PEOPLE DRESSING UP

22 September 2006

Performance art? It’s just people dressing up doing silly things, isn’t it?
For me, it has never been enough for artists to merely shock, amuse or prompt the question ‘why?’

I’m in a town called Sete, not far from Montpelier, on the French Mediterranean coast. I am one of 44 artists taking part in a performance art festival called Infr’action.

I arrived yesterday evening. Tonight I am making soup, hoping to instigate a French Soupline. To understand why I am making soup you will have to read about it elsewhere: www.penkiln-burn.com/highlights/construct/construct.html
It has nothing whatsoever to do with The17.

Tomorrow night I do An Introduction To The17 performance in a deconsecrated chapel. We visited the chapel this morning. It is perfect. All religious iconography has long since been stripped out of the place. The ceiling is high and the walls are blackened by centuries of candle smoke – or at least I guess that is why they are black.

Sete is a picturesque town of narrow cobbled streets sprawled over a hill. The hill almost feels like an island. Fishing seems to be the main industry. Today is market day. Everything that is good and fresh and French is being sold. While doing my shopping in the market for the soup-making later today I came across a number of the performance artists plying their trade.

The first one was in the process of opening for business. He was standing just outside the market hall dressed in a black tuxedo. To his right-hand side was a five-litre tub of white emulsion paint; to his left, a plastic bin of water. Leaning against the wall behind the tub of paint was a placard. The place was thronged with market day shoppers. He turned the placard round, it read ‘Poignées de main fraîches gratis’ I was reliably informed that this read ‘Fresh Handshakes For Free’. This man in the tuxedo dipped his flattened but almost quivering right hand into the white paint slowly and purposefully until it was completely submerged. Then he stood slowly and deliberately bolt upright, holding his still flattened right hand out waiting for a passer-by to shake it. The hand was completely whitened, the paint dripping off on to the flagstones in front of him.

He didn’t move. Not a muscle flinched. Except for the almost quivering hand. Most shoppers took no notice. He stood there for some minutes holding his pose. The paint kept dripping from his hand. A bunch of teenage lads strolled past. One noticed. After some deliberation one of the teenagers shook the white hand then washed his own hand in the bucket of water. He used the towel on offer. The sky was blue. More shoppers stopped to stare and wonder. The teenage lads moved on. The man in the tuxedo dipped his hand back in the tub of paint and returned to his position waiting for another passer-by to take him up on his offer of a free, fresh handshake.

The ice was broken. The shoppers started to take notice. The odd one, the more foolhardy, took on the man in the tuxedo’s offer and shook his hand. I moved on.

If I had just read what I have just written and you have just read, I would have thought ‘A performance artist dressing up and doing a silly thing’. This morning in this town in southern France I was strangely moved.

I walked into the market building. The place was heaving. Stalls of fresh fruit and vegetables, stalls of cheese, stalls of sausages and cured ham, stalls of fresh fish, all of them looked wonderful. I wished we had markets like this in Britain.

Then I spied a man with a brown suit on. He was standing at a stall that was selling fish. He was studiously inspecting the goods on offer. His head was bound up with bandages. You could just see his eyes, nose and mouth. He looked as if he had been in some terrible accident where the top layer of skin on his head had been burned off. I suspected this was not the case, as the bandages were fulfilling another function. They were holding in place at least two dozen rose stalks around his head. Above his head the roses, of various colours, were in full bloom. The image was arresting.

When I arrived yesterday I was given a programme for the festival. On the cover was a head-and-shoulders portrait of this man. He was staring directly from between the bandages into the lens of the camera. On his head was the blooming headdress of roses. This image was also on the fly poster around the town advertising the festival. It was also on the access-all-areas laminate that I was given. My first impression on seeing this image on the programme was ‘man dressing up doing silly things’, but now I am here doing my shopping and blending in with the other shoppers I am strangely moved again.

There is no part of me that wants to know why they are doing this or what it is supposed to mean but both the man with the fresh handshakes and the one with the roses communicated directly with my soul. Yesterday I thought of performance art as something left over from the 1970s. Today it is affecting me in a way I can only be grateful for. Should I learn something from this? Might the same thing happen this evening if I was to walk into a bar in Sete and there was a French singer on a stool with guitar on lap singing songs of loss and regret? Would I be as moved? If so, should I begin to suspect my half-formulated theories about all known music are headed for the dumper?

Last night at the opening do for us 44 artists from all over the world, one of the performance artists came up to speak to me. I vaguely recognised him from somewhere. He spoke to me.
‘Hi, my name is Erkki. I met you 14 years ago on a train in Finland; you were on your way to the North Pole with an icon of Elvis. You were with two other men. You told us that you were Zen masters and once you got to the North Pole, you would leave the icon of Elvis there and it would leak good vibes down the longitudes and out across the latitudes, spreading love, peace and happiness.’

It had been a long drunken night on a train bound for the Arctic. My travelling companions were Z (Mark Manning) and Gimpo. The story of the night became a chapter in the book Bad Wisdom that Z and I wrote. This man, or the man he was 14 years ago, just so happened to be on the same train as us and started to film the three of us getting drunk and telling our story to anybody who would listen. We had these lengths of wood that I had cut from an elm tree the previous morning. They were our Zen sticks and we kept whacking each other on the head with them to hasten each other’s Zen enlightenment. We were leaping from table to table as this train hurtled through the Arctic night. In the morning he was gone. We didn’t know who he was and we never saw him or his filming of us again. But now here he is asking me if I remember. Of course I remembered him.

It is now lunchtime in Sete on the Mediterranean coast. Lunch is being served on long trestle tables for us 44 artists in the gallery space and festival headquarters. The man wearing the same suit as the man whose head was bandaged with a headdress of roses sits down opposite me. I assume he is the same man.
‘Good day. My name is Pekka Kainulainen.’
‘Hi. My name is Bill.’
We shake hands.
‘Bill Drummond?’
‘Yes.’
‘Every year I show a film to my students of you on a train in Finland. It was filmed by Erkki Pirtola.’
He points to the man with the camera that I was talking about. Things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.
 ‘But why?’ I ask.
‘I use it as an example to show that art does not have to be made to be seen in a gallery or museum but can exist anywhere. Even on a train in the middle of the night when you are drunk. And that art does not have to be something premeditated and thought out. It can happen by accident.’

Well, I don’t know if he actually used these words as, of course, I didn’t record the conversation and now it is an hour or so later that I am making these notes, but I am hoping that was the gist of what he was trying to say. So I might have got it completely the wrong way round and he was using this film as an example of exactly what not to be doing while making performance art. The thing is, back in 1992 when we did this journey to the North Pole, I had no idea what performance art was. Not even sure I knew there was such a genre and here I am in September 2006 giving it ‘It’s all so 1970s’ as if I knew all about it.