FRANS WEST

SARAH LUCAS  Photo Julian Simmons, 2010. Image: Sadie Coles HQ, London

When we arrived at the elegant Royal Institution and entered the

lecture theatre with its hot pink tiered seating, artists Sarah Lucas,
Andreas Reiter Raabe and Franz West’s discussion was already in
mid-flow. Similarly the advertised “musical interventions” by Phillip
Quehenberger had begun. Drinking beer, grinning, and murmuring into
their microphones, the artists were often eclipsed by Quehenberger’s
keyboard sounds and growling electronic bass. Quehenberger, for the
most part silent and serious in his black vest and chain, carefully
produced music that has previously been called “electro-pop music for
test tube babies, a giant ‘f*** you’ to the Hoxtonites proclaiming the
hipster draw of ‘electro-house’, it’s mean, dirty and sometimes
horrible, but it was always meant to be that way, wasn’t
it?”(Boomkat). In some ways this description is apt for the way in
which many received tonight’s “talk” which took the anticipated format
and threw it back into the crowd. Much to the delight of many
(beautiful young art folk resembling the cast of Glee dragged via art
school into brogues, gingham and messy hair) who proclaimed the
evening “marvellous” and “mental!”, but much to the disgust of others
– two of whom were women in scarves and pearls who told me in the
Ladies’ afterwards that they considered the evening an “insult to
their intellect”.
Through the flow of Quehenberger’s music (at one point we seemed to
slip into an Orb song with Sarah Lucas’ words “penetrating”, “realer
and realer” and “sense of what they might be” floating through the
beats) the three artists covered varied territory, and though
individually their points were not particularly insightful, the parts
did eventually result in an interesting whole. Looking not unlike a
Madhatter’s Tea Party, the trio covered the abstract in music as
similar to the visual (Delacroix-style music as the most abstract
form), the subconscious, the role of music and colour, the artist’s
hand (Lucas: “ I make the eggs the best”), a love of pink and its
ability to improve in the countryside where it contrasts well with
green (a rural rather than urban pink), dentists as sculptors and the
use of furniture within Lucas and West’s work. The latter provoked
West’s initial interest in Lucas who began using furniture as a
substitute for the human body in the 1990s. Lucas has continued to
appropriate everyday materials to make works that use humour, visual
puns and sexual metaphor to discuss wider issues such as death,
Englishness and gender. The evening’s talk was filled with just such
humour and discussion. West spent the majority of the time requesting
the music was louder, more melancholy, sweeter. Maintaining a
whimsical smile for much of the time, his bright red socks popped like
one of his colourful sculptures or worn abstract objects. Reiter
Raabe’s questions vaguely held the conversation together – to take
this “talk = art” metaphor to its end, he compiled their words into a
loose linear narrative, posing conceptual questions in the same way as
he explores wider meaning in his photography.
The evening reached a climax of mixed pleasure, frustration and
confusion when Lucas walked out saying “I’m going for a wee” which
resulted in many people leaving. West shrugged and said to the
audience “money back again”. I suddenly felt I was part of a morphing
Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. When Lucas returned
questions were invited from the floor – to which a young man asked
what was going on. He had come for a talk, he had come to an
institution, he expected information, and he expected a structure. The
artists asked him what he wanted to know and they would tell him. The
starry crowd tangibly divided between those sneering at his lack of
comprehension and those nodding vehemently at his right to ask the
question they were too afraid to ask. Perhaps he exposed an Emperor’s
New Clothes element to the proceeding, but also in questioning the
activity he created a Brechtian sense of performance, a commentator
exposing the process of the event, clarifying the deterioration of the
4th (in this case even 3rd, 2nd and 1st?) wall. The frustration of
many seemed contradictory for a crowd so willing to accept anything
within the boundaries of the artists’ decision and yet they rejected
this member of the audience for demanding to become a part of an
apparently boundless event/experience through his question. However,
ultimately this need for formal structure resulted in his missing out
on the pleasure of the ‘in progress/in process’ flowing nature of the
event.
Despite the mixed responses, one thing was certain – the audience
positively buzzed as it left, whether in humour, joy, or anger. Before
the night closed, West had offered a definition of the aim of the
evening: a “loading of energy”. This description was certainly true
for me.

REBECCA BELL