Soup ‘n’ Cinema
PSL: Project Space Leeds
16th September 2009
Soup ‘n’ Cinema at PSL (Project Space Leeds) was BYOB (bring your own bowl). The evening was a screening of artists’ film and video linked by the theme ‘Town and Country’ in keeping with the current exhibition at the gallery, with soup as a starter. The soup was made from veg grown in the ‘Horteseum’ installed as part of the exhibition in part of the gallery that gets the most light. Horteseum is a word coined by PSL collapsing ‘horticulture’ and ‘museum’. The soup was delightful, as was the relaxed company as a group of strangers sat politely around a large table to enjoy a choice of two flavours. PSL can be a cold place, and soup seemed an appropriate way of warming up the audience for an evening of avant-garde film.
The cinema part of the evening offered a mixed bag of engaging and not so engaging artist film and video. Each ‘short’ explored themes around town and country, and as you would expect most just explored town or country, and others simply took town or country as a subject. The compilation of them all presented a disjointed sense of ‘town’ and ‘country’, polarising artifice with nature, and social interaction with solitude.
No more was this emphasised than in ‘WWOOFING’ by Robin Whenary which silently followed a Belgian man as he worked on the fields of an organic farm in Cornwall. The man had left his home in a Belgian town, for a three month holiday as a farmer. Other work explored the potential of the urban environment for different kinds of interaction. Amelia Crouch’s ‘Soft or Posh or Rich’ was a splendid narrative of an encounter with a man at a bus stop on Royal Park Road when she was a student. In this video the city became a place where her own background and social class could position her as an outsider in a familiar setting. This sat nicely against ‘No.1 Wilwyne Crescent’, a less delicate work by Tessa Garland that took a walk around a scale model of a suburban house at night time. The soundtrack was an over the top cacophony of sound affects that over played the sense of artificiality and horror. A horror we have always been led to believe lies below the suburban housing estate by Jarvis Cocker and other pop stars for some reason. The video felt like the preface to a horror movie, and played on the tradition of the establishing shot used in science fiction that uses a scale model to locate the scene of the impending horror. In this work, the model lived beyond the establishing shot and became the scene of a horror itself, and with a violent and crude soundtrack the work became even the more horrific for it. It was like a ‘B Movie’ made with your brother’s train set.
Other work dealt with concepts less successfully. Naren Wilks’ ‘House’ laboriously emphasised that all the terrace houses in Bristol look the same, to a soundtrack of doorbells. ‘Scott’s Garden’ by Ben Bartin was a Super 8 film of a chap in Kent called Scott in his garden, and ‘Boundaries’ by Patrick Murphy, was a slide show of images ripped from google earth, with the google earth watermark still visible. All were aesthetic works that required little engagement, or inspired little discussion afterwards. Michael Day’s ‘Adjournment’ offered a pleasant insight into our construction of landscape and pictorial space, as a cityscape slowly faded in ghostly manner to reveal a landscape ‘beneath’.
While this selection of works was hit and miss in places, the evening was certainly worth the £4 entry fee for an opportunity to enjoy ‘Let me take you there’ by Paul Rooney, if nothing else. An audio guide to a field in Calderdale, the dense narrative framed a locked off shot of a snowy field outside Hebden Bridge through a history of music and wider culture. It revealed that this was the site of a photograph that later became the cover of ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division, amongst other things. The work lingered at the end of the second half, and was the one piece everyone had been waiting for, for some it was the main reason they went. Paul Rooney is rapidly becoming everyone’s favourite artist since he won the Northern Art Prize last year, and this evening just added to this warm feeling towards a man we all wish came from Leeds.
The evening, including an interval of tea and cake (I had a second piece), offered a delightful night out in what is an increasingly friendly and social atmosphere of PSL. It’s city centre location, visible from the train as you leave the city bound for Wakefield and London, offered a warm haven and an opportunity to see film and video you couldn’t have seen anywhere else, let alone in such good company. Soup and Cinema will be worth a visit again.