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Following on from Thursday’s review of Henema Fa, the blind lesbian nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, there has been a satisfyingly disabled smell wafting downwind from the Tate: art-chins in high places have been wagging about another new artist - Bezier Conflagrĕ.
French, and deaf from the waist up, Bezier’s practice has involved faithfully attending various European nightclubs, discos and dancehalls and transcribing the dance moves he observes into poetry via the cipher of sign-language. The resulting tracts verge on the nonsensical, but like the monkeys-in-typewriters equation, Conflagrĕ produces work of Shakespearean dimensions.
The videostill above (above) is taken from a video installation, currently showing at the Tittelfukt in Leipzig, which documents Bezier’s reading of Berlin’s most notorious club event, Buttelfitzen-Freitziggernacht. The club is the setting for Europe’s most experimental dance pioneers (now being subjected to crushingly new EU regulations) who throw moves so cutting edge that onlookers have been known to weep and vomit through incomprehension and amazement. What’s more, these dancers unknowingly describe more than they know or can describe; the video’s crowning bubble occurs when two female vets on a Hen Night seem to communicate to each other the theory of relativity, whilst the moves of the crowd behind spell out an extract from a sub-clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Which only goes to prove the age-old parapet; when you’re deaf, no-one can hear you scream.
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2006-08-05 @ 22:31