Following the example of nuits blanches (white nights) held in cities around the world, London’s first all-night art festival had its highlights and its teething problems, not least the weather. Early on, Linder Sterling’s performance on Duke of York Steps, with a choir and orchestra, Northern Soul dancers and waltzing couples, ripped young men in torn denim and a pair of human rabbits, was squelched by a downpour. By the time it got going I was somewhere on the Strand, heading east.
Laure Prouvost’s dithering and harassed attendant (one of several actors) confused visitors to the bowels of Admiralty Arch with complaints of overtime. “I work 24/7! Wait there! I’ll go and find my keys!”, leaving us to find a blue-lit bar, drink a minuscule cocktail and consort with pallid denizens who claimed not to have left the room for 15 years. There was a dead squid in attendance whose ink filled the gutter-like handrail at the entrance. I think I spied a violinist padding about under strobe lighting through a gap in a door to an otherwise empty room. There was also a weird film and another squid (bronze this time) I somehow missed.
Onward! Downward! Between the abandoned Jubilee line Underground platforms at Charing Cross station, Koo Jeong A’s “intervention” – such as it was – consisted of a few powerful lights set up on the platforms, a white floor at the foot of the escalator, and the powerful smell of incense. A lot of security brouhaha delayed the descent, although we came up again pretty quick, wondering why. Why?
In a church at Aldwych, the opening titles of a film were projected on a screen over the altar, scratched and defaced by artist Jennifer West. Sudden bursts of music had me jolting in the pews and heading for the courtyard of Somerset House where we had been promised “hundreds of participants” would be involved in Xu Zhen’s Physique of Consciousness, a recreation of Chinese mass exercise programmes and western new-agey health and spirituality regimes. I counted about 30 participants getting up and getting down, to an on-screen instructor’s commands. Maybe the rest cried off sick or claimed spiritual unwellbeingness. I was mindful to leave after 10 minutes.
There were a couple more happenings I inadvertently missed, owing to timing collisions and hunger, but painter Celia Hampton’s project in an empty office-space overlooking the Thames was great. A big painted structure faced the window, like a blocky pair of open legs. On it hung three paintings of naked young women spreadeagled and painted from life, while on the reverse of the structure were several gloopy small paintings depicting the muddy spring at the source of the Thames. Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde was clearly the source for Hampton’s work, which really deserved longer exposure than a single evening.
Reanimation, Joan Jonas’s live performance with jazz pianist Jason Moran at Southwark Cathedral, was my highlight. First performed at Documenta 13 in 2012, it was mesmerising, silly and rather wonderful. Now 80 and dressed entirely in white, Jonas performed for a solid hour, donning masks, drawing maps and tracing over projected images of nature in Iceland and Norway, painting images of fish, scrabbling about with sheets of paper, ringing bells, reciting, being Jonas. A lively and playful presence, she performed as if her life depended on it and there was no time to lose. Moran’s piano and electronic keyboard gave the whole thing a rolling, elegiac continuity. I didn’t understand any of it but it was magical.
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