Showing @ Summerhall, Edinburgh until Sat 23 Aug @ 22:30
Ever since Duchamp’s Fountain, art has become increasingly experimental. After receiving a grant to travel to L.A. and make a performance, Dutch theatre company Wunderbaum are inspired by Inez van Dam’s passionate hatred of Paul McCarthy’s controversial sculpture Buttplug Gnome – its opposite her home and bookshop. Paid for by Dutch taxes, they use it as the seed for a show that will begin a dialogue around arts funding.
The performance consists of the group, Inez and Daniel (their American liaison) reading aloud their email exchanges during the process. This may sound flat and dull but is actually very entertaining. It’s immediately apparent that not everyone is on board and these grievances, often not intended to be heard by all, create tensions that grow as diverging performance ideas emerge. It’s also a fascinating insight into the motivations behind decisions and shows how collaborative work can be fractious and laborious.
If this were the show’s entirety it would have been a bit disappointing. However, once the correspondences are concluded, a display that is both performance art and theatre begins. To try and describe it wouldn’t do it justice, but it’s a surreal take on McCarthy’s provocative career. It is the antithesis of the static reading but it fits with their original intention. By using their funding to create a piece that many will find distasteful and disgusting, Wunderbaum make a comment on the freedom of expression. It may not be to everybody’s taste but isn’t funding some experimental, divisive work worth the cost of enabling free flowing creativity?