Installation art. In suits.
Generic
(2008)
DEFAULT productions
Friends' Meeting House, 3rd-4th May: 1:45 PM, 5th May 10:45 AM. £5.00 (£3.00)
Two men in suits are sitting at a desk facing one another in a room at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton. The room is untouched from its normal state aside from the addition of a projector screen which acts as a backdrop for the men who quote a stream of apparently unrelated facts, histories, lists, personal accounts and data at each another from folders open in front of them. As the pages continue to turn and more and more dialogue is expelled, projections of countless images, photographs, pictures and drawings are continually captured and discarded on the screen behind them.
Dublin based DEFAULT productions had set themselves the task of demonstrating that ‘if you speak enough all meaning is lost’, through this montage of apparently unconnected words and images, played out over a three hour period. During this time the audience were free to come and go as they pleased, which of course they did - even the keenest of spectators would need a toilet break at some point - and it felt to me that this time span to the piece by-passed any real effort or need to examine the complex system of semiotics. Nonsense was created by the fact that the piece was bigger than our ability to watch it and the manner in which we were being bombarded with so much so quickly, seemed an obvious way of recreating a post-modern angst. As it stood the meaning was lost only in as much as if one were to give a lost man a blank map and then ask him which way he is going.
Having said that the device was initially a very disorientating one and it was intriguing to note one’s innate inability not to try and connect the words and images, (usually understanding them through one’s own history); as an effort to try to establish some semblance of sense from the impossible amount of information we were being fed. Furthermore, images of Big Brother contestants, mixed together with orated war reports for example, did make one ponder the subliminal potency of the media and the power of the image to advertise and distract. It is a shame this disorientation could not be felt in its full force as the incomplete set meant that the room alone was ‘saying’ too much; it reminded of classrooms and childhood and was in this manner heavily indicative of meaning and contradicted the effect the company were trying to achieve (this was after all a theoretical piece that needed to be experienced viscerally). In this manner the piece seemed somewhat a work in progress and indeed the director afterward informed me that they were missing parts of the set, an actor and elements of the action! It is a shame this fully realised version of the production wasn’t brought to the Brighton Fringe as it could have functioned as a very effective installation piece.
[Alice Trueman]
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