LLGFF: the Future of Language

Just finished a whirlwind day at the Southbank Centre attending my first day at the LLGFF, which has been underway since Friday. Caught 2.5 screenings, conducted an interview and swung by the Royal Festival Hall to watch Laurie Anderson's Sounds from a Room performance live from the adjacent building.

To recap: Hit So Hard is a really emotive and illuminating doc on the life and near-death of Hole drummer Patty Schemel, chock full of archive footage she shot while on tour in the '90s, supplemented with up-to-date interviews with all of the band members and various observers and associates, among them Phranc, Gina Schock and Patty's mother and brother.

I'd hotfooted it back from Laurie Anderson's "The Future of Language" to speak to Patty before the screening, meaning I had yet to see the film, but we had a good chat about her early inspirations (amazingly similar to my own), as well as her current life in Los Angeles, where she has a dog-walking business.

I capped off the evening with a screening of Girl Or Boy: My Sex Is Not My Gender, Valerie Mitteaux's portmanteau documentary on four individuals born women who now identify as men or none of the above, among them none other than Lynnee Breedlove, ex of Tribe 8, whose bandmate Lesley Mah turns up in wedding footage in Hit So Hard. Truly a small world. Afterward, Mitteaux answered questions, and various testimony was given by audience members as to the limits placed on identity by the state, people's imaginations, and indeed the language we speak. Mitteaux said her film was meant to break out of the box and look beyond binary gender identity and that she hoped in future it would not be given so much consideration.

The Downtown New York Scene

A visit to Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s is quite the eye-opener, especially conducted under the watchful eye of the "supermoon".

In truth, the moon wasn't much in evidence when I arrived at the gallery for an early Saturday evening visit. And when I emerged two hours later, the moon was nowhere to be seen. But, SOMETHING was in the air. How else to explain the strange confluence of events, from the mysterious piano appearing on the pavement of a Shoreditch street to the gravity-defying yoghurt accident that befell me? London felt like one big performance piece.

But, back to the exhibit, a sprawling beast taking in two floors, numerous rooms and multi, multi-media: sculpture, sound art, Super 8 film, drawings, and even some dance. Trisha Brown's gymnastics-infused choreography is performed several times a day on the walls of the Barbican, as well as on the floor. I saw two pieces, Floor of the Forest and Walking on the Wall and was left rather bemused. But, it's certainly unusual. Too bad there is no recreation of her dances performed on the roofs of NYC. That must have been something to see.

Laurie Anderson I know mostly as an innovative musician, but her visual art was a revelation. Even her handwriting is artistic, perfectly formed letters that could be plucked from cartoons. No surprise then to discover she was a political cartoonist at the university newspaper. Is there nothing this woman can't do? Her drawings for such pieces as The Handphone Table were beautifully wrought, witty and clever.

And then to see the piece below and watch people's reactions to it was fascinating. When I'd arrived, I'd walked right past the cluster of her works, imagining the odd clasping gestures I witnessed to be one of the live performances scheduled. But, no, we were the performers for these pieces, as they were in the interactive section. Laying my head on the Talking Pillow, I heard Anderson whispering to me, while seated at The Handphone Table, hands pressed to my skull, I heard some bass frequencies.

By contrast, Matta-Clark's and Brown's displays were much grander: large-scale installations grounded in urban architecture and movement. Anderson's concerns seem more intimate and wittier and to me, more endearing. Though there was no video, just stills of it, I could well imagine her performing her Duets on Ice on the streets of New York, wearing ice skates encased in ice, playing her violin to passing jaded habitues of the city.

And there was a bit of nostalgia for me in this very New York show. Though much younger than the artists, I well remember the crumbling, grumbling New York City of this time in the early 1970s when The Big Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Though it spawned punk, No Wave and a host of counter-cultural movements, it was a difficult time. But, very exciting.

Of course, "downtown New York" meant Manhattan and I lived in the Bronx, oblivious to the world of performance and avant-garde. While Gordon Matta-Clark may have been "dancing with buildings", cutting sections out of them to highlight neglect, I was living a more mundane existence, full of subways, Yankees and the odd teachers strike. It takes a certain detachment to see everyday life as an art project.