3. dear escape artists (renactment of live performance july 2024)
Ah hmn…
Public speaking has always been a fear of mine. And yet, here I am. Again.
At the age of 12 I was called upon by a teacher to read aloud a story I wrote about a crocodile’s visit to the dentist.
Being 12 & not knowing I might be called to read aloud my crocodile story to my brand new classmates, I put everything into the story. In short: The crocodile loved heavy metal & pain.
In the writing of these 7 minutes I realised that I have been the crocodile all along. Mostly mouth. Hating yet seeking the opportunity to speak.
So why not disappear or escape like my idols did?
That is the hymn (with a y) I have for you this evening.
Artists are always disappearing or escaping from view. They come, they go. Subjects to objects. That is their alchemy, their Houdini. Escape artists.
Elaine Sturtevant, an escape artist remembered for escaping themselves to inhabit others, said:
“Although the object is crucial, it is not important.”
I’ve never been able to get my head around Sturtevant’s paradox of self & other. And at the very same time, completely believing it.
Here I am standing before you, your crucial presence, hating the fact that I have depended on the fantasy of you to write these words. You are crucial, but crucially, not important. We are on the same hmn sheet (without a y).
As Adam Phillips said of Houdini: “We can turn our desire for other people into a desire to elude them. We can decorate our burrows.”
Truth tell, I am tired of objects. I want to be a subject, a subject who doesn’t have to tolerate visibility for an hour or 7-minutes on the thoroughfare to become an object in an exhibition for six weeks or so.
“Parkers or Drivers”? As Miranda July calls them, is our parking or vacant lot in life.
When I was an exhibiting artist I made settings over objects.
I was approached by a very desirable Dublin gallery for a studio visit on the back of my visibility I guess.
When they got a better sense of what I did, settings over objects, they asked me if I could make an art object for a future group exhibition. I had two months to comply.
I tortured myself with what I could make. I was burdened by ideas & dreams of objects, but no motivation to make, without a womb to hold them — Mam & Dad died too young, for them & me. An orphan is an object without a subject.
12 years on I can see my work for what it was: a disappearing act with an implicit desire to escape being an object.
In one disappearing act in 2008, enacted by my future wife, I directed her to run full pelt into a crop of tall grass until she disappeared. Cut.
Two years later, on a year-long residency, I filmed myself sliding down a long handrail to disappear from view. Cut.
Disappearing was my endgame even when I was visible.
I wrote this mostly in Roswell New Mexico. On the road I was primed for anything that intimated disappearance.
Walmart had its wall of missing children photos that our kids curiously scanned with the excitement of fear.
Then there was the DUST STORMS preceded by signage that read:
ZERO VISIBILITY POSSIBLE.
And not to forget the camper van with a spare-tire cover of a silhouette of Bigfoot & the words:
THOSE WHO WANDER ARE NOT ALWAYS LOST.
BasJan Ader has been my siren song through all this. When art critics talk about BasJan they emphasise “gravity” because he fell a lot.
Sure, he falls off a roof into the bushes; he falls off his bike into a canal. But gravity is not his thing. Disappearing is his thing.
Is BasJan’s falling a dress rehearsal for something bigger? Something super? Something superhuman? The invisible man? Is disappearing a prelude to escape or the extraordinary?
After receiving the photos of this very setting from Anne & Chris, I sent them a “Sorry” email from Roswell to inform them I was backing out. I was trying my best to escape. I failed, it seems.
My escape for now is my epilogue, a letter, without an address, to those artists who managed to disappear or escape, unlike me.
———————
Dear Escape Artists — It’s been years since I saw you last. What happened? You just upped & went. I miss you.
Well not “you” exactly, your work, which is you, not you & everybody else I guess.
See, your work existed in relation to the work of the moment. It’s like this: without them there was no you; without you a part of them is now missing.
Some of your peers have disappeared too. You hear later they took up teaching jobs, hooked up International, or just said fuck it.
Last year, surprised by your absence, I searched for you online. Nothing. Only a biography with no mention of your art life before.
I think we ought to miss artists, not tolerate their visibility. We should wish for another exhibition while believing it’s the end. Visibility threatens seeing.
If I reminded you when in the process of forgetting — sorry.
P.S. Remember my crocodile story aged 12? Well, days after writing this I came across a drawing by BasJan Ader which pictured a crocodile lying in bed with the scratchy words: “Oh crocodile… you are so vile.”
“poof”
