone teenager he endured years of misery and bullying.”

It’s all very Jamie Oliver: a passionate, personal crusade, comprising a bit of raw confessional, some contemporary social critique and taking action for real change.

However, while Jamie’s various series have seen him slogging his guts out dawn to dusk, chasing up recalcitrant truanting teens, arguing with local authorities, managing school canteens, and ultimately winning an audience with then-PM Tony Blair, Gok’s mainly involves looking at pictures of models while going “urrr, she’s too thin!” and getting girls to write on mirrors in lipstick and cry.

The teens in this programme are amazingly docile.

“Why do you think you don’t look good enough?” Gok asks.

“Because I see images… on the internet… celebrities,” says Paige, hesitant but obedient.

They flash up lots of thinspo photographs and slogans. Perhaps they could have chosen instead to show Isabelle Caro, dead at 28, or Katie Chilver, rather than these glamorised, 'triggering' fantasies. But this isn't a programme specialising in conceptual coherence.

Gok takes Paige on a life-changing journey to see a model do a photoshoot. The photo gets retouched. Paige cries.

“I didn’t know it was fake,” sobs Paige, who puts this new knowledge into action when she goes home by, erm, uninstalling the Photoshop software she uses to retouch her own pictures online.

14-year-old Brianna, meanwhile, whose anorexic phase has already long passed, sits quietly while an American dietician shows her some computer-generated images of how she’ll look at 30 if she’s anorexic (weird, haggard, wrinkled and grey) and not anorexic (just weird).

“Gosh, I think I prefer the non-anorexic one,” says Brianna politely. “Thank you.”

“I think I really got through to her,” says the dietician to camera as Brianna leaves.

At some other point, Gok gets a bunch of adolescent girls to look in a mirror in front of their mums and teachers and to say they have fat thighs or flat chests.

“I just look… ordinary,” says an ordinary-looking girl. Mums dab at their eyes with tissues.

Assorted celebrities crop up from time to time. The idea is that they confide their own teenage horrors and reassure today's younger generation that this too will pass. The problem is that (a) they're mostly incredibly irritating and (b) their problems include 'fitting in with everyone so not being really true to myself' (Duncan from Blue).

Despite the odd bit of lip service about ‘confidence’ and ‘self esteem’ , the programme is thoroughly Christina: “You are beautiful, no matter what they say.”

What is never suggested is that maybe you’re not beautiful, and maybe that doesn’t matter; maybe that’s not the worst thing. It’s not because the images are retouched that it’s a bad idea to aspire to have thighs with a big gap between them: so what if they’re real? Perhaps there could be other things to dream of, wilder skies than these.

In the photoshoot, while Paige and her comrades are squealing over the revelation that even the primped and preened model can’t match up to her own photograph, there is another woman in the scene: the photographer. Hair scragged back, in jeans, without make-up, here is a woman doing a technologically savvy, well-paid job, one that doesn't entail being half-eaten away by your own excess gastric acid by the age of 27.

But we don’t hear anything from or about her, and here’s the untold story, the one where looks aren’t everything. The one where Paige's very creditable photomanip skills could be put to better use than making her collarbone stick out.

The stated aim of this programme is laudable but no serious thought has gone into it, as evidenced by the repeated inclusion of pro-ana material as wallpaper. Judging from the teaser trailer for next week’s programme, the flashy stunts (landing in helicopters) and relentless shallowness which characterised ‘How to Look Good Naked’ aren’t on the way out any time soon.

Gok’s Teens: The Naked Truth is on Channel 4, Tuesday evenings, 8pm. And on 4OD here

You are not a drone: The Cult of Quatermass

The Cult of Quatermass took over a basement in Hackney last night. Maps of communication networks and an old Periodic Table are tacked up above the wooden control desk, where a reel-to-reel tape is flanked by flickering video images and an oscillator screen with green lines arcing across it. The panels on the walls are a mass of clunky buttons, switches and knobs, delivering an instant nostalgia kick. And you can touch them (yay). Some seem to shift the noise which fills the air; others don’t have any discernible effect.

The creators emerged unannounced and unsmiling. Willing acolytes crowded the stairs as AAS twiddled dials, stopped and started tapes and climbed ladders to produce a sustained performance of droning, pulsating sounds. There was squealing at the upper reaches of the sonic spectrum while low thrums made the walls vibrate. Sometimes a thought-defeating chaos of noise, at other times different signals and voices seemed to make themselves heard and something more defined and rhythmic took shape as sounds meshed mid-air.

AAS were impassive and focused as they operated the controls and picked their way silently through the crowds of receptive listeners. Upstairs, bottles of Red Stripe swam in a barrel among splintering icebergs.

At first, without introduction and with no obvious moment of beginning, it seemed kind of shambolic and inexplicable. Then it gradually exerted a quasi-hypnotic pull so that the restlessness you felt after 1 minute faded away, and after 10 minutes you could have carried on listening more or less indefinitely. Rising and falling with the sound, dipping in and out of thought and pure hearing. There was something compelling about the slightly clumsy, amateur way it was carried out, the unremarkable clothes and the way that they had to push past people which made it quite genuinely odd and intense.

The Cult of Quatermass was commissioned by Pil & Galia Kollectiv for Xero, Kline and Coma and is developed from the earlier AAS project, The Quatermass Code (2006) which took place at BlocSpace in Sheffield.

It is a sculptural installation of a laboratory control room containing video works, an audio work and machines for producing sounds that can be mixed, live, by the audience. The narrative is built around the characters of Professor Quatermass of the British Sonic Research Unit, a drone band called Samekhmem, a cult of people called ‘Receivers’ and the ‘sacred eternal drone’ that is the obsession of Samekhmem, Receivers and Quatermass alike.

‘Silence. Even a vacuum may contain vibrations. Space itself is the dark matter we seek. All of time is compressed into a single vibrating filament, a new form of religion emerging from alphawaves.’

– Journal entry three months ago

The video and audio works draw inspiration from a range of cultural references and practices including: J. G. Ballard, Situationist dérives, audiomancy, William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, and glitching.

The Cult of Quatermass is at xero, kline & coma, 258 Hackney Road, London E2 7SJ, until 21 February 2012 (weekends only, 12.00-18.00).

For more information go to aasgroup.net or contact: info@xero-kline-coma.com

Angry Happy People: Josie Long at Soho

Josie Long is without question a consummate performer. She’s articulate and intelligent, endearing in a perfectly calibrated awkward-cute way, her timing is brilliant, her voices and characters are mesmeric, her ability to work a room and control an audience is outstanding.

You can tell there’s a ‘but’ coming, right?

Like newspaper columnists, the problem with stand-up comedians is often that they announce their views of the world without having seen very much of it. They might be able to tell jokes or construct pleasing sentences, but that rarely corresponds to having lived not wisely but too well. When someone does have an idiosyncratic perspective or profound experiences to share, it can be an absolute joy.

Long’s material is by far at its strongest when she’s embarking on wild fantasies: the Jedward routine and the one-woman play about the Brontës are both painfully funny and startlingly convincing. She says at one point that she’s seen a lot of sci-fi, and it shows in her grasp of imaginative possibilities that twist reality in odd ways. It also adds a layer of sophistication and humour to her otherwise horrifying account of a car crash which nearly left her for dead last year.

It was this car crash which, along with the coming to power of the coalition, set Long off on her new, political, direction. A disclaimer: in general, I’ve not got much affection for groups of middle-class people applauding self-congratulatorily at political comedy or its academic equivalent. I’m not sure the two things sit very well together, even if there is a collecting tin at the end. Unfortunately, last night did little to change that.

The jarring contrast of Long’s newfound fury at the government with her cheery, whimsical stock-in-trade is made explicit from the beginning – she repeatedly explains, justifies, apologises for this new subject matter, in a defence which is also a plea in mitigation. She knows that, no matter how true or important or deeply felt this stuff is, it’s just not quite as funny. The account of going on ‘This Week’ and accidentally telling Michael Portillo that he’s her favourite Tory (“He’s not even! It’s Bercow. OK, he’s not a real Tory…”) and her passionate defence of the protest movement UKUncut are interesting and witty, but by the end I did feel somewhat hectored without being edified. We all know the Tories are awful, we all hate the cuts and think that the super-rich should pay more tax, and respect to Long for going out and doing something about it. But impotent fury at the powers that be is nothing new, or shouldn't be.

It’s difficult to make these criticisms because Long herself is so overtly and self-consciously aware of the pitfalls of her new political direction. She harangues herself for this, apologises to us if we don’t like it, and seems genuinely torn between her desire to be funny and her need to express her political convictions. At one point she is drawn into an embryonic political debate with an audience member, but then pulls back from it, saying “hang on, this is turning into a political argument, not a comedy gig.” And therein lies the problem.

Even being self-aware to this extent doesn't meld 'happy Josie' and 'angry Josie' into a unified whole. These two personae battle for supremacy as she breaks off to castigate herself and picks up one of the cards strewn about the stage on which she's listed things she likes, her fantasies, her hobbies. The struggle between the two characters is played out in the open and she controls the mood in the room expertly, but it inevitably still jars.

To be fair, I may just be a grumpy old woman. There was lots and lots of heartfelt laughter in the room last night. Josie Long has a wealth of material and an abundance of wit and charisma at her disposal. But it is perhaps better directed at Jedward than Jeremy Paxman.

Josie Long is at Soho Theatre until Saturday 22 October.

Is this what you want? Tracey Emin at the Hayward

How do galleries choose an image to promote an exhibition? Sometimes it’s relatively easy, finding an image which represents Rothko or Henry Moore just a question of picking a typical, more or less interchangeable example. Other exhibitions offer a wealth of good options, and if they lead to controversy, all the better: the fuss over the pubic hair (or not) of Cranach’s Venus created a lot of not-unwelcome publicity.

Images need to be striking and to catch the eye. But they also ought to be a reasonable representative of the artworks being exhibited – representative in both senses, typical and emissary.

With this in mind, the Hayward’s choice of image to promote the current Tracey Emin retrospective is, to say the least, questionable. It’s a blurry photograph of a cobbled street. A naked woman, seen from behind, is running down the street, the lower half of her body visible. The top half of her body is hidden by a large Union flag which she holds in the air.

It’s a striking image, to some extent – naked bodies always attract the eye, just ask publicity-hungry protestors – but there’s nothing special about it, nothing that really grabs or holds the attention. It’s anonymous; this could be any street, any body. And it’s impersonal; the woman’s body bared for the camera, as usual, looked at, unseeing. She (we assume) doesn’t have a name, a stitch of clothing, or even, poor thing, a head.

In all of these ways, the image is at odds with the exhibition it represents. Emin’s work is nothing if not particular, personal, concrete. It’s her life, her face, her body, her words, her voice, her handwriting and handiwork that assaults you throughout the exhibition. She is exposed; not passively, blindly baring herself to your gaze, but glaring back at you hard enough to make you squint and flinch.

Her body features in these works many times, but it’s not the easy, objectified flesh of the running-away photograph, it’s a body which comes with a mind and a history and a personality of immense force. Rendered in sketchy, vivid ink, sprawled and masturbating, its tribulations recorded in sometimes nauseating detail, its by-products displayed in plastic tubes, this is not a body which permits a simple eroticisation.

Many different media are on show in this retrospective, and Emin is able to create successful works in all of them. Her use of traditionally feminine, domestic craft techniques – quilt making, embroidery, collage, letter-writing – intensifies the effect of the often-savage ideas and memories expressed.

The appliqued blankets which tell stories of her life, tracing themes (childhood travels, teenage shame, the death of sexual desire), look beautiful collected in one place. Get closer and you discover more, patches of small scribbled text amongst the large cloth letters which spell out messages and blazon important names and dates.

Throughout the exhibition there’s an exhausting amount of text, an almost obsessive recording of life stories and memories, all told with a directness and lack of pretension which draws you in, but enough of a sense of art and timing to keep you reading.

Much of Emin’s art is like that; it appears crude, childlike, and intuitive, but its careful spacing and balance demands a great deal of skill, planning and aesthetic intelligence. One of her great talents is to retain that sense of immediacy, the sting and the degradation of sickness and humiliation, within a tightly controlled artistic space.

The drawings are, as many have noted, outstanding. She portrays a great deal with a very few simple lines. The body here isn’t something to be leered at and possessed - faceless, it's contorted in its own private pain and pleasure. There's a sense that runs throughout Emin's work of wanting to regain and declare possession of her own body, to police its boundaries and to own even its rejected products. Movement is a big part of this: the triumphant and deliberate way she moves in the films is a declaration of independence without words.

For me the least successful works are the neon signs that spell messages (‘love is what you want’, for example, which gives the exhibition its name). Compared to her other work they’re too telegraphic, crude, simple... too commercial and cheap, too easy. They don’t have that howl or tenderness of feeling.

Because much of what’s here is surprisingly tender: both the tenderness of family love (her tributes to her nan and her dad, her unborn babies) and the tenderness of wounds that haven’t healed properly (the remnants of medical procedures little talismen held up to memorialise and prove that pain, the unspent anger against men who fucked her and jeered at her, blurring the boundaries between sex and rape).

Her recent works – paintings, sculptures, large embroidered versions of her drawings – are subtler and less overt. The sculptures are less personal-historical than most of her previous work, more surprising. There’s a lot of wood, plank-like or wheel-like shapes, echoing the seaside jetties of her early years but it's also a homelike, tactile material. Like most of her other work, it's dramatic but not alienating.

The overall impression is one of huge energy and talent, a remarkably versatile aesthetic sense coupled with commercial savvy, and an awesome, distinctive voice: mocking, self-mocking, slurring, sarcastic. And also a sense that all of this work hangs together, that it is the life's work (so far) of a consistent and strongminded artist, less subject to whims and fashion than you might have thought, all clearly part of a coherent whole.

As for a poster image, I know what I’d have chosen: ‘I’ve Got It All’ (2000), a photograph of Emin sitting on the floor of an almost-bare room wearing a Vivienne Westwood top, naked from the waist down, slender legs spread wide apart, head down, looking down at her crotch as she gathers handfuls of paper money into her body, coins and notes spilling in profusion across the red-carpeted space between her thighs. It’s colourful, it grabs you, it’s shocking, it’s beautiful, but most of all it’s unmistakably Tracey Emin. And it's ok because you can't see any pubic hair.

Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XX. Wednesday 18 May - Monday 29 August 2011.