Small talk 04 - Saving the World by Alex Eisenberg

Saving the World by Gob Squad

Greenwich Dance Agency

10^th April 2009

3.09pm – 3.17pm

Unreserved Seating:

Third Row – Seat 1 - (A)

Third Row – Seat 2 - (L)

Third Row – Seat 3 - (C)

You can read an introduction to Small Talk here.

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3.09pm

A: Hello

L: Hiya…

A: How are you?

L: I’m okay, you?

A: I’m alright…had to wolf down a sandwich just before I came in…I came a bit late…I’ve made it.

So what do you think it's going to be like?

L: I’ve got no idea? What about you?

A: Well…I think there are going to be a fair few projections…it looks like…

L: Seven screens…

Have you seen anything by them before?

A: No…have you?

L: Yeah we went to see something last year called ‘Kitchen’.

A: Oh right…how was that?

L: Amazing, amazing!

A: Oh really…

L: Yeah…it was kind of…it was at the Soho Theatre and it was kind of…the stage was a screen but they were filming everything behind the screen and projecting it live and it ended up with members of the audience going behind the screen and participating, and my partner, she went to it twice and actually performed in it once.

A: Oh wow…

L: Cos she was dragged off…by the company. And you know, it was great…very funny…very interesting ideas!

A: Great…

L: And we were totally blown away by them so that’s why we came today.

A: Have you been to any other things in the festival?

L: We went to see Inferno last week and C went to Purgatory as well…yeah, I liked Inferno but the people I was with didn’t like it that much…what about you?

A: I’ve seen things yeah…

L: Any recommendations?

A: Well…everything’s only on for a couple of days.

Hello J…!!

J: Hello Al…you alright?

A: Yeah good…

J: Busy working?

A: Busy…yep…yep…busy working…

J: Saw you talking to them out there…apparently Berlin, Germany…it's the place to be!

A: It's the place to be…this is what I have said…

L: Generally or….

J: And you can live for a fiver for a year!

A: Fifty – you can live for fifty quid a week…

J: Fifty quid a year!

L: Fifty quid a decade!

J: Live on cheese and sausage…

A: Not cheese…!

L: Fifty quid – how would you live?

A: You’d get a nice little flat…you can get…food…bratwurst…

J: You may even get a ‘driver’ for that much…in Berlin, it really is…it's the answer!

[LAUGH]

L: Fantastic…

J: They don’t ask you how you are spending the public’s money…

L: It's the way it should be…

J: It's basically elevated to a social concern, in that a healthy mind is something that should be part of public spending.

L: Yeah…

J: Whereas over here we’ve got the Olympics – so it's healthy body.

L: Slightly bigger bill as well, probably.

J: Yeah…well obesity is more of a hot topic…we’re the third most obese or second most obese after Germany.

L: It's all that bratwurst…they get it so cheap!

A: What do you think of this then J?

J: Absolute gold…I mean those projectors…I could just watch them for a while.

[LAUGH]

L: Yeah…it will probably be a disappointment when they actually turn on…won’t it…it’ll ruin it…

J: Yup…turning on will turn you off!...

[PAUSE]

Right, I am going to my seat now.

L: Enjoy the show…

A: See you….

A: Its not that busy is it?

L: No…no…cos they are doing two evenings…when is it? Last night and tonight?

A: Yeah…so I think there’s one on tonight…

L: It's a weird time for people to come in the afternoon on a Friday.

A: It is Good Friday though.

L: This is true…and we made a day trip of it…we came from North London…

A: Me too…

L: Day trip to Greenwich. We got the bus here.

A: I drove…but I had to stop in Tower Hill, so a sort of two-leg journey.

L: Well we were up at Kings Cross, and we thought, we could get on the tube…

A: You took the bus all the way here?

L: We got two buses, one to Peckham and one to here…it only took…less than an hour.

A: That’s pretty good actually…

L: And it's not often we get down to Greenwich.

A: I’ve been here a few times but hardly.

L: This place is amazing…is this quite a well known sort of dance place…?

A: Yeah…

L: Is it a school or a…?

A: Yeah it's space and support for artists.

L: So where do you live in North London?

A: Near Golders Green at the moment.

L: Yeah…we live in Holloway.

A: I drove through there this morning.

L: Holloway Road looking glorious on the bank holiday morning.

A: Quite empty…which is good for the drivers.

L: Yeah…everywhere was very quiet today…it's one of the quietest days of the year I reckon.

A: You know I didn’t even realise it was actually a Bank Holiday today.

L: You notice it when you get out though…on the streets.

A: You do…it's definitely quiet.

L: Yeah…I think the only place that’s busy today is Greenwich. [LAUGH]

A: What…cos we’re here!

L: Yeah…us…amongst others.

A: Slightly tricky seats, aren’t they? Mine’s got a bit of a dip.

L: They remind me a bit of school seats.

A: Yeah…very stackable.

L: Yeah…good for stacking – not for sitting.

A: Not the best! [LAUGH]

L: So I’m wondering if any people are going to appear?

A: Yeah, me too.

L: Or if it's just going to be….screens?

[PAUSE]

How many are there in the company?

A: About four or five I think.

L: Some from Nottingham?

A: And from Germany…they are a mixture of Germany and England.

You know…I’ve got…hayfever’s coming at this time of the year you see…so I’ve got quite an itchy eye.

L: You taken anything for it?

A: Usually, but I keep forgetting to go and buy them.

L: Hmmmm….I’ve had hayfever for many, many years and I tried last year…

A: The injection?

L: No…just to not take anything…

A: Right…

L: And it was kind of okay, once I got used to it…more comfortable…I think I did last year……C, did I not take anything for hayfever last year? Did I completely stop?...And it kind of worked didn’t it…?

C: I thought you had something for your eyes.

A: Yeah…I have the eyes coming now…

C: Reddy eyes?

A: Yeah…

L: Not much you can do when the eyes come…you’ve got to take a tablet really. You can’t just hope they are going to go away.

A: Every time before I see a show…I sit here and I start scratching my eyes!

L: Wow….

A: I know…

L: That’s quite early…because I think I get it a bit later…it depends on different kinds of pollen…doesn’t it…

C: Do you know what yours is? Is it grass or trees or…?

A: I don’t know specifically…but I do get it quite badly…so I ought to know.

L: Hmmmm…mine’s kind of grassy isn’t it….and then trees…and probably flowers as well…in fact it’s everything!

A: It's pollen! [ALL LAUGH]

L: It's pollen!

A: But…where is the pollen in grass?

L: Ummm…some grass will have little seeds…won’t it? Is there pollen in there?

A: I don’t know? There’s hay…?

C: What about flowers, no…?

A: Cos they say hay and hayfever…?

L: Yeah….hmmmm…

A: Oh…I think it's going a bit more quite now…

3.17pm

SAVING THE WORLD

4.36pm

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To find out about Alex's Small Talk click here: Small Talk by Alex Eisenberg

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival.

Gob Squad Meet Dominique Gonzalez-Forester or Film as Theatre by David Berridge

Saving the World

By Gob Squad

Greenwich Dance Agency

9-10 April

If Gob Squad had filmed their piece Saving the World a few months earlier, then, amongst the passers-by on the South Bank, they might have encountered Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, off to Tate Modern to install her Turbine Hall installation. It would have been an intriguing encounter, for Saving the World and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s recently closed TH.2058 seem to be in conversation with one another, both through themes of archiving, saving, addressing and imagining the future, and in the boundaries they observe, re-draw and disregard between film, installation, and performance.

TH.2058 was an installation of beds, books, films, and other peoples sculptures, evoking a future when the Tate Modern turbine hall becomes a combined archive and air raid shelter. Saving the World sees Gob Squad spend a day on the South Bank, video recording passers by to create an archive of contemporary existence for some unspecified future date. Both pieces have at their core an accumulation and a saving. Both place themselves at the centre of London’s diversity but are haunted by an experience, intuition, anticipation or memory of some ecological or other catastrophe. Both see the artist as a kind of fiction writer, scoring scenarios to be acted out: by sitting on the beds in the Turbine Hall and reading, or by asking passers-by for their thoughts on sex, nothingness, and the soul.

All this, no doubt, reflects different artists filtering the world around them with a somewhat shared sensibility, training and professionalism. As these processes manifest in the pieces themselves, Gob Squad foregrounds the newspapers and encounters of the world; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster foregrounds a certain art history, an accumulation within her installation of certain art historical precursors (including several previous Turbine Hall installations). It’s curious, then, that both end up in a similar place, suggesting art is the real news, and articulating this through a fluid sense of medium becoming theatrical.

For both Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Gob Squad this focusses on a sense of film. Film re-defined, partly as an event, partly as something not confined to the screen: in Saving the World people literally talk to the screen and, more theatrically, come out of and go into the screen. Entering the Greenwich Dance Agency to see the piece last week, film seemed to be becoming installation, but then revealed itself, somewhat cheekily, as theatre. One consequence of this is that the consciousness and materiality of the video itself becomes more a shared property of the whole experience than something just involving the projected image.

Aside from the different economies and professional networks of artists working in galleries (like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) or performance festivals (like Gob Squad), this is also a debate about live presence, moving beyond a sense of mediated and unmediated to a more variegated sense of liveness and place. Gob Squad’s search for interviewees on the South Bank, for example, is partly a search for those open to having part of their identity mediated (via the group’s video cameras) in ways beyond their control and that they might never see. Viewing Gob Squad and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster together foregrounds how, for all the ways this is a response to globalisation, media culture, non-place and instantaneous data transfer - it’s also a working through of an artistic lineage with a particular sense of the possibility of the moving image.

A longer essay than this, for example, might use Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s library of films screening in TH.2058 as a partial viewing companion for Saving the World. This wouldn’t create a set of easy parallels. But, to pick only a few of the more famous examples, I think the suggestiveness of viewing Gob Squad in the light of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or Chris Marker’s La Jetée, or Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad, are immediately apparent.

Actually, without checking I’m not sure TH.2058 did include the Resnais film but it certainly enters into the dialogue, as does Warhol’s Screen Tests, literally re-created in the Gob Squad’s Kitchen and becoming a research methodology in Saving the World, where groups of passers-by stare silent and still into Gob Squad’s cameras. Gonzalez-Foerster doesn’t include Warhol in her loop of films but the aesthetics of the Screen Tests can certainly be related to TH.2058’s ideal of audience participation: a figure sat on the beds, as absorbed in a book as Warhol’s subjects were in the 16mm camera before them.

Relations of film and theatre is a vast topic that could be traced in essays by, amongst many others, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag. Here, I want to highlight such dialogues manifesting as uncertainty, but in different ways. TH.2058 seemed always there, its films on a loop, but then the installation closed and it vanished. Gob Squad’s subjects are saved for DVD-posterity, but confined to the show’s limited (and for now completed) performance times. For both artists, film promises capturing and archiving, then delivers a richer, more substantial offering of the intangible and disappearing.

Not that these pieces are at all grim or po-faced about the apocalyptic scenarios they propose, for either London or the possibilities of film. Gob Squad’s attitude to such issues is summed up in the closing party-scenes of Saving the World where they cavort in bear-clown costumes made of multiple soft toys. It reminded me of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster‘s artists’ talk at Tate Modern in March which covered the Starr Auditorium lectern in gold tinsel and had a DJ play Latin Jazz records, before ending the evening with the lights suddenly out and a soundscape of tropical rain.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

Being a Superhero by Mary Paterson

Saving the World

By Gob Squad

Greenwich Dance Agency

Simon has always wanted to save the world, he says. And now’s his chance. Wearing a shiny cape and an eager expression, Simon is one of the Gob Squad members who spent a day filming life on the Southbank in London. The film they collected has been cut but not edited – it still plays out as a series of shots in chronological time, complete with mistakes and awkward moments – so that it lasts for an hour and a half. It was shown at the Greenwich Dance Agency on a semi-circular construction of screens, to almost fill the audience’s field of vision. This, then, is the size of the world. And everything that Gob Squad managed to record, has been ‘saved’ for the future – saved on film, so that you, the audience, can watch it in your present.

Of course, in saving the world Gob Squad also creates it. First, a magician conjures the world into view, screen by screen, and brings to life the sounds of the dawn chorus to welcome it. The magician is present in most of the film, lingering enigmatically at its edges until she is called to action to ‘save’ something. And what does she save? Money, the news, age, toothpaste, love … concepts grasped from the air by Gob Squad’s team of caped crusaders, and then explained, breathlessly, with the help of passersby. Love is explicated by a kissing couple; walking is described by people who have nowhere to go; sex can only happen off camera, and nobody is quite sure if that means it can be preserved or not.

As they try to explain the big things and the little things that make up life in this world, Gob Squad stumble over their own ambition. Does toothpaste deserve to be saved? Did Simon get it right when he talked about war? Moreover, this emblem of the world struggles to represent everything in it. North of the river must stand in for the west (‘the land of plenty’), and the Millennium Wheel somehow represents the wheel of industry; an office building is the repository of ‘News’, and the Southbank centre stands for Hollywood.

As the light fades over the Southbank, the Gob Squad team’s desperation begins to show. They are not only anxious about what to preserve, but also whom to preserve it for. Addressing the future as they save the past, it’s not clear if the members of Gob Squad are saving the world so that it can be remembered, or so that it can be mourned. At one point, the three agents of preservation loom large on the screens and call out for their future selves. Watching the film only a few days after it was shot, this plaintive marking of time sent a shiver down my spine. The film enacts the finality of time, which feels continuous but must only flow in one direction. By trying to break the flow, Gob Squad’s attempt at saviour is unmasked as nothing more than a technological and verbal pun: the world of a few day ago is already lost forever.

But then a miracle happens. Gob Squad’s future selves stand up from the audience and talk back to the screens. Unfortunately, the future has not been as bright as they’d hoped – love affairs have not flourished, fortunes have not been won, appearances are disappointing. And, as the conversations continue, it becomes clear that the future has little power over the past. Sharon asks for the moon to be lowered and the paving stones to light up, but the Southbank remains resolutely grey. Instead, Sharonsettles for a bit of smoke and the actors jump energetically back into the film.

It is this leap of faith that is the real act of preservation in ‘Saving the World.’ Shots of people staring into camera; breathless explanations of work, life and death; elaborate costumes and earnest expressions – none of this represents the world or anything in it. Instead, it represents a desire to contact the future, or to heal a rift with the past. It matters less that Gob Squad’s efforts are accurate or precise, than that they make the effort at all. As a result, Gob Squad manages to preserve something without letting it stagnate. What they preserve is not the world, but the desire to live in it.

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com