"If a man stands in a room, farts and calls it art then it's art, as far as I am concerned."
Not my words, you'll understand, but those of Mark Lawson, art critic, journalist and plainly a much more tolerant bloke than me. I was talking to him a few years ago and challenged him as to how he could consume so much theatre, TV and so on, without going round the bend. He loves his art (or is it culture, I'm never sure) does Mark Lawson.
And so, if Open Air (Mon 25th Mar - Fri 29th Mar, 9.02am) is anything to go by, does Radio 4. In tiny 3 minute slivers, so as not to frighten the horses. I'm paraphrasing, but I think the Controller (Gwyneth Williams) said she wanted R4 to become more of an artistic playground. God forbid I turn into someone who grabs a pitchfork and heads for Portland Place at such suggestions ... but aren't the pipe-smoking kulcha-warriors over at the Radio 3 Senior Common Room a better lot to chuck art at? The trouble is, no one would hear it.
I listened to the 3 minute interventions (even the nomenclature bugs me) as they went out and again via the web. Very often context can make a huge difference: busy kitchen -v- routine car journey, walking the dog -v- dropping off to sleep, brushing your teeth -v- staring at a computer screen not quite believing this stuff got commissioned....
They were not uniformly awful. It would be unfair and illegitimate to brand them as such. What united them was their failure to grasp radio as a medium of artistic expression. The intention behind the pieces was fairly clear, it was the execution which let them down. Except the second one, which was a poem arranged by Ruth Ewans and written by some 14 year old school children about an imagined brighter future where their woes were no more. It was read beautifully, but the choice of John Tusa made it sound like the bit on iPM where they read out listeners' droll accounts of their week. Well modulated whimsy.
It was the first one which seems to have upset most people. Christian Marclay set out, I assume and to quote Withnail, to "liven you stiffs up a bit..." He tried this by wheeling out that horny old cliche of "pretending it's all gone wrong". Little bits of off mic Today programme, little bits of stumbly umms and errs, a few seconds of silence - all very arresting but far, far, from original. His were techniques toyed with by Victor Lewis Smith, perfected by Armando Iannucci and exploited to great effect by Jon Holmes and Alice Arnold in the much missed Listen Against. He developed the fun into cut-up pieces of the pips ("But it's radio FOUR - you gotta 'ave the pips!!!" No. No you don't.) And then the greatest chestnut of them all - some of Charlotte Green's trademark giggling. Come on! You were engaged to make us think, not to tut in exasperation.The march into radio cliche pounded onward on Wednesday with Peter Strickland's homage to the football results. The network took the deliberate decision on the Monday NOT to warn listeners they were about to hear some art (it would have blown the hilarious premise that it'd had all gone wrong, see?) but the unpleasantness that was about to unfold on Wednesday was, at least, pre-empted by a warning of "do not adjust your radio". As the corny short wave tuning FX degenerated into unlistenable distortion, the sound of radios being very swiftly adjusted will have followed suit.
By Friday my suspicion that the audience had come second to "the big idea" was confirmed when a child stumbled her way, almost unintelligibly, through an excerpt from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Don't ask me what Mark Wallinger had intended with this, but the outcome was a self indulgent tax on the patience of the listener and unfair on both the performer and on Wilde.
These were some big guns rolled out by Radio 4 and Art Angel (I am assuming, or rather hoping against hope that Art Angel paid for it). I have always been one to speak up for creativity and its licence to fail. Maybe they thought they were making "pure radio"? Perhaps it really was a liberal experiment in re-imagining the radio space? If they did, 9.00 on a weekday morning is the wrong slot for them. I would perhaps go so far as to say these experienced and well respected artists were unfairly exposed at such a time.
I like art, maybe not as much as Mark Lawson, but I go and see things, watch, listen and so on - so long as the artist has more than a basic grip of the medium he or she is using to create in, I'm happy. I don't expect a sculptor to be particularly adept at oil painting or a conceptual film maker to be good at radio.
The Radio 4 audience are fiercely loyal and so tricks like this can sometimes be played and got away with - because what we ended up with was not 3 minutes of exciting audio, but three minutes of people across the UK wondering what the hell was on.
They called them "interventions" - which I always thought was that moment when you confronted an alcoholic. Maybe someone should have intervened a little more during the production process...?
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The five 3-minute commissions are permanently available to hear online and I would welcome you to do so and see if I'm right.
