Robert Sharp

Well well - Just as I take a step back from the running of Fifty Nine Productions, they find their way into one of those top 100 lists. We are now officially only 6 degrees less hot than JK Rowling:

The List’s Hot 100 - 2007’s hottest talent

59. Fifty Nine Productions
Fast-tracking their way to international success as audio-visual designers, Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner have worked with Suspect Culture, Grid Iron and, for the National Theatre Of Scotland, Black Watch. Following extensive work at the National Theatre, the Royal Ballet and New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, future projects include a new play at The Traverse and Salome at the Royal Opera House.

No mention of Robert Sharp, goddammit, which probably reflects my distinctly hands-off approach in recent months. One can only hope that the second-hand prestige shows up in some healthy dividend payments, one of these days.

Fifty Nine Productions did the video design for the delightful War Horse. It has been running for a few weeks now: Better-late-than-never with my customary company-aggrandizing review round-up.

Michael Billington of the Guardian enjoyed his four-starred evening at the National, and his colleague at The Observer, Susannah Clapp, predicts a success:

War Horse will be one of the National’s biggest ever hits: it is inventive, distinguished and it makes audiences cry.

Charles Spencer describes the show stealing puppets in the Telegraph:

Joey and the other horses in the show are truly magnificent creations by the Handspring Puppet Company which don’t aim for picturesque realism but with their wooden framework, translucent fabric skins, and extraordinary mobility somehow capture the very essence of everything equine.

And Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times explains just how compelling the horses are:

This is acting of the highest order, inhabiting an entirely different character and bringing him to life before your eyes. It just so happens this character isn’t human

And check out Sam Marlowe in the week-day Times:

Now and then the theatre throws up a piece of work so exhilarating that it makes you rejoice to be alive

I suppose, in a way, its a shame that the technical achievements of projecting onto a 20 metre strip of scenerywere glossed over by the reviewers. But this is a very blinkered outlook. In fact, all design aspects, top-notch though they are, must play second saddle to the horses… as indeed do the performances of the actors playing human characters! The appearance of Joey and Topthorne always get the biggest cheers at the curtain calls, and it is the puppetry that provides all of the stunning coup d’theatres that punctuate the show. Do go and see it if you get the chance. If you miss the current run, I hear it will be revived later in 2008.

The prolific Daily Dish links to a willfully provocative art exhibition in Los Angles, entitled “Merry Titmas”. Andrew makes the point that such ‘provocative’ shows are actually pretty run-of-the-mill and lacking in real bravery.

My general rule with “brave” outsider anti-religious art is to ask if they’d do to Islam what they do routinely to Catholicism. Most don’t. Poseurs are often cowards.

This is a surprisingly immature comparison to make, given the two religions’ very different attitudes to icons and imagery. Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, makes no bones about exploiting the images of its deities. The powerful and often visceral images of Christ, and the invariably erroneous images of the Madonna and Child, are central to the Church’s propaganda. By contrast, Islam guards against such crassness by forbidding any visual depiction of Mohammed, Peace be Upon Him, in any form (be it High Art, cartoons, or the modern medium of teddy bear).

So creating a disrespectful image for one religion is not really comparable to creating a similar image for another, because the critique and satire that underpins the artist’s intent in one context, is not always applicable to another. I agree with Andrew that these artists tend to be ‘poseurs’, and in other areas, I’m sure that one can make the “would you do it for Islam?” comparison. But unfortunately, that argument doesn’t hold for icons and iconoclasm.

I’m busy watching the Royal Variety Performance, and one of my bug-bears has reared its ugly head: The trans-sexual song. You know, one of those songs popularised by a person of one gender… yet performed by a person of another gender. And rather than simply sing the song as was written, they take the decision to swap the words around so they don’t sound, y’know, gay or something.

Sometimes, it’s fine. For example, ‘The Power of Love‘ is a serial trans-sexual, and “You are my lad-ee, and I am your man” does not sound so unnatural next to its opposite (”I am your lady, and you are my man,” which I assume is the original).

At other times, however, the sex-change makes a mockery of the song and its lyrics. In tonight’s gala, young crooners Teatro gave a harmonised rendition of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ from Boubil and Schonberg’s private mint, Les Miserables. But, the song was given a sex change, and such poignant lines such as “he slept a summer by my side” and “he was gone when autumn came” were emasculated. Since the song is about stolen innocence, broken trust and the crushed dreams of a teenaged girl, the emotional intensity of the song was dropped into the surgeon’s waste bin along with its gonads.

Its irritating that these guys are making a living by taking this kind of liberty, and calling it art. I would rather they kept to the original lyrics, and made a stab at trying to convey the original emotions. Voice and music are powerful enough to communicate such things, regardless the gender of the person singing.

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Sometimes its nice to return to those sites where one has left a comment, to see if anyone responded to it. Some blogs have a feature which notifies you when someone else responds. There is even a Web 2.0 application which does that job for you.

It was in such an act of trawling that I happened across a comment on Dave Hill’s post about the Amazon Kindle. The comment is a week old now, but still worth a response. Chip says:

I do fear that it would mark the death of novels in the way that MP3s are destroying the recording industry.

I think this is to mistake evolution for death. MP3s may be breaking the Music Industry’s current business model, but I see no reason why the model cannot change, to adapt to the new technology. At present, the way music is created and published is an anachronism. The standard album of about twelve tracks is a hang-over from the vinyl days - that was all you could fit on a 12 inch playing at 33 1/3 rpm. These days, since most music is released on CDs, you can fit a lot more than twelve three minute tracks onto an album. Double, in fact, yet the artists rarely use this free space.

Likewise with the three-and-a-half minute ’single’ track, so designed for convenient radio airplay. If, in the future, most music is advertised online (via MySpace, say, or Last.fm) then time constraints are less of an issue. Control is returned to the artist, who can play on for five or ten minutes if they feel the need, without being labeled ‘indulgent’.

So, the idea persists that a musician should produce a coherent body of work of about three-quarters of an hour, cut up into twelve tracks, and that they should do this about once every eighteen months or so. The costs involved in this (studio time, a big marketing drive, and maybe a tour) have to be recouped by the label. All these considerations feed into the business model… and when the income demanded by this business model is undercut by MP3 downloads and sales, the new technology is blamed for killing off an industry.

The way music is published clearly needs to change, and embrace the new digital formats. Instead of producing an album per year, why not simply release a new MP3 track each month, or each week, maybe as part of a podcast? This would actually be more interesting, since fans could observe the development of an artists style over a much longer period. If the artist publishes a blog, and maybe a dynamic playlist (”Currently listening to…”) then the fans will be able to engage with the artist and their work on a much deeper level. Its no longer a case of ‘the difficult second album’ so much as the ‘difficult second year’.

As computer software becomes better, and computer hardware becomes cheaper, publishing high-quality audio becomes easier too, meaning that more people can create music. It is no longer the preserve of the elite, in their ivory studios, backed by big labels. If production costs go down, then break-even points are much lower, and fewer sales are required in order to recoup costs. And by releasing fewer tracks at a time, but with greater frequency, musicians will see a quicker return, too.

Finally, this model should also foster greater creativity, and better music. A favourite essay of mine, by a digital artist named Momus, discusses this point at length: For something to be ‘mainstream’, he says, it necessarily needs to be generic. Artists have to smooth their edge if they wish to appeal to a diverse audience with its own tastes (A pop music track of any given era sounds much like any other pop music track from the same era. This is because they are all compromises, attempts on the middle-ground). However, in the digital age, the global audience is big enough that a small yet viable audience can be achieved without the compromises of ‘mainstream’. Musicians can find a fan base, and give it what it wants. Even better, with a weekly or monthly MP3 release, the cost of ‘flopping’ is greatly reduced, allowing more risk-taking, experimentation and collaboration.

The MP3 format may be killing the music industry, but it is also the stork of a new kind of social market for music, where the money is spread amongst a greater number of artists. The distribution and pricing models are not in place yet, but at least musicians are trying new methods. Radiohead offered fans the chance to pay whatever they felt like for In Rainbows. Prince gave away his latest album free with the Mail on Sunday.
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Sam Marlowe is scathing about Shilpa’s new show:

Given the anguish and humiliation that Shilpa Shetty suffered in the Celebrity Big Brother house this year, the British public are probably prepared to forgive her almost anything. Even so, she is pushing her luck with this shoddy piece of opportunism.

She should have taken my advice and gone for a six-part drama.

I was in the Royal College of Surgeons for a conference the other day, and wandered past this vast canvas.

It is one of a number of paintings hanging around the place, depicting various committees and groups of Fellows of the Royal College. The other pictures depict small groups of people in natural looking poses. The result is a convincing ‘action shot’ of the Great and the Good, and they look quite dignified. This one, however, is clearly a composite of dozens of individual portraits, and the inaccuracies of scale and sightlines make for a slightly disconcerting effect. It was surely conceived as a pacifier to satisfy the members of some bloated committee.

Most bizarre is the inclusion of a tea-lady, centre-right. She has a neat plait, and her head turned shyly away from the viewer. Even so, she towers above the Fellows she is serving, and is by far the most compelling figure in the image.

I mentioned ‘mash-ups’ last week. It’s a term that seems to have only gained traction in the past year. To me it seems to mean something halfway between ‘collaboration’ and ‘remix’. I don’t know what it means to other people.

We live in the age of the Remix. Sure, sampling and cover versions have been around for decades. Simple, honest plagarism has been around even longer. But it is the current era, one of cheap recording technology and limitless storage space for content, that the Remix and the mash-up will come to dominate.

The most popular video clip on the Internet is not a famous speech, a TV moment, or even One Night In Paris. Instead, it is footage of a plump kid wielding a broom, pretending it is a light-sabre. In one sense, he was not really pretending – The clip is so ubiquitous because thousands of people have added special effects to the footage, giving the anonymous hero a proper Jedi weapon (one suspects that the video was originally made for just such a purpose). Filming something and adding special effects is technically a remix. When we see unadulterated video, we call it “raw” footage, which suggests the idea that it is incomplete and un-evolved. Only when it has been mixed does it take on a clear and proper meaning.

I think one of the reasons I enjoy the music of Will Oldham is his propensity to remix his own songs. Hearing an old tune sung in a new style forces you to think about how the original was put together. The differences between the two renditions bring out the best of both. This is also true of artist Tommy Perman’s project Chinese Whispers, where the mix that was remixed was remixed was remixed, by an ever-expanding group of producers. Real World Records run a similar ongoing project too, again facilitated by the Internet and accessible production software that simply was not available five or six years ago.

Tommy Perman is a member of the FOUND collective. A couple of years ago, they thought up an excellent tag-line to promote their ‘Stop Look Listen’ exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy: Remix Our Poster. The results were quirky and highly entertaining. What the FOUND exhibition shows us is that an initial thought can take different people on very different journeys. The pleasure lies not in seeing one aesthetically pleasing image… but in seeing dozens. It is delightful to see how varied are the thought processes of our fellow human beings. When it comes to lateral thinking, human imagination expands into infinite dimesions. The idea of the remix gets better with each new pathway.

A more recent example is the Layer Tennis Tournament, currently in progress over at the Coudal Partners site. One artist remixes another artist’s work. The remix is then remixed once more by the first player (using Photoshop layers)… and so the ‘volleys’ continue. Last week, illustrator Kevin Cornell took on designer Shaun Inman. The individual images they created are very pretty, but it is the juxtaposition of two different minds that makes it entertaining.

The Remix allows dialogue between many minds, not the monologue of a single person sharing their experience with us. Technologies, which we humans have invented and perfected over the past generation, increasingly allow this kind of art to arise and develop. And why not? Human thoughts overlap, and our art should too.

Update

From a good review of Waves (and British Theatre in general), courtesy of Ben Brantley in the New York Times.

At a time when the theater is often regarded as the quaint elderly relation of the art forms, it’s a pleasure to the see this alleged invalid flexing its muscles, turning cartwheels and generally showing off to the tune of “Anything you can do, I can do better.” Adaptation, at its best, is not mimicry; it’s rejuvenation.

Fifty Nine have been working with director Sally Potter, on the video design for Carmen at the ENO. As with Attempts on Her Life, a micro-site has been created, presenting trailers and blogs which chart the creative process from start to finish. Its an interesting method of engaging with audiences, and by-passing the traditional “gate-keepers” in the press.

In this case, the show has divided critics. Writing in the Independent, Edward Seckerson enjoys the dystopian setting:

Potter’s big metaphor for her Carmen is civil liberty under threat. She and her designer use the scrim to superimpose the jerky CCTV images over actuality. Surveillance is the new reality. Carmen’s entrance is pre-empted by her grainy monochrome image blown up to fill the entire screen. She pouts knowingly for the camera, as if to say: “I know you’re watching.”

Later, Carmen angrily asserts her freedom, her right to choose her own path, in the face of Don Jose’s frenzied passion. She gets a knife in the belly for her troubles.

In The Times, Richard Morrisson is less impressed with the chosen themes… but is still complimentary about the video work:

Forbidding walls topped with razor wire; an oppressed populace spied on by CCTV; menacing cops and booted tarts; desultory, neon-lit bars; bodyhoppers and hoodies; dreary airport transit corridors – where have we seen this before? The answer is in most ENO productions since the 1980s. Potter should get out more.

What is saddest is that the staging’s most interesting aspect – real-time video (by Fifty Nine Productions) projected on to a gauze to suggest a society under constant surveillance – is abandoned after one act.

Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph also had mixed feelings about the setting, but still enjoyed the music.

Es Devlin’s sets are sparely beautiful and evocative, and Potter generates more intensity and atmosphere than Francesca Zambello did in her drearily conventional version for the Royal Opera. But I feel that Potter has been in two, or even three minds as to what she wants to do. Some scenes, including the final confrontation, catch fire. Others, such as Carmen’s arrest, remain inert.
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The biggest applause was rightly reserved for Edward Gardner, conducting a vivacious orchestra in a sparkling, colourful and clean-textured account of the score which never becomes hysterical or heavy-handed.

Andrew Clements in The Guardian was unfortunately not at all impressed, and thinks that “one of the most ambiguous heroines in operas is reduced to a mere cipher”. Ouch.

I meant to post this image yesterday. A few people commented on the (in)appropriateness of the Prime Minister giving his speech set against a lush Tory blue.

The choice of blue is unwise not only because of the political symbolism, but because of the technological implications too. The even blue is the perfect colour for CGI work. Anyone with the most basic CGI software can take an excellent ‘key’ from that blue, and will be able to add Gordon to any number of amusing or satirical locations - the most obvious being the Tory party conference. In this, the age of the ‘mash up’, I do not doubt several such projects are already underway, in upstairs bedrooms in cul-de-sacs up and down the land.

The Zidane footage from the World Cup last year had similar benefits. The assault was filmed against the green grass of a football pitch, and easy to replace with whatever the comedians wished.

The satirical mash-up, perfectly given a platform due to the wonders of YouTube and its ilk, will only become more common as time passes, and more and more people become more and more savvy with software that is less expensive.

Update

Compare the pictyure above, with this one from later in the week.