The Creature from Cardiff – Robert Fisk

In the pitch dark basement?so dark there?s no way of telling the difference between the floor, walls, and ceiling?you hear the strange rustling of some kind of nest, and the cold hard clanking of a chain. Then, for a split-second, a stark white light from a flashgun illuminates the room, revealing a naked, slobbering creature crouching in the corner, on leg shackled, guarding its tiny transparent plastic nest?or cage. It is a human being, kind of.

The Creature from Cardiff

Robert Fisk

In the pitch dark basement–so dark there’s no way of telling the difference between the floor, walls, and ceiling–you hear the strange rustling of some kind of nest, and the cold hard clanking of a chain. Then, for a split-second, a stark white light from a flashgun illuminates the room, revealing a naked, slobbering creature crouching in the corner, on leg shackled, guarding its tiny transparent plastic nest–or cage. It is a human being, kind of.

The Creature is not the product of a government-funded biotech project, or a rogue corporate scientist, but the latest performance art piece to emerge from Cardiff’s prolific tactileBOSCH artist-run studios. The center was founded in 2000 by Kim Fielding, Mara Bonacina and Simon Mitchell, who had all recently graduated from art school in Cardiff and were horrified to find that 90 percent of art students didn’t practice art ever again after graduating. The Creature, created by Kim Fielding and Jan Bennett, is part of a slew of new work that will change that disturbing ratio in Cardiff.

The idea for "making a little bastard," as they describe the project, started when Bennet was looking at a paper on growing fetuses in artificial placentas at the University of Tokyo. Bennet explains that the eerie combination of golem mythology and amateur biotech science in The Creature performance installation is about "the process of developing and making scientific discoveries. It’s about ego, ambition, mistakes and best guesses."

With most scientific breakthroughs, the public is only ever informed of the end result, and not the messy stages of experimentation and development. With biotech cloning, the mistakes are likely to be a lot messier than anything we’ve ever seen before. In the intermittent flashes of light in The Creature, we catch a horrific–and admittedly theatrical–glimpse of a dystopia in which humans might be used as slaves, as armies, or as genetic flesh for further experimentation.

After each blast of the flashgun, the audience asks: What did I just see? What really happened? "Using the flashgun with the creature made it a thousand times larger than life," says Bennet. "The audience didn’t know where it was. They were in the Creature’s environment–a sensory deprivation area."

Fielding says of her Creature: "We put him in that black room and he is our experiment. We are using him very abjectly and very cruelly. But at some point he might wake up or find a way to escape from our clutches."

A new animal is growing in Cardiff. TactileBOSCH has 10 resident artists in its large Victorian laundry building tucked away behind rows and rows of terraced houses. The group is constantly adopting new artists as they grautate, catching them before they fall into the trap of unrealized potential. Inside the building, people are constantly working, trying new concepts and feeding off ideas in the run-down and atmospherically draughty building. Through the collaboration of artists working in various media, understanding, skill, and a certain intensity increases. This is especially true with the performance art pieces. A performance is more than a visual experience. It is highly emotional as well as intellectual level.

This was most in evidence at the recent tactileBosch group show "Kissing the Pink," which they took to the Art Academy in London, the belly of the beast–a beast that Fielding thinks Cardiff can easily slay. "London is constantly looking at what has just been done and asking how they can cleverly and supposedly innovatively change this and become one better," Fielding say. "It’s all about one-upmanship and doesn’t have any real spark."

But at "Kissing the Pink" sparks–and various other objects, including a person–were flying. Tim Bromage did some rather loud smashing of an IKEA table, which involved dragging a metal chair across the floor and beating the table with a chisel and hammer. Simon Mitchell flaunted his machismo as he bungee jumped for beer. Then Duncon Sturrock strapped his ankles to some bricks, crawled across the gallery and, when he reached the other side, began to untie the bricks. He stacked and arranged them according to a label on each one. Eventually he had built up a beautiful face that looked like Sturrock, but was actually his father.

With "Kissing the Pink" marking the end of The Creature, locking him up in his basement lab for good, tactileBOSCH will now move to the next project. But the traces of their happenings, hangings, and science experiments do not exist only in archival film stills and essays. Says Fielding, "Live art is also in the residue of what’s left behind. There’s the carnage and the knowledge that something went on there."

The performances were born out of the buzz in Cardiff’s art scene. Fielding says: "So much of the work that we see in London is absolutely stale compared to Cardiff, where there is a tremendous vibrancy and an overwhelming newness collectively, not just in tactileBOSCH but all over the city."