Whippy Artery

WHIPPY ARTERY Film

The Mr. Whippy performance was staged at an art gallery where on a cold winter’s night a Mr Whippy truck pulled up outside the gallery with orange flashing lights playing "Greensleeves", inducing the audience to the front window. The gallery was then stormed by performers outside while many other performers who formed the audience were placed inside the gallery. Loud screaming ‘noise’ music mixed with a SMN concoction of sounds played as performers walked around the audience with tape recorders quite provocatively. The performance lasted a couple of minutes so the audience were unnerved and intrigued by the newly created atmosphere. This play on the vigorous laws of a gallery space devoted to aesthetics aimed to challenge the status quo and expectations of a traditional arts culture and audience. What was significant was this that was an artist run space and even in this environment, the audience’s reactions did not differ to what may have happened in other institutionalised cultural art spaces. The performance finished with an audience member being dragged and kicked from the space after being asked to ‘Say Cheese’ (go figure?), though the audience did not know that SMN had placed a performer as this ‘(un)lucky’ person.