“A Premonition of the Act” | Rose English at Camden Arts Centre | 12th December 2015 – 6th March 2016
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A low, round, revolving stage is lit from above. An audience circles it in tiers of violet hue. From a darkened aisle two women walk out, slowly, their leotard necklines sparkling. A woman—the artist, Rose English—proceeds to the circle’s edge dressed in a black robe. She holds a champagne glass on a saucer and passes it to one of the performers; a procession. I watch as the performers revolve to the crescendos of hymning emanating from the darkened aisles; words like flagrant, flutter, flicker, flower, flatter, flame, screaming, talking, music, wisdom. The tension rises as the women begin to balance increasingly complicated glass structures on their feet, their hands, and their heads as they bend, flip, slide and roll around the moment that never comes—when everything blows into shards. Like much of English’s work in her latest exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, watching this video my attention too revolved around two points: the collision, and the audience.
Known for her theatrical performance works, “the unsung queen of British performance art” English has been making work since the 1970s when she first emerged as a prominent figure from Britain’s feminist art scene, although her new solo exhibition The Premonition of an Act, remains emptied of any performance in the flesh. In each of the two video works in the exhibition, every audience member on screen is shifting, grazing, watching with you. Both works document bygone events; Ornamental Happiness filmed at the Liverpool Biennale in 2006, and Flagrant Wisdom filmed in what looks like a professional gym, then in Sunderland’s National Glass Centre where each performer takes a turn at rehearsing their own throwing and sliding and turning and balancing ornaments alongside their bodies. All the while their fellow rehearsers mimic you watching from the sidelines in a double-screened montage. Everyone observes what never happens; the crash.
Between these two films the largest room in the exhibition remains the calmest. Here, a group of chairs are clustered together in darkness under the sound of hymns falling from the speakers in the rafters, encircled again by the artist’s notebook pages pinned to the faraway walls, almost all of them penciled with phrases like electric glass, synaptic circus and liquid embrace, each one spotlit in a pool of amber light. A distant romance, a sanctuary perhaps from the adrenaline fuelled act of the near fall. This room offers some space—too much space—between the teetering disasters at either end of the gallery, its material unable to match nor counter the risk in the acts themselves. This install leaves English’s artwork to fall limply in the middle; filler.
In the final room as I watch Flagrant Wisdom the bystanders check their phones, so do I. The tension first encountered in Ornamental Happiness has at this point diffused. If only the space were made that bit tighter, and Camden Arts Centre could be transformed fully into that vessel so prominent in English’s works.
