BODY
BREAK * * * |
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PERFORMANCE
MAGAZINE No 35 Alastair
MacLennan's Body Break (the third of what the British Art Show catalogue
calls Four Related Performance Installations 1984-85) came as a poignant
reminder not only that there is a strength to be found in enormous length
(Body Break was 72 hours long) but also that it's a strength that can
help make performance combative and arresting: far from being complacent
about its audience, Body Break (which was performed in a small upstairs
room in the Mappin) lured people up from the
galleries with its hypnotic tape-loop soundtrack of helicopters and wailing
bagpipes, and once it had them up there, it either disgusted them - in
some cases quite literally, the stink of rotting fish got so bad - or,
at least as often it intrigued them with its at first apparently peculiar
assortment of objects - a basket of earth with Alastair MacLennan's life-mask
lying on it, a pig's head split in half, an old washing mangle with a
crumpled newspaper and crushed fish caught between its rollers, the square
of creamy-white flour that they were all set out upon - then it drew them
in as the resonances of more and more of the objects seemed to relate
to the fact that these were Irish newspapers, and finally it mesmerised
them with Alastair MacLennan's painfully slow, repeated, apparently ritualistic
actions. Again and again he brushed around the square of flour, tidying
up its edges; or slowly, as though measuring, he'd run his finger in from
the edge of the flour, continuing the squaring of the cork floor tiles
into his own larger, more important square. |