late night live art at kraak 3

Thursday night was the final in the current series of Late Night Live Art at Kraak. This has been a really interesting set of events and there will be more in 2010. The attendance was less than last week but there were still around ten people. Some of the advertised performers weren't able to be there but with three performances and an installation the night was still pretty full. The majority of pieces also used techniques that hadn't been seen at the previous events. A thematic unity emerged through some of the pieces with ideas of memory and erasure and transformation of the everyday.

The first performance and most easily overlooked lasted through the evening. David Hancock partially erased headlines from the days newspapers and the stuck them to the wall. He was in a corner close to the entrance separate from the main space. Performatively I was struck by several elements of David's work. The most obvious aspect was the rocking of the table as he erased the headlines. This was also punctuated by brushing crumbs of eraser off the paper and table. Then there were the occasional sounds of sellotape when a headline was stuck up. More visually his concentration and neat arrangement of his small table, with stack of newspapers on one side and pencils or charcoals and large number of erasers on the other side. There was also a small collection of screwed up bits of paper cut from round each headline on the floor. The faint but still readable headlines with sections of story and photos also partially erased were stuck on a wall to David's right. Whether accidentally or intentionally there was something of the filmic office - especially newspaper office - in the visual arrangement of desk and headlines. Perhaps encouraged by the way the space looks.

For me the performance had inevitable echoes of the only other performance of David's I'd seen with Yingmei Duan at Chinese Arts Centre. Whether erasure is normally a part of David's aesthetic I don't know, but it featured in both the performances. But whereas in Dreams he first created the images and then partially erased them in echo of the way dreams fade when we wake, in this piece the images were already existing. For many of the audience they were headlines we'd seen throughout the day even if we hadn't bought the papers. The focus on transience and erasure here was different, potentially more political. Although if we take Yingmei's dreams at face value there were still decisions made about what dreams to feature, how to tell them, and which images to pull out, the decisions here were very different. Decisions are made about what's newsworthy, what prominence it should be given, how it should be covered - the tone, the headline that should be provided etc. News is also prone to amnesia - what's important today can be forgotten tomorrow, positions on particular stories can change from day to day. In a sense the headlines erase themselves day by day while remaining much the same. But sometimes they can be contentious - I believe the Sun's recent celebration of its own headlines finds no room for the still offensive response to the Hillsborough disaster.

In a sense David was engaged in simultaneously reviving and erasing headlines that were already dying. The recognition and amusement derived from recognition of headlines previously seen and almost forgotten made the distance from them seem even greater. This was a piece hard to find anything so simple as a single meaning or obvious reference points in but which was still memorable.

Louise Woodcock's installation in the larger of the spaces attached to the main space was haunting in a different and much more disquieting way. The components were every bit as simple as David's and on the face of it not disturbing in themselves. A large crocheted 'biomorphic form' hung in one part of the room while a tape played. The large form which might have been an internal organ or placenta with long trailing umbilicus was clearly crocheted and oversize, but looked entirely plausible as a biomorphic form. It hung from a meat hook attached to a chain slung over the metal sprinkler system creating a real Silent Hill/Jacob's Ladder atmosphere by very simple means. This was reinforced by the tape which played a loop of a baby making sounds but pitchshifted down significantly. Since the sound was sometimes quiet and sometimes loud and since there was a lot of silence it was not something you could easily get used to.

As Lou said it was probably something best experienced in small groups. I suspect also that the piece is something experienced differently by women than by men. Women's bodies have traditionally been, and remain, a contentious personal, political and religious battleground. They have been the site of fear for men, especially where they have chosen to encode notions of morality and control in the body, specifically the reproductive body. Culturally it seems as if a woman's body is still not seen as hers and as if any decision she makes about it is seen as having a moral and political import. Add this to the physical changes women undertake at puberty - far greater than those experienced by men - and the fact that it's women who undergo childbirth - then the near body-horror of Lou's piece has a far greater individual and personal significance for women.

Then there is the double effect of the skill required to create what is in fact a quite beautiful object but which is then presented in a disturbing way. And the curious loneliness of the piece isolated in a large white room with periodic mournful cries emerging. Thematically it doesn't seem that far removed from Lou's previous performance eating words. And both I think are pieces that could easily be repeated in other spaces. It is however really an installation that you need to experience rather than read about or even look at photos of.

Graham Dunning and Gary Fisher collaborated on an improvised sound piece. Graham mainly used decks with modified records - different records stuck together, records with tape across, 'records' apparently made from unconventional materials. Gary used mainly tapes, tape loops and amplified objects with delay pedal. Once again and even more than previously it was sometimes hard to differentiate between who was creating which sound. Sometimes it was obvious, the rhythmic thunk of needle passing over tape on a record, or the delayed sounds of a cymbal with contact mic attached being stuck.

Gary seemed to be a little more prominent than he has in some of the previous performances I've seen, while Graham was more obviously engaging in performance than I'd noticed before at similar events. Again it wasn't wholly serious with some funny moments such as when even Gary seemed surprised by a sound on tape that sounded like Chewbacca. Another was closer to the end when Graham added tape to a record already playing, initially causing it slow down and then catching the needle on the tape.

Graham's practice in these collaborations does - as I've probably noted before - seem to be about the materiality of sound reproduction. The techniques used and how they can be subverted or used in other ways. For instance he dropped marbles one by one onto a record at intervals until the were sometimes pushing the playing arm out of the way and once or twice forced it upward to pass underneath. Gary's practice is similar but with less emphasis on the methods of reproduction and more on sounds of objects not normally used for music. Their collaborations exist in an interesting space where sound art, music and performance join together.

Finally Helen Shanahan (with minimal sound accompaniment from Gary on amplified Kalimba) did a live performance with a film of Dungeness. The film was projected from the front onto a suspended sheet. Behind the sheet Helen then painted over the image with ink.

There were several interesting aspects to this. First and most obviously the lines only bled through slowly. So you could see from a disturbance of the sheet where marks were being made but not the marks themselves. Then the line would become faintly visible almost more like a flaw in the film than a mark on the sheet. But it would gradually darken and start to obscure the projected image.

As the lines appeared and increased I found myself doing two things simultaneously. At once attempting to watch the film and ignore the intrusion into the image while also seeing whether the lines could be resolved into some kind of image of their own. But after a while that became unsustainable and the lines and film had similar weight and began to interact in different ways. The lines almost formed a cage inside which the film happened. But more strikingly they obscured so much of the image that it wasn't possible to look at the smaller details. Instead you began to focus on the composition of the images, which then drew attention to the edits. And the further the performance progressed the more the ink lines began to coincide with outlines in the film. It was almost as if the two elements had began to co-ordinate. And this in a sense almost contradicted the general import of the performance.

The film records a home and a place that after generations of family presence will soon be sold. The film is a way of holding on to some part of that, of concretising memory, and the performance enacted the loss and erasure of place and family ties. The shift from belonging to being an inadvertent tourist. Having already seen the film this performance heightened the parallels with Ivan Civic's Return to Sarajevo... after ten years... which I saw at Marina Abramovic Presents in the Whitworth Gallery during the summer. In that piece Civic reinserted himself in footage shot on returning to Sarajevo after ten years away by climbing with a projection of the film. Helen's performance was poignant in a different way but equally affecting.

If Helen repeats the performance or shows the film in another form I'll let you know, it's very much recommended.

And that, unfortunately is that for the time being. More in 2010. Be there or suffer the potential future opprobrium of your grandchildren.