BIZARRE ART
By Helen Busheby
IN
ENGLAND, THE BRITS DISPLAY A TOILET SEAT IN THEIR MUSEUMS AS AN ART
MASTERPIECE!!
THE ENGLISH ARE BIZARRE THIS YEAR!!!!
From Saatchi offensive art
exhibitions to displaying a toilet as “PUBLIC ART”!!
Photo: Sir Anthony Hopkins
directs a play about Dylan Thomas.
The venues were revealed on Thursday as the
event's organisers unveiled some of the highlights of the 57th annual Fringe,
one of the biggest arts festivals in Europe. The festival included more venues
than before - more than 200 - and this is in spite of three of its
long-running sites being damaged by fire in December. The Fringe runs
alongside a number of other separate arts and entertainment festivals in the
Scottish capital and is known for showcasing an eclectic range of innovative
productions. Fringe director, Paul Gudgin, said: "At the end of last year, we
were faced with one of the most serious problems in our organisation's recent
history, as images and reports of a city consumed by fire were appearing
across the world.
"I
am extremely grateful to the Edinburgh community for continuing to prove
itself as the perfect host, providing a record number of spaces to present our
world-famous programme." This year one of the more bizarre venues will be a
man-made waterfall where dance group Materiali Resistenti will perform under
16,000 litres of water in the city's Old College Quad. Theatre group Semper
Fi's show will be in a public toilet behind Edinburgh's St James Centre.
Comedian Alfie Joey will entertain four people in his car each day - one in
the front seat and three in the back. The festival's more traditional
highlights will include Sir Anthony Hopkins' direction of the play Dylan
Thomas - Return Journey. Kelly Osbourne, the daughter of Black Sabbath singer
Ozzy, will also be on the bill. Other familiar faces making a festival
appearance include comic Jo Brand, who will be taking an acting role in the
new drama Mental. Comic Rhona Cameron and magician Paul Daniels appeared too.p
Photo: A public toilet hosts one of this year's shows.
Porn and
Perspex at the Turner Prize The
Turner Prize is back again to baffle, bemuse and bewilder with its annual
line-up of unusual artworks. This year's selection includes sculpture,
painting, film and photography - something for everyone you might think - but
it is still difficult to know what exactly to make of them. On first impact,
the artworks appear odd and somewhat inaccessible. It is not until you see a
short film about each artist, including interviews about their work, that it
starts to make any real sense. Fiona Banner's exhibition is perhaps the most
startling, and will no doubt win in the headline-hitting stakes because of its
sexually explicit nature. The artist's premise is that language has inherent
limitations.
Photo:
Fiona Banner's Arsewoman in Wonderland is a graphic description of a porn
film, while her show is "punctuated" by giant, gleaming full stops.
By
describing subject matter that draws and repels her, she feels she is able to
explore its boundaries. Having already explored the violence of the Vietnam
War in her previous work - 1997's The Nam - she is now looking head-on at sex.
Visitors to her exhibition are greeted by a huge white billboard, called
Arsewoman in Wonderland, covered in fluorescent pink words which detail every
move and squelch from a pornographic film. It is impossible to read the whole
thing, but you get the idea fairly quickly. As you scan the words, the obscene
ones jump out at you with alarming regularity. By inviting you to stand in a
room full of strangers and read pornography, Banner certainly knows how to
make you feel
disconcerted, which
presumably is the idea. The room of her works is also broken up by giant
sculptures of full stops which "punctuate the space", as she puts it, and if
nothing else they provide light relief from her uncomfortable Wordscapes.
Catherine Yass's work in the adjoining room is much easier on the eye, and
altogether more enjoyable to explore. She uses photography and film to look at
flying and the fact that many of us have, at some time in our lives, had the
urge to be able to fly. Her works include a bizarrely fascinating film called
Descent, shot upside-down from a crane being lowered on a foggy day at Canary
Wharf, east London. Another of her works, called Flight, was commissioned by
the BBC and filmed around London's Broadcasting House from a tiny helicopter
with a camera attached. It flies and spins, giving the sensation of
precariously hovering around London's rooftops. An entire ceiling is devoted
to the work of Liam Gillick, who believes that "visual environments change
behaviours and the way people act". While this view is hardly groundbreaking,
his work is nonetheless attractive and easy on the eye.His
artwork of colourful Perspex acts rather like a stained-glass window, with
daylight filtering through it onto the faces of the people below. The room
also contains muted sketches of some of his designs, including one
commissioned for a beach towel. His works are perhaps the least
thought-provoking of the exhibition, but by trying to "address the
unaddressable" his work is open to any interpretation. The last shortlisted
artist, Keith Tyson, has produced a large body of work, which includes
sculptures and a wall covered with paintings. He is keen to explore the
"perplexing questions underpinning human existence" and one of his sculptures
attempts this. It is a huge, black solid-looking block - called The Thinker
After Rodin, and is not unlike the giant black monolith which appears in
Stanley Kubrick's ground-breaking film 2001: Space Odyssey.
It
contains a bank of unseen computers, whose presence is made known only by the
sound of a fan keeping them cool and a tiny red, flashing light on the
sculpture. This depiction of "thought" is interesting, but again needs some
explaining before you can get a handle on what his work is about. His other
works include two paintings called Bubble Chambers, two identical-looking
paintings of a colourful molecular structure, with each featuring different
events taking place in a sort of parallel universe. Overall, the exhibition is
worth visiting, if only to see what is considered to be at the forefront of
British contemporary art. It is certainly a more interesting exhibition than
the one put on last year. Whether it will be an enjoyable experience is
another matter, but then it wouldn't be the Turner Prize without a bit of
controversy.