Kim Coleman
& Jenny Hogarth
An Infusion of the Evening Air
What's Happening, Man? Another ICA Re-Enactment
By J J Charlesworth
If you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there, is what the May 68 generation love telling everyone. I can't remember the 60s, but I am there, right now, because that's the magic of re-enactment. You weren't there, so you re-enact it so that you are there. It's great. I'm standing in the ICA theatre space, and we're re-enacting a happening first staged by the Boyle Family in 1965, at the ICA , called Oh What a Lovely Whore (which originally began with the announcement over a microphone that if the audience wanted an event they'd have to make one themselves). Everyone is excited. There are big hanging projection screens with coloured lights all over the place, and people are jumping into a pool of multi-coloured plastic balls. There's a PA with vinyl records and CDs that the crowd are starting to mix. There's a stage with a drum kit and a guitar and some crappy old synthesiser, and some chick is getting a good rhythm started. There's a big rainbow-striped sheet that people are wafting up and down, sending a pile of feathers flurrying through the space, getting into peoples' hair, dropping into their beer, getting caught in the strings of the baby grand piano that some other types are plinking at, revealing that they don't know how to play the piano.
Mark Sladen, the ICA exhibitions curator, slides past, asking me teasingly why I'm not 'interacting'. I mumble something about being the guy re-enacting the guy who stood at the side and just watched. So far everyone is treating it fairly cheerfully; chatting like it's an opening, not a happening, the older art-work folk looking on as the younger crowd get stuck in with the free creativity, making things out of cardboard to make shadow forms on the screens, playing some bits of Northern Soul loud on the PA, splashing about in the ball-pool.
Then the tab of acid I took accidentally kicks in and everything is now the same but better. A bit of a lapse, and I find that I'm talking to the artist Dean Hughes about his show at Dicksmith, which I'm trying to explain was terrifying, even though it was nothing but small boxes made out of cardboard that look like washing machines or bird-boxes housed in little apartment blocks… Dean is roaring with laughter and his face seems very red. He is ripped off his tits on speed, I think. There's some kind of call-and-response thing going on between the band and the DJ, a rough pulsing too-and-fro. Then a crash – the baby grand is overturned, and people start beating it up with its own legs, wood splintering. I announce to Dean that all art schools should start their students off with smashing up a piano. Some people want to turn the piano right way up again, so I join in the lifting. Flipped back over, the audience start hammering its exposed strings with whatever's to hand. Suddenly I see an image in my head of how the great German noise band Einstürzende Neubauten would position microphones into the objects they would hammer to make noise, so I bring a mike stand and position it into the piano, which makes the noise of the hammering a bit louder. Now that the image and what I am doing have merged, I am no longer clear what year it is, let alone what time – Neubauten played a gig in this same space in 1983, which I had not been to, which the ICA then re-enacted in 2007, which was the last time I was here. I find myself next to Neil Mulholland, who is just laughing a lot, like a bearded Scottish Falstaff, and he introduces me to Martin Creed, who has a crushing handshake. I say hello, but can't get my eyes of the fabric of his suit, which seems to be weaved for very fine, glossy black snakes, perfectly alive, all moving. The comic artist mr clement is on the stage laughing hysterically into the mike, but doing it in a forced, emphatic way.
Now everything is being torn, smashed, and the band area has coalesced into a group of players that seems to know what they're doing, thumping out a rough Moog-driven mess of noise. There is just stuff scattered, floating everywhere, and noise. I stagger out into the ICA bar, where my partner is having a drink with some colleagues of hers. They ask how its going on inside. I declare, 'I have been smashing up a piano', which doesn't seem to impress them. But there's something unconvincing about re-enactment art, even more so the re-enactment, three decades later, of a hedonistic mid-60s psychedelic happening, here in 2008.
The ICA has redecorated its bar again, and somehow they've managed to make it even more of a frigid, mirthless white box than it was before, except now there's a wall of multi-coloured tiles that look like bricks. In my current state, this seems like a cynical, bleak ironic statement, about how art culture has become the safe, spangly lifestyle coating to an increasingly prison-like world. Nobody in the frigid white box of the ICA is smoking, and inside the happening, the bouncers have stopped a girl from taking her clothes off. But still, beer is drunk for an hour, and a friend of Neil's offers me some little seeds that he says are 'legal highs'. They taste like little seeds. We roll out into the Mall, and all the red stop lights of Trafalgar Square stare at me like eyes…
artreview.com, May 2008
