There are three films which I really like, all of which have, on paper, terrible premises:
Phone Booth (2002) – Colin Farrell in a phone booth for an hour and a half.
Buried (2010) – Ryan Reynolds in a box for an hour and a half.
Locke (2013) – Tom Hardy in a car for an hour and a half.
Yet all of these are fantastic films due, primarily, to the way in which their verbal description and the experience of that concept are fundamentally different things.
Perhaps one could add to that list the following performance:
The Ticklish Subject (2013) – Andy Ingamells is tickled for an hour and a half.
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Sol LeWitt claims in his “Sentences On Conceptual Art” that “Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.” He is wrong.
People often talk about “conceptual” art work as if reading the description of a work is the same as experiencing it; as if someone’s detailed first-hand description of being attacked by a shark is the same as being attacked by a shark.
And a loosened concept of authorial ownership allows me to claim that the last shark attack was actually a work of art by myself. Or Andy Ingamells.
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At its best, Andy’s work joyfully shows the beauty in the most banal ideas through a finessed execution. Take, for instance, his recent Composing music for 11 minutes dressed in 18th Century costume (2015) for ensemble and video, in which that act of composing becomes the sounding result, the process of writing resonating through the ensemble as they echo the construction of the notation in realtime.
Here, as in the best of his work, Ingamells directs us outwards towards several historical markers, the “18th Century costume” of the title worn by the composer and the musical material, and the contrast of candlelight with the harsh blue iridescence of the laptop, creating an historical anomaly.
Other times, the idea is so simple that only the most inept execution could kill it, such as his much seen Solo (2010), which combines pornography, masturbation and slide whistles to a sublime degree.
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There is:
music which doesn’t take itself too seriously
“music” which doesn’t take itself too seriously
music which doesn’t take itself too “seriously”
and
“music” which doesn’t take itself too “seriously”.
Andy Ingamells does a bit of all four.
Much like the work of the squib-box group of artists, Andy’s work plays at the corners of visual art, music, and comedy – a trend perhaps most obvious in his Packaged Pleasure (2015), a 27-minute video combining many of his works into a hilarious meditation on vanity and narcissism.
Packaged Pleasure (EXCERPTS) from Andy Ingamells on Vimeo.
Included in this work are extracts of several previous works worthy of mention: His Bowmanship, Tape Piece and a realisation of @textscoreaday’s #180: “Run 10km to a concert hall & immediately go onstage. The piece finishes when your breathing has returned to normal.” He was one of the contributors to the @textscoreaday project and performed the première of this work which involved him running 10km to a concert in Huddersfield with 3 bike horns in his mouth.
As part of WEISSLICH 7, Andy will be performing Bowmanship, Shh, and Tape Piece.
WEISSLICH 