Beauties of the Night

For the final exhibition at artist run exhibition space Flaca, which included work by Nora Schultz, Alex Heim, Sophie von Hellerman, Kalin Linden, Michael Hakimi and Rochelle Fry, Austrian band beauties of the Night played an energetic set from the cramped space of the archway under the pavement. Their name is taken from the French 1952 film Les Belle de Nuit, about a young music teachers' thrwarted attempts to compose a masterpiece as he is constantly irritated by the noise his neighbours make, but who ultimately seeks happy refuge in his elaborate dreamic fantasies. Beauties of the Night aim create an intense and noisy embracing of the audience, more and less visible at turns through the illuminating slides that light them sporadically during their performance, they are definately heard by their neighbours.

Berlin Biennial

Transmissions captured three independent highlights from the opening weekend of events in and around the 4th Berlin Biennial. Paul McCarthy's 1992 'Bang Bang Room' -a brilliantly pared down haunted house style stage set-in-motion- was reinstalled in the Jewish School for Girl's as part of one of the major presentation on Auguststrasse for this year's Biennnial, 'Of Mice and Men'.

Away from the Biennial but attracting its crowds Galerie Giti Nourbaskhsch presented Cezary Bodzianowski, a Polish-based artist whose very idiosyncratic performative work has been described as "insouciant flanerie", which "recalls the chess career of Marcel Duchamp, or Arthur Cravan’s forays into boxing". On this occasion the artist was found standing stock still on the road opposite the gallery holding a bunch of bananas whilst a large crowd stood in the gallery waiting for an event, many of whom remained unaware of the small action outside.

Occupying its own historic position next to the Volksbuhne -one of the main east Berlin early 20th Century theatres- is Galerie Meerrettich run by artist Josef Strau. Housed in a small pavilion set next to the concert hall in a space that was once its ticket hall the exhibition programme is produced within the special conditions of the building as object, with its special architectural limitations. An intruiging mise-en-scene of beautiful two-dimensional painted characters was on show, entitled 'Jigsaw (jeu de societe) by artists Lucile Desamory, Lucy Mckenzie and Birgit Megerle.

Carl Hopgood

Carl Hopgood was the latest artist to exhibit in The George & Dragon's White Cubicle gallery -brainchild of energetic gallerist, curator and magazine publisher Pablo Leon De La Barra- in which the confines of a small tatty loo actually represent a kind of freedom to present anything. Hopgood plastered the cubicle with 'Hustler Freeze': many tiny pictures of men advertising themselves for sex as published in gay magazines. Hopgood also treated us to his own live huster dance performaance as he took to a makeshift podium and danced a buffed-up gyration to Omaha's anthemic "You came into my life".

cheapcream

cheapcream is a guest-edited series of video clips captured and collated by artist assume vivid astro focus. It is made up of short pieces of footage shot at a variety of performances in many venues worldwide over the last year or so. Each captured by assume vivid astro focus, the footage covers drag acts, artists' performances in galleries, bands playing events and documentation of some of his own work. assume vivid astro focus -avaf for short- is an artist moniker that is used in the spirit of an inclusive, often collaborative, artistic practice. avaf operates as part of the legacy of artists such as Canadian collective General Idea who have consistently worked accross a variety of media to communicate political ideas about queer identity and politics. avaf also acknowledges the precedence of an artist such as the late Felix Gonzalez Torres, an influential artist who invited participation from his audience through simple gestures such as sculptures made out of sweets that were there to be taken away. cheapcream comprises a selection of avaf's ever-growing personal film archive, presented as a resource that is there to be shared. As part of his larger practice and part of a research process -a distinction avaf doesn't make- it is an enthusiatic sharing of what he considers public material. The clips are an ongoing record of others' performances, and the series offers insight into the world of an avid observer and collector of such. cheapcream also represents access into the ideas that inform or might become assumed by such a practice as avafs, and an invitation to be engaged in this ongoing work in progress.

All film by and courtesy of the artist: assume vivid astro focus 
Editorial Direction and Text: Christabel Stewart 
Editorial assistance: Jenny Campbell-Colquhoun 
avaf thanks: Carla Machado, Christophe Hamaide Pierson, John Connelly Presents, Peres Projects, Bec Stupak 
SHOWstudio thanks: avaf, The Britannia

Derek Jarman

An event that brings together again a historic collaboration between industrial music group Throbbing Gristle and the work of the late film-maker Derek Jarman. Their original collaborations happened in 1980 on Jarmans ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’, and on ‘TG Psychic Rally in Heaven’. Throbbing Gristle have performed relatively rarely in the last decade, and their live respond to this selection of super eight films is a one-off. The screening includes Jarman’s ‘Studio Bankside’, 1970, a poetic journey through his own studio, showing characters who frequented it, and providing a snapshot of the artistic social scene in the pre-punk era in the urban surroundings of a pre-development Bankside. Throbbing Gristle -Chris Carter, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson- formed in London in 1975. An experimental British band who “sought to explore and expose the limits, and limitations, of popular music”. They pioneered the use of pre-recorded samples, “the banal sounds of English suburban living”, and made extensive use of effects, “the junk sounds of everyday life”. Renowned for their confrontational live performances, they were famously labelled ‘Wreckers of Civilisation’ by a Tory MP in 1976.

Ei Arakawa

'Keep Passing the Open Windows or Happiness' is curated by Anke Kempke's, a former colleague of Gisela Capitain and now running her own space in New York: Broadway 1602, presented on the occasion of the opening of Capitain's new space in Cologne. New York-based artist Ei Arakawa performed one of his 'choreographed actions' on the opening night, entitled 'Eurovision 2006 as Reconstructed Mode', it continues his interests from the previously featured 'Toward A Standard Risk Architecture', that he performed over four days last March at Reena Spaulings in New York. Performing with Mari Mukai and five other participants from Cologne the participants pass building materials through the gallery windows, constructing and deconstructing a make-shift stage to a thirty-minute compilation of Eurovision songs - all 38 songs from this year's Eurovision 2006 in Athens. The songs had been cut in length (traditionally three-minutes long) into less than 1 min each, and some abstruct sound added. During 38 minutes of song, played in alphabetical order according to country name, (so, U.K was last) they built, unbuilt and reconstructed the stage set, itself based on this years Greek stage designer set, leaving a lasting installation out of the materials and debris.

Enrico David

'Transmissions' was keen to inveigle a camera into the intimate, concealed atmosphere of theatre backstage preparations to witness the gauche mechanics of a monumental sculpture by Enrico David being brought very subtly to motion. The movements of the giant figurative sculpture, elegantly titled 'Mantwat' were conjured to dramatise its encounter with Modernist dance legend Merce Cunningham's 'collage choreography', later that afternoon. The invitation to exhibit this sculpture in such a performative exchange came under the mantle of a short, curated series of dances in front of that and five other contemporary art works, cumulatively entitled 'Event'. Merce Cunningham has applied this title and term since the early 1960s to describe working choreographically within 'unusual performance situations'. Cunningham is of course renowned for his lifetime of inimitable artistic collaborations: Martha Graham, John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, number a few of the American artistic Avant Garde that form a key part of his reputation as a Modernist legend. To receive an invitation to join such a distinguished collaborative roster during Cunningham's 86th year must resonate.

Cunningham claims not to work directly in response to any stage decor, but rather to create a dynamic whereby dance and sculpture, each conceived of and created separately, are allowed to serendipitously connect. Partly given this independent scenario of performer and prop, partly my own fascination with imagining the brilliant peculiarity of Enrico's practice brought to clumsy life, but also because of the fact of a fiercely unionised situation that is necessary for the dancers to protect their creative livelihood, 'Transmissions' focuses very much on 'Mantwat', and its encounter with the cavernous Barbican theatre space. This moment itself has a proximity to performance. Enrico has been making work that forms an astute, complex and compellingly individual aesthetic constructed from contemporary and historical sources outside of purely fine art sources, and the puppet phase of 'Mantwat' seems confidently to continue that. Commissioned originally as the distinctive sculptural presence for the vast art wall at Sadler's Wells in London in 2004, the plywood sculpture has embraced and teased its politely cultural environments, poking three-dimensional genitalia and tongue at its onlookers. It achieved four distinct positions for the dancers and audience of 'Event'.

Film: Karim Rabik

• Sculpture: Enrico David 'Mantwat', Plywood, pencil and wood stain, 2004, Courtesy Cabinet, London
• Performance: Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 'Event' curated by Griselda Yorke for BITE '05 at the Barbican, London, June 2005
• Film Edit: Salwa Azar
• Thanks: Mads Perch-Nielson, Ariella Yedgar, Mark Sladen and Angela Dias at the Barbican

Gustav Metzger

"Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which individuals and masses are subjected...Auto-destructive art mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture - polishing to destruction point."

In 1961 on the South Bank in London Gustav Metzger -wearing a gas mask and protective clothing- painted hydrochloric acid stroke by stroke onto nylon canvasses causing their rapid but beautifully aesthetic disintegration. The action was conceived of as a demonstration of an artwork that is simultaneously created and destroyed. This he referred to as Auto-Destructive Art, a concept that has been the cornerstone of his practice for decades. Metzger's is work that consciously resists commodification by the art market, being public, performative, temporary and critical. "Self-destruction was built into the art as the mirror of a system careering towards annihilation [...] and as a desperate last-minute subversive political weapon...an attack on the capitalist system...(an attack also on art dealers and collectors who manipulate modern art for profit.)" On October 14th he recreated the action, 45 years after the original had taken place, recapitulating his demostration against the continuance of war, capitalism and the commodification of art.

Martin Creed

A selection of new work from Martin Creed opened at the large east end space of Swiss gallery Hauser and Wirth this month. Creed is a recognisable name for the adding to the British media's age old consternation at how major British art institutions can support meaningless ordinariness such as rows of bricks and -this must surely be the Emperor’s New Clothes to cap them all- Creed's Turner Prize winning 'The Lights Going an and Off', an installation that did exactly that. In developing from this audacious, rather tongue in cheek minimalism Creed has chosen to make a number of discreet works, each conceived in rather a monumental way: a pile of cut wood, a giant girder, a very slow-motion, aestheticised film of sexual penetration, an incongruous painting of a smiling woman, and for the opening night only a literal 'slice' of an orchestra, which played with the light on and the lights off.

Kunsthalle Bar, Basel (with stills from Gavin Brown's kitchen, New York) Saturday 16th July, 2005

Pil & Galia Kollectiv

The Israeli artist duo who refer to themselves as the Pil and Galia Kollectiv, in particularly reverential Modernist mood, presented 'Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet' on stage at the Conway Hall Humanist Centre, in Holborn last week, in collaboration with musicians Les Georges Leningrad. Well attended, the programme was a three act, asparagus costumed dance that moved methodically through a series of moves for different numbers of the vegetable cast. The programme makes claim to the ballets basis on 'Marx's Das Capital (as Lali Chetwynd did recently in her vegatable performances - something in the zeitgeist?). Make sense of this how you will with some parts following of the different acts presented below.

Lali Chetwynd

Lali Chetwynd has staged her theatrical performance in two locations recently - at Tate Britain as part of the Triennial Live Works, and again in Berlin at Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch.

Peter Saville

'Estate' was a major solo exhibition by Peter Saville at the internationally renowned Swiss Migros Museum in Zurich. A film shown here in four chapters captures the exhibition itself, and Saville discussing aspects of the installation and background with film-maker Marcus Werner Hed, who captured and directed the dual aspects of the split screen footage.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

This collection of short, looped video clips documents Rirkrit Tirivanija's recent Serpentine Gallery exhibition 'A Retrospective (tomorrow is another day)' which ran from 5 July - 21 August, 2005. The videos are personal views of the exhibition as a project by the artist Paul, Marc & Raymond, who captured footage within the installation during the final weekend of the show. In observing the audience and gallery staff within Tirivanija's exhibition -an environment deliberately created to instigate participation on the part of its viewers- Paul, Marc & Raymond captured various elements of the realities of audience involvement, having access to the exhibition as any visitor would.

Visitors were invited to intervene in the installation but without specific instruction. A physical structure was created by Tirivanija that used the footprint of his own apartment in New York as the basis for a plywood recreation of its spaces. This was made twice over in a mirror version and in the centre a radio broadcasting studio was built. The catalogue for the exhibition talks about a curatorial desire to restage previous Tirivanija works in a manner "akin to theatrical performances or musical scores", and this was probably most specifically encapsulated in the daily radio play that was broadcast from this booth (on Resonance FM). This was a fictional work written by Tirivanija and his collaborators that interwove stories about previous participatory works Tirivanija had made. Gallery visitors were invited to participate in this by playing parts from the script. Paul, marc & Raymond's observations are of more prosaic events: a woman writing a joke on the wall, pictures and commentary that had been pinned up, invigilators and visitors alike cooking in the two kitchens, a regular visitor sleeping in the beds, and Saturday afternoon sport broadcasting on the televisions. It does not include footage of the audience engaged in scripted role-play, but focuses on their engagement with other aspects of the 'stage' set by Tirivanija, and is presented as set of curious exploratory encounters.

Roger Hiorns

Less a performance than a 'happening' where objects and situations were set up by the artist and some responses were choreographed as well as just occuring. In the main artist studio space a giant and very bright light bulb forms an orb-like centre piece that the audience is warned not to over look at. In another part of the building there is a lift, where a man guards a book of sheet music that is lying on the floor. Downstairs in the cafe a woman emerges from behind the curtain, to no great fanfare. Hiorns evening is a made up of a series of unexpected actions and semi-hidden goings on that subtley destabilise an apparently ordinary gallery situation.

Rodney Graham

Rodney Graham, a Canadian-born (and based) artist, has built a diverse body of work that has earned him enormous recognition as a leading practitioner of his generation. Associated with the so-called Vancouver School that includes Ken Lum, Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall, each renowned collectively for distinctive practices based on photography. Rodney Graham has long held a dual interest in music and visual practice. In the 1970s he was part of the Vancouver's punk new wave performing with UJ3RK5 ("you jerks", with Wall), then with the band Volumizer, and solo as a singer-songwriter. His discography and play-list equal an extensive list of international group and solo exhibitions he has participated in. Graham's points of reference range from the philosophical to the musical, tangents which coalesce in a body of work that is intellectual, absurd, and entertaining.

Stephen Willats

'Multiple Clothing' presented a selection of clothing-based works by British artist Stephen Willats' that spanned 40 years of practice.

Willats began his project 'Multiple Clothing' in 1965 as a strategy to engage directly with the fabric of society, exploring clothing as a very basic externalising of the self. Made up as kits, the clothing designs were created out of many small units that zipped (or later Velcroed) together in various formations to make multiple garment types - including simple shift dresses and jackets.

The Dimes of March

An exhibition at New York's art collective-run space Reena Spaulings includes works by Patterson Beckwith, Lizzi Bougatsos, CUP, Kim Gordon, Jutta Koether, Seth Price, Josephine Pryde, Josh Smith & Christopher Wool, Agathe Snow and Lee Williams also featured four days of live performance by Ei Arakawa entitled 'Toward A Standard Risk Architecture', it ran from March 9-12. A selection of video-phone clips captured in the late afternoon of Saturday March 11 show how Arakawa presented a complete transformation of the gallery by way of a team of female renovators painting walls, laying carpets and fixing the place up. This continuous work in progess was augmented by a lone dancer who provided a focal point for the activity, moving and falling around to the music of Seth Price. The gallery organisers themselves appeared to be re-hanging the works around the renovations, whilst various audience members sat or walked around deciphering the activity.

The Thing-In-Itself

At Peles Empire, an artist run outfit that stages occasional exhibitions and events, Mark Leckey was invited to curate a project. He invited one-time students of his JD Williams and Andy Holden who made sculptures and wall work, as well as a live outdoor work which happened in a nearby basketball court. It involved a car, car radio and a sculpture in a face-off (without a specific climactic moment). This was shown in the busy, convivial space of Peles alongside Leckey's own giant Incredible Hulk 3-D cut out and Duck animation video set in nearby Old Street tube station. The footage is rather murky, but the 'thingness' of the sharply lit pseudo (temporary) public sculpture was in keeping with the introductory text about bulk and mass and corporeality.

Whitstable Biennale

The Whitstable Biennale is a festival of contemporary visual art held in a seaside town that has become an increasingly popular place for artists and curators to relocate to. The Biennial, officially, wants to recognise and celebrate this developing community. This year there is a focus on performance. Launched here in section -performer by performer- the first to be introduced is Nathan Penlington's 'Speed Cabaret': timed table-based performances presented in a manner that takes its measure from speed dating, as the performer spends a short time with you at your table - the beachside tables at The Old Neptune Pub. First of these is comedian Simon Munnery, doing his routine in 10 minutes and in close proximity to his audience. Second on the dating circuit is Victor Mount, who rails against talent as the enemy of creativity, and finally Suzanne Andrade who brings poetry and a miniature theatre to the table. Edwina Ashton and Matt Rudkin filmed their performative enterprises in and around Whitstable, and named it "Beauty Spot". The footage takes place in local shops, bars and the beach in Whitstable, and presents little tableaus of anthropomorphic activity.

Credits

• Editorial Direction and text: Christabel Stewart 
• Editorial Assistance and Image Capture: Jenny Campbell-Colquhoun 
• Thanks: Matt Rudkin, Edwina Ashton, Nathan Penlington, Sally O'Reilly