Summary
LAST week's news that Glasgow artist Sue Tompkins has been short- listed for the Beck's Futures Prize is welcome indeed, for Tompkins is one of those artists whose influence and importance far exceeds her current public profile. As live spoken-word performer, visual artist, part of the performance group Elizabeth Go and one-time singer and writer with the much-praised artrockers Life Without Buildings, she has characterised a remarkable creative energy.
Somehow always finding the new way to talk about old feelings and creating, in poetic terms, a spoken word equivalent of the visual arts being created by the improvisers, appropriators and cultural magpies among her peers in Glasgow and beyond. Tompkins performances and text works meld both emotional sophistication and every day banality, using repetition and incantation, snatches of song and dialogue, flashes of absurd humour and a pronounced physical rhythm created by the artist pacing the floor or pausing to grin complicity at her audience. With excellent timing, she opened a new show on home ground at Glasgow's Modern Insititute over the weekend, kicking off with a new performance. Sometimes Tompkins in performance is a Patti Smith in priestess mode, but on the Friday night she donned a flowered cowboy shirt and jeans to give a musical performance of bluecollar melancholy, with the painter Alan Michael on guitar. It was a magical moment that matched the January night, with the wind whipping round the building and a collective desire to escape the inevitable gloom.See the full content of this document
Extract
Sue Tompkins, Modern Institute (Until February 11) 4/5
From the old-fashioned Friday night longing of Richard Thompson's I Want to Se...
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