Cross My Palm With Sugar: Sweet

Audrey Baldwin at GalleryGallery at C1 Saturday July 25th.

Are you here for the toilet, or the performance art? It was quite a good question. There were two queues in the room at the back of C1 on Saturday afternoon; one for the bathrooms, and one for Audrey Baldwin's performance Sweet. You waited on a bench. Occasionally someone would walk in, wait a minute or two, then ask worriedly if the queue for the loos was really that long. Once reassured, they'd dart in, looking at the rest of us as if we were slightly odd, which I suppose was basically true. Periodically, one of the people ahead of you would disappear into the sanctum, a white space visible through a doorway with a basket of broken eggs sitting outside. Quiet conversation would emerge. Then so would they, with one hand covered in white lines, vaguely organic, vaguely reminiscent of henna. Some people nibbled away at the lines of icing, while others held their hand carefully, trying not to disturb the setting confectionery. Eventually, you got to go in, and sit down, where the artist chatted away to you, about nothing in particular, while doodling away on your palm with a mixture of icing sugar and egg white.

And it was over, and you went home.

Sweet was a very privy piece. There was something a little furtive about disappearing into a rather hidden space to do something, especially something that drew so heavily on folk-traditions of hedge-witchery and the gypsy fortune teller. It was ritualistic. It was crafty. It was occult. It was the rite of the supplicant applying to the cunning folk, to the clever woman, stripped of content and reduced to an elegant form. The broken eggs sitting in the basket by the entrance particularly affected me; the cracked half-alive shells, almost the only sign of the activity going on inside, recalling the visual markers used by non-literate societies. Here, they said, something especial was happening.

At the same time, Sweet also played with the imagery of the fairground, of the travelling carnival. (The space itself, rarely enough for a gallery space, has travelled all over Christchurch in the past, from the inner city streets, to other gallery spaces, even out to Kairaki forest.) Palmistry may be an ancient and mystical art of the orient, but it is also the stuff of circus caravans. Being drawn upon is a traditional game for children, a ritualised transgression against the rules of everyday life (people on the buses stare at you when you have a hand covered in icing, did you know?) And, of course, what could be more fair than sugary messes?

I read Sweet as a kind of mock ritual, rather like Michael Houseman's The Red and the Black. But where Houseman's initiation ritual was primarily a means of teaching about initiation rituals, Baldwin's was a thing-in-itself. It used imagery and ideas from outside, but worked independently. It was a little thing, with a cool symmetry and style. There was nothing out of place, just a pared back informal formalism, a liturgy without any of the encumbrance of religion. It was a secularised, rational irrationality, with all the sharp good taste of a slightly pointless act.