Tempting Failure
The live art festival Tempting Failure was conceived by Thomas John Bacon back in 2011, as the practical element of his PhD at University of Bristol. It is a festival of body art and explores questions of transgression and - as the name suggests - failure.
Contrivance in performance is everything that Tempting Failure is asking artists to work against. Failure however is not vital, but the dance with it should be; the risk of it manifesting therefore is to be embraced. So when & if it happens, artists should not feel ashamed but celebrate that they were given the chance to go there. Beyond there, wherever ‘there’ may be for them personally, and perhaps in so doing, they may create something wonderful, or perhaps challenge a convention, socially or artistically.
Tempting Failure 2013 housed the same ethos. It was a bolder project in which over thirty artists took part. Collaborating with a fantastic and fully supportive, uncompromising venue, TF13 took over the former Police Station of Bristol using its cells, exercise yard, showers, tunnels, holding spaces and isolation rooms to show the work of forty national and international artists at all stages of their careers. At the start of the evening the audience was guided through the live events via a hand drawn map, passing through the dimly lit maze-like space in search of the work. The programme of actions was intense, with artists spread throughout the rooms, cells and spaces of the Police station’s basement level. With performances and actions often occurring simultaneously it was virtually impossible to experience everything.
Many of the pieces in the Cells were durational, which allowed the audience to visit and re-visit the works in-between encountering the shorter pieces in the larger space. Each work addressed the ethos of ‘Failure’ individually; from the inherent fragility and mortality of the body made manifest through penetrated broken skins to challenges of an unknown intimate encounter. Audiences were given freedom and the opportunity to choose, to select what to see. At first people clustered in groups, holding on to the map, tentatively navigating between the rooms and corridors. Initially, with no guidance on what was about to start there was a sense of anxiety and confusion, as though something might happen at any moment, or something might be ‘missed’. This left a charged residue of anticipation and excitement. We wanted to see everything and as the evening progressed we developed our own rhythm; snaking between places and spaces…each person carrying their own witnessed map of remembering’s from the evening.
Project website
Dates
2012 & 2013
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