By Ellen Mara De Wachter
Kieren Reed, 'From the Ground Up, (A) Social Building', 2014. All photographs: Ellen Mara De Wachter
‘We haven’t rehearsed this. Not because we don’t care; because we care very much.’ On a sunny beach in Whitstable, Kent, Fiona James began a brief introduction to her work ‘The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable’ (2014) with these words. After telling us a bit about what would happen during the next 45 minutes, she handed the microphone over to an acolyte who explained that she had three minutes to locate as many casualties as possible. What followed was part performance, part sport and heavily fuelled by adrenaline. Five female ‘contestants’ were acting out a series of ‘incidents’, or lifesaving simulations. They took turns to lead a rescue mission, going through the bare bones of their scenario and then stripping down to swimsuits and shoes, while narrating the clues they could see and the dangers they concealed, and narrowly avoiding panic. ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Where’s the BABY??’ When James blew the whistle, the leader swapped with one of her team members who dealt with a wholly different scenario. Some incidents involved dogs, some floating plastic bags, and some purple smoke. In the performance of their imagined emergencies, they deployed silver foil and orange plastic sheeting whose colour popped against the blue sky. They used tent poles to improvise a range of sculptural signals and beacons, and disposable cameras to document their efforts. Each rescuer delivered a real-time monologue of her critical and analytical processes, describing and interpreting what she ‘saw’. The visually arresting shapes made by the performers and the excitement of their speech coalesced into a moment verging on absurdist theatre when one of the rescuers, now sheathed in dazzling silver foil and pillows inflated with smoke from a flare, walked slowly up the shore while belting out The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’. James’s work, with its foundation in the analytically rigorous sport of lifesaving offered a fitting metaphor to the esoteric sport of biennale visiting.
Fiona James, ‘The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable’, 2014
Scheduled over three consecutive weekends between May 31 and June 15 – with some video installations running on weekdays too – the biennale is concentrated along the Whitstable shore, with its temporary headquarters next to the Royal Native Oyster Stores, home of the town’s famous delicacy. The HQ is sited in Kieren Reed’s From the Ground Up, (A) Social Building, a 4-metre tall plywood A-frame building covered in Tyvek. A round window at the top of the sea-facing wall is placed so that red light streams into the structure at sunset. It operates as the information point for the biennale, and is home to a programme of talks and events organised by Collaborative Research Group, led by artist Toby Huddlestone. The biennale doesn’t have a permanent office in Whitstable but instead in nearby Canterbury – a testament to increasing property prices in the area and also to the close relationship between the two towns. In the 1980s, several local art colleges were amalgamated into the Kent Institute of Art and Design (now the University for the Creative Arts), and students unable to afford the high rents in Canterbury moved to Whitstable, setting up an artistic community in what was at the time a modest working-class seaside town. The biennale grew out of a local arts festival set up in the 1990s and has been under the directorship of Sue Jones, previously the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, since 2006.
Laura Wilson, ‘Black Top’ 2014
Unsurprisingly, many artists use the seaside backdrop and industrial context as inspiration for new works, for example: Laura Wilson’s Black Top (2014), a video and month-long performance at the aggregates factory that still operates on the east side of Whitstable harbour. Wilson explained to me that her durational performance consists of ‘A shovel driver called Andy on a loading shovel adding to a pile of asphalt every day until the end of the biennale’. In her video, extravagant quantities of gravel used by the factory to make the asphalt cascade from the mechanical hand of a digger in a graceful gesture. The prosaic materials Wilson filmed seem almost alive. Her camera revels in the sensual waves of grit and sand, capturing their silky ripples and their watery hiss as they hit the ground. The video was installed in a shipping container on the harbourside, and the bodies populating this claustrophobic space suddenly brought to mind the more sobering aspects of shipping including the economically-motivated transportation of live bodies and goods across oceans.
Wilson’s work was not alone in lending lifelike qualities to inanimate substances. Across town at St Peter’s Church Hall, the ARKA Group’s Beginnings (2012) invited three people at a time to sit down with headphones, don a blackout hood and hold a fragment of meteorite while a voice led them through a narrative in which they became the meteorite coming into being. ‘You feel each finger that pointed at you as you tore across the sky’, says the stirring voice of Dr George Wake, a biodiesel expert and meteorite collector, although he may as well be a professional voiceover artist. The sound quality and headphones were excellent, the chair was comfortable, and the hood completely impermeable to light – these important details were notable for having been scrupulously attended to. The meteorite fragment, about the size of a tangerine, felt very heavy and warm in my hands. While the work did feel a little like a tribute to the currently trending Object Oriented Ontology, or more settled notions of Deleuzian ‘becoming’, it did offer me an experience that was entirely mine; a private moment of escapism a world away from the usual biennale bunfight.
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, ‘Das Hund & The Pilgrim Shells’, 2014
The opening weekend of the biennale featured several one-off performances, including The Sorrowful and Immaculate Fall of One Hundred Grazing Sheep (2014) an enigmatic work-for-one by Bronwen Buckeridge for which I was given secret instructions that took me to the private quarters of a Whitstable resident, through her bedroom and into her library with a view. There I listened to a 10-minute audio recording of an ambiguous conversation between a young woman and an elderly man, apparently discussing hidden architectures or archaeological finds. My search for a specific meaning in the work was unfruitful, but I felt vindicated when the man explained that, ‘What you can’t see or can’t find is the bit that interests me’. The best part of the work was the way in which the audio recording operated as a pretext to indulge in the voyeuristic frisson of observing how a stranger had composed her living space.
Saturday evening began with a gig by Das Hund & The Pilgrim Shells, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski’s band, which, for this performance, benefited from the addition of three professional guitarists. The duo had festooned the harbourmaster’s boatshed, a cavernous and odoriferous space, with an array of colourful plaster masks or ‘pilgrim shells’, large paintings on silver Cellotex boards and flickering video projections made during a residency in Whitstable preceding the biennale. Expanding on the maritime theme of their surroundings, the performers wore costumes made of beachcombed fragments of rubber tyres. Against the group’s idiosyncratic harmonies and layered guitars nostalgic of 1990s American garage bands, Levack’s declamatory style on vocals came close to spoken word at times. He intoned what felt like a cautionary tale, which culminated with an arresting falsetto warning about ‘New York gallery rooms’, summing up the unconventional tone of their gritty art-music crossover performance.
Louisa Fairclough, ‘Compositions for a Low Tide’, 2014
Along the coast to the east of the harbour, Louisa Fairclough’s Compositions for a Low Tide (2014) made use of The Street, a half-mile long shingle spit that extends into the sea at a right angle to the beach. At twilight, choirboys from Rochester Cathedral surrounded the compact group of people who had booked to take part in the performance, and led a procession to the end of The Street, singing phrases taken from a notebook belonging to the artist’s deceased sister. ‘Oh god’; ‘Can people see me swallowing’: the boys sang these simple phrases over and over again. At times, and given the knowledge of the words’ source, their repetition felt utterly sad. At others, the absurdity of an obsessive-compulsive rehashing of such a trivial concern snapped back with hilarity. This swinging of emotions was all the more affecting given the performance’s time – neither day nor night – and place on neither land nor sea.
With six performances and nine installations, the first weekend of the biennale was small enough to see in one long day. Although most performances are one-offs, some works are ongoing, such as John Walter’s Turn My Oyster Up (2014), a beach hut to the west of the town centre, which will extend the hospitality of the artist for the duration of the festival. Walter performs the character Nanoneon, serving visitors gin and tonics, local gypsy tarts and a healthy dose of Polari, the gay slang popularised by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick in the 1960s BBC Radio 4 show ‘Round the Horne’. While Nanoneon prepares the drinks, his video sidekicks Bummy Pete and Goat Guy – names borrowed from pseudonyms Walter discovered in online gay chat rooms – exchange Polari jibes across the counter. The installation is a superabundance of bright wallpaper, neon light and chattering videos, all of which conjures up a hysterical nightclub or playroom atmosphere. Walter’s costume is adorned with such an array of brightly coloured lumps, bumps and soft protuberances that you have to see it to believe it. And many have: visitors queued up to be admitted a handful at a time for an intimate audience with their host.
John Walter, ‘Turn My Oyster Up’, 2014
The Whitstable Biennale has kept projects to a manageable size, enabling visitors to have a rare and valuable direct access to artists and performers. The proliferation of biennials through the 1990s and 2000s has given rise to an international exhibition circuit whose schedule and cost can be gruelling for those who faithfully attend openings in cities across the globe. It has become hard to avoid ‘biennial fatigue’. The success of a relatively small endeavour on the Kentish coast, in particular its ability to offer focused and personal encounters with art and artists, made it clear that there are increasingly sophisticated local art events to match the international ones.