Dromos @ Generator Projects
Posted by Ben Robinson, Wed 03 Mar 2010
The Generator’s show Dromos takes as its lofty aim the creation of “a New Babylon of discovery” unconstrained by the rigid white cube. Incorporating performance, sculpture and graphic design, pleasingly the work here is visceral, funny and compelling enough to make good on its ambitious promises.
The first gallery is reborn as the scene of a terrible accident outside Dundee train station, an abandoned taxi intersecting the space and facing a floor scattered with broken boxes and littered with tattered clothes. On a screen we can see a messianic performance by Bedwyr Williams whose bloodied features are haunted by the trauma of his art-world misadventures. Leaning over the taxi’s bonnet he ponders why “Scottish and Irish artists are always bullying Welsh artists” and other imagined slights. The opening-night audience chuckle away in sympathy with his thwarted ideals. Next door the work of Derek Sutherland, Never Been In a Riot, carries on the theme of urban ennui. Three wheelie bins stand shrouded in dry ice before a slide show that sees shots of fashion models and scenes of wasteland illuminate the wall. Nearby two LCD displays scroll fragments of text by William Burroughs, as the sainted junkie evolves his thinking about systems of control. Guiding us through this dense, exhilarating exhibition, the Dromos gallery handout is designed by the London-based architect James Alexander Craig and sees image, text and typography collide and bleed into one other across the page. You’re left dizzy and thrilled, immersed in the Dromos experience.
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Black Spring
Last night I read some poems in the fabulous Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of an event called Black Spring, organized by the artist Derek Sutherland. It was strange and rewarding reading in an environment more geared (at least in my mind) towards visual art, but what came across was less a sense of jarring difference than a sense of different takes on the same root emotion or feeling. Shame, embarrassment, nerves, indigestion, and a feeling of not being quite at home pervaded every piece.
First up was Stuart Mcadam whose exhilarating (exacerbating?) spoken word performance centered (or more appropriately for such a derailed delivery, decentered itself) around objects: a grapefruit fork, a paper boat. It might have been just me, but his performance drew seemingly benign surrounding things into the black hole of his devalorising of the artistic object, the carlsberg can he downed, the music-system someone told him to turn off, his music stand like a makeshift lecturn and the sheet of prepared notes he refused to continue reading. Even aspects of his personality seemed tugged into the sinking sand of his alergic reaction to artifice; I'm still not sure if his elaborate, freezing, dumb-founding nerves were real or not, but, whatever, that kind of seemed to be the point: the dramatisation of anxiety at making or being an artistic object. Mcadam set the tone of the evening perfectly (though it was something we all had to forgo any hope of matching) with his wacky, uncertain, improvised, will he forgive me if i hyperbolise and say 'deranged' talk? (I hope so because I loved it.)
I think we were all ready for a film after that and I for one wouldn't have said no to something long like Titanic to get my breath back. What we got was this charming, witty, winsome autobiographical film from Derek Lodge :
Life Drawing
The film is 'about' Derek's residency at Yorkshire ArtSpace where he does a life-drawing class and finds (he hasn't drawn since college) he's not as good as he remembered. Maybe i'm reading it simplistically, but I couldn't help be struck by an irony in the similarity between what Lodge does in the film and life drawing itself. For one thing, the life Lodge draws (his own) relies on 'lines', well-drawn otherwise, just as life-drawing does. I find the resilient note tinkled in these lines totally irresistible as he sings "Gonna keep on drawing though I'm technically poor/ that's my choice./ i'm gonna keep on singing songs,/ even with this strange voice." The tone of Lodge's film was more confident, more assured and less aggressive than Mcadam's piece, but it certainly had a fragility to it too. I urge you all to click that link and watch the film.
I had to follow Lodge's film by reading some poems from a sequence called 'i am an atomiser', and i even sang (which is something i think i could only have plucked up the courage to have done on the margins of Edinburgh- the Sculpture Workshop is in deepest darkest, most mysterious and leafy Newhaven.) On that (bum) note, the first half came to a close.
The atmosphere was extremely sociable when we returned, but I could taste expectancy and I think everyone else could too. My programme said that recent ECA graduate Sophie Orton was staging a performance, but I hadn't at this stage met Sophie, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Looking around the room, the small table-clothed restaurant-table in the corner felt like the natural place for something to occur. For a few seconds it was quiet enough that you might have heard Mcadam's paper boat slide along his music stand. And then the door behind us opened and a man was led by a young woman dressed as a waitress to the table. She settled him in then left and promptly returned with wine which she efficiently offered him. He didn't say no. We all watched fixated as the two of them went through the complementary rituals of serving and dining. This relationship is further complicated when you realise that all three (the man, the waitress and the chef) were hired by Orton to perform. I'm not sure we all knew what to make of this, but it was undoubtedly fascinating and we chewed and slurped it, luxuriating in voyeurism.
In fact, I was so entranced that I forgot I was meant to be up next, performing while Orton's performance played out. Derek gave me the nod and I sprung (blackly?) up to finish my set. If the thought of being watched didn't give the man indigestion, I'd be willing to bet my poems did.
Johannes Sailer's strangely beautiful film inhabited what he calls 'non-places'. It featured two individuals who were slowly waking, rising, floating almost. It seemed to reach out and point to places i wasn't quite sure I recognised, places that felt sort of real but also very unusual. I feel like I'd need to watch this film again to make something more of it. Luckily, Sailer has a solo show coming up in Edinburgh: Deleted Scene. So I'll be able to see more of his intriguing, complex, enigmatic work.
The evening was rounded off by Jessica Curry's lovely film 'i carry your heart'. It's her adaptation of the famous ee cummings poem. Images of family and childhood are projected onto a pregnant woman's torso as a strong female voice sings the poem. One of the strongest images for me was of a child rocking to and fro on a juddery swing. It seems like an image that could be potently melancholy or playful depending on what mood you were in. Curry herself calls it a 'film about love', and that speaks a refreshing honesty and simplisicity that was also present in the film.
And then, with a modesty almost unbearably cool Derek Sutherland announced the evening over and those of us who didn't go prowling the Thursday night city centre for euphemistic 'late night shopping' went home with a sunny disposition and (thanks to Sophie Orton's hired chef) a nagging hunger for chilled melon soup.
First up was Stuart Mcadam whose exhilarating (exacerbating?) spoken word performance centered (or more appropriately for such a derailed delivery, decentered itself) around objects: a grapefruit fork, a paper boat. It might have been just me, but his performance drew seemingly benign surrounding things into the black hole of his devalorising of the artistic object, the carlsberg can he downed, the music-system someone told him to turn off, his music stand like a makeshift lecturn and the sheet of prepared notes he refused to continue reading. Even aspects of his personality seemed tugged into the sinking sand of his alergic reaction to artifice; I'm still not sure if his elaborate, freezing, dumb-founding nerves were real or not, but, whatever, that kind of seemed to be the point: the dramatisation of anxiety at making or being an artistic object. Mcadam set the tone of the evening perfectly (though it was something we all had to forgo any hope of matching) with his wacky, uncertain, improvised, will he forgive me if i hyperbolise and say 'deranged' talk? (I hope so because I loved it.)
I think we were all ready for a film after that and I for one wouldn't have said no to something long like Titanic to get my breath back. What we got was this charming, witty, winsome autobiographical film from Derek Lodge :
Life Drawing
The film is 'about' Derek's residency at Yorkshire ArtSpace where he does a life-drawing class and finds (he hasn't drawn since college) he's not as good as he remembered. Maybe i'm reading it simplistically, but I couldn't help be struck by an irony in the similarity between what Lodge does in the film and life drawing itself. For one thing, the life Lodge draws (his own) relies on 'lines', well-drawn otherwise, just as life-drawing does. I find the resilient note tinkled in these lines totally irresistible as he sings "Gonna keep on drawing though I'm technically poor/ that's my choice./ i'm gonna keep on singing songs,/ even with this strange voice." The tone of Lodge's film was more confident, more assured and less aggressive than Mcadam's piece, but it certainly had a fragility to it too. I urge you all to click that link and watch the film.
I had to follow Lodge's film by reading some poems from a sequence called 'i am an atomiser', and i even sang (which is something i think i could only have plucked up the courage to have done on the margins of Edinburgh- the Sculpture Workshop is in deepest darkest, most mysterious and leafy Newhaven.) On that (bum) note, the first half came to a close.
The atmosphere was extremely sociable when we returned, but I could taste expectancy and I think everyone else could too. My programme said that recent ECA graduate Sophie Orton was staging a performance, but I hadn't at this stage met Sophie, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Looking around the room, the small table-clothed restaurant-table in the corner felt like the natural place for something to occur. For a few seconds it was quiet enough that you might have heard Mcadam's paper boat slide along his music stand. And then the door behind us opened and a man was led by a young woman dressed as a waitress to the table. She settled him in then left and promptly returned with wine which she efficiently offered him. He didn't say no. We all watched fixated as the two of them went through the complementary rituals of serving and dining. This relationship is further complicated when you realise that all three (the man, the waitress and the chef) were hired by Orton to perform. I'm not sure we all knew what to make of this, but it was undoubtedly fascinating and we chewed and slurped it, luxuriating in voyeurism.
In fact, I was so entranced that I forgot I was meant to be up next, performing while Orton's performance played out. Derek gave me the nod and I sprung (blackly?) up to finish my set. If the thought of being watched didn't give the man indigestion, I'd be willing to bet my poems did.
Johannes Sailer's strangely beautiful film inhabited what he calls 'non-places'. It featured two individuals who were slowly waking, rising, floating almost. It seemed to reach out and point to places i wasn't quite sure I recognised, places that felt sort of real but also very unusual. I feel like I'd need to watch this film again to make something more of it. Luckily, Sailer has a solo show coming up in Edinburgh: Deleted Scene. So I'll be able to see more of his intriguing, complex, enigmatic work.
The evening was rounded off by Jessica Curry's lovely film 'i carry your heart'. It's her adaptation of the famous ee cummings poem. Images of family and childhood are projected onto a pregnant woman's torso as a strong female voice sings the poem. One of the strongest images for me was of a child rocking to and fro on a juddery swing. It seems like an image that could be potently melancholy or playful depending on what mood you were in. Curry herself calls it a 'film about love', and that speaks a refreshing honesty and simplisicity that was also present in the film.
And then, with a modesty almost unbearably cool Derek Sutherland announced the evening over and those of us who didn't go prowling the Thursday night city centre for euphemistic 'late night shopping' went home with a sunny disposition and (thanks to Sophie Orton's hired chef) a nagging hunger for chilled melon soup.