Il tempo del postino, or all that bull

"Il tempo del postino" is conceived not so much as a show, but as an exhibition - the exhibits being presented over time, rather than through space, to a seated rather than mobile audience. It is, in this sense, right that Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno are titled curators. But what then are they curating? As an overall theme, and one is never stated beyond time and postmen (topical note: where, in all solidarity, is mine?), it is difficult to think of an overarching theme other than perception and how it might be played with

The show opens with music from a mechanical piano, followed by a ventriloquist compere, and then dancing red velvet curtains - a quite beautiful piece of wit from Phillipe Parreno. From this point and for the most of the remainder of the show we are presented with conceptions of some seriously clever artists, all of which one might wish had been developed further.

Anri Sala gives us an aria from Madame Butterfly, but there are four butterflies and two Pinkertons. Placed on stage and in the audience, they share the singing part of any given moment, lip syncing when not voicing. The effect is one of great disorientation for the audience as sound bounces from stage to upper circle.

Perception is also at the heart of Carsten Holler's "Upside Down People 2007" in which three (willing) volunteers have their vision inverted, or, as our retina naturally gives an inverted image which the brain corrects, set right side up. For the volunteers this is not a instantaneous process, as they have viewed the world as it "is" for eight days and have special visors removed on stage. There is very real thrill in watching their reaction to the removal of these visors. Do the subjects reject their status as entertaining guinea pigs? Will they collapse in fits of vomiting? If perception is the theme of this exhibition, this piece works in terms of forcing the audience to question its relationship to what's on stage, as access to any inverted world is limited to the volunteers' minds.

Tino Seghal uses the patter of auctioneers to call attention to the sheer musicality of language even when spoken at speed (this musicality may have had much to do the with the repetition of the word "dollars", the only one I could recognize). Finally from the first "act" there was the sage advise of triplets directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay: "I own no more than is necessary, So I work no more than necessary".

Following an interval there followed the most covered event of the show and the arrival of Ross the Highland bull on stage. Ross is a reasonably docile animal from what I have seen of him, and was probably more than happy to help Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler with their particular artistic vision.

This involved a crashed car on the stage, on this would lie a woman, apparently with prosthetic legs. In front of the car stands a woman fisting herself. Men in combatwear melt plastic to drape over the auto-fister. She remains in the black hood for the remainder of the scene. This is presided over by a small dog, mounted atop a man in a lighter shade of combats. You must understand, the whole thing is all very Egyptian afterlife while I suppose recalling a more recnt Abu Ghrahib.

In black and in white spangles arrive two stilettoed models, who parade around the stage at dramatically slow pace, before bending over backwards in front of the car, showing off their Brazilians and urinating. They will remain in these damp poses for the next fifteen minutes.

By this point in time the audience is getting tetchy for non- terrorist, non-urinary contact. Did I forget the on-stage and in-audience wind militia? Well, they were there too, apart from those playing diminutive ukeles, who strummed their all behind balaclavas. To keep interest alive, Ross is brought in, very prettily tethered by a beribboned rope. After a tour around the car, hooded fister, and model vaginas, he is invited to smell a she-bull skin laid on the bonnet of crashed car.

You can see where this is going, yet to the presumed relief of the lady with the prosthetic legs atop the vehicle, Ross is no exhibitionist and fails to add to the bodily fluids on stage by fucking the car as was intended.

He is led away, possibly in some disgrace, while the fist is at last removed allowing the shit to land on the stage, joining the pile which had fallen some twenty minutes earlier with the start of Barney's conception.

Many will find all this offensive, either through the sexuality of the piece or its use of animals. Barney and Bepler's real offense, both to their audience and the other artists they share the stage with, is simply using sensation to mask the elaborate tedium they ask us to indulge them in.

My advice: leave at the interval.

Deliver me from Spinning Plates - Monkey: The Journey to the West

Monkey is apparently based on a Chinese legend with music from Damon Albarn and animation by Jamie Hewitt, both of Gorrillaz. Along with their work is the often astonishing acrobatics of 40 performers on stage. The first scene is called "The Birth of Monkey and his Quest for Immortality". Immortality is achieved by the third scene where, with simian glee, Monkey trashes what appears to be a celestial tea party and eats the peach of immortality. There are another six scenes, each set in such locations as an underwater crystal palace (compete with suspended singing starfish), the Volcano City and Paradise. Having achieved his Nietzschian goal, monkey is incarcerated for 500 years after which he joins a young pilgrim looking for sacred scriptures. Their search is rather unfocused and this goal is soon abandoned, or their discovery was lost by me through the daring use of blue subtitles on a black surface, so quite what the purpose of the last five scenes is other than pointlessly clever acrobatics I am not sure. Each of these follows the same template: acrobatics to set the scene, the disruptive arrival of Monkey and gang, gleeful slaughter by Monkey to initial shock but eventual participation by his companions. By scene seven my forehead was resting on the metal rail in front of me. Catatonia was beginning to set in by this point, but this deliverance was prevented by Mr Albarn's attempts at martial music which at times verged on the sub-Gilbert-&-Sullivan. Thus, by the final scene when you thought you'd seen everything, out come the spinning plates which torture at least I thought I had been spared. Jamie Hewitt's animation is the best thing about the show, especially the way it combines with the acrobatics, but this is only used to link the first three scenes. Either money ran out or he possibly felt that he had nothing to contribute without the semblance narrative.

Manchester. Not original. Not modern.

Ahead of the opening of the Manchester International Festival in nine days time, it is perhaps worth dwelling for a moment on the words of Nick Johnson, the head of Marketing Manchester, as he promoted the Festival in New York earlier this year. Of his strapline, "Manchester. Original. Modern," he was reported by the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead as saying, "What it's encouraging everyone in the city to do is to ask the question: Is what I'm doing original and modern?" As yet no-one has been struck down in St Ann Square on exiting Starbucks by the existential crisis this demand would inspire, but there is the nagging question of the consequences of failure to participate in the urban flashmob army. Banishment to Bury? Accompanying Johnson in New York was city council leader, Sir Richard Leese, who of the strapline interjected with the wonderfully heartfelt, if worryingly vacuous comment, "It's not a slogan - it's a brand signifier".

Marketing terminology aside, the slogan is an odd choice. As much as Manchester might claim originality and modernity as the cradle of the industrial revolution, it has in recent decades understood itself in its representations and stories. The ecstasy of this is that as a city Manchester knows that it is caught in its stories. We know that Manchester is not Coronation Street, Shameless or Cold Feet even if we nod ironically to these stories on an almost daily basis. That Mancunians inhabit stories was precisely the point of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. " Print the legend," says Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson quoting John Huston, while telling us that the legend is not the reality. These stories, our desire to inhabit them, the way they help us understand our lives suggest that Manchester, far from being original or modern, may in fact be a mythical place. In understanding this, Manchester rejects the idea of originality and authenticity, a defining practice not of modernity but of postmodernity.

The Manchester International Festival is itself part of this myth. Billed as "The world's first international festival of original, new work," it is designed to position Manchester as a centre of creativity of international standing. But even a cursory glance at the programme suggests we pause to question the originality of the work. First up on the Festival website is Industrial Revolution, a clubnight whose very name gestures to that moment of "original modernity" in the eighteenth century and take of Factory Records in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth. The principle behind the work of the event's performers, who include DJ Shadow, the Unabombers, Fat Boy Slim, is of course quotation. The launch event, Monkey: Journey to the West, is, we learn in the detail, "based on an ancient Chinese legend," while we might ask where would Victoria Borisova-Ollas, composer of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, be without the novel of the same title by Salman Rushdie?

In this morass of quotation and allusion, we might ask in what sense is the word "original" being used. The question is not pedantic. To bill a festival of creative work featuring artists who clearly reject notions of originality as original to an audience who do the same is to risk ridicule, insult your audience, or demonstrate a philistine approach to the creative process. That is to say, artists and writers have through the ages suffered those existential crises on exiting Starbucks as they are poleaxed by their own lack or originality and mediocrity. For Horace it was the art of poetry to make the ordinary seem original, with the result that he is reputed to have also written that, "He who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand and frauds." More recently, T.S. Eliot put it more baldly: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." In this sense the history of art is the history of theft.

Which brings us back to the claim of Manchester's later day Medici's that their Festival is "The world's first international festival of original, new work," a claim which shows a marked indifference to, for example, the Venice Biennale, now in its 57th year, or the work of the Edinburgh Festivals. It is, of course these, which Leese, Johnson and other city fathers wish the Manchester International Festival to rival. They are to be applauded for their aspiration, but it is neither an original nor modern aspiration; Edinburgh and Venice got there before them. As Coogan/Wilson points out Manchester is like Renaissance Florence, and in the intention to put an artist on every corner, Leese has created a festival of thieves and frauds which will only add to the myth that is Manchester. And for that, their "brand signifier" might be the greatest work of art of the festival.

Other takes on the MIF - [added 19 June 2007]

Yankunian at the Manchizzle tells about Not the Manchester International Festival and being MIFed on Portland Street by the New Yorker article.

Diehard Manchester media bunnies at 1 Scott Place produce this surprising result at Comment is Free: