slightlymoving

went to sydney on the weekend to see the final show of the luminous festival, which was curated by Brian Eno.

as a finale to the festival he had brought together a bunch of extremely talented, highly respected and innovative musicians; Karl Hyde, Leo Abrahams, Jon Hopkins and The Necks. they also had Toby Vogel doing some projected visuals. oh, and Eno himself performing - first time in Australia apparently.

they were performing three concerts in a row and were slated as being improvised. i would have loved to see all three to really get a sense of what they were doing. and it fits in with the impression, comparison, perspective ideas on performance improvisation that jacob and i have discussed. simply put, experiencing improvised work three times gives you a chance to triangulate and develop your understanding of what those particular artists are doing (in terms of performance at least). the first performance only gives you an impression of what they do, seeing a second allows you to have a comparison, a third time gives you perspective. unfortunately, i could only really afford one show, so my experience is limited to the first show.

the concert hall at the sydney opera house was almost full. probably about 2,000 people there for the first concert I’d say. Karl has put up some photos of the stage on the Underworld blog, which will give you an idea of what it looked like. he seems very pleased to have been involved. we were sitting in the second row, very close to the main speakers - which initially worried me but the mix was excellent and not too loud at all. the audience seemed weighted towards people older than 45 or so, with a smattering of kids and a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings. i imagine Eno himself would be the main draw card and given his longevity in the music industry there would be a wide range of ages interested in his work.

so… the work.

i can only really comment on the first concert, which was a continuous one and half hours of minimalist, ambient, soundscapes and songs, with grooves and rhythms providing anchors to the interactions of electronic and acoustic instrumentation. they also played a short encore as well, almost pop really.

at the bottom of this post there are links to some reviews that describe the work, so i’m not going to do that. what i thought a lot about though (as i often do) was the process. according to Karl they’d had two days together to devise the work. at the end of the set Brian suggested that they were songs by saying something along the lines of “i bet you weren’t expecting us to play songs. you thought we were just making it up.” and there were clear indicators of scoring used to define the different sections of the work. Brian would write things on scraps of paper as instructions to the musicians, as well as providing cues through gestures and visual contact. so essentially it was a structured improvisation with Brian as the band leader. sometimes the audience was shown the instructions via projection, and sometimes not.

there’s a nice quote from eddie in a blog post about the event:

When I closed my eyes I experienced — more than listened to — the sounds; it became less about being an audience member and more about participating in the event.

this encapsulates the idea that in an improvisation there is such a vital link to audience - of course it exists in all performance, but i like how eddie has exposed it in this instance.

if you’re keen to read more, there’s an ad-hoc review from a punter, and a review in the australian newspaper.

there are some videos of the event on youtube as well.

my mum and dad took me to Greg Taylor’s latest exhibition in melbourne yesterday. (makes me sound like a teenager doesn’t it?)

it’s called cunts (and i can only imagine what that’s going to do to my ranking on search engines).

and it’s quite beautiful. greg has sculpted 100 or so life-size cunts, which he had models sit (quite literally i imagine) for and has set them in porcelain. they were hung in a line around the wall of one of the gallery spaces at the meat market in north melbourne. each one is held using a plate holder, so there are 4 little claws creeping over the edges of the sculptures, which i found a little creepy - their disembodiement adding to that effect. from the opposite side of the room they somehow reminded me of the vertebrae of some large animal.

up close each cunt is unique in it’s form and detail. all very realistically sculpted and none cast (although the detail makes some of them look like casts).

what is great about the exhibition is the extent of normal that is portrayed. in an interview greg mentions that about a third of the models had never looked at their own cunts, which was an indicator of the discomfort society has with female genitalia.

a paper by helen o’connell et al in the journal of urology oct 2005 discusses (in part) the obliteration and repression of anatomical knowledge and detail of female genital anatomy. the paper anatomy of the clitoris seeks to redefine the anatomical basis for the clitoris and also examines the historical constructs that have meant the information presented to medical students today is both inadequate and inaccurate. it’s a good read - and i hope to see it’s findings implemented (although a quick pubmed trawl shows it has only been referenced half a dozen times since it’s publication) in clinical and academic practice. for another really good read on the hard work done by feminists in the 1970s that the medical world has finally caught up on is a book by Rebecca Chaulker called The Clitoral Truth. i highly recommend it for men and women.

just an aside. last year, we were given a lecture on male sexual function with no corresponding lecture on female sexual function. repressed or what?

pictures to follow.