EXHIBITION: BROWN COUNCIL’S BIG SHOW
Laughing so hard that pee trickles down – while wearing primary-coloured conical hats and leotards – is not what you usually hear associated with performance art. Brown Council are not your usual performance artists. The skit, blending humour with spiralling uneasiness and a definite gross factor, was one I was lucky enough to witness at the recent Cabernet Sauvignon Christmas Party, but you can also catch some Brown Council action at Locksmith Project Space in December. Like the pee skit, Big Show also attempts to lift the curtain on comedy and its dark side in a series of endurance performances (as the archetypal ‘Dunce’) as well as video projections. Brown Councillor Fran Barrett tells us more …
Who or what is Brown Council?
Brown Council is a collaboration between four artists: Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith. Our practice is premised on performance, interrogating how it is that we perform. Our works include live performances and recorded performances which take the form of video installation.
Who or what is Brown Council?
Brown Council is a collaboration between four artists: Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith. Our practice is premised on performance, interrogating how it is that we perform. Our works include live performances and recorded performances which take the form of video installation.
Your upcoming residency Big Show promises to explore the slippages between art and entertainment. Can you explain what you mean by that?
The new body of work presented in Big Show depicts endurance performance presented like a variety show. We are specifically looking at the role of laughter and humour within art and comedic performance – how laughter and humour can be rejuvenate and provoke forms of art making, specifically performance art.
What makes you think there’s a malicious side of comedy?
Nietzsche states that there is a malicious side to laughter: so we wanted to explore this quality held within laughter and its potential to confront and/or appeal to an audience. This new body of work explores the point at which an audience member recognises the origin and cause of their own laughter and what this reveals of their character.
What will the performative video works look like?
An installation of a video projection and a work on a monitor, accompanied by the beautiful cascade of a glittered blue curtain … very stark gallery meets big show spectacle.
In your 2009 piece What Do I Do? you mention a ‘performance anxiety’ and the interrogation of performance art in general. Where does this anxiety spring from?
A performance anxiety arises from the absolute fear of making work. Within the whole context of (performance) art history, where does your practice lie and how do your ideas articulate an original voice? We are shadowed and often paralysed by this fear of mimicry and repetition, but then we utilise those anxieties it to our own means to make new works.
There are also frequent mentions of ‘endurance’. Do you enjoy pushing your bodies to their limits?
Our interest in endurance lies in our training as visual artists. We each studied performance art throughout our time as students and began making performance work whilst at university which was very much infused with this history and methodology of making work. Since then our own style has developed, but it is very much founded in this initial interest in performance art.
What is next for Brown Council?
In May 2010 we are presenting a new work, A Comedy at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. So until then we are in development of this new performance, undertaking residencies as Bundanon, NORPA and HotHouse Theatre.
Until Dec 19, Locksmith Project Space, 6 Botany Rd Alexandria, www.locksmithprojectspace.com
