Buzzcut

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on BUZZCUT at the Old Hairdressers’, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 15.3.12
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4 stars ****

WHEN GLASGOW’s New Territories festival collapsed last year – amid the kind of full-on financial disaster that is every artistic director’s worst nightmare – it left a gaping hole in the city’s creative calendar. If an art-form is alive, though, it takes more than the odd financial catastrophe to keep it down; and so now, here comes a new, informal pop-up mini-festival – run by young artists themselves – that seeks to keep the spirit of experimental live art alive in Glasgow, and to offer an annual celebration of it, in all its mind-blowing variety.

Staged over four nights at the Old Hairdressers in Renfield Lane – with a final day of no-holds-barred performance and celebration at the Maryhill Glue Factory on Sunday – Buzzcut is curated by young artists Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson, and features almost sixty performances, events, installations and exhibitions over five days. The work, needless to say, ranges from from the near-nonsensical to the brilliant; but a glance round the bar of the Old Hairdressers on the opening night offers a glimpse of just how rich and strange the Buzzcut experience is likely to be.

So at a romantic table for two on the mezzanine, one solo audience member is reading to the next an intense piece of prose by artist Chris Hall about how we don’t say “sorry” and “I love you” enough. In another corner, people are playing Thom Scullion’s dinosaur video game, while earnestly debating with him the ethics and aesthetics of the video-game world. And all across the bar, beautiful young people are debating the first two shows of the evening, involving artist Julia Scott exploring the erotic power and limitations of live computer messaging, and two foxy ladies from London – known as Foxy and Husk – offering meditations on friendship and loneliness, as live accompaniment to some terrific video material that conjures up the animal in each of us. it’s clear that most of this doesn’t matter at all. Yet it’s out of this kind of ferment of invention that truly groundbreaking work has a chance to emerge; and it’s a fine thing to see Glasgow’s young performance artists seizing their moment, and making it happen, for themselves.

ENDS ENDS