Paint Perform Political

Standing by the sea shore with 400 naked people,

3, 2, 1....

GO!

Bathing in your own body beautiful with crowds of hundreds cheering and applauding, you have just re-created the opening credits of one of Britain's most loved 1970s sitcoms ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’.  You have attracted national media attention and the intrigue of the local community. They all want to catch this fleeting moment of naked bums, boobs and willies. Earlier in the day, the BBC called you ‘outrageous’, Libby Purves on BBC Radio 4 referred to you as a ‘performance artist who likes to get his kit off’.  A passer-by said she was shocked and it must be the ‘naturalist’ in you. The final straw is a BBC newsreader referring to you as ‘brave, on such a cold day’. Later, the documentation of the piece in Bob and Roberta Smith's book ‘Hi-Jack Reality’ reveals that some of these naked runners kept their underpants on, causing the artist Marcia Farquhar to remark ‘this only goes to prove the prudishness of some people’. You don't care whether anyone sees this as ‘performance art’ because you have created a painting, an action performance painting - a mass of bodies bathing as if they are the planes in Paul Nash's 1941 Totes Meer (Dead Sea). Yet this is a celebration of life unfettered, the sea a signifier of freedom. Two fingers to capitalist wankers. Bring on the last of the big spenders.

I didn't get where I am today by keeping my underpants on!

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Compel Repel.

Out of Holloway Road tube and down a few streets on a Spring evening in 2000, I arrive at Mamma Roma’s exhibition of three painters entitled ‘Sporadinate’. Downstairs are the paintings of James Aldridge and Dan Coombs and above the work of Danny Rolph exhibiting sheets of perspex   seemingly smeared in paint in the aftermath of a stippled paintbrush having been wiped over their surface at great speed. Having noticed mapping pins securing the works to the wall, I was then told that these are the artist's chief tool. Hours are spent etching paint from the surface to create a disturbing interplay between process and finished product. The presence of the mapping pin was crucial - the signifier to the previous ‘performance’ of making. The work affected me deeply. I was excited as a viewer to be pulled  in to a painting and then pushed back again and then pulled in again. In a time when Tomoko Takahashi was throwing mountains of shredded paper from fire stations,Tim Noble and Sue Webster were gathering  piles of crap to create romantic views in their  shadows  and audiences were finding beauty in Chris Ofili's elephant shit, Danny's work triggered me into becoming fascinated with  the relationship between performance and painting and to question a work beyond first impressions. By the reduction of applied paint  to  sheets of unsuspecting perspex,he had created a pathos for the audience. No glitter, nor sequins, or shit to entice. 

The pins were the trigger. The pins the killer. 

In a later conversation between myself, painter Estelle Thompson and sculptor Phyllida Barlow, I talked about the performance in painting, 'the compelling and repelling' of surface tension. Estelle's paintings nod to the angular planes of a Piet Mondrian with the emotion intensity of a Mark Rothko. Exuding a further poetry by such titles as 'Abracadabra'and 'Gone', Estelle gives formal minimalism a quirky twist. Estelle compels and repels the audience with her optical subterfuges between colour shifts and tones. Gordon Cheung creates big bad sexy paintings of apocalyptic scenes, whose 'subterfuge' is the layering of sheets of newsprint jargon, not instantly recognisable amongst the bright colours he uses and the epic landscapes that he depicts. All three artists negotiate with the physical and formal aspects of painting, building up a relationship between themselves and the work. Danny's paintings are underpinned by a repetition that the artist exercises in its production. This is a performance. It may be a private performance by the artist in his studio but it is a performance. Jasper Joffe creates gutsy paintings with a certain British tongue in cheek swagger and in 1999 invited an audience to witness '24 Paintings in 24 Hours' at the Chisenhale gallery, London.Alex Veness has developed a technique where members of the public and chosen individuals move in front of a camera lens which scans their movements. The image is then painted and the result has the fantastic blur of a Gerhard Richter and the awkward unease of Francis Bacon's body distortions. Painting and performance blur and the process is revealed in all it's beauty for all to see. Sarah Bowker-Jones, post Tomoko-phenomenon, hunts out life's redundant and discarded has-been products to create bizarre material hybrids and uses them as catalysts for audience interaction, who thus manoeuvre  themselves around her sculptures as if they are learning a tribal dance. In a recent event, vocalists inter-twined with her brightly coloured sculptural eclectics. The audience view the work,can be part of the work, and are the work. Here painting, sculpture and performance collide. Let's move beyond dissections of Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein dragging naked women through paint.

This is just the beginning. Let's go!

I want the world to see both the performance of making and not just the 'relic'- the painting.

Where does the real energy in the work lie? 

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Arachnophobia.

What is the relationship between painting and the contemporary perception and pre-occupations of 'performance art'? Just as 'performance art' engages the viewer's spirituality so does painting.  Many painters I have spoken to agree that audience rapport with their work is fundamental, yet I am enraged by their beliefs when I tell them about my 'live paintings'.  Most will adamantly refer to what I create as 'performance'. I am frustrated by the naive snobbery that I have encountered. Does the revealing of the performance in a works production destroy 'the mystery' which they are so keen to embed in their works? They consider themselves magicians. Paul Daniels with paintbrush. I think not. They either sneer at me and try to shrug off 'performance-art phobia'. It is as strong as homophobia, xenophobia, and arachnophobia ...

Many disparate entities cannot be united under one banner and performance art is one of them. 

I believe that many fine artists are not prepared through sheer awkwardness or simple 'can't be arsed with it once it's up on the white cube gallery money machine wall' to acknowledge communication between artwork/viewer.

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NOW NOW NOW!

Peggy Phelan's opening address to Tate Modern's Live Culture conference in 2003, stated that (performance art) 'has developed from three points: theatre, painting and a return to shamanism.' Yet collectively 'Painting' and 'Performance Art' as separate entities similarly heighten our own spirituality with the now and may also reference the past and the future. Just as artists in the 1960s were so determined to be ephemeral as a protest against the objectification of the artwork, so their  work is about the experience of the moment. Peter Bond writes in his book 'Locating Performance',  'Performance lives for the moment; it too is based upon corporeal space. Our obsession with performance mirrors our obsession with the now—I want it now—to take away---instant this and instant that'. 

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Shift.

The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, edited by Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass, states the discourse of 'performance art' as: 'A kind of art which in its purest form would be a branch of the visual arts differing from painting and sculpture, only in its use of live performers as material, and, as a consequence, having only a temporary existence within finite limits of time'. The term became widespread in the 1960s /1970s with US art group Fluxus as its key founders. In Tate Magazine Issue 2 Summer 2005, Germaine Greer states 'It is no small praise to say that Frida Kahlo was the first ever true performance artist, that the performance lasted all her life long, and that she was indefatigable in presenting it, year on year, day by day. At least as much creative energy went into dressing the part as in drawing and painting it'. Bruce McLeanwas part of a shifting in thought in the 1960s to what constitutes a painting/sculpture. To my calling him a 'performance artist', Bruce's response was short and sweet,'I never was a performance artist. This is a term created by the Arts Council to categorise difficult people like me. I am a sculptor, sometimes making live actions statements moves and of course posing'. Describing a painting as a performance pisses off traditional fine artists. The contradiction is that a 'coolness' now surrounds the medium due to a shift in values in galleries and institutions.  Galleries are holding more and more live art ticketed events to generate money. They are relatively cheap to stage with minimal worry for the piece's conservation. Performance art's fashionability is rising. Know your audience. Terminology needs re-defining, re-addressing. Fast.

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Pour Your Bloody Broken Heart Out Art.

Bring on Franko B.  Bodily fluids, blood and gore; a freak show for some. Franko is the painting, the ultimate pusher, the ultimate puller. His tattooed naked body is his pin. We are humble in the presence of seeing the body at its most bloodied conviction. We are faced with life on the brink of eventual  death.  We experience the ecstasy and the agony of seeing pleasure and pain. Death must also  fascinate Mark McGowan, current King Enfant-Terrible of 'Performance Art'. The death of Jade Goody, the Shannon Matthews kidnapping and the Jean-Charles de Menezes shooting, all recently  re-enacted by Mark along with various international news stories.  He is one of the UK's most sensationalised, talked about and revered live artists. 

Shock Art.  

Cock Art.  

Pour Your Bloody Broken Heart Out Art. 

This 'now now now' can be the get up and go for many a live artist. 

Richard DeDomenici and Mike Chavez-Dawson fascinate themselves in  social affairs  without being over-dramatic (Chavez – Dawson describes himself as an ordinary 'jobbing' artist). Both  act  on such   business as capitalist  conspicuous capitalism with the same apocalyptic curse to that of one of Gordon Cheung's paintings. They are headstrong performers for the people.  Adrian Lee's recent costume bravados include poker-faced bunny rabbits and giant cigarettes,appearing to have walked straight out of Mickey Mouse Main Street USA Parade at Disneyland, Psycho-ville.Alexander Costello likes his suits. Whereas Franko B lets it all hang out, Alexander tucks it all in. He stood in front of a tower block demolition in one and supposedly stood on water in a lake in another. He confuses order with chaos and vice versa  and likings his British reserve to a  poetry of life's small complexities. 

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Play on Words.

Bugs Bunny and suits included, we are all dealing with LANGUAGE. Art production must be about extracting the poetics of something, of revealing it's beauty or its ugliness or at the very least acknowledging its relative existence. Everyday life is the starting point. The language of  Bob and Roberta Smith's text banners, placards and songs can be lifted straight out of a walk down the high street or in the pub which resonate with Frog Morris's live anecdotal performances  with narratives ranging from impressing the Mrs to stroking the hair on the belly of a dog. Victoria Melody's careful meticulous observations of British culture appropriate our passive aggressive society often with devastating results. Miss Melody, the bored out-off-her-brains office PA, once machete-gunned a stress ball. She also created a bit of a hoo-ha,  when visitors to my Curse of Me show were asked  to form an orderly queue outside in the pissing rain. They would enter one by one to find nothing. Marcia  Farquhar is loved for her stories where the audience is unsure what is pre-meditated and what is spontaneous. Head-fucking is Charlotte Young's performances which mix reality and fiction, turning supposed truth into pure fiction and vice versa. How dare she but how clever to tell me and all in sundry at Whitstable Biennale 2008 the whole life story of a certain 'ROSEMARY FENNING'  only  for us to learn that Ms Fenning and the Whitstable Tourist  Board were pure nonsense. Charlotte's intricate weaving of stories and facts are as perfect as any layering of paint to a surface. Text is layered and disguised, hidden and revealed in much the same way as Danny Rolph's collage paintings or it is presented as minimal as can be. Gary Stevens revels in this in 'Ape', a piece  that understands the fine lucidity of language so brilliantly that the complex layering of language in the piece is equal to that of any painting by Estelle, Jasper, Danny or Gordon.

It is a most beautiful 'live painting'. 

Lee Campbell