Interview with Rose English at Camden Arts Centre

29/01/16

Interview with Rose English

Rose English: A Premonition of the Act

Camden Arts Centre

12 December 2015 – 6 March 2016

Postscript

Camden Arts Centre

11 and 12 March 2016

Rose English (b1950) came to the fore on the 1970s feminist art scene, in particular with her 1975 performance Quadrille, a ballet for six horses and hoofed dancers presented at a dressage show – and her work crosses boundaries between performed installation, vaudeville, film, spoken drama and opera. She has appeared on stage and in films and has been writing, directing and performing for 35 years.

English has been working with Chinese acrobats for more than a decade now and her collaboration with them has evolved through various performances and exhibitions, including Ornamental Happiness – a show in song and circus – at the Liverpool Biennial in 2006 and Flagrant Wisdom commissioned by the National Glass Centre in 2009. Her current exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, A Premonition of the Act, is described as “reconfiguring elements of a major yet-to-be-realised performance”, hinting towards two live performances that will take place after the show has been taken down, on 11 and 12 March 2016.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the sound work, Lost in Music, an operatic piece for 10 voices and percussion, scored by Luke Stoneham for English’s libretto. It plays in a darkened room, on the walls of which extracts from the score and English’s notes, as well as images of the acrobats at rehearsal, and glassware being blown, are displayed in lightboxes: image juxtaposed against word; sight against sound. Next door, three screens show breathtaking footage of the acrobats, performing complex and almost unimaginable feats with the specially made glass vessels – a selection of which are displayed on a table nearby. A girl carries a tiered tray of champagne flutes on her feet; a boy tosses a seemingly weightless vase lightly into the air. One slip and disaster would ensue.

The work as a whole has been described as “a meditation on the temporality of ephemeral work” and “a meditation on the correlation between word and image, inspired by the Sister Sledge hit Lost in Music and a resonant line from the writings of Walter Benjamin”. Studio International spoke to English about her inspirations, aspirations and the practicalities of producing such complex and enduring – if ephemeral – performance pieces.

Watch this interview here

Review of Liberties at Collyer Bristow Gallery

16/09/15

Liberties

Collyer Bristow Gallery
2 July – 21 October 2015

The year 1975 was a landmark one for women around the world. It was declared by the United Nations to be International Women’s Year, and, in the UK, it saw the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Employment Protection Act (making statutory maternity pay a requirement for employers and legislating against dismissal on the grounds of pregnancy). Since then, things have continued to improve in the UK: in 1976, the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act was introduced; in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected as Britain’s first female prime minister; in 1987, Julie Hayward, a canteen cook at a Liverpool shipyard, became the first woman to win a case under the amended Equal Pay Act; and in 1992 Betty Boothroyd MP became the first female Speaker in the House of Commons. There is still much to be fought for to achieve full equality, however, and the creation of such projects as Million Women Rise (2007) and the Everyday Sexism Project (2012) is testament to this. This year has seen the founding of the UK Women’s Equality Party by broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and author and journalist Catherine Mayer. 

Given this unsatisfactory status quo, the curatorial duo Day+Gluckman (Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman) wanted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a pivotal year, but also to provoke and encourage continued attempts at revolution and radical transformation. As Alexandra M Kokoli notes in an essay to accompany the exhibition,1 “feminist accounts of the past first emerged as feminist responses to gaps in historical narratives”. The curation of this show follows what the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal has called a “preposterous history”, whereby contemporary artworks quote or allude to past artworks, “put[ting] what came chronologically first (‘pre’) as an aftereffect behind (‘post’) its later recycling”.2 This is exemplified in Jessica Voorsanger’s Claude Monet (Bald Series) (2013), where a woman is seen adorned with the artist’s iconic beard; Rose English’s Baroque Harriet 2 and 3 (1973) where women are seen reclining on a chaise longue and posed in a frame, but wrapped up respectively in a duvet and a large bow, destroying the traditional gaze, by offering them some modesty; and EJ Major’s series investigating the axe attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914.

Read the rest of this review here