Bedrocks Garage

Bedrock’s Garage

as part of Dublin Fringe Festival ‘09

Created & Performed by Amanda Coogan & Dominic Thorpe

(article from The Fringe report Colm Higgins)

This once-off live art show took place over a single afternoon in the window of Arnotts, a major department store in Dublin city centre. It consisted of a man (Dominic Thorpe) and a woman (Amanda Coogan) remaining still like mannequins, but moving occasionally, albeit with their eyes mostly closed.

The man was in a business suit, but with his shaven head painted green. He sat on a stool beside a table with a large bowl of what looked like sugar, with a slab of raw minced meat in his left hand. His movements had a certain pattern, which repeated every quarter hour or so.

Occasionally he would stand up, lift some sugar from the bowl with a ladle, and pour it into his open mouth. After a few minutes, he would regurgitate the half-digested sugar on the floor. A little later, he would write with a green marker on the shop window ‘You can’t see me’.

One possible interpretation is that the man represented the gross consumer, addicted to sugar and cheap meat, but green with envy. His cryptic remark on the window could be a reference to importance of privacy for an individualistic consumer culture.

The woman was dressed in a dark gold dress with a yellow belt, but the lower part of the dress extended to cover half the shop display space and was tied to the window and walls behind, effectively trapping her in her dress. On her head was a pair of tights, with a yellow pad covering the centre of her forehead. She would change the positions of her arms occasionally, or even turn around within the confines of her dress/trap. A possible interpretation is that she represented women ‘trapped’ by fashion – although this choice limited her ability to move and interact.

The visual impact of the piece was striking initially, and it was easy to draw from it strong visceral comments on the nature of consumerism – particularly as it took place in a shop window. But it changed little over the course of the two hours. This may well have been the intention, as while a crowd of up to 50 people were watching the display at any one time, few casual passers-by stayed for longer than 20 minutes.

The show’s entry in the Dublin Fringe Programme described it as an ‘improvised performance’ shaped by passers-by and their reactions, with ‘participation the name of the game’. But there appeared to be little or no reaction by the performers to the audience outside the window, or even between each other. The fact that both had their eyes closed would have made this difficult in any case, but even when the occasional group of teenagers knocked on the window, there was no response. The most notable exception was when the woman traced words in the air on one of the occasions that the man was writing on the window.

Some of the comments by passers-by were interesting in themselves. Many focused on the raw mince meat in the man’s hand, with some disgusted and others fascinated.

The visual impression created was affected by the presence of a teenage homeless beggar on the left side of the window through the performance, creating an unintentional lopsided triptych. With a downtrodden but defiant expression, and wearing plastic rosary beads as a necklace, his occasional movements became almost as fascinating as those of the performers.