DIALOGUES

Lax

Hugo Glendinning and Adrian Heathfield

Working on and around performance for many years Hugo Glendinning (photographer) and Adrian Heathfield collaborated on several book projects. In making these books they talked about the nature of events and their traces, the presence of performers and the strange life of images. One day they decided that their conversations were not just about performance, but that they were a performance: a stumbling and stuttering dialogue full of refusals, difficulties and unanswered questions. They wondered if they could re-stage this relation …

In an event that hovered somewhere between an experimental screening, a conversation between collaborators and an art lecture, Glendinning and Heathfield wove together images and words on the nature of photography and performance, time and vision, stillness and movement, capture and loss.

Glendinning is mainly known for his performance and dance photography and for his portraits of artists and actors, but over the last ten years he has accumulated a body of short films in and around the professional and personal worlds of the subjects with whom he works. These films are striking because they catch the mess: states of self-loss, unguarded moments, chaotic happenings and unconscious performances. Heathfield, whose primary medium is the page, used the occasion of the screening of Glendinning’s films to cast live words back and forth on the cultural value of the arts of performance and photography. Some questions were asked that they both found difficult to answer: How do you know the moment? What is present and what is lost? When is an image an event? What is the pleasure of looking compared to the pleasure of doing? Is it ok to take something someone didn’t mean to give? And are all the people in the photographs dead?

This was an honest dialogue in which personal, fictional and philosophical observations were laced through exquisite images.

Lax was premiered at Tate Modern, London and Tate Liverpool galleries in October 2004, as part of the Activations series curated by the Live Art Development Agency. It was also performed at the Hebbel Theatre Berlin January 2005 and in Providence Rhode Island as part of Becoming Uncomfortable PSi 11 in April 2005.