Dead/End

Dead/End
The Consequence, Janie Nicoll and Alex Hetherington
Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow May 2007

Five monitors greet the audience as they enter Glasgow-based Nicoll and soon to be San Francisco-based Hetherington's first collaborative installation, four monitors flicker out edits and sequences, dialogue and tones (Stein's 'chorus' from Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights?), while one is left dead, blank and left redundant on the floor. It's a tele-visual dead end motif and beckons the viewer towards the central themes that crash and collide through this deceptively simple but hypnotically complex show.

Though described as a collaborative process the show is a game of two halves where only suggestions of overlapping and cooperation are indicated, black and white, chalk and cheese, the artists aren't in conversation, they are in confrontation. The 'argument' is based round Hetherington's recital of Kate Valk's dialog from The Wooster Group's House/Lights. Here he speaks Valk's lines using a combination of in-camera techniques and electronic technology to distort his voice from Scottish to American, from masculine to feminine (this performance was filmed over an extended duration so that the texts were spoken slowly with a falsetto US accent so when played back at real-time speed the words and the voice would sound normal). This represents another coda dispersed throughout the show: masculine and feminine made fake and interchangeable and the real presented as counterfeit. The monitors playing in tandem screen scenes of an imagined remake of Fassbinder's Querelle, which is given a soundtrack of tones and songs, while the House/Lights monologue continues to delineate the context of this fake promos giving it a new feminized reading; this video responds, fights back, as embedded in the work is a description given by Kate Valk herself during a radio broadcast about House/Lights and The Wooster Group's work in general; she is simultaneously commenting here on her own performance and that of Hetherington's comic, queer, full-on pastiche. Hetherington's voice again in falsetto mode plays on the eponymously titled video The Consequence; here he employs extracts from lines from the film Olga's House of Shame, House/Lights companion to Gertrude Stein's Dr Faustus Lights the Lights. The lines imply criminality, House of Shame is after all a grindhouse feature film depicting a lesbian narcotics ring hiding out in upstate NY, in a place where jewel theft and S&M torture seem to go hand in hand; these texts are accompanied by gentler descriptions: "how do we give children something more permanent than snow?" he/she says. On-screen beside this are invocations of defunct disco and House music stars, film cinematographers, glamourous German actors, spiritual and feminist philosophers, the gay draftsman Tom of Finland and the soft spoken voice of radical New York theatre Spalding Gray. Hetherington wants the electronic chants and whispers to raise the 'dead' or 'past', remembering and elevating his influences and sources.

The sheer scale of references here is an embodiment of the tensions between known cultural spikes and obscure artistic endeavors, plotting a map that tends towards a literary and visual biography of Hetherington, it begins to 'imitate' a self portrait, all the while, in one video masquerading, as a portrait of Nicoll. The feminine and masculine in collision course.

'Mistaken' identities are reinforced by Apple computer default noises; a technique used in the original House/Lights and here used to remind the viewer of how much that is constructed to make men men and women women is the politics and vocabulary of control and social expectation. This was represented well at the opening: it would seem this pair of artists have a fan base of gay bikers and leathermen, dandy gentlemen and women, social outcasts and of course the expected rough stuff of art school openings and parties. It was redolent of a gay pride march in a hells angels bar inside Fosse's Cabaret.

There is an underlying thread of violence in the project: cars are smashed up, children and dogs are murdered, souls are sold to the devil for electric light, women are poisoned by vipers, riots result in running mobs attacking city hall, glamour is killed for cheap gold rings and bets are made on who will win and who will lose; the defeated sure to die or maybe 'Never Die' as Nicoll suggests. Among the rack and ruins comes glimmers of hope, or suggestions of hope within the torrent of abuse, parties gone wrong, street fights and drunken disasters.

Rings of fire are littered throughout the show: from the gold ring at 4000% on the floor, to Johnny Cash's iconic tome to gay leather men seen blowing cigar smoke rings in Sisyphean absurdity. Equally images of 'seeing' and 'eyes' punctuate the work: from googly eyes representing eyes which don't see and if they do it's all comedy to video camera 'eyes' seeing and recording passively to peacock 'eyes' the sign of the evil eye or masculine showmanship. These images killed of by the statement from Oscar Wilde, mouthed by Jeanne Moreau and sung by Hetherington that: "Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves."

Nicol 'sees' too, with an impassioned gaze at the invisible, she works with detritus of good nights out turned bad, bad boys making their marks in the world, punk rock hopes that never died, and social behaviours reasserted and reconsidered that turn everyone into prostitutes. Inside this though is a kind of street philosophy that goes beyond anti-social vandalism; she highlights more significant thoughts discarded though the streets but there to be observed. "Never Die" a drawing says, never die, achieve the impossible and live forever or as Hetherington would observe to do that you need to sell your soul and use every modern trick of video technology to keep your heart beating, your lungs working and your brain on.

Her deliverance of We Are All Prostitutes faces us with a dilemma of our core moralities, our identities and how these can turn and change with the wind; that the statement is covered in leaves reiterates this sentiment. That it is also graffiti splendidly underlines its cheapness, its readiness, its casualness while alluding to a more theoretical description of gender and cultural politics not readily found on the 'textbooks' of the street, it's a graphical statement about the correspondence between ideas and their replacement, thoughts and their transience. It also suggests that for good ideas we may need look no further than the street.

Nicoll screens a video piece in response to the devil in Hetherington's House/Lights (where Faustus sells his soul for electricity) her music plays backwards like the myth of 70s rock sending messages from the devil in reverse. The 'dead' theme also continues here with sounds from The Vultures picking over the remains of cultural deposits in green fields and forests where 'bad' things happen, her theatre space, again in response to Hetherington's RGB glamorous video stage, is a nighttime scenario where the forest hides anti-social antics, gangland marauding and suggested brutal or sexual encounters. Here her video flickers the Vertigo logo, the dizzy sleaze of human interactions, the "wild woods everywhere" not just the forest but the streets too.

The Dead/End of this show is an articulation of the devices - social, sexual, gendered, textual, cinematic or artistic - that in reality keep things as they are. The Consequence is an accusation of disquieting actions, of how processes become corrupt, of spiritual and lascivious motivations, of how fate and luck may play a hand in our lives (the giant lucky gold ring, the Tarot Readings), but eventually not everything you see or read or understand, can be trusted.

The dead TV, abandoned there in uncomfortable silence, 'sees' and 'says' it all.

Prudence Howell