I'd like to tell you the story of a friend of mine, let’s call him Billy; well he’s not really even a friend, just someone I know. He is a Live Artist living in a large metropolitan centre in the English-speaking West. I want to tell you about how he came to be a Live Artist, why he continues to work as a Live Artist and what that really means day to day.
Let’s begin the story at a performance which was key in Billy’s development as an artist. When Billy was young, his mother used to strike him and embrace him in quick succession and so he got confused and that is why he now likes to eat in fancy restaurants and has fantasies about being a catwalk model. Because he can’t eat in really really fancy restaurants or be a catwalk model, he makes Live Art.
His mother used to call him ‘Little Shit’.
Not in a nice endearing way: Hello lovely cute ‘Little Shit’
But in a nasty dismissive way: You ‘Little Shit’
Consequently he was always worried about being little, and shit.
He was always worried about shit.
Not just shit, like that it would come out at the wrong time or stay in for too long, whether it was too hard or too soft, too runny or too ploppy, if it was the right shade of brown, too pale perhaps, perhaps too red, too fat proportionally to it’s length or too long proportionally to its width and he did worry about all of these things, but that everything he did, his work, was, well, shit.
As his friend (or I had better say, acquaintance) it has been so moving to witness him shift from the position in which he saw his artistic product as self-created faeces, with the constant terror that it would be revealed as shit, to the genital position in which he sees his creation as a baby to be nurtured, the result of a meaningful internal intercourse.
This is the story of how that change took place.
When Billy was ten years old, after slapping him around a bit and cuddling him up so tight to her breast smothering him with kisses, Billy’s mother left the family home and travelled far away to another country. Everybody was sorry for Billy that his mother had run away but secretly Billy was, well quite pleased really.
Billy lived with his father. His father was a kind and gentle man, although, well, he was, non-communicative is probably the right word. No matter what Billy asked him, his father would say ‘no’.
Dad, can I have an ice-cream?
No
Dad, can you help me with this maths homework?
No
Dad, can I watch this late night programme on TV?
No
Eventually Billy tried to ask the questions the wrong way round in order to get the answers that he wanted.
Dad, I know that you won’t let me stay up to watch the late night programme on TV; that’s right, isn’t it?
No
So that means that I can watch it then.
No
But you just said that I was wrong for supposing that you wouldn’t let me watch it!
No. I said that no you didn’t know that I wouldn’t let you watch it, but the answer is still no.
This kind of philosophical wrangling with his father around not being allowed to do things got Billy thinking. How can I do what I want? How can I really investigate the things that matter to me? How can I get the ‘yes’ that I really want to hear? And so he became a Live Artist.
It’s a shame that he didn’t just become a Live Artist straight away because that would have saved so much time. Perhaps what was really a shame is that he didn’t realise that he had always already been a Live Artist but just didn’t know it. He tried doing various things that he did know about: being and actor (it was so boring pretending to be somebody else) being a filmmaker (that was really too formulaic). Then one day he went along to a series of talks called ‘Everything you wanted to know about Live Art but were afraid to ask’ (which might have been financially assisted by something like the Arts Council England London) and on that day he realised that he was a Live Artist.
So he started to make Live Art.
Very quickly he realised that he had entered into a mode of production which was economically exhausting. Even his friend Lisa, who was a painter (and not a very good one at that) could buy canvas and some paints, spend a variable amount of time ‘making work’ and sell the completed artefacts at a profit. Billy had to work as a waiter to subsidise the making of his art. On the rare occasions when someone would pay him a wage he soon became aware that his employer was relying on public subsidy rather than ticket sales. He realised that since he had become a live artist he was expensive.
He used up capital in the world.
He did not produce, he consumed.
He was negative equity.
He felt a bit funny about this. On the one hand it was great not to have to worry about how much profit his Live Art was accruing because is was only ever producing a loss. Even when someone was paying him, it was, by and large, tax payers money. This meant that it was useless to talk about his work in terms of its financial worth in the artmarket. Billy read in a newspaper that the Japanese paper magnate Ryoei Saito had purchased Van Gogh’s quite nice painting of Doctor Gachet in under three minutes for eighty-two-and-a-half million dollars (I’ll say that again: eighty-two-and-a-half million dollars for a painting, quite nice). He was glad that he didn’t have to compete with that. It became slightly more troubling when Billy realised that Ryoei Saito was probably a Live Artist too because he requested to have the painting of Dr Gachet placed next to him in his coffin when he was cremated. He must have fucking loved that painting, Billy thought. Anyway, Mr Saito owed lots of people money when he died and the painting had to be sold, so his piece ‘Burned with Gachet’ didn’t quite come off as he had wanted it to.
Once he had made a piece of work Billy invariably found it a struggle to know what to do next. Whereas his friend Jonathan, who was an aspiring writer, would pick up his pen and scribble in his Paperchase cloth-bound notebook every time he had another idea for how to develop his characters, or would tippy-tappy away on the keyboard of his computer terminal continually checking the word-count of his Microsoft Word file ‘my novel’, Billy spent hours and hours trying to decide if he was going to do a fifteen-minute ‘cabaret’ performance in art club in the East End of the city in which he planned to attempt to sew his right elbow to his left ear to prove that anatomy really is destiny (to paraphrase Sigmund Freud) or an installation which retold the story of his recovery from a two year addiction to jelly-tots.
Billy’s problem was that now he had decided that he would do what he liked, he didn’t know what to do. Oh the agony of choice; the prison that is freedom. It was only when he realised that the answer lay in the job he was getting paid for already being a waiter that things began to make sense.
He started with the premise that he would attempt to do his job impossibly well. He served the patrons of the restaurant at the, well let’s call it the Royal Flange Hotel, he would serve these patrons of the dining room with impeccable manners, extraordinary courtesy. They would be impressed by his efficiency, confident in his suggestions, bowelled over by his intelligence, titillated by his wit to the extent that they began to think something was not quite right. Billy managed to destabilise the status quo by doing his job perfectly.
A particularly bejewelled diner had such an intense need to be served that the more polite and amenable Billy was, the more modest in his demenor, the more hoity toity she reacted. The table layout was exquisite, his sliver service flawless, his ‘Good evening madam, good evening sir’ so deep, so genuine, so fucking English, that even she could not find cause for much complaint. At the end of the dinner Billy felt in need of a little bit of extra perfection, and as his customer left through the door of the dining room to return to her suite, her husband by her side, Billy dropped his head and offered the most deferent and gracious, the most deep-seated curtsey, you would have thought he was Eliza Doolittle being shown to the Grand-Duchess of Transilvania by Crown Prince Igor. The lady was confused (she identified the gesture with absolute deference but knew that there was something wrong in this young man offering that gesture) she could not respond. She simply thanked him and left.
Billy liked to think about the moment in which this woman would have realised what had happened. He thought about that again and again and again. Part of the reason that he thought about it so much is that he didn’t really know what it was that had happened himself.
While his mate Rama, who was a base guitarist in a band, found it hard to spin out her excellent four-bar-riff to last even the four minute duration of a song, Billy realised that he could quite happily make work that took up four hours, four days, four months, or even four years. Maybe life isn’t going to be such a chore after all, Billy thought.
He realised that unlike Rama, who was making songs about her life, her loves, her fears and her desires; unlike Rama who was making a performance out of her life, he was making a life out of his performance.
Everything became a performance for Billy. On a trip to the USA he became the only audience member for his solo performance titled ‘Transatlantic Accent’ in which he boarded the plane speaking in the most pronounced BBC English received pronunciation, the vowels of which would shift over the course of the flight on each successive encounter with cabin crew and those travelling with him, until he arrived in New York speaking in an aggressive down town droll. Fuck you.
It was as he was performing this piece on the aeroplane that he realised that performance didn’t so much enable him to be what he was not, in the sense that acting enables you to be someone that you are not, but that he could do the things that he wanted to do by performing them.
It was performance, after all, that had enabled him to eat in some of the most fancy restaurants in the world (albeit as a waiter in the kitchen). His experiences between the dining room and the kitchen had taught him that actually most of these places were, well to be perfectly honest, they were shit.
He also realised that he could probably even be a catwalk model. And there and then in the middle of flight BA7861 to JFK New York, he strutted up the gangway to the cubicle with long long long strides accepting the loving gaze of all the seated crowds, every one of them facing that way, who had made it there just for him, to look at him, to love him and to say ‘yes’.
It was kind of like he could be mad for a while without really going mad. It was kind of like people watching him were allowed to go mad for a while too, without going mad.
What Billy found, was that the more Live Art he made, the more questions he had, and the more questions he had the more Live Art would try and make up some answers, not really, well there’s the answer answers, but answers which tried to make sense of another little proposition, another little quandary. Live Art, was a kind of stab in the dark: a making sense out of nonsense. Live Art was a way of thinking through; it was knowledge.
Don’t think that all this means that his father now says ‘yes’ to Billy because he doesn’t. He still says ‘no’, if he says anything at all.
Don’t think that now on the few occasions that Billy sees his mother that she hasn’t still the same schizoid reaction to him - aggressive one moment and sweet as the most sickly sweet tiramisu you’ve ever tasted in your life the next - because she is still the same.
What has changed is that Billy can now invent ways to understand these personal problems and look beyond them to the wider world around him.
If this story of Billy sounds too much to you like psychological clap trap, the angry young man who used his art practice as therapy; a continual working through of his damaged childhood (which didn’t sound that damaged to me); an inability to face up to legitimate responsibilities; a failure to address the formal concerns of a developing arts practice because of a deep solipsistic wallowing in the narcissistic splitting of his ego, then let me tell you something: I agree. Art practices bear a responsibility to society at large (do they?). The personal is no longer political (isn’t it?). Billy is not important (isn’t he?). We live in a post-human age now where the concept of the individual has been eradicated by entropy: global decay, conflict, racial, ethnic, social, national and sexual apartheid. When Billy dies he won’t be remembered for very long by very many people; he won’t have changed anything much or left much of a legacy… and yet… maybe, just maybe…