Issue 1: Summer 2008
Live @ 8 (Galway)
Review Posted: 08 Jun 08
The high turnout for Live @ 8 made it resoundingly clear that Galway needs a free, monthly arts-centered night. It premiered on the night of Wednesday, April 30th, at Bar No. 8 on the Docks. Video, performances and installation featured on the programme organised by No-Wave film pioneer Vivienne Dick, performance artist Áine Phillips and curator Maeve Mulrennan.
In Sarah Pucill's stop-animation You Be Mother, images of eyes and lids are projected onto teapots and cups, which weep, attempt to speak, and commit mutiny. The cramped hallucinatory space is reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer's Alice, where the use of ‘innocent' domestic objects conveys deep meanings of power to quietly electrifying effect.
In Vivienne Dick's Staten Island, a silver-clad androgynous creature inhabits a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with heaps of inexplicable industrial rubbish. This world is post-culture, post-civilisation, even post-hope, where the solitary post-human sucks on an electric-blue Mr. Freeze pop, that quintessential post-food invention, with the grimy glamour and deeply melancholic manner of a Ziggy Stardust.
In Aideen Barry's Experiments in Splitting, three white-gowned women whip long black hair asynchronically on the edge of a cliff on Arann Mor while a turgid beat drums on. As evident from her other work, Barry is interested in the lone Gothic figure surrounded by a vast, impersonal natural space. That this figure has been split only amplifies the kind of rural solitude that could drive a person to madness.
In Different Shine, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling have fused a pulsating soundtrack to a flickering apartment intercom monitor. Colour becomes the protagonist, the beat its narrative; hypnotic fields of colour morph as time and space seems to collapse.
Tom Flanagan's piece Eye/Needle is equally as mesmerizing, albeit in a wholly uncomfortable way. An eye is confronted by the close proximity of a needlepoint, which is reflected in the eye. A throbbing soundtrack amplifies the tension. Flanagan calls on the viewers to be brave, as they oscillate between wanting to look and wanting to not look.
We can't help but look at Moira Tierney's American Dreams #3, which begins with scenes of a blue sky blotted by smoke. There is no commentary to let us know what has happened; we only know that something has happened. Images collect powerfully: people walking across a bridge; more smoke; a distant, vaguely familiar skyline; more smoke; warships converging, a green, miniscule Statue of Liberty in the background; and more smoke, ever unfurling from the city's ruined economic center. A rare hush falls as the audience becomes absorbed by these familiar images, now liberated from the relentless commentary that had accompanied them on 9/11. With echoes of YouTube, this film is an unexpectedly contemplative counterpoint to the perfectly framed (and cropped) representations of NYC in postcards and movies.
Viewer fatigue sets in by the end of an exhaustively multimedia night. The one criticism is that too many works are shown in a full house. The viewer is unable to give the attention needed. If it weren't for the pungent smell of compost lingering after Marton Rochford's physically demanding, surprisingly semi-erotic performance, it could have gone unnoticed. Videos on monitors set in different parts of the space are almost lost, obstructed unintentionally by a body or pillar. This is unfortunate. In Orla Clogher's eerie video Untitled, a ghostly white female body floats over a body of water, her face completely submerged, as she seems to struggle with or enter the water. Aoife Cassidy's video, El Preso, shows a hand performing to Joan Baez's version of an emotive Spanish song, to beautifully comic effect.
One of the most striking elements of the event was a live performance by Anna McLaughlin. Without introduction, a young woman starts to dance, back to audience and IPod in hand, before a full-length mirror propped next to the big screen. She dances for an hour, sometimes singing, sometimes with eyes closed, bra straps falling down in abandon; she is the typical teenager, or amateur dancer, perhaps both. Enthusiasm is the force that drives her, so that no one-not even the disinterested girl who walks between her and the mirror-can interrupt this almost meditative act. As with dancing, art is not just for the experts. Live @ 8 doesn't just include established professionals but an intriguingly diverse range of people, and was met with a standing room-only crowd.
- Phillina Sun