IF YOU'D been parachuted into Glasgow's Tramway on Thursday evening just as a performance called Insecurity was starting in the National Review of Live Art, you'd have had all your worst fears about performance art confirmed.
It's intermittently amusing, frequently boring, generally shapeless and apparently arbitrary. You are left puzzled by their behaviour, but not sufficiently so to work out their purpose.
According to the programme, they're angry about Western cult
ure limiting freedom in the name of security, but it's beyond me how anyone could get that idea by watching this short performance. But, of course, nobody is parachuted into the National Review of Live Art and, in the context of what's going on around it, Insecurity is just one curious sideshow among many.
For the past few days, Tramway has been an artistic theme park, complete with the big rides that everyone wants a go on (turns by Ian Smith, Donna Rutherford and Michael Mayhew were all packed on Thursday) and the end-of-the-pier stalls with a more idiosyncratic appeal.
Never, not even in the glory days of 1990 and Glasgow City of Culture, have I seen Tramway so buzzing with life. Turn right for video art and smaller performances; left for the bigger shows; upstairs for photography and sound installations; straight through to the garden at the back for video and sculpture. This is Tramway as it was conceived to be after Peter Brook's The Mahabharata in 1988 and it's a tremendous shame that funding doesn't permit this atmosphere year round.
Get a day ticket and you can drift from talk to exhibition to cafe to performance to screening, dwelling as long as you feel the work merits. Not all of it merits very much: the video artist who claims to be "building on the intensity of a performed moment to encounter a possible absent totality" is either taking the mick or seriously short of ideas. Indeed, most of the video art is tedious.
More typically, the work is intriguing, captivating and amusing, and this year it's the installations that come out best. There's Geraldine Pilgrim's Sea View, a surreal suburban guest house with holes punched through the walls to reveal underwater swimmers, and a crack in the bedroom ceiling dripping water on to the bed.
There's Naos by Noise-Maker's Fifes, a mesmerising room full of home-made instruments, recordings and video projections capturing the ebb and flow of the sea.
And there's Lisa Wesley and Andrew Blackwood squirrelling away in the greenhouse creating a white-washed model landscape complete with animals, flyovers, factories and numbered points of interest.
All of this work chimes with the belief of Glasgow's Ian Smith that art can be entertaining and entertainment can be art. It's only when the artists lose sight of the audience that the work seems indulgent and self-obsessed.
It was a striking theatrical moment, for example, when Michael Mayhew gave a pint of his own blood, but it would have had so much more power if he'd explained why he felt the need to do it in the first place.
National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow (0141-357 5538), ends today
