An evening with:
Lutz Bacher, Gregg Bordowitz, Billy Bultheel, Anne McGuire, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Dylan Peirce, Rachel Reupke, Edward Thomasson and Ian White
Curated by James Richards and Fatima Hellberg
Assembled from newly commissioned performances and select pieces, Novel Pleasure is screened, staged, and recited in the spirit of the variety show, with choreography, chamber music, video, and electroacoustic sound.
Looping back to the slippages between music, sound and voice, many of the works deal with the threshold between inner and outer worlds, the interaction between interior monologue and that which comes into being in relation to others. The evening, lasting around three hours, is structured as an unfolding and partial reveal, punctuated by a light supper interval.
Novel Pleasure is part of a long-running series of projects by James Richards and Fatima Hellberg around the fragile nature of collaboration, liveness, and curation. Beyond the rehearsed gesture and the presence of a performer, there is another promise of encounter found in the broader contingencies of the event – in the focused attention on what else is happening in the room and with whom. The communion of different works and ways of working, of coming together and staying apart – remaining intact while being in relation – is part of the logic of Novel Pleasure.
In this spirit, the connections between information and expression, the visceral and the conceptual, and their potential of collapsing into each other, are explored: the tensions between holding-it-together and a monstrous letting go.
The programme opens with Lutz Bacher’s What Are You Thinking?, a looped soundtrack of two lovers in the rain, set to a fading black and white dissolve. The monumental projection is at once an image and pure illumination: not a window into another world, but light bouncing back at us. The phrasing seems familiar, a cinematic déjà vu: loving words uttered in past movie theaters, or as we wake up mid-film, blurred and foggy at its bittersweet conclusion.
What Are You Thinking? is a tuning fork and opening of the programme:
Lutz Bacher, What Are You Thinking? (2011)
Edward Thomasson, Security (2023), Let this longing lead me (2024), Trouble (2024)
Billy Bultheel, excerpts from Mt. Analogue (2023)
Rachel Reupke, Questionnaire (2021)
Anne McGuire, Joe Dimaggio 1,2,3 (1991)
Dylan Peirce, Stepping Room (2024)
Gregg Bordowitz, Gone Missing (2024)
Ian White, Black Flags (2009-10)
Situated within Michael Kleine’s solo show, and anticipating Gregg Bordowitz’s forthcoming exhibition, Novel Pleasure is articulated within the logic of the exquisite corpse, an unfolding of connected parts and a nod to our being, in Bordowitz’s observation, “neither the origin nor the terminus of our emotion.”
A space of vulnerability in voicing recurs in the works of Edward Thomasson. In his solo performance Security, as well as in a newly conceived intervention set to Mary Margaret O’Hara’s 1988 cult classic Body’s in Trouble, the tone sits between the mannered and the vulnerable, confessional and fanciful. Many of his words are sung rather than spoken, at times in the spirit of the chorus, with and by amateurs.
Throughout the evening, Billy Bultheel will present parts from Mt. Analogue, a spatial composition modulating structures of harmony, rhythm and timbre across voice and brass. Dylan Peirce's newly conceived Stepping Room is a composition of footsteps rhythmically built up as an atmosphere. In the patterning of feet meeting ground, other spaces of embodied looping are evoked, from breath to heartbeat, dancing to marching.
In Anne McGuire’s Joe Dimaggio 1, 2, 3, the artist stalks and serenades Hollywood icon Joe Dimaggio in her car – a private joke unleashed into virtuosic hysteria.
Rachel Reupke’s video Questionnaire, captures two trembling lo-fi avatars performing a mental health checklist. The considerations and evaluations are read across degrees of attention and distraction, withholding and promiscuity.
Gregg Bordowitz’ contribution takes the form of a video address and meditation on what we might intend by the statement of someone being “gone.” Here the negative space of absence becomes a place to fill with meaning and presence. These considerations extend into the restaging of Ian White's Black Flags, performed by Adam Sinclaire. Black Flags was part of a longer investigation of White into negation as a possibility of something new, as a horizon of generosity.
With the generous support of Charles Asprey and Andreas Hölscher.
