It didn’t feel like this week had a though line, it was this loud discordant expanse, pots and pans being smashed together, a third example, but last night I went to this art show, Anatomy 23 and it helped collate what I’d been feeling and experiencing. Earlier in the week Lindsay, her boyfriend and my girlfriend watched and chatted as I was setting up the cameras, microphones and lighting needed to record a maladapted episode (we’ve gone video), at the start of Anatomy I was the audience to the same performance. Markee de Saw’s show was simple, she quietly sets up all the equipment and accoutrements necessary for a live stream, she tests her audio, she messages someone asking when it starts, there’s makeup, prep. The way that the private space is transformed into a performance one is examined, she now transforms a performance space into a living space and back again. The intimacy of this part, of putting together a backdrop and plugging in a ring light far outshines the fakery of our overproduced social media age. The rest of the show was great, I always love to see Mystika Glamoor and ‘The Renovation’ a peace by Lydia Newman was partially moving, a rhythmic, repetitive and evocative exploration of mental illness. But I was stuck in the aftermath of the first show for a while, seeing what I do, make live streams, set up lights, plug in laptops as part of the performance, part of the larger narrative of art? It was very affecting.

The gaze of recontextualisation now (unfortunately) falls on 15 Minutes. In the noise of the week it was the only film I saw. We watched it because Kelsey Grammer is in it and Frasier is all girlfriend and I watch. It’s this kinda pop-culture, film with films in it look at ‘what we are becoming’ (the scare quotes are, spiritually, the movies own). Robert De Niro is an alcoholic star police officer who’s being helped/followed around by an arson investigator (Edward Burns), they’re on the hurt for arsonist/murderer/filmakers played by Karel Roden and Oleg Taktarov. The latter I recognised from Rollerball (2002), where he plays a gruff eastern European with his Rollerball number tattooed on his face. The movie is mainly about him filming his accomplices crimes and getting caught up in what film is to American audiences and culture. It owes a hell of a lot to Natural Born Killers, inherits some of the debt that has to Thelma & Louise and adds some Network to taste. There are so many references and ideas tried out, during the often incredibly violent POV attacks random effects are applied to the camera Taktarov’s character is using, on top of that barking snarling dogs fill the soundtrack. 15 Minutes isn’t bad, it is a little incoherent, more than a little long and could do with a whittling down of it’s themes. It has a lot to say about too many things, but maybe that’s ok? Maybe you can see the construction, the messy bag of cables and still enjoy what was made out of it.