A chunk from a long piece I wrote a while back about Eva Meyer Keller's brilliant performance Death Is Certain:
Deaths are enacted on cherries, one by one. When the last cherry is killed, the performance is over. The execution of the performance (small pun intended) is as perfectly simple, as lacking in frills or ornamentation as the structure. Meyer Keller moves between the tables in her deadly kitchen, moving from one killing to the next, in a mode that might be described as neutral or functional, but which in any case declines to signal comment on her task. She makes no drama of her decisions, no comedy or tragedy of her actions and no melodrama of her reactions. Slightly brusque, with a faint hint of the laboratory or cook’s assistant in her demeanour, her manner might best be described as that of someone simply doing a job. She does what’s needed, not more and not less. After an initial acknowledgement of those watching, she does not bother much with the informally grouped audience; does not seek eye contact or look for reactions to what she is doing. She is self-contained, to all extents and purposes too busy with her job to have time for social niceties and in any case, clearly convinced that what’s she’s doing – demonstration of death on her thirty-five cherries – both speaks for and is clear enough in itself not to warrant further mediation or explanation from her.
What I'd forgotten, watching the piece again last week in Toulouse was how much Eva's performance tunes you to see detail. The difference (visually, emotionally, physically, performatively, metaphorically) between a cherry skinned with a razor blade and a cherry stripped with the abrasive edge of a nail file, the particular crackle and fizz of bare electrical wires pushed into the cherry on the plate, the way the smoke from a cigarette curls and shifts when trapped inside a plastic cup (gas chamber to some other unfortunate cherry). For something so small - a performance that takes place for the most part on two table-tops - it's extraordinarily vivid. Made me think a lot about the way that any work creates an economy of expectation - a set of parameters - which it then exploits. It's great how sometimes the strictest of these restrictions create the most beautiful resonant things.
He says he walked two hours to the station and that the strange thing is he didn't see anything. I mean normally you see something - a building, or people, or a street, or something interesting to remark on. But that morning he did not see anything. Only later, thinking back on it did he remember that the people there seemed to put many little things in their windows - pictures of family members in plastic frames, small trinkets and souvenirs, or flowers, or dolls or statues, or those little plastic cats that look back at you.
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"It winds me up. I can't go nowhere without them following me," said Michael, 18, after what he said was his fourth stop. "I got back from work and as soon as I got out the van they were just taking photos of me straight away zooming in on all the patterns I've got in my hair."
Strange scenes in this link Ant sent me a while back to a piece on police surveillance-as-systematic harassment in Essex.
I added a page here about my novel The Broken World - the cover is above. The book looks great and it's released on 3rd July. I'm hoping that the Live Art Development Agency online bookshop Unbound, as well as the Forced Entertainment online bookshop, will be carrying copies - I'll be signing some for each of them. Impatient people, or people unconcerned with my signature can already advance order the book here from Amazon.
Strange feeling on the arrival of the 'actual' book - not the page proofs, not the printed proof edition but the actual thing. A worrying 'finality'. As soon as it's out of the Jiffy bag I am scouring it to check the places where I made changes in the last proofs - are all the changes there, do they make sense? After a few minutes of randomly opening it at different parts, reading passages I've read (and propbably rewritten) a million times I realise that in fact what I'm doing is looking for a mistake. It takes me 15 minutes to find one - a place on a certain page where a the word 'world' has dropped a letter and mutated to 'word'. It's a strange mistake and easy enough to see how it has slipped through - because the error is an actual word, not a nonsense, and because in the context of the sentence 'word' almost makes sense. Apparently though, I'm satisfied to have found this error (proof that there's nothing definitive about the object, in that sense nothing 'final' at about it at all) and once that's done (the object is just a process) I put it down on a pile of other things and get on with my day.
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Meanwhile my friend Asta Groting, for whose ventriloquism project I wrote the performance Dead Air has a new website. You can check out her projects, and clips from her videos here. A clip and some info on the piece I wrote for her is on this page - second video clip down is mine, first on the same page is from her piece with Deborah Levy. Buddy Big Mountain is the performer in each case.
From his position lain on the couch, enjoying the shade as a break from the afternoon sun, S. yells me that he has "done something with the titles of the books" on my shelves. I go into the room and ask what, and S., still lain there, in serious mode, eyes scanning the chaotic and piled shelves to pick out the titles he needs, recites:
They All Sang Sharp Teeth and Nova Swing
in Japan, Seattle, Paris and Tokyo
and in the Mapplethorpe trees
they made a Massive Change
it Charmed them
like What is the What?
my words to you are
Black Swan Green.
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