- Venue
- Artsadmin
- Location
Part of Artsadmin Summer Season
Question: why is a pub quiz Art? Answer: Because the quiz mistress says it is, and the quiz mistress is always right. This is how sometime stand-up comedienne and live art artist Yara El-Sherbini holds fort in ‘Pub Quiz' at Toynbee Studios' Arts Bar and Café. And true to both El-Sherbini's comedic roots and her live art practise the questions and answers in Pub Quiz are variously open to interpretation, politically astute and extremely funny both in, and because of, their deviousness.
For example Round 6 Question 2 "Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed when mistaken for a 'suicide bomber'. On news reports shocked passengers on the tube carriage stated the Brazilian man was 'Asian, definitely Asian'. Does this suggest that A. All brown people look the same or B. There are people in the world who believe Brazil is part of Asia". Round 6 Question 5. "As a team, how many times in the past 2 years, have you refrained from criticizing an artwork because you were afraid that you were being culturally insensitive? A. Once, B. More than Once, C. Never"
Crucially, El-Sherbini herself is also ‘at risk' within these questions, but not only with regards to her own ethnicity. Pub Quiz ruthlessly subjects itself, and on this occasion it's Artsadmin sponsors, to its own brand of comedy: Round 2 Question 2: "In a recently advertised position at Artsadmin for a culturally diverse curator scheme an Australian citizen of Moroccan and Scandinavian decent was informed she could not apply. Was this due to A. Her being under qualified B. Her not being from the specific ethnic diversities they where helping promote. C. Artsadmin gave it to someone internal, but had to advertise the post" *
It follows that any points given for answering such ultimately unknowable questions are awarded according to the internal logic of the quiz mistress. Due to El-Sherbini's (un) wise judgement our team somewhat unfairly missed out on pole position, but we did win a prize for the best team name ‘I'm Just Going for a Wee…' The winning team – beating us by one point – were made up mostly of Artsadmin staff and were awarded their winning point on the dubious ability to spell Artsadmin team member, Manick Govinda's real name: not, we the losers felt, Pub Quiz's finest moment.
But despite all the fun, Pub Quiz is deceptive. Underneath its jollity lies the serious strategy of much socially engaged art practice: that of locating the subject of the work at the very site of its political or conceptual operation. Art as social engagement mimes the form, content and structure of that which it inhabits in order to trouble the presumptions and function of that system; in doing so it activates the concerns of the art work ‘from within'. El-Sherbini, in taking her art about positive action BME policies, racial politics and identity in today's multicultural Britain to a pub, infiltrates the very nucleus of British culture that has traditionally harboured heterosexual white working class resistance to the actual subject of her work. In short, El-Sherbini's seemingly innocuous Pub Quiz culturally masks the artist's true satirical and political intent, thus giving the work a potent criticality that is best located in the unsuspecting pub regular.
However, this potency is somewhat lost in Toynbee Studios Arts Bar and Café. The venue is not a pub and El-Sherbini's liberal Artsadmin audience are all too aware of the tongue-in-cheek artistic aping of the pub quiz format. We are already primed to have our assumptions about British Pakistanis and Indians – not to be confused with Muslims – unpicked. More importantly, no-body here would want to question the quiz mistress, her art or her politics. As such, the Art Bar and Café context acts as a critical muffler for Pub Quiz, transforming what would have been a true critical encounter in a pub into something more like a sideshow to the real event. This is not to take away from the work's impact in other national venues. My hope is that Pub Quiz will forever be linked to the anecdote (thanks Tim) of the perplexed pub quiz enthusiasts in Bristol who complained about the quiz mistresses' supremely subjective reign over the answers and were duly offered a full refund. Whether or not the disappointed quizzers took the refund isn't clear but it proves that, when staged right, the particular clashing of cultures in Pub Quiz can be an enjoyable, but moreover challenging, experience.
‘Correct' answers to the questions are: Round 6 Question 2, B. Round 6 question 5, A 1 point B 0 points C minus 1 point. Round 2 Question 2, B. Manick Govinda's real name is Comerasamy
