| Tract Live A rt |
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| Site specific live art and performance in and around Penzance, Cornwall, over three weekends. Summer 2006 | ||||||||||
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| Information on this site will be updated as part of the Tract Live Art Programme | ||||||||||
Review of Tract Live
Art at Penlee House by Dr Chris Short
| Penlee House, which is now a museum and gallery, was built in 1865 in Penzance, Cornwall as a home for the wealthy miller and merchant John Richards Branwell. Set originally amidst formal and informal gardens, the house has been through various changes but the character of much of the house and gardens remains that of a villa of the mid-Victorian era. Taking tea while sitting in dappled sunshine on the terrace to the rear of the house, one had to be impressed at the decision of the organisers of “Tract Live Art” to use Penlee House and grounds as the venue for the last day of events in the series. |  |
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| Tract
was co-curated by Art Surgery
(St Ives-based artists Andy Whall and Delpha Hudson) and Newlyn Art
Gallery, and ran on 21st-22nd July, 18th-19th August and 22nd-23rd
September 2006. It presented a diverse range of live and performance
art, much of which was site-specific and based in and around Penzance.
These included Roddy Hunter’s “East-West. The nearest
place from where to begin a journey”, which took place in the
Victorian Council rooms in St Johns and in which Hunter read aloud
while pacing about the small space that he had littered with “esoteric
visual symbols” (Tract web-site) including tape measures, bars
of silver and red ink with which Hunter wrote onto his torso. Important
for its engagement with the place and its history was the work of
Matt Hawthorn entitled “Shanty”, in which he displayed
200 model wooden fishing boats, inscribed with house names, at the
Jubilee Pool, Penzance, concluding the performance by ritualistically
casting them into the sea, The boats named for houses referred, we’re
told, to the slum housing that had been cleared from the town in the
1930s in spite of the objections of inhabitants who took their protest
to Westminster by boat. The Jubilee Pool, whose waters are cleansed
and replenished by the movement of the tide, was also an ideal location
for Misha Myers’ “Hevva Hevva”, a title that takes
its name form the cry traditionally sent out on the arrival of the
pilchard shoals (“here they are”). Viewers were asked
to make entries to a “Ledger of Losses,” entries then
translated by Myers to a kind of historical semaphore, originally
to guide the fishing boats, now directed toward the open seas. The
somewhat haunting sense of loss and return that the work created mirrored
the movement of the sea through the pool itself. Much more interesting
to the national press was Kira O’Reilly’s work, appropriately
entitled “inthewrongplaceness” in which the audience were
led to a disused social club in the centre of Penzance where they
were presented with O’Reilly, naked, lying on the floor caressing
a recently slaughtered pig. The point here is not to offer a reading of these or any of the many other works done in the series of weekends. Sitting on the terrace, sipping tea, one must be struck by the incongruity of it all. A guided tour of the area that spins yarns about historical happenings in the town (Caroline Morris); a series of four journeys by taxi-cab in which the drivers tell the audience about their favourite parts of the town (Fran Cottell); an artist secreted in a tree somewhere in the grounds of the house (Gino Saccone); a somewhat threatening security guard, protecting the paintings on display in the House (David Brinkworth); and a figure seated for nine hours in a greenhouse (around the roof of which are the carcases of mutilated mackerel), very slowly and methodically inflating balloons (Alaistair MacLennan). The incongruity that I describe, though, is not a result of the very different art forms that have been presented in the series. We are used to performance and live art taking such diverse forms. Rather, that incongruity operates at two levels. First, it is triggered by the apparent conflict between the sedate, middle-class, Victorian ambience of Penlee House and its grounds, which speaks of tradition and convention, and the contemporary, make-shift, nomadic and largely counter-traditional activities that take place within it and its grounds. Second, it is triggered by the apparent conflict between those activities as art, and the art on display in the galleries of the House itself - two exhibitions, one entitled “A Century of Art in West Cornwall 1840 - 1939”, the other entitled “Spotlight on St Ives” (consisting of works by the St Ives modernists from the Arts Council collection). The naturalism and modernism that characterise historical painting in Newlyn and St Ives, with their apparent joy in form and colour that derives from the land and sea around Penwith, have been conceived as the antithesis of much that that more contemporary, concept- and time-based art seeks to achieve. While such incongruity surely exists, it does not sustain. The genteel conventions that fill and surround our imagined Victorian villa were themselves - like the values that underwrote those conventions - fraught with contradiction and instability. This is more than adequately suggested in the pages that Freud wrote on the middle-class psyche during the same era. What is more, the seemingly bizarre, and surely quite disturbing act of sitting in a greenhouse for nine hours while inflating balloons was, nonetheless, sedate and conducted with all the dignity of an extended tea ceremony (itself subject to critique in the work “Neo-Sakkharic: A New Sugar Age” by Amanda Couch, in which sugar tea cups and saucers gradually disintegrated). The second incongruity - naturalist and modernist painting in relation to contemporary live and performance art - likewise, does not sustain. Many of the live works are troubling for the viewer, apparently eschewing conventions in art that please on conventional aesthetic or narrative terms. Bloody, dead flesh embraced by the naked female form, and rotting fish; these forms are deliberately remote form the pastoral landscapes and abstract fields of colour that we encounter in Penlee House. Yet O’Reilly’s “inthewrongplacenes”, as much as MacLennan’s THYME MITE, could, for its pace and for its formal construction, easily be described as aesthetically pleasing, even beautiful. At the same time, the ease with which we may nostalgically enjoy Stanhope Forbes’s oil painting, “On Paul Hill” (1922), with its romantic reiteration of childhood pleasure and tranquility and its compositional stability, belies the painting’s theme of personal and massive human loss that the First World War visited upon Forbes and the nation. Such painting, with its social-historical gravitas, is pleasing and disturbing in the same measure that certain of the more successful contemporary work on display is disturbing and pleasing. While there clearly remain dis-junctures between the conservative atmosphere of the Victorian villa and the more radical forms of activity that take place around it, and between the historical and contemporary art at Penlee House, the moments of incongruity that we may initially identify cannot be fully sustained. Repeatedly through the series of works shown under the name “Tract”, both sets of incongruity and disjuncture have been at play: between the most radical of contemporary performance and live art, on one hand, and the place (Penzance and its environs), and the history of art of the region (naturalist and modernist), on the other. This is the real strength of the series of works. Only in relation to site, and in relation to the history of art produced at that site - and in Penwith, art and place have so often been conceived as intimately related - could such truly international performance and live art work be “brought” to the region in a meaningful way. Art that engages neither might just as well have been shown anywhere. |
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