- Venue
- Intermedia Gallery
- Location
Gertrude Stein observed that there is a permanent discrepancy between a performance in progress and the emotions and experiences of its audience; she suggests: ".. your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play," suggesting an in-betweenness, a hesitation between observation and participation, seeing and understanding. Elsewhere in the libretto for her opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, her main character Faustus, having sold his soul for electric light observes: " What do I care there is no here nor there." Further underscoring a sense of limbo, of the nowhere, of emptiness, of exclusion, without dimension. These themes are particularly relevant to a show called The Consequence appearing at Intermedia Gallery. Stein's conceptual approaches appear throughout this show as either quotations of her plays or as thematic inspirations. The notion of the theatre and the theatrical in general are further traces of investigation – from the avant-garde theatre of New York's The Wooster Group filled with their pop/theatre texts mixed and mangled to high tech oblivion to a street theatre of after-dark angered high testosterone, of shattered glass and liquor filled human dramas bloodying the streets with haemoglobin Pollock-esque drips and blobs. What we see here on show are ideas, objects and references at once removed from their source, further pushing this sense of "a permanent discrepancy".
Hetherington presents videos screened in syncopation and synchronization; he has learned the libretto of Dr Faustus Lights the Lights by heart and speaks the lines like "Betty Boop on helium" in a similar fashion to the original Wooster Group production he references and remakes as a rehearsed reading. Another screen presents a slightly different version of this text pinned onto footage that doesn't quite measure up to Stein's collage text of deceptions and desires: another discrepancy. The third and fourth screens see another collage of footage including what is describes as Trailers of a remake of Querelle, Fassbinder's original an essay likewise on deceptions and desires. At this point somehow the narratives of these works hook up; but after all these are merely 'remakes' and 'revivals' and any attempt for them to stabilize and connect is transient. More discrepancies.
On the opposite wall Nicoll has a trio of wall-based drawings: morality tales of prostitution, gang names and protest graffiti, together they inform of us of a kind of ethical discrepancy, between senses of moral sensitivity, disgust, behaviour and sensibilities. She plays this off with a joke about gambling, luck and trust, the punch-line being a giant tacky fake gold deck-of-cards ring. It's scale being the final discrepancy this show offers: the things we hold onto dear in life may just be too much to carry or rely on. Nicoll's video ruminates on a tension between nature and human interaction in it, which in this case is a pantomime of green glades and burned-out cars, trees and thrash metal, lush pastures and lurid action.
Stein's Modernist thought processes are in action here; all plotlessness, meandering, loaded with discrepancies and as such The Consequence is an exploration on observed action and removed participation.
