WITH a programme devoted almost entirely to romance art, Cork's Intermedia festival, which finishes this week, was less varied than that of previous years, and with only two installations, there wasn't really a strong base to link up the transitory nature of performance.
The first installation, by the Polish Czeslaw Minkus, in Triskel's main gallery, consisted of six TV sets arranged in a circle, playing back identical film footage, with a 30 second delay between each. The recording was of the artist playing "free form" trumpet at a 1990 performance the cacophonous effect integral to this work seems to have been a fair assimilation of the initial performance. The second installation, by Damien Doyle, also in the main gallery, runs until Thursday and is a fairly sparse affair, using door stoppers and hooks screwed into facing walls a metal case containing two bricks fitted with buckles and straps reveals little about the nature of this piece.
Colette Lewis's performance, Too Naked, was a well staged and executed piece, involving stretch fabric structures, and through its location in an A Wear shop window, had a higher public profile. Augustine O'Donoghue, sat static in the Boole Libarary of UCC from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a sign reading "Thinking", which explained the function of her contribution.
All the other participants were concentrated in the Triskel's auditorium, with the first performance coming from Michael Wilson. Entitled Performance Anxieties Am I Talking Too Much?, Wilson delivered three "little chats" on various subjects including modernism, queer theory and sexual identity interspersed with snappy anecdotes, singing, poetry and what seemed to be spurious rant. His delivery alternated between well defined opinion and more tentative questioning, which cleverly wound itself into a kind of perpetual loop of word, image and concept.
The nudity involved in Mary Duffy's Stories Of A Body was of a different essence than that in the ritualistic events staged by artists like Carolee Schneemann during the Seventies, and was a direct and open appraisal of her own experience as a Thalidomide survivor. In a soothing voice, she spoke of the humiliation she had suffered at the hands of a medical profession that has awkwardly tried to make up for her disability. But in more general terms, Duffy was provoking each member of the audience to assess his or her own attitudes and preconceptions, closing with the particularly poignant statement, "I'm winning my own battles, and for the most part, I'm doing it with dignity and pride" Leah Hilliard's piece staged directly afterwards, involved her determinedly putting on various items of clothing, building intentionally or otherwise comic suspense, as the clothes became increasingly difficult to put on.
An ominous atmosphere pervaded Danny Mc Carthy's Artuation XXVII. A monotone synth soundtrack accompanied McCarthy, who cut a rather ghostly figure, his presence blurring slightly through the haze of slide projector and dry ice. Walking slowly around a circle of tall lighted candles, he knelt periodically to extinguish each candle, with a separate doll's head. His final gesture was to suspend a teddy bear from the ceiling allowing it to swing, its luminous "heart" becoming hypnotic. McCarthy's interest in shamanism is not a novelty in performance art, but this was a powerful piece, the most visually elaborate of the festival.
