| Smashing |
Mr and Mrs Clark |
| Mr and Mrs Clark- Smash It Uo , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , March 11, 2016 |
Art like life is replete in irony. Works destroyed can assume in their afterlife a renown as great as that during the time of their material existence. The Bamiyan sculptures or the Lion of Palmyra have an immortality now that is different from their manifestation in stone but real in a different way in their new garb of language and image. The mountain sculptures of Afghanistan are to be seen fleetingly in an early high-speed mash-up of images on the big screen behind the three performers who make up Mr and Mrs Clark’s exhilarating, vital and probing show.“Smash It Up” uses Steven George Jones' film in two ways. One features the three performers on the streets of Newport in witty confrontational sequences involving site security staff and police. They fret and nudge at the shadowy borderlands between public and private space. This film is edited for clarity and exposition. The other use of film is from the public domain, the images edited at a speed beyond assimilation. It is the Adam Curtis aesthetic of the edit, that meaning will derive from juxtaposition. Harpo Marx, Leni Riefenstahl and the Odessa Steps are there. In truth the images depend on pre-knowledge, for instance quite what Stockhausen said fifteen years ago. The tradition of iconoclasm is both long and deep. The film and physical theatre gives way to direct audience address. The totalitarianisms of political and religious ideology are recalled. The first recorded act is the burning of the great Library of Alexandria. South Carolina among the States has a particular nervousness towards books. Even J K Rowling scares them. Michael Landy’s total destruction of his possessions is cited. The passage of artists is remembered from the nineteen-sixties onward. Yves Klein, Fluxus and later the K Foundation are in- but not the explosions of Ivor Davies whose major retrospective at the National Museum has a week left to run. This sequence ends with the open question “What do they think art will do?” It is not what art will do. It won't do anything but the objection is that it simply is, that it stands autonomous. Julian Barnes' “the Noise of Time” is a big-seller, and rightly, this season. The sin of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is not that it is bad art but that it is not in obeisance to the emperor’s whim. (Irina Politkovskaya is included in a roll-call of the dead.) The significance of Kenneth Rudd's mural is the issue as to which art Wales is to project. There is the proud self-definition of the tradition of dissent that has powered, for instance, the work of Tim Price. But of course ideologies need not necessarily be malign. Like Dostoievski’s Grand Inquisitor they can be beneficent in intent. The backers of Art-as Heritage-and-Boostery are sincere. The making of a crapulous public-funded art has to do with a soggy snuggling-up to power in the name of collective solidarity. It may be “community” but it ain’t art. Expect Roald Dahl to be defanged of anything that actually makes him interesting. The Herald in Scotland saw “Smash it Up” last August. Their correspondent’s judgement got it right- “a furious hour-long cut-up of performance lecture confessional, artistic actions, film, dance routines and a welter of pop-art detritus that rallies for an assault on the sort of reductive money-led culture that is now the norm.” The last sentence is journalistic pulp. All endeavour requires capital- just ask Earthfall or Mid-Wales Opera. What is up for question is the mode, method and motive of the capital allocation mechanism. From that perspective “Smash It Up” is finely rhetorical, formally impish, bangingly imaginative but extra-political. It confronts the what of civic policy but not the why. Security men and police constables are first-line defenders trying to do their job. The decision-makers did what they did, because they believed in all sincerity that Newport’s centre was dying. As ever the women and men of power of Wales are offstage. The last words of “Smash It Up” before the onscreen credits are a request for feedback and commentary. It can be either live or on social media. “Smash It Up” includes a list of the instigators of iconoclasm but lets one vandal of immeasurable cruelty off the hook. The Cultural Revolution in terms of pure quantity was the greatest smasher of the twentieth century. The notion of creation requiring destruction, a key element too in the economics of Von Hayek and Ludwig Muses, needs to look further, to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The total mass of the universe is fixed so that all making- art as well as the time-limited organo-chemical entities that are ourselves- is a remaking. But time is a process of the universe running down in complexity. Since art is a making of complexity and pattern-within-pattern it is more than formation-via-destruction. It is a statement of defiance against entropy. “Smash It Up” continues until 20th May at the Riverfront, Borough Theatre, Small World and Battersea Arts Centre. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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