As a curatorial adjunct of Tate Modern, the Level 2 Gallery is the Tate’s answer to London’s promulgation of project spaces, independent artist-led venues, and other mercurial pioneer outposts of art. These spaces can have a contemporaneity, versatility and singular focus where the Tate’s main collection, in size and polyphony, can fall short. Here We Dance is third in a series of exhibitions aiming to address the theme of citizenship, this time focusing upon relationships between the body and the state.
Gail Pickering’s three part performance and sculptural piece ZULU: Speaking In (Radical) Tongues sets out to ‘channel’ and amplify an array of voices from 60’s and 70’s radical leftist politics. Surrounded by a sculptural rendering of the word “ZULU”, with each wooden and hollow-backed box-like letter acting as both stage and prop, a lone figure wanders through the letters, pushing them about and flipping them around as she speaks. Sometimes despondently creeping inside the boxes as if to find shelter amongst ruins, sometimes proudly standing on them as if on a soapbox, her speech alternates between ecstatic, polemical and introspective. During the performance, an old Revox reel-to-reel recorder mounted on a small wooden plinth silently whirs away, storing the words onto tape.
According to the artist, the text is a collage of memoirs, manifestos and other ephemera which she has spliced together, forming a schizophonic montage of radical language from the past forty-odd years. Although none of the speech contains citation of their source, the politicised tone of the voices is immediately apparent. An arrogant voice describes the audience as “ballot beef” or going from “bus face to lunch face” and “street face to home face.” Not that the work is simply a caricature of angry radical rhetoric: at one point a voice describes “I went along to a peace-in, I noticed everyone was smoking Gauloises, so I began to smoke too.” Further along another voice describes the brutal tactics used in a terrorist operation, “Quite simply, anyone who resisted was to be killed. The same went for anyone who tried to escape or became hysterical […] That was too much for me. I explained I wasn’t a killer. But he insisted, he said it was a matter of necessity, a matter of survival.”
The overall effect is that of a lament for a time when one could think that social change through independent, street level organisation was possible; that one’s voice would be heard. Using ideas such as ‘channeling’ voices and ‘speaking in tongues’ as compositional and performative devices both imbues the text with a religious aura and shifts the tone of the voices into that of the archaic and spectral. Watching this as a process is humorous and engaging, enabling the work to poke fun at the pomposity and apparent naïvety of the language used, while also revealing the variety of interpretations that the word ‘radical’ evokes. The actress gives a new body to these voices, letting them speak into our present, but at the same time relinquishes responsibility for what is said. It’s fascinating to watch this distancing between the artwork and its content. Though I’m left wondering if the work is only a simplifying rendering of the complex polyphony inherent in the idea of the radical, more indicative of an intellectual and artistic infatuation with the sexiness of the socially transgressive than with its artistic investigation. To the ear it can be heard as a rather bleak and futile ambience: that the idea of the ‘people’s voice’, the very possibility of it being heard individually let alone as a chorus, is now so seemingly distant.
