Artist Hanne Lippard is bringing a “speech-based lecture performance” titled The ssecret to ssuccess iss in the ss to the Hague’s 1646 project space for one night only on December 3.
The performance combines “strategic business rhetoric with human failure”, interrupting the “smooth convincing tone of professionalism” with human errors like mispronunciation and awkward sounds. In a meditation on the acceleration of technology and its effect on human expectation, Lippard tries to explore the blurred lines between human and machine and the ways in which “demands on human efficiency aspire to compete with that of technology”, exceeding and effectively displacing human nature.
Building on the general late-capitalist discourse of the Post-Fordism era, Lippard taps into the modern expectation of never-ending labour – and the supposed unconditional love of said labour that perpetuates it – with a statement released alongside the performance’s descriptor that begins: You must be absolutely clear on who you are and what you want. You need written goals and plans for every part of your life. You must become a meaningful specific rather than a wandering generality.
The reading performance comes as the first of what will become a weekly ritual, with the invited artist working to record and reflect current developments of the performance art scene, and Lippard’s Thursday reading takes on the topic of the office environment as a potential Eco-system, “deployed by the human endeavor to seek success”.
She takes a critical view to the rat race of modern life, using a to-do list as a metaphor for the exhaustive and endless cycles with life and its echos – “to-do, to-do, to-do” – which appears as both a rhythmic and primal thumping of the heart and a ceaseless call to command.
New York’s Old Room will be hosting a group exhibition titled Is it much too much to ask, not to hide behind the mask at their West Village space from September 13 to 28.
The group show is curated by Gregor Quack as well as Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff of Berlin’s km temporaer and titled (maybe) after a lyric from 1968 The Nova Local song ‘If You Only Had the Time’ -otherwise its sampling on the the Danger Mouse and MF Doom collab track ‘The Mask‘.
Attendance at Berlin’s New Theater events always seems to exceed capacity. A one night only performance of The End of Love, written and directed by venue founders Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, takes this trend to extremes. Some of those attending tonight fill the seating area like a liquid. The rest are squeezed out and pushed into the bar or spill out onto the rainy street. Once the curtains open, oblivious chit-chat from outside contributes to the foley sound and these often filmic interjections occur as if they’d been scripted. A North American whine sounds louder than anything on stage saying, “I’m leaving tomorrow.” The audience titters. Someone answers, “perfect.”
The play begins with our leads; bratty expat siblings, ‘Scott’ (Skye Chamberlain) and ‘Lucy’ (Leila Hekmat) who find out that their parents have died and they’re now the heirs to the Parisian bookstore where the play is set. An artistic collaboration, the setting is an ensemble of art pieces and their artist creators. Six posters by Lucy Stahl hang stage-left to advertise the readings to come. A framed poster by Stephen G. Rhodes to the right reads “learn to read god damn it”. The painted backdrop of dusty bookshelves, a spiral staircase by Chamberlain and Patrick Armstrong sets the scene; prop elements, a book and pencil from Sara MacKillop laying on Lucy’s desk add complexity to detail.
The End of Love (2014) @ New Theater, Berlin. Image courtesy the theatre.
Many of those who created the pieces for the set return to the stage as a cast of functional clichés: David Lieske as ‘Tall Jerry’ , Mia Goyette as ‘Browser’, Mia Von Matt and Florian Ludwig with their own first names. Each delivers a line or two before taking their place, perched on Scott’s ladder, curled around Lucy’s feet. All of them remain as further amendments to the ever-changing stage set installation.
The script itself is sparse. Most of the dialogue is one-sided correspondence, like Scott’s letter to his deceased mother, and Lucy’s emails to a Florian who “never writes back.” Melodramatic monologues, “some day I’ll explain to you the way, the way you left me, like some royal child lost to the revolution”, offers a profound-sounding nonsense and sits adjacent to six artist readings, for which the play is an elaborate vehicle. Taking her place in a rocking chair built by Florian Auer out front, Hanne Lippard is the first to read. Her spoken astrological predictions, a successful performative gesture, strike a balance between content and delivery enabling her to top Scott, Lucy and the audience. The latter yawns, aweless, while handing out baguettes and saying, “this bookstore is boring.” Scott barrels ahead on his trajectory of progress and improvement: “I replaced your coffee maker with a strobe light.”
Pippin Wigglesworth‘s reading, which comes out like a barrage of rhetoric spat directly onto the stage, sounds like a retort. Even so, Scott and Lucy’s performance of indifference is already reflecting into the audience, which is too large, too loud and too unruly for the tiny theatre with its even tinier PA. Between readings, ‘Flower Boy’ Georgia Gray parades increasingly embellished flower ornaments of her own creation onto the set. Reciting French as if she were reading it from a cheese packet, her offerings are hung on a ladder, dropped under a table, with elaborate nonchalance. It’s all part of a seemingly deliberate stylistic irreverence.
The End of Love (2014) @ New Theater, Berlin. Image courtesy the theatre.
The phony French accent of Jack Gross’ ‘Pierre’, our bookish Parisian who is ordered by Scott to “stop browsing” in order to look for a screw, falters when he answers Pablo Larios‘ reading of a melancholy love story set on the Rhine asking, “is this an autobiography?” It’s a question put to the entire performance. Set in Paris rather than Berlin, it’s one of imperialist ex-patriotism that pokes at the German city’s exile art scene from a safe distance, yet the comparisons are unmissable. Pierre’s accent and appreciation for literature, marking him as foreign even as he plays a native Parisian, is a bite on most every expat scene in Berlin, where being a ‘true Berliner’ has become an exotic subjectivity.
By the time Maxwell Simmer arrives on stage to read, form has succeeded in dominating content. Edging towards parody, off-stage expressions of dramatic restlessness become more frequent and increasingly difficult to ignore. The audience’s refusal to quit performing seems to be met with a certain unwillingness by the readers to perform in kind. Lucy noisily rips pages from a book, Scott tyrannically fusses over a mirror ball. Bottles and glasses smash in domino-effect from the audience.
Reading the last piece from the very back of the stage is Goyette. Before her words reach the second row they’ve been swallowed by the milieu. Whether by design or fault or contingent inevitability, the mise en scène of New Theater is so convincing that anything occurring in its vicinity – unscripted interjections and accidents of smashing glass, a flower sculpture dropped under a chair – is easily absorbed into the drama of its collaborative performance. In another context, every detail could succeed as a stand-alone piece, in this space they acquiesce to the collaboration, forming a persuasively layered ambience; the audience included. At New Theater, just by being there you get the feeling that you are taking part in something, something that is happening. **
A board of blinding lights, the metronomic click of a beat-up CASIO taps against an elastic keyboard loop that stretches and contracts, expands and compresses, across the ebbing tide of space and time. A tiny bottle of Chanel No. 5 materialises, Steven Warwick gingerly squirting its contents on a convulsing audience at the Berghain in Berlin. This is one of several times I’ve seen, felt and absorbed a Heatsick performance but the perfume’s a first.
At the time, I thought it was just another addition to the multi-sensory experience that Warwick strives towards; a bodily transcendence founded on a powerful conceptual bearing. By now I’ve figured otherwise. Said ‘feminine fine fragrance’ reappears, again and again, as a bootlegged ‘climate change’ sweatshirt and the “clear chanel” of his RE-ENGINEERING artist statement, a manifesto of sorts accompanying what he calls the “11 blobs” of his upcoming vinyl release, out through PAN on November 26. “It’s the smell of modernity”.
Warwick is as much a musician as he is an artist and intellectual, the distinction as imperceptible as his life view is malleable. A Berlin-based performer steeped in a visual culture orbiting but not limited to the city, his first full-length as Heatsick is littered with references to the contemporary art discourse and theory that he disrupts, dissects and often parodies, in the same cyclical way that RE-ENGINEERING ends as it begins, if not in a distant, degraded form.
Fellow artist Hanne Lippard’s colourless, disembodied voice preens, over measured exhalations and a crisp melody evoking a dial tone, as she robotically engages in a disintegrating loop of references; speaking, quoting, sloganeering, “black power”, “gay Google”, “what we do is secret”, “labour in the bodily mode”, “second annual trend report”, over a rhythm that is less a groove than a forward lurch. Warwick’s manifesto’s “relentless interconnectivity” carries on, across ideas and ideologies, philosophers and philosophies, even past recordings and present tracks, surfacing and disappearing across its track listing.
“I’ve just really thought about these things, they’re such concerns,” says Warwick through Skype and on tour in Australia, about the ideas and aesthetics that he often explicitly explores, sometimes abuses, on RE-ENGINEERING, “That’s the thing with a lot of network theory and circulation. I’m really trying to link a lot of ideas, or map my own ontology, or even some kind of mode, and I’m trying to think about why I think that. Sometimes, if I see people referencing certain philosophers or schools of thought, and it’s just a bit of a quick joke, you feel a bit short-changed, and not in a particularly subversive way.”
Jesse Garciapurrs, disjointedly in ‘DIAL AGAIN’ emulating the stilted automated voice, deliberately, poorly, over swaggering toms, while Warwick’s voice comes through a far-off megaphone, beneath the noise of a field recording, repeating Lippard’s words (“Modern life is still rubbish, you say. Modern rubbish is still life”) from the beginning, now at the end, as it links into album-closer, ‘ACCELERATIONISTA’ –a circular motion of movement ending up where it began, but different.
“With RE-ENGINEERING,it’s playing around with treating it more like a manual. It’s like, ‘let’s look at these options and maybe you can reprogram yourself to try and get around this dissatisfaction’, or you could just also remould something,” Warwick tells me, following up an email listing ten artists he thinks are doing just that.
***
“Ed Lehan is known for his acerbic commentaries on participation and the public event. See his various shows where the opening will consist of a reconstruction of an empty charity box built by the artist, a case of beers, a barrel of mojito and the visitor(s). For the one at a gallery in Tallin [Error 404 at Temnikova & Kasela] he reconstructed an adizone that had been popping up in various parts of London for the Olympics.”
“In Loretta Fahrenholz’s film ‘Ditch Plains’, a street performance group contort in the early hours of a desolate area of East New York, various upscale hotel spaces and an apartment in Manhattan, post-Hurricane Sandy. It’s a strange post-apocalypse zombie HD afrofuturist hypercapitalistic ecological crisis; a networked virus of disconnect.”
“Georgie Nettell’s last show [2013 at Reena Spaulings]dealt with notions of recycling, circulation and eco branding. Local dirty dishes were picked up in restaurant bus trays and re-presented in the gallery, images found on the internet were downloaded, distressed and formatted onto raw linen canvases. Her musical group, Plug (with Sian Dorrer), also used a stock image as its cover, confusing the listener as to the public image of the group. “
Plug, Body Story (2011) album cover.
“Katja Novitskova uses images found on the internet such as wildlife and prints them out, mounting them in physical space and opening up the notions of documentation, preservation, ecology and materiality. The digital image is itself fuelled by carbon materials and minerals extracted from the earth. Species on the verge of extinction are fed back into image circulation and, in turn, play with the neuro-chemical recognition mechanisms in the viewer’s brain.”
Katja Novitskova, ‘Approximation III’ (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Paul Kindersley’s thebritisharecumming YouTube channel is best viewed left running during a morning after with genuinely bizarre makeup tutorials, presumably also made the morning after (perhaps a satire of the MT genre themselves) at once absurd, daft, unnerving, hilarious and engaging. Current fave: Babes (correct usage).”
“Gili Tal presented REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE [at LimaZulu]as a wall text superimposed by four gestural paintings, evoking haptic gestures and waiting room paintings. The text consisted of the “goriest parts of Marx’s Capital” (itself full of references to Dracula and Frankenstein), written in languages from post-Communist countries and presented with the deceptively friendly aesthetic of an Innocent smoothie, one visitor was heard to have described the show as “Muji Expressionism”.”
Gili Tal, REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE. Installation view (2013). Photo by Tom Carter.
“Sabine Reitmaier is a photographer and artist whose work blurs commercial and fine art contexts. Her show [Not comme les autres at Galerie Friedlaender] last year consisted of portraits of models staged in a similar method to how she would present them for the Psychologie Heute covers she also shoots for. In the exhibition, the large format photos confront us, provoking how we make neurological recognitions and associations, down to posing, body language or the coloured backgrounds that Reitmaier herself painted as per a photo shoot.”
Sabine Reitmaier, ‘PETIT POIS “CAVIAR VERT”‘(2012). Courtesy and @ Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin.
“Hanne Lippard‘s vocal register evokes the automated hold tone of a service centre phonecall and plays with pre-existing imagery found online. Her videos such as ‘Beige’ deploy wordplay and humour to comment upon the hyperreal mundanity of part time work, lifestyles and (non) space.”
“Sarah MacKillop‘s Ex Library Bookis itself an artist book consisting of fragments of obsolete library books –withdrawn from circulation and sold off at a discounted price onto a discarded heap –presented as a shiny glossy catalogue. Her other artist book, New Stationary Department, consists of various materials found at various stationers, be it neon marker pens or corrective materials such as Tipp-Ex, found in the commercial office, highlighting and reworking notions of editing, work and commercial presentation.”
Ex Library Book by Sara MacKillop. Published by Pork Salad Press (2012). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Rachel Reupkedeals with HD stock images in videos that, when stripped of its conversations, penetrate an eerie and uncanny atmosphere of social relationships and catalogue-like objects. The warm emotional bond of social relation deployed by advertising is stripped and the viewer is suddenly presented with a cold flat image.In ‘Containing Matters of No Peaceable Colour’ from 2009, the hard gaze confronts the viewer with a series of HD towels while an automated voice proceeds to obsessively list a lifestyle specification quota with the delivery of a Robbe-Grillet novel.” **
