Where’s My Art?
I’ve been a showman all my life. I’ve not had any other job than doing shows. In fact I’ve hardly made a dollar from anything but performing. So, after all these years as an artist, what do I have to show for it all? Where is my Art?
I have some money in my account. I have a place to live. I have some things. I have some books. Actually I have a lot of books. I have this stuff because I have received remunerations from Crowds who have enjoyed my performances, via clever producers of fabulous events, but ultimately from Crowds.
The money is the result of the performance, but not the art itself. I’d be lying if I claimed money is unimportant. I need to live. I am a husband and a father, the sole provider and bread winner of my family. Yet, money is not the point. If the pursuit of riches was my ultimate goal, would it be deemed wise to spend my time practicing magic? Spend years learning juggling from a book? Doing street shows without having seen a proper street show before, or when I decided to dedicate myself to becoming a freak show performer? Imagine the business man who says, “I think the real money is made from going on tour in an old ambulance filled with bricks to be smashed on a hermaphrodite.” It should be screamingly obvious the choice was about something else; something inner, rather than something outer. I was doing it to fulfil something which was inside me. A passion, an enthusiasm, rather than a monetary gain.
Since the tour of Europe in the ambulance, 1998, and in truth from a few years before that, I have been living out of a suitcase. All my clothes are black, so that in the limited space available in an airplane regulation size and weight suitcase, every piece of clothing can be worn with every other. I have heard that Einstein had many suits in exactly the same cut and colour, so he wouldn’t have to spend time choosing his outfit. People in mental or correctional institutions also dress the same every day.
I only just recently unpacked. That is, I didn’t unpack. My wife knows me too well. So after gently suggesting I should consider unpacking over a period of time she unpacked for me. After all my family and I are at the start of our longest stay in one place since we met. Even though I was buying her arguments I still could not get myself to do it. Eventually she unpacked for me. Folded my pants, placed a divider between my socks and my underwear and did a fold/roll kind of thing with my t-shirts so I can see which one is which before putting it on. Now I stand, a fully grown man, before my t-shirt drawer and ponder which one of my black shirts I’ll wear today. Maybe I’ll even get a coloured one one day soon, just kidding, of course I won’t.
My Art of entertainment was created because of passions I don’t fully understand. I don’t know why I am attracted to the things I am. Why I find things that are obscure, strange, occult, and esoteric so appealing? When I read a review of a book that says the book is hard to read or dense there is a part of me that goes: “Oh yeah? Bring it on!” Why? Who knows?
Back to the question at hand: Where is my Art? As I look back at my production as an artist it is strangely absent. I have done thousands of shows, where are they now? I did shows with my dad for a decade and I only have about five or six paper photographs to show for it. Not one minute of video. Not a single clip of moving images of me and him performing together. These days that’s hard to imagine. I have some scrap books in my father’s attic in Norway. There are some leaflets from the family Zirkus I performed this summer in Denmark on a shelf in my Vegas hallway, but these things are just memorabilia, objects associated with memorable events. Leaflets, posters, and advertising postcards are all typical ephemera. The pictures on them tells of the people I did the events with, and the places where it happened. All the information is on the leaflets, but the event itself is lost, lost in time. Because the results of my art, the object of my art itself is nowhere to be found.
There are videos, but strictly speaking they’re not the performances either. A video of my performance is not my art. They are also a form of memorabilia. More complete records than leaflets, but still just records capturing images of the outer aspect of the events.
A video is a document of what happened but it leaves out the feeling in the room, and in the hearts of the spectators, the true emotional engagement, the electric feeling. There is a big difference in how something plays on the screen as opposed to how it plays in real life. Much of the kind of tension developed when a clown stands still in the circus ring, doing nothing, something which creates a huge tension in a big top, most often translates to dead time on the small screen.
Live timing, live stage or circus ring behaviour is not the same as television timing or behaviour. When something is created for television, or for a movie, it is a different thing. Circus and live performance can be great on television, but it needs a whole production team, camera, editing, sound and light on top of the live performance. Then the show is still not fully captured, but a new thing, some video art reflecting my art has been created. One good aspect of video, as opposed to photographs, and leaflets, is that video includes the fourth dimension, time.
This is a clue. Time.
A photo of me performing is a three dimensional object, some might argue it borders on two dimensional, but an object nonetheless. This gets to the heart of the tiny bit of insight I want to share. The photo itself might be art. The hard won, and expertly created result of a photographers art project.
A photographer’s photo is his art. His art is an object. There is a story to how he got the shot, how he got his camera, the journey he took to capture the image, but the art is the photo. The art is something you can touch, hold in your hand, or nail to your wall. You can’t nail my shows to the wall. Although in 1999 I was nailed to a cross, with nails through my arms, and one through the head of my cock, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Still, that experience, when the Kamikaze Freakshow took to the stage with our beautiful freak performance, it happened at a particular time, at a particular place, but left no physical object behind.
After the show we packed our props, our massive cross, the accordion, the concert harp, the hammer and the nails, the needles, swords, and tennis racket into our Leland DAF ambulance and drove off. We had used all those objects to create the art, but the art itself was no where to be seen.
It was somewhere though. Just not in outer space. My shows are presented on stages, but the art is experienced, and exists only in the spectator’s inner space. Their experience of the show is the true fruit of my art. The art is the impression it makes on the individual spectator’s soul. It is what they take away in their hearts and minds. The emotions it stirred, the thoughts it triggered and the inspirations for future actions is the true result of my art. So, my art is not a thing. My art is a process.
A show is not a thing. It’s a process. It’s an unfolding in time. Much like you. You aren’t a thing either. Relationships aren’t things. Your career or your health are not things. An organism is a living process. Life is not a thing, it’s a process. All these things are processes made up of events and experiences in time.
You’re an experiencer, and these experiences makes you feel and think and do certain things at certain times. The experiences, like watching me perform, changes you. Maybe hearing something I said, maybe the images presented trigger something, either way you will change, sometimes subtly, other times more profoundly. You learn new things, you form new opinions, which again leads you to taking action you wouldn’t have taken yesterday. You are a work in progress, a process.
A show, my art, life, is not like crystals, they’re like fire. Not like nouns, like verbs. My art is retained inside, and becomes part of a living human being. My thoughts, my actions, and my emotional connections slips into the spectator’s living processes. Thinking, feeling and desiring, willing and wanting human beings watch and take in my show, thus becoming the keepers, the guardians and the walking expressions of my Art.