Sorcha Dallas

Forgetful Green, Linder

Linder’s Frieze Film commission was filmed in the aftermath of her Chisenhale Gallery performance.

On July 10th, a 13-hour improvisational performance, The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME took place at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. On the next day, the characters from The Darktown Cakewalk – a Star, a Muse, Puella Aeterna, a Witch, a Cakewalk King and Queen - found themselves blinking in the early morning light in the Rose Field of Cants of Colchester, the oldest rose growers in Britain. The three-minute film begins here – the morning after the night before as if in Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - now manicured, suburban and retail. Abandoned hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and other domestic appliances amongst the roses pun on the use of 20th-century Bosch electrical appliances. The three-minute duration of the film mirrors that of the seven-inch single. Three minutes of sound was the optimum recorded length for a single due to the constraints of manufactured vinyl from 1900 until the 1960s. Songwriters and musicians composed and recorded songs appropriate to the constraints of this format. A three-minute single, a ‘spiral scratch’, is reflected in the filmed choreography throughout the rose garden, and echoes the mystical spirals of Dante or the mythic site of Glastonbury Tor. The characters from The Darktown Cakewalk circle through the rose garden led by Linder as Minerva (Minnie Mouse’s original name) and eventually meet the artist Harminder Singh Judge as the goddess Kali by way of Gene Simmons from the rock group, Kiss. The film traces a compressed history of glamour, from its origins in 18th-century Scotland describing enchantment, to its present day aerosolic ghosts.

‘Now, it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odour is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever.’ L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Like every work I make, my new film Forgetful Green (2010) is taken from a location defined by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) as ‘the most dangerous place in all these parts’. Bunyan describes the tale as being ‘delivered under the similitude of a dream’, and my early arrival at a rose field in Colchester in mid-July, directly after my 13-hour performance The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME (2010), seemed wholly dreamlike. Manufacturing constraints within the record industry once rigidly imposed a three-minute limit on the length of a single: pop subservient to vinyl. Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks once described this as the ‘spiral scratch’. I witnessed a similar spiral- ling process each time the cinematographer Tim Walker pressed the shutter and exposed a three-minute roll of Forgetful Green. When I was 17 in 1972, I stood in the middle of a field in Bicker- shaw, near Wigan, at a pop festival. I wandered into a market tent and bought some joss sticks, some blue love beads and the ‘Cuntpower’ issue of Oz, edited by Germaine Greer, containing a list of Victorian slang names for the ‘female pudendum’. In 1982, I recited this list for a John Peel radio session and named the track ‘Vagina Gratitude’, to redress Freudian notions of penis envy. Forgetful Green revisits this list of slang terms and interweaves it with the names of English roses; some are almost interchangeable. Throughout life, I repeat myself: tape loops, spiral scratches, the fractured female body – these all help trace my own pilgrim’s progress. But my story –‘her story’ as the feminist writer Robin Morgan would have said – has yet to end. I find myself in my sixth decade with the Sikh mantra Ek Ong Kar Satnam on my lips – that and the abiding memory of the three-minute pop song. Vanity Fair, here we come!

Linder, 2010

Frieze Film Commission Duration: 2010 Duration: 23 minutes Original Shooting Format: 16 mm Cinematography: Tim Walker Costumes: Richard Nicoll Colour