Kiss The Blade: Beatific Visions

Alice Baxter, Annie MacKenzie, Ashlin Raymond and Ella Sutherland at 69 Cathedral Square, October 2-4.

I’m sure you’re all fucking sick of the future.

That whiny “dude, where’s my flying car — I was promised”, the sad gits who thought that the world really would look like the set of Star Trek complete with attractive available women in miniskirts, the endlessly retro hipsters who arrogantly think that the new, the now, the whole fucking future stopped because they were born, it all gets terribly dated, doesn’t it? If you are going to be retro-futurist, you have to be deft and careful about it, because while playing with tenses is all very well, there is only important tense when looking at a work of art, and that is the present.

Ashlin Raymond’s film Ludic Celebration Transformation was ridiculously Blake’s 7, even down to the utterly daft costuming. If you want classic British SF revivalism, then look no further. I half thought I’d see Terry Nation’s name come up the credits. It was perfect; madly over the top, totally cosy. The effects were at that point where they are developed enough to be shockingly bad, but still charmingly good. There’s this lovely moment where two hands — both bearing the most brilliant stage jewellery — fade away across each other, and at once one sees Anne Tirard and the Graff Vynda-K sauntering across the television screens of 1970’s Britain, all Pertwee and Baker and K-9 falling through history and the future in a wooden blue box. Except, of course, like Kerr Avon one feels it is all bullshit, all an attempt to brainwash Roj Blake one way or the other, all total lies in that vision of what is to come where Servalan stalks through Alison & Peter Smithson lecture theatres, power plants, and the stately homes of England. The sound lives up to expectations; like the best of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop it’s a throbbing mass of noise sliding up and down the scale, magnetic tape cut and reunited.

The second floor of 69 Cathedral Square is a truly weird space. It looks like it was abandoned in the mid-90’s by a horrible corporate in the face of Cthulhu, the desperate despair of the cubicle deserted before that which is not dead.

I’m going to completely ignore the pieces by Ella Sutherland and Annie MacKenzie; they were good but I honestly can’t think of anything useful to say about them, and wovon man nicht sprechen, darüber muß man schweigen.

Alice Baxter’s Test Site (TK) is not retro. She disdains to refer; she stoops to conquer. Two lights on tripods blink at each other. Contained within magic circles, glittering mystifying lines drawn in the sand, designed to be seen from above, they stutter on and off, like they know something we don’t. Lighthouses and UFOs and theatrical devices and pulsars wave across a abyss of fresh air. Mathematically they claimed the space, drawing parabolas across the floor, across the ceiling, standing forth as problems in conic sections suitable for Seventh Form Geometry and yet without any such logic, without any such sensibility. There was that vivid feeling of the Stapledonian, with Wellsian and Clarkian tones echoing through that empty room overlooking Christ Church Cathedral; there was a cold and beautiful estrangement as ouside, without any fuss, the sun went down, and the luminiferous pillars flickered into the dark.