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September 03, 2007

Good Evening Song

Good Evening Song
Sept 2 - Gallery Delacatessen

Johannes.S.Sistermanns, James Geurts, Linda Marie Walker

Last night I attended a performance at Gallery Delacatessen that I thought would be worth mentioning.

Good Evening Song was a combination of sound (Sistermanns), words (Marie Walker) and images (Geurts.) The performance was already underway in a sense as myself and few other people arrived at the venue ten minutes prior to the designated start time. The atmosphere seemed quite casual and informal as James Geurts worked by a projection, Linda Marie Walker sat at a table cutting up text and pasting it into an empty book and Sistermanns greeted people at the door discreetly. Geurts projection showed a sequence of somebody (him I assume) peeling and fixing transparent tape to a surface, shot from the top with only his hands and arms in view. This sequence was occasionally intercut with pixelated mattes of colour. Geurts was working at a nearby table carefully measuring lengths of transparent tape and fixing them to the wall over the projection. Marie Walker sat on a chair elevated with blocks of cork as she pasted fragments of text into her empty book and stood up to read them (quietly.) Each time she did this she would purposely dislodge the chair from the cork blocks and once she had finished speaking, refix the chair to these blocks before sitting down and continuing her process. Sistermanns activated a series of sound devices around the space which emitted a variety of soft and metallic attacks and sustained sounds. He then proceeded to move to the piano, striking a note then fixing sellotape to the key and dragging out the length of tape (through the audience in some cases) to a section of the space. This process continued until there were several lengths of tape creating a transparent web across the space. As Geurts and Marie Walker continued their respective tasks, Sistermanns stood over the piano emitting a sustained singing tone, turning slowly as to articulate the resonant frequency of the space. Notes were occasionally struck and trilled on the piano and later he would proceed to play a contact mic on objects around the space, including the tape network and Marie Walker's table.

This was definitely the most conceptually broad performance I've been privvy to in some time, though then again this may suggest a lack of diversity in performance art activity around Adelaide. I had short discussions with the artists and some audience members afterwards and we agreed that the key to this performance lay in its consistent pace and respective discipline of its performers, wherein it never accelerated or slowed down - everything had a natural flow to it. This was essentially mixed media theatre reminiscent of Fluxus and Happening performances of the 1960s, though I wouldn't wish to consign it to this approximation alone. Good Evening Song overall was a highly enjoyable, curious and playful experience.

1 comment:

Freddie said...

I thought I'd leave a message since I've never seen any posted in your blog at all.
There you go :)
btw, I like that new banner. It looks cool, also your trip around Adelaide sounded interesting. It's a shame they're pulling down the old factories at Port Adelaide. I don't know, they just look cool to me. A bit like the abatoir at Gepps Cross.

intrepid visitors since 25/1/08