Tyra Wigg SQUEEZE MDT, Stockholm November 8-9, 2024
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Ann-Sofie Back Go As You Please - Ann-Sofie Back - 1998-2018 Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
Ann-Sofie Back, Go As You Please - Ann-Sofie Back - 1998-2018, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
There’s no apparent reason why a review of the just unveiled retrospective of the iconic, and now former fashion designer Ann-Sofie Back at Liljevalchs Konsthall, should have to interpolate a review of choreographer Tyra Wigg’s new piece SQUEEZE at MDT, and vice versa. Well, aside from having just seen the two back-to-back. Perhaps, I’m just offering myself a writing leeway in what has been a fairly busy week, to produce a text in the guise of “chunkiness”, without necessarily having to say much about either two, and instead just cutting right through the seams to the crucial “nitty-gritty”. Back’s retrospective is prefaced by death and Wigg’s choreography by touch. I tell myself there is a sufficient oxymoronic link to substantiate this mash-up. At any rate, Wigg’s last name proves a material fixture in Back’s exhibition, and Wigg’s piece circles a lot around the back. Is this what dance critique has come to? Well, let the community itself answer to that.
Tyra Wigg, SQUEEZE. Photo: Karin Salathé
When I learn re: SQUEEZE that the audience will be offered the option to consent or not to being touched and massaged I instantly wonder about the solidity of this “social contract”. If it means what it means, or if it serves rather as a “premonition”. MDT is a “correct, by the protocol” kind of a space, so I don’t think further, and either way I’m not very sensitive to participation in an arts context like this one. But I do recognize that the gist of a piece like SQUEEZE, which rests on renegotiating concepts of personal space and physical integrity, bears far more potency in a regional Nordic context, where we’re not so tactile with strangers, than elsewhere. We’re hardly all “MY FREEND, MY FREEND!”, waving arms all over the place, tapping/slapping people’s shoulders, like they do it in Italy, or doing “la bise” like in France, or kissing people on the mouth to say hi. Is it a novel approach, an impromptu interactive performance that weighs partially on the audience to be physical? Hardly, if anything often a perquisite, but it certainly doesn’t need to be novel. What I enjoyed about SQUEEZE is that its distinct and indicative parts read and feel more like a live workshop, where one considerable strength lies in how smoothly the audience is balmed into participating. How a gentle trust is forged, in the seemingly insubstantial and disalarming first act, that is as gentle and harmless as the exercised touch to follow in the second act.
And what is this first act even? A mirror of what I now know, and have said before in texts to be almost formulaic for MDT; “monotonous” 15-minutes’ lead-in towards action; discombobulating the audience into a clean slate before anything really happens (Inside voices have confirmed this shared sentiment, so need to come for me). First act; save for the last couple of minutes; mostly redundant and could have used an edit. It only starts picking up traction where sleeping bags that later will be used as "islands" and sitting space on the floor, where the audience will be invited to take seat, are introduced into view, carried over the shoulders and dragged across the floor as long veils, in circular, centripetal motions. Very ceremonial and ritualistic in feel, inviting the next move, which is a literal and collective one.
Tyra Wigg, SQUEEZE. Photo: Karin Salathé
Once inhabiting these islands, the audience initially watches as the performers engage with each other to find their pressure points per squeezing and massaging. Over the course of the second act, this inevitably gets more and more elaborate; the bodies of the performers interconnecting with each other, not crawling or towering over each other like in Twister, but rather linking together per the shoulder region. Zippers on unassuming clothes are pulled down allowing touch on more intimate but not overtly sexual parts of the body. My guy asks me with genuine curiosity afterwards as we speak on the phone, if the performance sexualized the space. No, did not, but certainly sensualized it. I whisper at one point to my female artist friend and “muse”; “This is strangely erotic”. She responds slightly embarrassed; “Yes”. No surprise there, really. I find inexplicit eroticism far more interesting in performance than a tedious, head-on nudity onslaught.
The chemistry and dynamics between the performers are ultimately what make this piece something to remember in the moment. They’re instant strangers but here you are responding with an empathetic chord to the countenance they display with each other, whether you expected to be touched or not.
Ann-Sofie Back, Go As You Please - Ann-Sofie Back - 1998-2018, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
Meanwhile, Ann-Sofie Back’s retrospective at Liljevalchs Konsthall is a perfect broadcast of how as a designer she delivered on the promise of grandeur attributed to her. Everyone should really see this, and perhaps see this as a significant offering as to how Swedish fashion too, in instances over time, connected to “conversations” about fashion from a universal lens, beyond just ACNE (great, but so inconsistent in their lunges you wouldn’t even be able to tell what they’re about, from one season to another). Thought shoots back to circa early 2000’s and learning about Back's work in Dazed & Confused; a Central Saint Martins grad with a Swedish sounding name whose ethos at the time seemed to echo sophisticated Belgian avant-garde. That Back went from this, to near household name after reinventing herself as a fashion commodity just one step shy of commonplace and mainstream is a testament to the whirlwind and the once in a blue-moon kind of career she has enjoyed, or rather; experienced.
Ann-Sofie Back, Go As You Please - Ann-Sofie Back - 1998-2018, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
In a sense, I’d be much more interested in reading her memoirs than reading diarrhetic things by the curators like; “A grave for former collaborators. In Go As You Please, Ann-Sofie Back bids farewell to the fashion industry by coming to terms with outdated female ideals, personal grief and a fashion world in turmoil.” What fashion world in turmoil, the world is in turmoil? There’s evidently plenty of narrative in Back’s backstory (pun intended) to empower an exhibition. You can imagine how some of the formal ideas at hand must have sounded edgy AF by the curatorial storyboard. “Ann-Sofie Back will have the ultimate showdown with herself, her own story and the fashion world; it’ll serve as her obituary! Let's even have an obituary as invitation! We’ll even chill down the room as though a morgue in a grand austere room! It’ll be so evocative and powerful!”
Yes, it sounds like a parody and cinematic plot for a scathing Altman-esque fashion world satire (who’d direct Prêt-à-Porter today or its remake?) and would properly work only if there were enough humour to really go around and substantiate such direction. Back has exhibited plenty of such in the past when her brand at a certain point boiled down to the "modular humour" and inherent capacity for textually orchestrated garments, found in the trademark of her last name (“BACK”).
Ann-Sofie Back, Go As You Please - Ann-Sofie Back - 1998-2018, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
Some of the production choices do work; the clinical autopsy tables as podiums I suppose are chic enough, stirring up an eerie Margiela vibe of making the personal impersonal. The "Thrash Humpers" death masks à la Harmony Korine in abundance turns parts of this exhibition down a very sour and theatrical rabbit hole for which it does not hold up. It ends up neither edgy nor funny. And at the end of the day there is a reason why substance sometimes should override excess. Make no mistake, Back’s designs are wonderful, and her star and the talent she possessed will speak for itself, but the clothes would have persisted beautifully without some of “the makeup” of this exhibition, and that’s both on the curators and artists, but not the artist alone. Thank you Back, it's been nice looking back. You were great.
Ashik Zaman