Diary: BUZZCUT Festival 2023
A welcome return for Glasgow's experimental performance art festival
Day 0
My BUZZCUT experience started earlier than expected when Karl, who masterminds the festival, invited Laura to The Old Hairdressers and I used my husband privileges to tag along.
The venue was appropriate because it was in this bohemian bar that the first BUZZCUT took place 11 years ago, as two graduates of the RSAMD’s Contemporary Performance Practice course, Nick Anderson and Rosana Cade, had the idea to put on a festival of live art.
Glasgow had long been an internationally-recognised centre for performance with the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) and New Territories attracting big names like La Ribot, Forced Entertainment, Franko B, Ron Athey, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Richard Layzell, and Esther Ferrer. When NRLA stopped in 2010 and New Territories ceased operations, the loss to the art scene was devastating.
BUZZCUT emerged like a phoenix from the ashes but was always its own thing: humble, intimate, and full of good vibes. It has been amazing to see it evolve over the years, tapping into the appetites and energies of the performance world to bring new experiences to larger audiences whilst avoiding commercialisation.
On arriving at The Old Hairdresser’s we saw FK Alexander, one of this year's curators, and Rosana Cade, who is no longer involved in the running of BUZZCUT but who was happily chatting with other artists. At the back of the mezzanine were Guillermo Gómez-Peña (GP) and his partner Balitrónica. Laura is hosting him at the Royal Conservatoire on Monday and we immediately got into a deep conversation about ancestry and adoption, nature and nurture.
Day 1
Most BUZZCUT pieces take place in 30 or 60-minute slots—even the avant-garde conforms to society’s arbitrary measures of time—but BUZZCUT provides opportunities for artists to do durational work. These performances might go on all day if only their bodies could endure them.
For instance, Tom Cassani’s The Perpetuation Series took place over four hours and consisted of him attaching his top knot to a cable and then spinning and falling and running and hovering, sometimes over shards of glass. Watching Cassani build the momentum to be able to float and glide through the air felt like being in a dream. It was mesmerising and beautiful, showing unbelievable endurance.
At the same time, James Jordan Johnson was performing Something is Trying To Disappear Me, a ritual of laying down soil that felt too slow for my excited, happy-to-be-here headspace, so I only lasted about ten minutes.
One of the great joys of the old BUZZCUT was when it moved beyond the venue and into the world outside. We got a small taste of that this year as the InXestuous Sisters performed HotWorks in a car park. They put knickers on a washing line and proceeded to blowtorch them. It was an incredible visual spectacle, it looks great in the photos but left me bemused by being so rote.
In the run-up to BUZZCUT, I had a theory that the difference between performance artists and visual artists was a question of temperament: are you an introvert or an extrovert? Susan Cain in the pop-psychology book Quiet relates how introverted and extroverted tendencies can be seen in humans right after they're born. Some babies are agitated by noise and others are relaxed by it. Introversion and extroversion are essentially immutable traits in human nature and forcing one type to submit to the demands of the other is cruel. I often think about Cain’s book when I compare events in the fine art world with events from the performance art world. This is a broad generalisation, but maybe it rings true with you. Art galleries— displaying painting, sculpture, and film-making—are frequently dour places that demand quiet contemplation. Performance art is the world of theatre kids doing outrageous things. Fine art is introverted, performance art is extroverted. However, having seen some very introverted live art, I now think this division isn’t quite right.
An exhibition by Jasleen Kaur in the main Tramway hall gave me an opportunity to interrogate people from the art world.1 What I learned is that more than just being introverted, visual artists are cool. Or, if not cool, they really want to avoid cringe. For BUZZCUT, embarrassment can be the portal to new experiences. This is certainly why I enjoy it: by confronting your cringe you can be liberated of hang-ups and achieve cringe equanimity.
I invited the art people to come out to the car park to see That Which Lies Beyond by Tim Martin-Jones, but they preferred to see the exhibition and drink free wine. Nothing personal, Neil! The thing with performance art, I told them, is that you can usually get up and leave. It’s not like a big theatre production where you'll disrupt other audience members’ experience.
Tim Martin-Jones's 40-minute performance consisted of his failing to fall. He wore a suit and a weighted vest and would stumble forward only to catch himself before he fell on his face: again and again. Occasionally, he would throw a stone. Earlier in the evening I talked to a Latin-American woman who said that my trying to make sense of the world through Venn diagrams showed my colonial mindset. She bet me a pound that nothing would happen in the performance. He would never fall. I took the bet and she won. But I still enjoyed seeing nothing happening, it was an opportunity to experience true boredom, which is rare in the age of smartphones.
Day one ended with Robyn’s Rocket Jam Ship, an extraordinarily joyful musical improvisation where everyone got to sing, dance, and play their hearts out.
Day 2
It was Laura’s birthday and I had booked an intimate one-on-one performance with her in a posh restaurant. We did however pop into the CCA2 for Tink Flaherty's Benched, a monologue about human relationships. Every chair in the space had a personal memento on it and some audience members were called on stage so Tink could discuss the object’s meaning. A heartwarming performance, closer to Alan Bennett than anything we'd seen the previous day.
We didn't have much time but spent ten minutes in (a kind of) Requiem, Lulu Obermayer's 6-hour durational piece. To review it would be like reviewing a movie after looking at a film still.
Day 3
My regular diary usually starts with a report on how well I slept. After indulging for Laura’s birthday, I slept badly and need an afternoon nap. I think this is now called ‘self-care’. Unfortunately, this meant I missed the durational performances. When I got to Tramway, I felt a need to lie down in FK Alexander’s Quiet Space which was delightful with its fluffy clouds and ambient music.
Most of the BUZZCUT events are unticketed, which added mild peril as to whether we would make it into Temitope Ajose & Leah Marojević’s N.I.PS (NUNS IN PARADISE). Fortunately, there was just enough room to cram everyone in. We sat on the floor to watch two intertwined nude figures bound by what looked like kelp or plastic netting. They are wet, their hair dripping, and all the action takes place on the floor making it sometimes difficult to see what is going on. The performance is like a life in microcosm: from an amoeba’s first movement to exploration to procreation to shrieking death. As the bodies move around the space, the audience nervously gets out of the way. But I don’t see why: by the end of the performance, I knew these bodies better than my own and felt an intense intimacy.
With N.I.PS, language is reduced to animal cries and you are left alone with your thoughts. By contrast, Pandemic Divination Ritual by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitrónica is closer to poetry or stand-up comedy. Balitronica spins the roulette wheel, chooses a Tarot card, and then GP reads a text. Some are glitchy, many are political, but all are witty. This work emerged from the strictures of lockdown and bears the traces of the period. For me, that period is over. It’s done: I've drawn a line under it and I don’t want to relive it for the rest of time.
Usually, I don't have expectations when I see work at BUZZCUT, but earlier in the week I read GP's 2011 book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, which documents the kind of things that happen in their workshops. It was a revelation, showing how identity politics exist in the body rather than the mind, but this piece didn't feel as embodied as I imagined the workshops. With expectations adjusted, I am really looking forward to his lecture on Monday, especially since I designed the flyer.
Nothing makes me feel more present, embodied, or serene than experiencing live art. For the first time, I didn't drink alcohol there, and not just because Tramway charges £5.70 for a can of Tennent's lager. The festival encourages you to confront awkwardness and boredom directly, to experience raw life. It felt great to do so and I can't wait to see what they put on next year.3
This piece was originally pitched to Nothing Personal, a biannual magazine based in Glasgow that seeks to write honestly about art in the city despite all the cliques and interpersonal imbroglios. I specifically wanted to write about BUZZCUT for them because most people in the visual art world seem to have no time for performance art. I wanted to prod and probe this reluctance to engage with what, to me as an outsider, seems relevant to their interests. Due to funding difficulties, however, there will be no magazine this spring, giving me the chance to share my immediate reaction the day after the festival ended.
The biggest headache for BUZZCUT this year was the fact that Saramago, the cafe bar within the CCA, is closed due to a labour dispute. It was bleak to be in a venue with a closed cafe, however delicious the flavoured water was.
Having said this, beer is full of sugar so gives you an energy boost necessary to stay up all night for the BUZZCUT party and I didn't have it yesterday. Nothing personal(!), but my main feedback to BUZZCUT would be:
there is no need for it to be in two venues, especially when the CCA is so far away from Tramway;
venues like The Pearce Institute encouraged random people off the street, with Tramway being the usual performance art crowd; and,
if we are going to have all-day events there probably needs to be better food options.