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REVIEWS WITH YOU
Concerto for Voice & Machinery II, 20 February 2007, Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London, live performance. Photo: © Matthias Schmidt, ICA 2007. Courtesy ICA, London
Violentome option from the Inface Life Enhancement Solution. Courtesy With (withyou.co.uk)
WITH (WITHYOU.CO.UK)
PLYMOUTH ARTS CENTRE
14 APRIL – 27 MAY
Everyone has a website these days. Created by Alasdair Hopwood with single-colour background, With allows the clients to have their features
recent assistance from Sean Parfi tt, With (withyou.co.uk) surfs the gaps digitally imposed on the agent’s face at a later date.
between the virtual and actual, using hijacked corporate rhetoric and Refl ecting a culture that seeks to reify experience through media
idiosyncrasies of self-help culture, and ripping of_f interactive TV show documentation, clients’ memories of events are substituted with the
formats in its path. Holding ‘expos’ that promote their take on the self-help documentary ‘evidence’. Accordingly, this material is on view, including the
phenomenon, With may draft in a studio audience (kitted out in With T- prep work of initial email correspondence, images of the agent rehearsing
shirts) who applaud ridiculous promotional jargon spouted by company the scene and maquettes complete with tiny fi gures choreographing the
representatives. The act is delightfully bad – the audience clap of_f cue, and bottling. Elsewhere there is some video footage of the incident shown on
I’m sure I even spotted the artist and some of the production team in there a tiny DV player – fi lmed perhaps on a mobile phone, an adult nod to the
making up the numbers. adolescent trend of ‘happy slapping’.
What are they getting so excited about? Well, by constructing Along with an ‘artist’s impression’ of the resultant trial, a doctored
‘biographical plugs’ or Life Enhancement Solutions – LESs in With’s report in the local press and images of the agent carrying out Stephen’s
sometimes schoolboy wit – With of_f er a set of services to individuals who community service, the documentation also included a memory stick
would like to have their lives ‘enriched’ with a more turbulent personal displayed in a ‘bespoke’ box (With’s term, not mine). This is presented to
history, but lack the emotional CV required by The Jeremy Kyle Show. the client on completion of the treatment – a souvenir of an eventual life.
For their commission at the Plymouth Arts Centre, an analysis The bric-a-brac presented in the gallery is slightly disappointing,
of random articles of property belonging to a new ‘client’, Mr Stephen partially because the ‘documents’ tick so many boxes of what we might
Humphries, leads to the decision that a service involving an act of extreme come to expect from a spoof. Perhaps tacky digital presentations and
violence (a Violentome) is crucial to spicing up Stephen’s drab existence. performative antics are better suited to exposing the utter absurdity of
The solution: to bottle someone down the pub. reducing personal crises to mere spectacle. Simply because, like tele-
Knowing that clients won’t carry out the dirty work themselves, an trauma, it is visually more alluring, more dramatic and easier to mimic – in
agent is assigned to act on their behalf. Using chroma key, or ‘bluescreen’ the game of critique, parody is a powerful tool, and With put it to better use
– the video editing technique of superimposing imagery onto a blank, elsewhere. Cameron Irving
ARTRTREVVIIEEW W one.linfive.lintwo.lin
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 6 3/5/07 16:22:30
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