Site-Seeing in London: Observing Edge 88

As the performance community rounds the corner into the next decade, the old form-vs-content arguments have given way to talk about context-the importance of the who-what-when-where-and-why surrounding an art object or event. Culture-watchers are excited to point out that a frame doesn't just bind a picture, it alters it; and in performance a radically unusual setting or a repositioning of the physical relationship between artwork and audience can add fresh perspective to issues that have been media-battered and hyperanalyzed. Site-specific performance is certainly not a new idea, considering the history of Happenings, but one that is rightly being reconsidered. These were my thoughts while experiencing a number of performances and installations that explored unusual sites during the Edge 88 festival in London last fall (I3-25 September I988), particularly while witnessing a live work by an eminent Belfast artist in a dark, musty warren of subterranean cells that once held Irish prisoners. The political rhetoric, republican drama, and terrorist belligerence around the centuries of struggle between Ireland and England were infused with something quite new for me during my hours there in the terrible dark. Because I was physically involved, the experience opened realms of feeling and perception that would not have been available if I had been safely removed from it in a theatre seat. Edge 88 was characterized by the careful search for interesting sites where the artists of this international festival might create new pieces. Edge 88 founder/director Rob La Frenais (founder and former editor of England's Performance magazine) and staff members Alison Ely and Tracey Warr chose the urban village of Clerkenwell, hard by the downtown financial district of London referred to as The City, and scoured it for locations for performances, installations, and site-specific sculptures. Festival-goers got to know this section of the old town by walking the 30-plus square blocks to visit and revisit contemporary works mounted in an artdeco swimming pool, a cloistered garden, a converted slaughterhouse, an empty warehouse, and a tiny hospital chapel, in addition to the local AIR Gallery and other artspaces in the area. I found this contextual framing device far more interesting than the festival's stated focus-"Britain's first biennale presenting artists working on the experimental edge of the visual arts." Likewise, the issues that the festival was to address, which included "the use of the body in art, the development of women's performance, artists' use of technology and