In Adelaide recently for a variety of reasons including taking He Who Had A Birthday To Celebrate out for dinner (and what a dinner it ended up being) but also to experience the Fringe Festival, which we did with much unearthly delight, I found myself in North Adelaide one night in a room above a café watching a young man film himself. No, I hadn’t strayed and ended up in a strip joint, though this was before He Who Had A Birthday To Celebrate flew over to join me.
You see, I’d run into a friend at an arts function – Malcolm, a performance artist, and I first met on a residency last year. Anxiously, he invited me to attend his Fringe show. I’d seen his work before, in fact I’d been quite moved by it: it was both shambolic and finely honed, which sounds oxymoronic, I know, but is accurate.
So I accepted the invitation and headed over the Torrens. The café was posh: well-dressed patrons comfortably sipped expensive wine or imported beer and ate $30 pizzas. But upstairs five other people and I watched the young man film himself; for an hour he did nothing else but dance, the footage projected on vertical blinds for our viewing pleasure, on an adjacent wall YouTube video clips of other people filming themselves dancing. Apparently it was about how the internet has blurred the line between public and private, which is undoubtedly true.
After a ten-minute break during which I hurriedly drank a glass of Riesling, we returned upstairs and watched Malcolm, now alone, begin his piece (his opening-act colleague had inexplicably scuttled away in a taxi). But Malcolm was so nervous he couldn’t get a glass of red wine to his lips. Nevertheless, he repeatedly asked us to love him; he stripped down to his boxer shorts and conversed with an empty chair; he eventually managed to get some red wine into his mouth and then let it dribble down his neck and chest so it looked like he was bleeding from the inside; he smashed a red wine bottle and put the shards between his toes and paraded around the room; he tried to explain the show by drawing a graph on the wall; he sang a Nick Cave song; he finished by inviting us to get naked, which we declined.
In the taxi back to the relative safety of Hindley Street, I couldn’t help wondering what makes someone travel halfway across the country to perform in front of six people. The thrill of the risk-taking? The rush of communication? The satisfaction of pursuing a career most would consider useless at best?
I bunkered down in my hotel room. Needing company I clicked on the large flat-screen TV and watched beautiful young men and women go through their meretricious moves on So You Think You Can Dance. And then some Peter Carey lines popped into my head, from his story The Death of a Famous Mime: ‘Asked to describe death he busied himself taking Polaroid photographs of his questioners. Asked to describe marriage he handed out small cheap mirrors with MADE IN TUNISIA written on the back. His popularity declined.’
My friend Malcolm may or may not end up being popular, but his bravery has been etched onto my mind.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, March 27 2010.)
9 comments
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March 27, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
screamish
Malcolm…bravo! I feel I was there with you all. Bravo for having the balls to do it.
But isn’t that the point? people who, exactly that, do it for no perceptible reason except to DO IT?
amazing committment to their ‘art’ (i put that in inverted commas because i’m not sure how else to put it without using the A Word), incredible bravery…
mais chapeau! c’est bien fait, c’est super.
…people like that keep pushing the boundaries, they’re the real artists. they make the maps for people like me.
March 28, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
screamish
rereading this i have to sort of clarify I dont mean by “people like me” that im in any way talented or an artist, just that its the brave people who go out on the edge maybe kind of redefine things for “normal” people who dont live that extreme freeform art life…they take the risks
sorry, can’t explain this properly, i seem to have no vocabulary…!
March 29, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Screamish, I love both sets of comments from you. I do think you’re right: artists are the ones at the borders and edges, acting dangerously, asking questions, going to places where others wouldn’t. They DO make the maps that others follow.
What sort of world would we live in if artists didn’t exist?
March 29, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
Ms. Moon
I read an article recently in the New Yorker about performance artists and frankly, I was horrified. Some of them are very much into self-mutilation and doing things which are horribly difficult- sitting for hours motionless, letting themselves be viewed constantly for weeks on end- and I just had the same question you asked- WHY?
But, it must be something they have to do and I can respect that and also, as you said, the bravery it takes.
March 29, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Ms Moon, thanks, as always, for your comments. Yes, I think performing is what performance artists have to do. Is it egotism? Of course – the arts are everything to do with egotism! Is it about exploration? Yes. Is it about shock? Sometimes, though the better performance artists have a great deal of respect – even love – for their audience. I think in this instance I was also asking a question about travelling so far to have an impact on such a small audience in such a small space. In Malcolm’s show there certainly was a sense of intimacy and frightening honesty, which will linger with me for some time – I remember so much about the first time I saw one of his performances. But it’s also the strangeness that I find so attractive – it makes writing and performing songs, or writing and publishing novels, seem…so conservative! And there’s also the fact that I’m in awe of performance stuff – perhaps many of us ask ourselves, Wouldn’t it be great to be as brave as they are?
March 30, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
Sarcastic Bastard
Nigel,
I must say I’m a bit stymied by performance art myself. Nice report on the event.
Sending love,
SB
March 30, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Mar
Nigel Featherstone
Hi SB. Yes, performance art has a bad reputation, probably because so much of it in the past has been about the artist, not the audience. But there seems to be a movement – or maybe I’m just noticing it more – where performance artists are approaching their audiences with much more care and attention. They seem less interested in being shocking, and more interested in engaging with intelligence and humour and warmth.
April 2, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Apr
A Free Man
I found the Fringe really difficult. There’s just too much choice. Rendered me paralysed. So I ended up seeing very little of it. I often think I would have done quite well in Soviet Russia…
April 2, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Apr
Nigel Featherstone
Hi AFM, agreed that there’s too much choice at the Fringe – when I first downloaded the guide (though it’s more an amassing) I thought, Holy Shit, there are quite literally thousands of acts here. Luckily we knew exactly what we wanted to see plus, by sheer chance, we got some great advice on one particular show to the see – The Wau Wau Sisters, who were brilliant. But the heart of the Fringe, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, looked and felt fantastic – truly magical. Perhaps it was because we were in Adelaide from interstate so we could just blindly do this and that without really thinking about a nice comfortable couch/bed back at home. Because ‘home’ was a hotel on Hindley Street, which made us feel like we were living in a 24-hour party. But, hey, Soviet Russia would be nice too. All that snow and cold and ice and bleakness – mmm perfect.