Peter
Harris I'd Laugh But There's No Punchline -
Version
Screenings
Wednesday 29 June - Saturday 2 July,
every hour and half hour from 11am - 5.30pm
Private
view
Wednesday 29 June, 6 - 8pm
 |
Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to be screening Peter Harris’s
new film I’d Laugh, But There’s No Punchline
– Version, with audio played through the Terrortone
sound system. A new series of prints that further explore the
issues raised in the film will also be shown.
As with many of the seemingly mysterious connections that have
arisen in my professional/personal life during the last 25 years,
I first had the pleasure of meeting Peter Harris through our
mutual involvement with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the
shamanic music producer and walking performance art piece that
has created an incredible body of recorded music since the early
1960s. The initial link between Perry and Harris came about
when Harris sought Perry’s contribution for his film Higher
Powers, which explored the possibilities surrounding the existence
(or non-existence) of a Higher Power (or Powers) with a number
of exceptional contemporary figures. A next link in the chain
came through Adrian Sherwood, the inventive producer whose On-U
Sound label has remained at the vanguard of experimental British
music during the last 30 years by merging the talents of transplanted
Jamaican artists with local post-punk players, and with whom
Perry’s best post-Jamaican work has been recorded.
In September 2009, Higher Powers was given a special
screening in the hallowed ground of the Tabernacle in Ladbroke
Grove, accompanied by an exhibition of large-scale collaborative
artworks made by Perry and Harris. Perry gave a live dub performance
dressed as a kind of anti-Pope, aided and abetted by a sterling
mix from Sherwood, while manipulated filmic backdrops created
specially by Harris and animated by Llyr Williams formed a dopplegänger
visual enhancement which served to underline the messages of
Perry’s partially ad-libbed lyrics, acting as a counterbalance
to the gig’s inevitable unpredictability. On the night,
it was a real pleasure to see quotes from Perry, as first published
in my authorised biography of the man, People Funny Boy, beamed
onto the wall behind him during the performance, and meeting
Peter somehow felt like re-connecting with an old friend, especially
since the last time I had visited Perry at his home in Switzerland,
he had the Higher Powers film screening on an endless loop on
his computer, as he worked on his ever-changing sculptures and
collages (most of which were glued to the wall, ceaselessly
plastered on top of each other).
Peter Harris’ previous work has typically involved ‘proxy’
creations, making use of the words of others to define himself.
His latest project, which takes the form of the short film I’d
Laugh, But There’s No Punchline – Version, is something
of a departure in that he narrates everything in it himself,
appearing as a virtual ‘version’ of himself, this
time in the form of a stand-up comedian, with special dub effects
on the soundtrack enhancing the overall feeling of anxiety,
rootlessness, and despair. As with Adrian Sherwood, Harris says
that reggae and dub have long been sources of fascination for
him; indeed, the reggae form had twin elements of particular
appeal: there was the humour so often evident in lyrics and
song titles that referenced in-jokes and made use of peculiar
punning, often incorporating cartoonish, over-the-top sound
effects, while conversely, there was astute social commentary
by artists such as Big Youth and Doctor Alimantado, who railed
against social injustices and racism of ‘Babylon’,
which perpetually victimizes the poor. The assumption of such
obscure names by reggae artists, pointing to a problematised
identity, is another element that held resonance for Harris,
providing another layer of inspiration for this new work. Perhaps
most importantly, there is also the intangible quality of dub
music, which opens up new spaces through the reinterpretation
of a piece of recorded music by dropping out its original vocal,
and then subjecting the raw rhythm to manipulative mixing, as
well as echo, delay, and other types of mesmerising sound effects
that impart a feeling of infiniteness—the cavernous sound
of limitless space, as well as a bottomless abyss.
In dub music, through an inverse process, the accepted mask
as presented on a standard vocal recording is stripped away
to reveal a truer sense of the core that lies beneath it, often
revealing the song’s protagonist to be vulnerable or helpless.
Harris says that a particular point of reference for his latest
project was the work crafted by the forward-thinking Jamaican
producer, Keith Hudson, who was one of a handful of noteworthy
Kingston innovators that began issuing dubs during the early
1970s; on his tense and emotionally-laden releases (as heard
on both the vocal and dub cuts of tracks such as ‘Satan
Side,’ ‘True To My Heart,’ ‘Jonah,’
and ‘Darkest Night On A Wet Looking Road’), Hudson
yielded an other-worldly and somewhat tortured feeling, as though
he was not at peace with himself, or felt that all was not right
with the world.
With such elements in mind, in I’d Laugh, But There’s
No Punchline – Version, Peter Harris draws on the
altered format of the version B-side, to give an alternate reading
of himself as a stand-up comedian, who is here revealed to be
an angst-ridden figure, beset by neurosis and potential personal
calamities, which are intrinsically linked to the essence of
his vocation, or indeed, to that of an artist, or perhaps simply
to anyone that finds themselves with the misfortune of being
of a certain age, living in our contemporary falsified reality.
By reworking and subverting a range of traditional joking forms
and turning them in on himself (with occasional visual effects
from Llyr Williams adding to the tension), Harris seeks to present
an alternate kaleidoscope of his own identity, a splintered
anti-comic reflected through dub’s fractured lens. Thus,
the dub sound effects that rapidly appear and disappear behind
Harris’ troubled monologue (drawn from Adrian Sherwood’s
personal archive, but here reconfigured by Harris and sound
engineer Riccardo Carbone) form a sonic filter for Harris’
alternate funhouse-mirror portrait of himself as a manic depressive
stand-up comic, subsumed by an ongoing identity crisis.
Text by David Katz
After leaving Chelsea College of Art Peter Harris (b. 1967)
co-founded the exhibition space Uncle Grey Presents with Charles
Avery in 1996. He has since exhibited widely, including the
presentation of Higher Powers with Lee ‘Scratch’
Perry at The Tabernacle, London (2009); solo exhibitions at
Kunsthalle Lüneburg (2007), Andrew Mummery Gallery (1999,
2000, 2002) and group exhibitions at Laura Bartlett Gallery,
London (Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 2008), National
Film Theatre, London (Artists’ Films on Music Culture,
2004), Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore (Contemporary Self-Portraiture
/ Re-assessing Identity, 2004), Kettle’s Yard Cambridge
(Face Off, 2002), Milton Keynes Gallery (Air Guitar,
2002). Peter Harris’s collaborative work with Lee ‘Scratch’
Perry will feature in the forthcoming exhibition Self Determination
= Power at Sorcha Dallas Gallery, Glasgow.
David Katz is author of People Funny Boy: The Genius of
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Solid Foundation:
An Oral History of Reggae. For more information: www.davidkatz.r8.org
For enquiries, please contact Laurent Cottier at:
laurent@mummeryschnelle.com |
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Back to exhibitions
Art Dads
2013
I'd Laugh But There's
No Punchline - Version
2011
Self-Portraits by Proxy
3, 4, 6 & 7
2009
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a press release in pdf form
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