They say that performers often suffer for their art. That is particularly true of the annual Glasgow festival, the National Review of Live Art. In the past, the event has featured Italian artist Franko B siphoning his blood into a bag and Irish performer Kira O'Reilly cutting her skin with scalpels.
On Saturday night, however, it was the audience's turn to suffer. After hundreds of pass-holders had been forced to queue for over an hour, a mere 100 people were granted access to the performance by Tim Etchells of Sheffield-based company Forced Entertainment. The piece might have been better entitled Instructions for Forgiving and Forgetting.
The work did not entirely repay their efforts. The performance displayed much of the quirky humour and provocation of thought that have come to characterise Forced Entertainment productions. However, the deliberate looseness of the performance, which is based on fragments of stories and videotapes that Etchells requested from friends around the world, is a weakness as much as a strength. What, you might ask, does a film of one of Etchells's female friends performing a bored striptease for money have in common with the story of a Lebanese man whose father was shot dead in Beirut by a far-right Christian militiaman? How does either relate to the story of Franko B giving Etchells a tape in which he has a sex act performed upon him by women using one of the Chapman brothers' famous sculpted heads that has a penis where the nose should be?
These are the sorts of question Etchells wants us to ask. This is a piece about memory, and how it selects its subjects. It is also a performance about performance. Why, for example, is it acceptable for Etchells to describe that sex act, but not to show the tape, which may or may not exist?
As three TV screens carry the many and varied pictures, Etchells, unshaven and lugubrious in an old football shirt, delivers the text in a banal yet somehow poetic staccato. The atmosphere is one of faux naivety. He is, of course, playing with our minds. At almost two hours, however, his piece is too long to sustain the diversity of its fascinating ephemera.
