Coal Velvet

Tori Wrånes and her performance “Coal Velvet” was part of the final exhibition “Take Off” in the Brandstrup Gallery in Oslo the 16th of June 2007.

The performance “Coal Velvet” is a visual composition consisting of voice and accordion. The physical setting for the performance is a quite simple part of the exhibition premises of the Gallery Brandstrup. The light is off and the doors are closed. The room is full of people who Wrånes invites to approach the corner where she is standing. We can see her and the accordion with the light from a small handheld torch. The feeling of being in a gallery disappears. Some people might get the impression that they are in a cave. People are invited to draw nearer in a natural and confidence-inspiring way; it seems as if she wants to tell us a story. She starts playing at the same time as she uses her voice in a magical way.

The refrain is without any text, only vocal sound.
The first stanza goes like this:

I’ve found a man in the bathroom
every girl’s dream,
but nothing happened
nothing at all
I just washed his heart
his back
and his brain

I found my mother outside my door
but nothing happened
nothing at all……………..……..


Wrånes is singing, telling us almost the same story three, four times, with small variations. Her presence is touching and sincere at the same time as it is extremely intense.
As the French philosopher and critic Roland Bartes said: The voice is the fantasy about the whole body. It moves organically in space, while the visual has clear contours.”
Wrånes is the original and modern human being in one person repeating meetings with people; near and distant relations, meetings that, in a civilized society, often are characterized by ritual patterns.
The stories don’t become privat, but keep their balance between the ironic, the serious and the hopeful. They hit the audience on a totally emotional level. Many of the spectators in the room seem touched and some are crying. The performance is over and the light is suddenly turned on. The whole thing has lasted for about 3 minutes – it seems as if we have been here for an eternity.

Rituals

Rituals are key features of the social life of every known society. Ritual has something important to do with social relations and social orders.

Several avant-garde performance artists used rituals and repetitions to obtain a certain reaction in the public. Avant-garde performances in the 20th century came as a response to political decisions both in Europe and the USA, ruining to a large extent the social and cultural life. Questions were asked in connection with market forces and art. Art as a merchandise was viewed as a problem. Many artists wanted to reduce the feeling of alienation between spectator and performer. Performance art was regarded as a way an artist could reduce this feeling so that both parts – the artist and the spectator – would be able to experience the work simultaneously. Many of the established views of the society and the cultural life were set on the agenda and turned upside-down. Many artists re-evaluated their intentions about creating art in this period.



Emo-conceptualism

Today there is marked turn towards confessions on the alternative scene of art, some sort of “emo- fetish” where sincerity is in the centre. Wrånes work can be placed within the notion of emo-conceptualism that investigates the status of confessions in a commercial media world.

In Morgenbladet the 13th of July 2007 Ketil Røed wrote: “ At a time when suffering and private confessions have become a merchandise in the entertainment industry – e.g. in the goth-culture or in Big Brother – emo-conceptualism works with how to analyse fundamental emotional situations. The analysis consists of reducing a feeling to an isolated unit, without having the support of an environment that will explain everything. You have to put the outer circumstances between brackets, as you might say it. The feelings are presented in an isolated way so that the spectator has to make up a coherence him/herself. Whether you will find a satisfactory context is nevertheless rather unlikely, because the aim of these projects is to keep the register open, let things remain inexplicable, produce more uncertainty and constantly demand new answers.

In this way you will make a conceptual setting yourself to be able to analyse the emotional situations with our own experience as a point of departure. This can be looked upon as an expansion of the aesthetics of relations, but also as a more humanistic version of cold and distant installation art.”



Relations and recognition.

For Wrånes as a performer there are many rituals in connection with every preparation for her performances; in how to build up the body, both physically and mentally. These rituals are quite decisive for how the performance is done. It would have been interesting to see some of these exercises or rituals documented.

The preparations influence her presence, which again influence the public. Her body and mind are ritually training on communicating an emotional atmosphere. In this mutual focus she repeats meetings with people with the help of her voice.

The performance is entertaining and touching. The atmosphere and the short stories give the spectator a hint as to something that might have happened, the rest is up to the audience to make out. The mutual focus is in the recognition of a situation and a feeling. The recognition lies in both the relations she so honestly describes and the spectator’s associations to his/her own life. Even though the spectators haven’t gone through the same life, there is nevertheless created a feeling of something collective, something everybody has experienced.

There is something very vigorous in this.

At a time when private confessions and exposures of your own and of others’ life have become merchandise in the media, Wrånes does something strange. With her intense presence she transfers focus from herself to the spectator. She puts us back to our own lives, our own reality. The spectator gets a feeling that the “I “ exists. This concerns the human and private part of the lives of all the spectators.



References:

Rothenbuhler, Eric W.: “Ritual communication: From everyday conversation to mediate ceremony.” SAGE publications, Inc. 1998.

Sell, Mike: “Avant Garde performance and the Limits of Criticism.” The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Kaprow, Alan: Art Which Can’t Be Art”. Article published in 1986

Røed, Ketil: “Feelings under the magnifying glass”. Article published in Morgenbladet the 13 of July 2007.