An Unusual Thursday Night

Over the last year, Ella’s been doing her MA here and last Thursday she held her final show. It was called Pilgrims’ Process - A Journey Over Land and Sea: Beyond the German Girl Shrine. Ella has researched loads of stuff about Chinese customs and rituals for her course. She knows lots of legends and stories and has dug deep into local culture, all of which fed into Pilgrims' Process.

One of the most interesting places she’s been to in order to find stuff out is a workshop where they make miniature bamboo and paper houses. They also make shirts and ties out of paper. Shoes, hats, horses, people and cars, too. These paper and bamboo objects are burned when someone dies. The Taoists believe that when these objects are burned, they will become real cars, houses, horses etc and will go with the deceased to the after-life. The objects in this photo, for example, are all made out of paper:



Same goes for this shirt:


A lot of her research has been into pilgrimages, shrines and rituals and her final piece reflected this. The audience (including me, of course) met at her college, where we boarded a minibus. We were given a goodie bag with various things in it like a map, a torch, some sweets and a brief description of the legend of the German Girl whose shrine is on an island called Ubin, which was where we were heading. Once we reached the jetty, we boarded a bumboat and made the 5 minute crossing to Ubin. There we got on bikes and cycled for about 15 minutes, following a red thread that guided our way.

As we reached the brow of a hill, we heard music on the breeze. There was a chap playing a euphonium, and very solemn it sounded too. The landscape had changed: after cycling through jungle, we were now at the barren edge of the island, by the quiet and calm sea. Ella's installation/sculpture loomed. It was a bamboo structure, about the size of a large transit van, but an unusual, sometimes angular, sometimes rounded shape. It looked a bit like the bone structure of some kind of giant insect, possibly. Red curtains were attached to bits of it, looking like hunks of flesh still hanging from the bone, if you like. A mysterious atmosphere immediately descended on the group.

There must have been about 40 of us and we approached the piece hushed. This quiet, reverent atmosphere prevailed for the next 30 minutes or so. During that time, we were led through the labyrinthine innards of the bamboo structure by the euphoniumist. We also walked around the structure whispering about what it might mean. Then we watched Ella approach it with a homemade fire-torch, which caused some people to gasp in a “she’s not, is she?” kind of way. She set fire to the curtains, which burned as the sun went down.

There was a ripple of applause as she put the torch out, then we got back on our bikes and cycled back in the dark – using our torches to guide the way – to have dinner at a seafood restaurant on Ubin jetty.

What was all that about then? Well, I suppose we were all the pilgrims referred to in the show's title. The way the audience was behaving reminded me of the way people behave in temples and wats. For example, on my first visit to a Buddhist temple, I didn’t have a clue how I was supposed to behave, what I could look at, what I was supposed to be doing, whether I was allowed to talk, whether I could take photos... that kind of thing. Most of all, I didn’t know what any of the ornate stuff inside the temple meant, or who people were praying to and why. The experience of visiting such an unusual piece of art, in such an unusual context, which had been preceded by such an unusual journey, created the kind of mystified, reverent response one feels in the temple of an unfamiliar religion. The almost ceremonial, ritualistic burning of the curtains by Ella took ages, maybe 10 minutes, and, apart from the music, there was complete, respectful silence.

The meaning derived not from the structure, I suppose, and came more from the behaviour of the audience. I suppose it was about human behaviour. That's what it meant to me, anyway. The artist didn't explain her work afterwards... they, don't do they? I think most people thought something either slightly, or very, different to me. Which is what art should be like, I guess.

Of course, Ella's piece was very much modern, abstract art, but there was also something quite anachronistic about it. It was almost like going to visit a henge or something.

Anyway, about that modern art stuff. I’ve been to the Tate Modern a couple of times and I like 50% of it and hate the other 50%. Unfortunately, the best contemporary art never really gets much exposure, whereas people like Emin and Hirst are rammed down our throats. Emin, in particular, gets my goat, with her visually unappealing and uninteresting, self-obsessed, obvious, illustrative and oh-so-shocking installations. Ella likes Emin, so we… er… discuss her from time to time. Perhaps I’m just biased, but what Ella did on Thursday seems to me to be open to interpretation, which, for me, as a literature bod, is what I like, whereas Emin’s work seems to have only one idea running through it. Usually that idea is “I’m really rock and roll, and a touch miserable, me”. It’s all about trying to shock the audience with how rock and roll and miserable she is. Her themes are obvious and are presently crassly. Looking at Emin’s “My Bed”, for example, is the visual equivalent of reading an Irvine Welsh novel. Spare me, please spare me…

I say all that about Emin because I’m quite hard to impress when it comes to, well, anything, really, but particularly modern art. At risk of someone sending my words into Private Eye’s “Pseuds Corner”, Ella’s work seems to layer concepts and ideas on top of concepts and ideas. Her lecturers were impressed, but so were the people who were there who, like me, don’t really know much about modern art, but like pretty paintings. I was very proud of her for pulling it off. Whatever it might mean, “Pilgrims’ Process” was a lovely experience. How often do you go on a mystery journey to an uninhabited island where you watch the sun go down by the sea to music with a mysterious, burning structure in front of you? Beats my usual Thursday night routine, I tell you.

Please note: this blog contained the phrase: “We were led through the labyrinthine innards of the bamboo structure by the euphoniumist”. I love sentences like that because I am almost 100% certain that those words have never been used in that order ever before. I suppose the words only came about in that order because that was what actually happened. Life's brilliant! More on this phenomenon soon, possibly! And hopefully fewer exclamation marks!

Some photos of the structure: