131: Spectacle

The opening shot fades in on a pair of white gloved hands, straightening an unframed canvas on a gallery wall. It’s an abstract geometric painting in tempera, comprising a triangle of cardinal red, sloping up against a field of smudgy pale peach that spreads to the extremities of the support. The camera ping-pong pans from the picture to the face of its attendant, back and forth, with ever-increasing speed, until the motion becomes a slow, unresolved cross-fade between the face — made up somewhere between Pedrolino and Pierrot — and the canvas, which appears to smirk and wink in playful luminescence. “Feeling smoochy?”, it seems to whisper. A rather brutal jump-cut lands us in the next scene, certain to make the rushes (for we’re watching the rushes right now). The art handler from the previous scene is helping the Head Gallerist install her Vision Helmet, carefully distributing its weight, clipping and tightening its buckles and straps, and setting the visor down over her eyes. A double clap from behind the camera is the attendant’s cue to take a break, while the Gallerist makes her final adjustments, straightening the device on her head before bringing her arms down rigidly beside her and turning to face the onlooker, with an air of celestial messenger or news anchor. “Whomsoever might assume the virtuous sceptre…” – She raises a sceptre, seemingly from nowhere, and points it at the camera – “…With crania encased in crowns of fancy…” – She raises the staff to the helmet, giving it a couple of emphatic taps – “…Are ordained to ride illustrious into triumphal obliteration.” Subtitles flash at the bottom of the screen: “We let technology remove from our lives that which it promises to recover”, they flicker and vanish, too fleeting to read. In the darkness of the edit suite, as I start rummaging around in my rucksack for the tupperware box of seitan teriyaki pasta, my hand clacks against the edge of what, as I draw it out, reveals itself to be a sheet of oddly warm etched metal. The Eotogram! How did that get in there? Back on screen, the director pipes up as the cameras stop rolling. “Wheel the gold stage into shot and bring that damn scrap of tin to the lectern”, she says. “Rest it on the others. Gently! Rest, do not stack! Any damage comes out of your wages, as per your contracts, which I know you haven’t read.” A director is essentially a type of manager. An effectual solipsist, believing themself to be ‘the’ hinge of the whole process, its real anchor or architect, but also the dynamo: the life-spring and driving force. But a manager is actually subject to far more pre-processing than any other player in the whole scenario. “The scene’s gotta be solid!”, she growls. “The rooms have gotta ring like rooms, full of room, 100% room: no walls no doors no windows no ceilings, and “no” floors – none of that quasi-room-esque posturing, you hear?” The producer stands by, crossing these items off her checklist. She gestures for “the veil” to be drawn across the stage: layers of light gauze hanging from the stage-curtain rail, wafting and bunching in nebulous roomfulness. The Head Gallerist is now on the golden stage, behind the lectern, and the Vision Helmet’s lights have started blinking, in anticipation of another speech. Though the device is largely a cardboard construction, with a couple of seven pound ballasts on each side, there’s an internal membrane, a layer something like vaseline, oily, but with a skin. The warmth moves around the head once you’ve put it on; viscous veins pulsating with purpose, massaging your prefrontal cortex, working in skillfully engineered syncopation with the heat-strobes, inducing the violent mouth-birth of the words etched into the Eotogram. A carnivorous howl, wraithlike and crackling, creeps in through an air vent. There’s a demonstration taking place on level three, protesting the "Hearts for the Arts" organ donation program that has recently been aimed with laser precision at the creative community, and has quite literally cut flesh from many an artist's body. Some interdepartmental initiative to get something for nothing had culminated in an agreement by the health secretary and the minister for culture to nudge a little tick box into the arts funding application form, enquiring about the applicant's organ donor status. As every box unchecked is a pan flush against the stool of an artist's dream, the donor program quickly ballooned and now people from all walks of life find themselves retrofitted with unique pieces from those most personal of collections. The Coyote Crew leading the demo hands out felt-tip pens wrapped in bacon to the audience, encouraging them to scribble words of dissatisfaction on the gallery wall. Though clearly, behind their wolfish masks are several DCMS staff, sheepishly testing out one of their own initiatives in the spectacular guise of critique. Back on level 1, the Gallerist’s speech against the recent tactics of the Coyote Crew is in full swing. “Blowing up artworks in peacetime is an empty gesture, like an armchair archbishop delivering a lecture from a big bone throne…” As she says “thrown”, she makes a gesture symbolising a back flip by rolling her hands and forearms over each other. The audience turns to the mime standing next to her who performs the move with some hesitancy, flipping several times in the air before landing on her feet and continuing her backflip down the steps of the stage and along the slope towards the audience, which is scattered around the gallery floor, pockmarked with trenches and craters. As she lands in perfect stillness on her feet at the edge of one of the huge blast-holes, some of the people in the gallery tear off their clothing in one graceful sweep, revealing head-to-toe grey clay painted bodies as they start to dance in unison to the first two bars of Nine to Five with extra house beats thrown in. Some of them have canes, and some have top hats in their hands, which they basically wheel and flick in time with the music. Then, in unison, some of the performers backflip into the craters, others following the Gallerist as she backflips onto a model steam train that starts to chuff around the gallery. She stands in the driver’s cabin pulling the whistle chain and shouting, “It's a free for all! Take it all! You've got to purge the collection! Of itself!” Technicians are marching through the carriages holding handheld super-8 projectors, some of which are laden with bombs. “We can no more get away with any of this, as artists, than we can explode our way out of the 21st century, as artworks” says one, as she flings the projector into the corner of the gallery. The camera pans away because there's no budget for special effects, but we hear the sound of the explosion and know what it indicates. The remaining group swaggers towards the viewer with synchronised wide steps and finger snaps. With each snap their bodies grow an eighth in volume, until there’s not enough room for them in the big bone pit. After the blast, there’s a sudden hush as all the lights turn off, save for one spotlight on a figure that enters through the double panelled doors at the northern wall of the gallery.