Guster Slendervalve and the séance of dead poets. A performance by Max Avery

What a strange experience! It happened quite a while ago now, one night last November, but it has left a vivid imprint in my mind as if it could have happened yesterday. I doubt any of those who were at the AUCB Studio exhibition have forgotten it. Of all the interesting works at that show, Max Avery’s Posthumous Poetry was by far the most enthralling and beguiling piece.

Unannounced, his entrance came as a surprise, bursting through the doorway was a loud and audacious caped individual. Upon taking his first few strides into the room he declared that his name was Guster Slendervalve and he would perform for us a most spectacular feat, a Posthumous Poetry reading. Some laughed but most just stared at him, standing in silence and confused.

I know Max Avery, but I didn’t know the man I saw in front of me, he was confident, bold and attention grabbing. Had the artist transformed himself? Did Guster Slendervalve exist? Where was Max?

During the entire performance there seemed to be an amazing tension between this larger than life character and the timid and nervous performer bringing him into being.

Twitching, cracking of the voice, stumbling over words and frantic rubbing of the brow where Max’s glasses usually sit. If this were a film, the struggle and uneasy breakdown in the character would ruin the illusion and diminish our connection but this wasn’t a film, there was no screen between this character and us. This was not an actor performing someone elses script, this was something far more nuanced and perplexing.

If anything, this battle between the artist and what he was trying to be and become, made every moment tantalizingly present. We all became ever so aware of our role as an audience. We were intimately connected to this performance whether we like it or not.

It was slightly awkward to watch and looking around the crowded gallery space I notice that although many where completely transfixed, others were doing as I was, looking at one and another, trying to figure out what was going on and how they should respond. Was this a piece of theatre, a comedy act or something other?

The fight between the performer and the performance, the endeavour to be someone more potent and notable is paralleled in the narrative told in the supposed ‘Posthumous Poetry reading’. For this, the artist has appropriated and synthesised the words of famous poets and collaged them together with his own more colloquial phrases, which again allows it to function with a duality of meaning. The result is a poem with a mixture of grand words, noble ideals and the concerns of adolescent male who would like to the be a, ‘bright Adonis’ to attract the, ‘social chicks’. It is both a sincere contemplation of being a young man, with hopes of becoming someone more exciting, and a bizarre and comical, cut and paste, pretend séance complete with a reindeer snow globe in place of a crystal ball.

The humour and the absurdity of it, coupled with the naivety of props and production all acted to blur and break down the boundaries between the audience and this lived performance. That’s why I loved this piece, because of the way it induced and balanced so many conflicting states, such as the flux between pretence and sincerity. It was a truly absorbing and challenging experience for the audience. By the end we all stood staring towards the artist, wondering if there was more to come and I think most of us were feeling a little bit bewildered, like stunned rabbits in head lights. We weren’t the only ones, Max too seemed lost, trapped in a state of performance.

Great work and I can’t wait to see more.