Reviews
Alex Hetherington: House/Lights
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Alex Hetherington, ‘House/Lights’, performance at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2007.
Photo: Jennifer Beaton.
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
19 July
A random arrangement of cameras, monitors and wires face us on the empty stage before Alex Hetherington enters the room. Waiting in anticipation is artist Janie Nicoll, wearing a pair of devilish horns and blood red lipstick, ready to play the non-vocal part of the devil in this head-muddling, Faust-inspired performance. Hetherington enters in a dark suit to deliver his monologue, joining Nicoll behind the monitors so we see their faces both in reality and replicated on the screen, thereby creating a simulation of the actuality before us.
Hetherington’s script is taken from the play House / Lights by The Wooster Theatre Group, which combines elements of Gertrude Stein’s play, Dr Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph Mawra’s disturbing 1970s film Olga’s House of Shame. Just to add further to the confusion, Hetherington re-enacts the part of Kate Valk, the original lead actress, attempting to vocally imitate her performance by delivering his monologue into a microphone which morphs his voice into a ‘feminised’, electronic tone. It is at times completely incomprehensible, Hetherington camping it up further with limp wrists and hands on hips, thereby softening his masculinity. What we can make out of the Faustian text is overtly repetitive, with little sense of narrative or structure, in true Stein fashion.
There are amusing, surreal moments, as when Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire murmurs and jerks in the background, whilst randomly placed devil’s horns and plastic dinosaurs on monitors are playful and entertaining. At one point Nicoll takes a stroll with a camera, snapshotting the audience and the performers so that we too are included, and one starts to wonder if there isn’t a camera somewhere filming us watching them. It is this multi-layered complexity which makes the work so intriguing, and the more one reads the accompanying texts and blog pages the more one is thrown a wider array of contrasting sources and references, revealing the depth of analytical research within this scintillating ongoing project.
Rosie Lesso
Rosie Lesso is based in Scotland and writes about contemporary art for a number of regional and national magazines.
First published: a-n Magazine September 2007
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