Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Dublin - Factum: The Choir - Project - October, November 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | Factotum: Factotum Choir performing at the opening of the Project exhibition, 2006, courtesy; Factotum | Belfast-based Factotum has a fundamental inclusiveness when it comes to art. Following on in the tradition of Joseph Beuys, it is clear from projects they have undertaken that they believe art should have a place in daily life for everybody. Launching The Vacuum in 2003 was an effective way of bringing their writing and ideas to a wider public. In transforming Project’s gallery into a reliquary of material tracking the history of ‘the choir’, they have created an accessible, enjoyable exhibition. Four monitors show footage from the different directions taken by the choir over the years under various prophetic leaders. A desiccated cat, programmes and scores for fictitious musical events, inventive rusted musical instruments, an LP made of cured meat (part of a vegetarian campaign), a poster advertising the digital opera The Hund of Ulster , and examples of uniples (one-off pieces made through the processes of mass production), create a rich and diverse archive for a group that never existed. Well, to say ‘never existed’ is perhaps not entirely accurate. Initially, Factotum were to pen and perform a corporate song for Project Arts Centre; this developed into the creation of a choir for the opening night of the exhibition, a choir which incidentally still meets every two weeks to rehearse an ever-expanding repertoire of socialist songs, amongst them Fujitsu, a workers’ song about labouring in a multinational corporation. In reality, the songs are quite thin on political content but big on humour. The phony retrospective is an accurate model of the information we are accustomed to hearing in ‘behind the music’-style documentaries. Internal politics and group disputes colour the development and progression of techniques. From the beginning there are clues to the irreverence of the archive. Inspiration for a socialist choir is cited as coming from Mark Carter’s grandfather, an adventurous seaman who had travelled the world; later we are subsequently notified that of course none of the family were remotely connected to seafaring. There is enough mixture between truth and fiction to make it difficult to be confident of what is true and what is not. Citing the Destruction in Art symposium in 1966 as an influence on the choir is not wholly unfounded. Although Factotum only came into being in 2001, one can see the reverberations of situationism and Fluxus on their perspective. One of the fraudulent claims is that Patrick ‘K’ Kelly in 1971 performed Die Orgiegeheimnisse , “a six hour epic of duck wagging misery representing conflict in Northern Ireland,” in the ICA as part of the second Destruction in Art symposium. There never was a second Destruction in Art symposium. One of the pieces is labelled as courtesy of the Bethlehem Hospital Museum and Archive, a famous psychiatric institution that has given us the word ‘bedlam’. A contact number on correspondence from a Dr Nils Garman of the Technical Institute of Port Stanley in the Falklands is fictitious. Factotum’s website [1] reveals that
Nils Garman is an occasional contributor. Despite the fact that the number given for the Port Stanley Institute of Technology was inoperative, Stanley’s motto is indeed “Desire the right.” A scrawled phone number on the score for Die Orgiegeheimnisse anachronistically led me to one of the choristers from the modern choir.  | | Factotum: Poster for 1985 performance of The Hund of Ulster, featuring Hugh Allen
and his innovative Digimitt technology; 2006 courtesy Factotum | In some respects Factotum appear to be outsiders in the art world. The emphasis is placed on involving people who might not necessarily consider themselves participating in an art event. Humour is the mainstay for Factotum events. Despite their populist leanings, there is an academic history of the absurd supporting their efforts. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdism and his sense of nihilistic pointlessness has a resonance with the Klapdans and Slatt dancing of the imagined Mark Carter. Perhaps it is even a particularly Irish history. Irish literature has a warm and cosy place for Lawrence Sterne and Flann O’Brien, with their tangential digressions and imagined particulars. Telling stories within the bounds of convention but twisting and skewing the facts to elucidate the ridiculous in our social behaviours is an effective way of expressing dissatisfaction and frustration without alienating a complicit public. The Choir presents the truth as a clouded fiction. It represents the petty politics of group dynamics, from internal squabbles to leadership succession stories, in the guise of an archive of fifty years of a socialist choir. Many of the parallels for this exhibition are with mainstream culture. This is Spinal Tap comes to mind when reading the blurb for The Hund of Ulster , “a multi-media spectacular concerning a scientist who invents a time machine and goes back into the distant past to rescue Cuchulann before his death on the battlefield. Cuchulann then comes back into the future to do battle with the UVF and IRA who have stolen his identity for their respective causes.” Humour perhaps has been a coping and a cloaking mechanism for expressing frustration with group dynamics. The SWOT analysis (a fictional survey of the choir) has some telling feedback from members of the choir on disputes and disagreements in relation to creative decisions. Couched in the joke one can’t help but feel there is real expression of an inability to assume leadership or direct others without having to kowtow to a dissenting public. There is ample room for interpreting this difficulty to lead and coordinate divided groups in relation to politics in Northern Ireland. Following on the situationist and anti-gallery guerilla tactics laid out by Fluxus artists in the ’60s, there is a satirical undertow. The humour, jokes and elaborate hoaxes flummox the viewer, leaving them unsure of what is real and what is not. This intended confusion can be alienating, but perhaps more subtly it expresses discontent at the many recent exhibitions that take on a curatorial role of archiving rather than encouraging and presenting new works. Even the freshest of artists can be given the archive treatment, where past works take on a venerated status and new work exists only in the form of reconstituted tomes or anthologies of things past. By inflating the importance of the past, new works have to be prematurely aged to pass into the holy sanctum of the retrospective. Information, background and paraphernalia have become at home in the gallery, joining the ranks of museum and library.
Rachel Ní Chuinn is an artist and occasional writer. Dublin - Factum: The Choir - Project -
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