Klare Lanson is an artist working in poetry, sound, film and performance. She fuses text, gesture, electronic music and visual imagery to create experimental performance works. Klare’s performances are numerous and include the This Is Not Art Festival, Overload Poetry Festival, La Mama Theatre, The Melbourne International Arts Festival and many other live venues throughout Australia and overseas.
Klare was 2004 finalist for the Victorian Babble Slam and the wildcard for the first National Slam competition through ABC’s Radio National. She released an independent debut album, Every Third Breath, and in 2004 completed an artist in residence at FRUC in Montpellier, France, also touring Berlin, London and New York with her “Can’t Talk Right Now I’m Busy” performance. Her poetry is published globally on radio, web and sometimes even for the page. She likes working with people who occasionally Google themselves.
Lanson’s work interrogates the concept of collaboration as a constantly-evolving process. Projects with artists and musicians such as Cornel Wilczek <aka Qua>, Ollie Olsen, The Hypersense Complex, Bjoern Stolpmann, Unamunos Quorum, John Troyer, Nick Kallincos, Emile Zile and other poets have produced works that are a reflection of memory, social error, anxiety and time-space compression. Recent performances have tended to place traditional notions of collaboration under scrutiny. The word “collaboration”—while a useful one—fails to capture effectively the concept of “community” inherent in Lanson’s work. This being said, collaboration is still an essential part of her practice. She has now begun exploring this idea in her written work as well.
Her recent experiments in creating visual poetry through the medium of short film and the mobile phone also demonstrate an awareness of the contradictions inherent in collaboration (or interaction with) technology. The lo-fi, low-res quality of the medium of the mobile phone is used as a device to reflect the western contemporary environment. Just as the mobile phone footage is remixed and cutup, so too is the electronic music she makes. These works ask questions with no easy answers: they provide the film-maker with a sense of instant pleasure, and yet can also be used to capture a moment, or memory. In this sense, the boundary between reality and archive is blurred. Additionally, Lanson’s incorporation of mobile footage into her performances reminds us again that this “easy” genre adds yet another layer to creative collaborations.
Lanson’s live performances exude a peculiar sense of chaos, utilizing poetry, gesture, music and electronic voice effecting. When possible, visual footage is projected behind the body to allow as much body/screen interaction as possible. This complex layering of elements appeals to the senses of sight and sound, gesturing towards multiple uses of the body, and even that most corporate of concepts, multi-tasking. Watching her live performances, one suspects that Lanson’s intention is to cause as much “anxiety” amongst the audience members as possible. Subtle hints of wit and humour, however, complicate the suggested antagonism of such an approach.
To read this approach as confrontational misses the point Lanson is making about traditional notions of “performer” and “audience”. A recent gig at Glitch involved Lanson inviting audience members up on stage (whilst performing) to interact with the screen in anyway they wished. The fact that uniformity emerged in terms of audience behaviour suggests that we as consumers of creative works are still wedded to a rigid notion of what constitutes effective or “good” art. Perhaps we still do not trust ourselves when confronted with an opportunity to liberate ourselves from a passive use of technology. While the spaces Lanson explores via technology have become more political in nature, her work is not simply determinist in nature. Above all else, Lanson’s work resists a literal reading.
Go and visit her at http://klarelanson.net.
This text first appeared in The Material Poem (ed. James Stuart, non-generic productions, 2007).
