There seems to be a lot of strange activity during the Dublin Fringe Festival - but that's okay, it's art, writes Sara Keating.
A man stands at a table selling pieces of the moon. A girl in a yellow dress feasts on her own clothes. An elderly woman hugs bricks to her breast and whispers secrets into the dead afternoon air. Tourists survey the strange happenings in respectful silence. Teenagers giggle nervously and take pictures with their mobile phones. Security guards and policemen look on bemused, trying to decide whether it is the world they are protecting from such eccentricities or the eccentrics they're protecting from the mockery of the world. And in the background someone is filming it all in the name of what is known as "live art".
The Out Of Site project, a "guerrilla art" intervention comprising 16 different performances, has been taking place daily throughout the city centre, offering an unsuspecting public everything from falsified documents of Irish citizenship (Céad Míle Faílte, Dylan Tighe, Monday, Burgh Quay) to a chance to confess and be forgiven of their silliest or gravest sins (Confessional Booth, Anna McLaughlin, Friday, Grattan Bridge).
Brian O'Connell's installation in Temple Bar Square on the first Saturday of the Fringe was a particularly successful intervention, his market stall blending in with the natural environs of Saturday afternoon and attracting active participation from genuine browsers, who gradually realised that the virtual reality goggles (that let you see both sides of the face of a two-faced politician), the genetic experiments and the prime development sites for sale on the moon were sophisticated satirical marketing strategies designed to make them think differently about political issues of local and global importance.
Other performances from the Out of Site project attracted passers-by in a more passive capacity. In St Stephen's Green on Tuesday, Frances Mazetti, a striking white-haired figure in a blue velvet dress and lumberjack boots, laid out patterns with bricks from the recently demolished York Street flats, banging them together, "cleansing" them in the duck pond and offering them up as testimony to the people who had been moved out to make way for the site's redevelopment.
Passers-by gathered in small groups playing Chinese whispers, each explanation of what Mazetti was doing with the bricks as plausible as the next. Meanwhile, two days later, only metres away from where Mazetti gathered crowds, Sophie Linehan made an elaborate meal of her hat and dress in a beautiful Alice-in-Wonderland-type picnic scene (Picnic, Thursday, St Stephen's Green) and no one batted an eyelid.
There was a lot of eating at The Personality Café (The Cake Café, until September 22nd), but unfortunately not much food for thought. A thick slice of chocolate cake, a cup of coffee and an intimate relationship with your waiter may give what the best of art aspires towards - a sublime feeling of joy - but while it satisfied a physical hunger, it merely whetted an artistic appetite that it was itself unable to fulfil.
Intimacy was the name of the game for the trio of Norwegian performers in The Bag Show (Prosjekt Beskriveise, Filmbase, Tuesday-Saturday), who introduced themselves personally to each visitor before inviting them to choose one of several themed half-hour performances. Based on a blend of spontaneity and structured performance, the half-hour performances touched on everything from politics to the performers' personal experiences.
Intimacy was also crucial in Slow Set (Vaginal Vinyls, Saturday, Nitelink) where a trio of female singers serenaded unsuspecting revellers on the Nitelink, the last-chance saloon for the bleary-eyed bachelor heading home alone.
The following morning I'm sure that many thought they were hallucinating, but that element of the unexpected and sometimes surreal is a key to grabbing the attention of an unsuspecting, non-art-consuming public - the target audience for much of live art. So, if you see someone behaving strangely on a street-corner over the next couple of days, perhaps you should pause for a moment to take it in instead of hurrying by; you could be part of the public landscape of live art, too.
