Written for Culture Wars
Bryony Kimmings is an enigma. Her work comes encased with whopping great quotation marks around it. So many, in fact, that you lose track of the layers of knowing irony you’re supposed to be peeling off and just sit back and laugh along. She’s a real hoot: thoroughly likeable, self-mocking and ferociously uninhibited.
Last year, Kimmings spent seven consecutive days drunk, maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.7% between the hours of 10am and 7pm. That involved breakfasting on 11 vodka shots and totting up throughout the day, while being monitored by a walk-in centre’s worth of clinical psyciatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists and nurses. To explore the relationship of alcohol and creativity (like, why do so many artists drink so much, yeah?), she made a whole heap of art and tested it out in front of friendly, judicious audiences. It’s science, see? Except, of course, it’s not.
And that’s fine. We don’t go to the Soho Downstairs cabaret bar for the latest clinical testing results, and Kimmings is perfectly entertaining and passingly illuminating. Who knew that limp-wristedness can signify a malfunctioning liver, for example? Or that there were three main types of alocohol use in artists: mystical transportation, sensitive retreat from reality and middle class slumming?
What’s more obvious is that Kimmings's art – much of which she recreates for us sober – gets worse with the rising inebriation. So does her mood. Both were bound to, though, weren’t they? She kicks off with Day 1’s witty song and ends with Day 7’s downer, an semi-coherent moping ode to her family that took four hours to compose. Funnily enough, the clinical results attest otherwise, which suggests that audiences take pity on drunken artists. She has an audience member drink alongside the show, as living proof of alcohol’s effects, and talks us through her early associations with alcohol.
That she turns around after all this and describes an idyllic night’s raucous drinking that whizzes from beers in the park to ciders at a lock-in, shots in a club owned by Eastern Europeans and Bloody Marys over the next day’s The Observer presents a soaring, heady finale. More than anything, for the first time, she really, really means it. That makes all the difference.
Because Kimmings uses irony as a hiding place. Seven Day Drunk, like its predecessor Sex Idiot, is made up of knowingly jejune performance knick-knacks – a bathetic song here, a whimsical bromide there – all delivered in a series of flamboyantly ridiculous costumes that transform her into some sort of hipster clown. She takes potshots at the notion of art itself, most potently in the squawked number “I’m An Artist (A Fucking Artist).” It’s all designed to be absolutely, 100%, certifiably unpretentious. She refers to the whole process as an “art project” – a deliberately childish and amateurish label – and she fills the final show with shoddy, self-indulgent, but crucially self-aware, routines. (At least here, unlike in Sex Idiot, her previous drunkenness provides a surface reason for them.) She plays the classic clueless clown, except that she’s totally clued-up, so we’re all in on the joke. We can all see those inverted commas, right? Isn’t art stupid?
But no, no it’s not. At least, it doesn’t have to be. My point is that Kimmings could make really good art from really good components, but chooses not to. That way lies real risk – not the sort of faux daring with which she’s obviously completely comfortable. Instead, she makes decent entertainment out of substandard components. Ultimately, Seven Day Drunk does little more than confirm expectations, albeit with colour, sparkle and a huge sense of fun. Writing this feels excessively critical, but I’m positive Kimmings could keep all those qualities while doing something that genuinely matters, both to her and to us, and that, I really want to see.
Photograph: courtesy of Bryony Kimmings
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