Lights jazz and sounds flicker all around. It’s theatrical. It’s a scat kind of spatial choreography. And my head turns frantic, struggling to keep up with the routine.
It’s a particular space for an exhibition, Claridge’s—a place where art deco decor is done over in a modern body, snapped and shared across multiple screens. Descending from the Hotel’s newly-built café into its subterranean gallery space (creatively titled Claridge’s ArtSpace), cool coffee chatter dissolves into a popping pool of noise—piano keys and clippy-clappy percussion. The sound builds and becomes everything, almost. Then: an enlightening flash of peach, “hello”; a red light and a rrruuuummm-ish sound; white followed by silence. Either side of the gallery, I see two microphone masses swarming. Their mechanic bodies are spotlit, casting long shadows across the gallery’s floor. They beckon with a pained pull. The tempo changes, hot-pink and disco-lulls suffuse the space. And I am drawn in, towards a three-screen video installation, the central protagonist* in Daria Blum’s first UK solo exhibition Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot. It’s an immersive performance as space.
Surrounded by video screens, I get lost in the horizon of still and moving images clacking, back lit and saturated, like the content on a dancer’s TikTok feed, or at least what I imagine a dancer’s TikTok feed to be like if they have an algorithmic interest in architectures, reliving third party documentation of their own performances, and dance histories. To the right, I see a sunrise, a sunset? To the left, I glimpse cityscape details, mid-night windows within warm pebbledash cladding; “Let me in,” the ghost of a phrase lingers as subtitles. Confused, I don’t know what is going on; what is happening in and between this jitter of dancing images. I try to follow, nonetheless. Central now, Blum-cum-fictional-protagonist walks the halls of a vacant office building. A clerical space, visually cold and hopeless, ’70s and socialist in style, bare of human touch. Moving through this space the narrator gesticulates profusely with one of their index fingers. It’s a writhing movement, not so much a pointing out but a smearing in; a trashier tone which also echoes in the video’s white text subtitles: “let me get closer,” “you see that!?,” “look at it!!” These gestures drag my eye towards the aesthetic faults in the building as it sits in a state of sublime decay—rotting roof tiles and shit-stained windows abound within this barren complex.
Cut left. Fat pixel phone footage of two ballerinas rehearsing. The flow of their bodies, all tip-taps and elongated twirls, illogically recalling the actions of my hand as I unlock my phone: pin*pin*pin*pin*pin*pin* flick and tap. The picture I take is poor, like an early Instagram filter. Looking up from my palm, large on the installation’s central screen Blum shadows this stuttered ballet routine. She is dressed in modern garb—white shirt, black trousers, Acne-style square shoes. She is mic’d up, looking like a tour-guide or digital gym instructor, one debased of motivational chintz and chatter; of human touch. She looks like the living embodiment of her awol surround.
To state a truism: Blum’s practice is performative, live in the most capacious sense. As seen in the video installation her artistic actions continue to be influenced by her training in classical ballet (something she received at her mother’s dance school, once based in Lucerne, Switzerland). Blum is not bound by this bodily education, however. She seems to push against it, to question it, or at least to approach it ‘against the grain,’ showing a fuller spectrum of being through a non-normative angle. I first saw Blum’s work in 2018 when she was one of the new graduates included in Annka Kultys Gallery’s exhibition Cacotopia 03. Performing there, Blum took on a number of slack personas—punky body motifs that have reappeared throughout her more recent work. Situated within something like a chaotic teen’s bedroom, each character in her uncanny crew took a turn on a microphone getting lost in themselves and dreams of their outlandish becomings. The set felt raw.
In Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot traces of this surreal attitude replay through the installation’s three screens. The video includes phone-filmed documentary footage from one of Blum’s previous performances. Showing Blum’s body gyrating club-like at the centre of an arty happening, the footage is recast here as something of an allusive mise en abyme: on the installation’s right-hand screen I see this documentary footage replaying, in tandem pictured on the central screen Blum views this documentation through the face of her iPhone, her elongated index finger tracing those body movements now held deep in her muscle’s memory.
This performed seeing has an anticipatory touch to it. The press release for Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot tells me that the recurring images of disused buildings throughout the video act “as a gateway to think about classical dance as an ‘archaeological site’.” Subsumed by this dérive, I want to take this thinking further and suggest that this recursive collaging of footage, of buildings and of Blum’s body, acts as a gateway to think about human being as archaeological site. And to take one more step, to think about the fabrication of such performative body-sites in relation to our contemporary screen world.
As I see it, Blum’s video questions the way a ‘normative life’ is constituted through the specific histories that it replays—the actions and routines that promise a feeling of sure-footed validity within our optimising world-system. The non-linearity of the video’s narrative exposes the futility of this copying: no matter how well one moves in time with the postures of history, as dictated, one’s body and being can always be judged lacking. You missed a step. Your hair is out of place. Skin, greasy. In an age where life is becoming an ever more screen-based thing (an End of History devoid of human touch is in sight), a self has never been placed under greater scrutiny, be this self-imposed or systemic. Personally, at least, I feel the pressure of this recursive life performance. Cut up and running frantic, struggling to keep up with life as it’s smeared across multiple channels, it is as if I am a stuttering ballet dancer competing for a place at the most prestigious of fantasy schools. And for what, to be hollowed out and left abandoned like a general office block once a flashier model comes along? Blum’s exhibition scats with this feeling; her body becoming an actor refusing to conform to life as a meek representation of decorative ideals.**
* It’s worth noting that I experienced Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot as an installation alone. Throughout the exhibition Blum has programmed several live performances each giving the research behind the show an IRL presence. The depth of Blum’s research for this exhibition is also of note; as an exhibition Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot relates to a far wider set of contextual and conceptual references than what my personal take here foregrounds.
** Or this is the sense I get watching Instagram footage of Blum performing within the exhibition.
