Pete Hindle

There’s been a hiatus since my last post, so you’ll have to bear with me while I express myself without all the nice footnotes and links that I wanted to put in.

I was quite unwell in Helsinki, so I didn’t actually manage to see a lot of the festival. I did, however, catch a number of performances by artists in the evening, and it struck me that there was a lack of narrative in many of the performances I caught. Or rather, there was narrative, but it was too focused on implied ideas.

Music in popular culture is a celebration of youth – we think of rock/pop music and we have the icons of the Beatles and the Stones to refer too. The performances I saw in Helsinki were very far away from that sort of music, often being in the ‘noise’ genre of music. But there was a strong performative element to what I saw most of the time, in that people got up in front of an audience and performed.

Sometimes the performances were given by people in costume. A pair of men wearing suits, or people dressed in a hip-hop style, and one memorable performance by a man wearing a gas mask and underpants. These clothes that they chose to wear are significant, as they proclaim either cultural baggage or an otherness in their performance. Those that made their performances from behind laptops also have a costume, but it’s still so new that we might have difficulty recognising it as such.

When the spectacle of performance is so far removed from most people’s experience, these costumes take on a larger meaning. The bulk of the performances I saw were not talking directly to the audience but instead showing them something that was confusing and took mental effort to understand. Previously, I have enjoyed seeking out the experience of culture shock, and pitting myself against the artists vision in an effort to understand what they were saying.

In Helsinki, perhaps due to my illness, I found myself wishing that there was some narrative thread I could follow. Think of it this way: paintings prior to Modernism tell a story through a visual medium. Films and screen-based entertainments also tell us a story. But the art world seems to not want narrative to exist outside of art history, where contemporary art is represented as a series of movements.

I felt that narrative was strongly lacking from the work I saw, especially when audio-visual works were presented. Montages of images create a narrative in the viewer, as the watcher tries to figure out the nature of the work. However, when the house lights came I up, I was often still mystified about what I had just seen/heard/experienced. What I was left with was a feeling that there was a performance, and it was created by the person at the front of the audience.

I wondered if the performers knew that they had become like rock and roll stars, even when they reject performing in favour of working with a laptop. It seems to me that some of the stronger pieces I saw in Helsinki were about the performer, rather than the piece, because the work we were presented with was often personal reflections upon the artists use of technology.

Narrative would have given the audience a way of understanding the work that was often lacking. Instead, with no way of penetrating the noise of the performance other than as an event, or as a spectacle, we become forced to give adulation to the performer for crafting something new and unknowable. And that hero-worship leads to a recreation of the rock and roll iconography. Is that all that can happen with New Media in the twenty-first century?