Venice Biennale 4: the Soft Machine response

What do Biennalers do when they hate what's in front of them?

Criticise? Protest? Walk out? Not even walk in?

I'm phrasing the question like that because I see that the bass guitarist Hugh Hopper has just died. His band, Soft Machine, was the first act that I ever saw booed, shouted, pelted and abused offstage.

That was at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange in around 1967, a scene about as far from Venice 2009 as anyone could imagine, a nasty incident when an audience expecting Gino Washington's Ram Jam Band had to watch instead the most 'avant garde art-rock act' of their time.

It is not an incident that figures in Hopper's obituary. Probably it happened all the time. But it made a big impact on me. I went on to collect Soft Machine albums for years.

At a Biennale the biggest way to show offence is to walk through quickly with a smile and a yawn. The Swiss pavilion offers good examples. So does the Scottish, where grey slabs of stone, plastic autumn leaves and a few rooms of metal furniture do not even earn the smile.

Alternatively you can shout - at the presence of Berlusconi or at assorted images of artists' priapic parts.

The veteran journalist, Anthony Haden-Guest, whom I hadn't seen for many years till the Daily Beast's Biennale party, gives the Beast the best and fullest account so far of what's been going on, including a range of answers to the questions above.

I have not seen all of the Danish pavilion that he talks about, only the dead man
outside in the swimming pool (see previous post). There is an excellent Art Beast account of this too.

What am I applauding? What would get from me the Gino Washington rather than the Soft Machine response of Chelmsford forty years ago?

If clapping were an option in the artworld, which it seem not to be, top of my list would be Fiona Tan in the pavilion of the Dutch.

If I can find an expert appreciation of her I'll post it here before I give up the world of blogging Venice and return to books and a bit more sanity.

Comments

[Andrew Kenneally]

Did you ever get to see the great Syd Barrett, friend of the Soft Machine, play with Pink Floyd at that timeof 67, Peter? Apparently sometimes met with similarly undesirable responses when playing some venues.

I've an art-concept which I'm sure could make me millions if I ever get round to it. It involves an installation of an artist successfully managing to disappear up his or her- we're all equal now-own arsehole. And since of course all that a hole- be it the hole of an arse or any other kind of hole- consists of is a void, an absence, then this installation shouldn't pose too many logistical problems, consisting as it will, should it ever coalesce into tangible existence, of the absence into which the artist has apparently voided him, or her, self. Pure nothingness, art reaches its pure vanishing point. What a day of joy!

But would such an installation be treated with the respect it deserves? Is the modern world ready? Is it modern enough? Perhaps abstraction from reality has to go that bit further first. But then, presumably, the modern world itself having disappeared up its own arse will be no longer there to witness my concept. Which would be a shame.

[peter stothard]

No, I never saw Syd Barrett with Pink Floyd. But I always thought that I'd heard him with Soft Machine's Kevin Ayers on the 1969 album Joy of a Toy. This arrived at the office of the Oxford student paper Cherwell in my first year - and its bright yellow cover was triumphantly (or was that surreptitiously?)snaffled away to my rooms. Sadly, it seems, checking on names and dates in Wikipedia just now, there seems doubt as to whether, forn the usual reasons, Barrett actually played on the album at all.

[Andrew Kenneally]

Not familiar with Ayers' work myself but Singing a Song in the Morning is the one that gets Syd B's contribution mentioned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQhuCJaNpI

I see from ther comments that: "The song was originally recorded with contributions from Syd Barrett on guitar although his parts were edited out of this release, only re-appearing (as a bonus track) on a 2006 reissue of the LP.

A charming suitably whimsical tribute to Syd by Ayers below: "Oh Wot a Dream"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OykeXhdcGc