The installations at this year’s Electric Picnic, which took place last weekend, were some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. The entire site exhibited a thoughtful curation of festival art. If the line drawings of upright foxes in a meadow scrawled across a huge canvas weren’t to your liking, there were an abundance of installations to choose from ranging from a burst of twinkling fairy lights to a sprinkling of rainbow crepe paper. The survival of a few canvases, in spite of the weekend producing the wettest demesne in the midlands, is proof that art sees all ground as fertile enough to germinate a presence.
The whole place was ignited by an intriguing suggestion of experimentation. The driving notion of the weekend – the replacement of reality with a euphoric wonderland – was represented by various elements. Many of said elements did well in surviving the very wet weather. Interestingly, the definition of art was stretched as far as the mind could wander. The people were there for a good time, and the art’s purpose was to complement this.
The weekend’s overarching theme was spontaneity. It took the form of nets, tights, glitter and cans. A thin layer of delicate translucent sparkle shrouded the festival. If it rained, it rained. And the art was a complete congruent reflection of that.
I have nothing to criticize about the installations. And I think I may be doing my art degree wrong, but the gloriousness of art is its omnipresent quality over every aspect of life. It can survive behind bulletproof glass, in the face of no flash photography, surrounded by 20 armed guards. Alternatively, it is made of drainpipes, and it’s hanging from a giant oak tree in Stradbally. It might not necessarily be saving lives, but it makes them an awful lot prettier.
For whatever reason you attended Electric Picnic – whether for the chunky chips, the superior funky dips or the acts – art’s small part in the world looks very beautiful from the damp seat of a crazy mouse carriage adorned with a smattering of fairy lights and a sprinkling of crepe paper.
