Roundtable on Live Art (part 2)

Awright troops. We got The Mondays on Spotify and we are ready for rahnd two. Let's talk art!

I'd like to get a little deeper into the overall feel of Into the New. This annual event is pitched... well, who do you think the intended audience is?

Lovers of experimental art, innit?

I disagree; this is a degree show, of sorts. The actual audience will consist of fellow students, friends and families. The audience are only there to provide a sounding board for the artists.

This is a work in progress type affair?

After a fashion: but even more than a WIP, Into the New is for the benefit of the performers more than the audience. That might explain why one of the pieces we saw was a big in-joke about the CPP and the RCS.

That was farkin shite.

Either that, or we ought to congratulate the artist on knowing his audience so well. He was playing to the crowd, who got the joke. 


That mentality is wat causes problems for Live Art all ova. It's self-congratulatory, self-indulgent.

Perhaps we could more generously assume that the artist in question is displaying a sensitivity to the audience...

You sed. But if is jokes had bin funny..

Moving past this... we have mentioned the nudity, but did anything else crop up for you, in terms of themes.

I didn't get past the jubblies.

But feminism came up a few times...

Mainly in the durational piece... it felt a little obvious to me.

Let's remember that this is a student work; obvious is going to happen. If I remember, the piece had two elements. The preparation and the catwalk. The preparation was all about the 'creation' of femininity, the catwalk about its performance.

I think it did its job, but there's little to add. I have that same problem I always have with CPP 'feminist' performance.

That it reads like a response to Judith Butler?

More than it seems pretty old fashioned to juxtapose make-up and the body as twin signifiers of the female and its exploitation. It's all a fiction, I know, I know. I am pleased to see the ideas being rediscovered, but I would like something that speaks to 2015, not 1978. 

Yer jus gettin old.