In January 1995, Blunt Cut commenced a series of collaborations with The Devil's Chauffeur under the title of Die Lieber Rausch. The premise of these events was to provide an accessible format for the presentation of specially commissioned works by live artists to new audiences. The solution was the creation of an environment that used signifiers filtered through the screens of cinema and live television, a stretch limousine became our interview lounge and video projectors relayed chat between The Devil's Chauffeur, the show's host, and the guest artists. The performances were not only relayed live but recorded and uploaded onto the internet.
These events received positive reviews both locally and nationally and set the tone of our engagement with the Devil's Chauffeur for the Transmutations festival. Previews appeared in publications such as i-D and Artists Newsletter and the events received national television coverage on ITV's Nightshift and C4's The Big Breakfast.
The production of the documentary footage of the events entailed the co-ordination and direction of three camera crews, the installation in the main venue (The Zap Club) of audio visual relays and on line internet links.
The majority of the material used was originated in this space and reflects the ambience of the club events. Other material derives from location shoots at various sites around Brighton. Three formats, SVHS, 16mm and S8, were used to produce a diversity of texture in the final cut.
The video Die Lieber Rausch No.1 was commissioned by the arts council and released in a limited edition of 500 copies.
Bruce Gilchrist - Ways of asking Questions
We are all physically paralysed each night during periods of R.E.M. sleep; contrary to the ethos of the cinema, to act out our dreams would endanger the continuity of the species. Nature realises that when we find ourselves at the intersection of these two worlds we should tread carefully: belief systems crumble, rationality is found melting, language explodes, continuity fractures.
Penrose has recently been describing the area of transition between the quantum and classical universe as 'not computable' and 'dithering', whereas both quantum and classical theory are computable and determinate, in their own ways, according to their own laws. We cannot imagine how they could possibly meet, but surely they must[?].
I feel that the comparison of the philosophical difficulties we have with the thresholds of both the conscious/unconscious and quantum/classical may be more than analogous, and poetic if not scientific.
I am interested in finding ways of using physiological and neurological states as material for a direct expression. An ongoing, long-term project is investigating the possibility of a communication conduit between conscious and sub/unconscious minds, using codified, electrical languages.
As a performance artist I have an inherent interest in the definition of presence. My investigation is currently looking at ways of communicating this presence using the primal and elemental language of frequency and vibration*, a language hopefully unfettered by semantics and liberated from the fucked-up, rapacious ego.
*One way of modelling the brain and finding increasing support, is as a dynamic, multi-dimensional holograph. This is believed to constitute the miraculous complexity of our minds and to create our ideas of the world around us. The holographic model of the mind-brain suggests that reality is really a frequency domain and our brain an encoder that converts these frequencies into what we see as the phenomenal world.
Bruce Gilchrist September 1995
D.A. Jones - The Ideology of Soap
Performed as part of Transmutations by David Alexander Jones, It was initially to be performed in the gallery window of the Brighton University but this location was deemed too upfront. It was consequently relocated to a shower room. Here it was witnessed in the intimate confines that add rather than detract from its removal from the open gaze of the public. In perverse ways it mirrors the overexposed body of pornography and in another the exquisite banalities of Soap Operas.
As a living sculpture in the tradition of greats like Yves Klein and Gilbert & George it takes as its materials water; a classical symbol of sexuality, soap; so saturated in puns that it bubbles away from all serious analysis and dead skin that is rubbed obsessively from the body.
In the context of alchemy, to which this performance was addressed, one is also reminded of the infamous Howard Hughes and perhaps Macbeth.
Drako - Bliss : a body modification
Drako introduces himself via one of many stories of his exotic past. This one is located in a prison called, 'Queen of the Sky' where he was being held on a drugs charge. The piece itself is straight from the text of Genet.
As he stands in thigh length leather boots, his arms bound by manacles, his genitals displaying his customised rings and piercings, his flesh inscribed with Cocteauesque designs, it is not a naked man that is before us but a man whose body is a modified mask, a fetish to signify a story that is always denser than it's surfaces.
Adrian Challis - GO/NO
Performed by Adrian Challis as a response to the continued disturbances in the Gulf and his interest in the interface between War and Drugs and the War on Drugs.
The performance remixes original feeds hacked from satellites transmissions during the conflict and faked soundbytes and interludes that detour and recontextualise the ambient traffic of information in and out of the war zone. In the light of Baudrillard's infamous 'The Gulf War Didn't Happen', this performance becomes an advert for the syndrome of Hallucinogenic Simulation Disorder wherein we hear voices speaking through the fragmented pixels of an impacted target.
Makaki Iwana - Butoh Assault
Masaki Iwana is on the edge of the tradition of new Butoh. His zone of expression is dark and intense to the point of inducing a nausea in the voyeur.
In this work we are offered dance as a criminal velocity towards the stasis of perception, every muscle strains to wound.
As with earlier forms of Butoh, his work engages with the territory of gender and sexual desire, but always in between his body rebels against a priori identity tags. To watch him is to see a body pulling itself inside out.
After 16 years as a dancer he has only one thing to communicate, "Don de soi {gift of oneself}" a gift that comes wrapped in torn stockings and is barbed with negative ecstasy.
Marisa Carr - Striptich
Three extracts from Marisa Carr's 'Dragon Lady' cabaret which demolishes the boundary between performance and pornography.
If you can imagine channel surfing between Barbara Windsor and Showgirls in a helium filled room you have some idea of where she secretes those sticks of dynamite. Eloquent, but never indulgent, she claims that her intention is not to sexually arouse her audience but to publicly redress its perception of her.
Having gone out to the United States to work with Annie Sprinkle, Marisa has returned to England with a curiosity that has dug up some long forgotten treasures of the music hall tradition. Dragon Lady is a celebration of a very English sense of burlesque.
Tatsumi Orimoto - Event-Communication: Breadman
Tatsumi Orimoto was the man who fed Beuys' cayotee and a founder member of Fluxus.
"When i was young I loved the shape of European bread. I ofter drew and painted pictures of bread. I knew that bread represented the body of Christ.I found it was very easy to tie bread to my face. I thought I want to surprise people with a performance in the street."