Projects Blog

Soap box performances

I began this performance in 2011 on a single soap box - a counterfeit of Andy Warhol's iconic Brillo Boxes. During this performance I rant about the importance of copying in art and social interaction, at the same time I hand out stamped copies of the text - The Truth Is A Copy.

Photograph: Gwen Gilchrist

Soap box oration De`Graves St Melbourne 2011

 

In 2012 I expanded on this work with Michael Meneghetti as part of our Performprint performance at the Fremantle Art Center.

Michael and I kept expanding Performprint and in 2014 we had a major exhibition at The Meat Market venue of Arts House in North Melbourne. The space is cavernous and we were thrilled to develop Performprint in this location. Among many other aspects of Performprint we exhibited a large scale Soap box performance. In which I stood on a small zigurat of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and preached about the importance of the copy.

U think yr green?

For Christmas 2012 I decided to hitchhike up the east coast, I wanted the experience to be an extension of my art practice. I created a sign that could hang off my back-pack that would make motorists consider their role as emitters and offered an idea that exposed the irony of carbon trading.

The sign read: Let me reduce your carbon footprint. It is, at once, an irreverent humour pleading with motorists to pick me up – offering them a type of salvation for their guilt ridden east coast petrol guzzling journey- and on the other hand it discusses the irony that baffles popular interpretations of the carbon trading schemes. That is, that there is no real displacement, it is just a carbon neutral person allowing a carbon heavy person to use their neutrality to continue to exist in the same manner as before…

This work is an installation of the remnants of this journey. The sign itself, the photos I took and a cue card detailing some of the places I passed through.

You think yr green?

Performance vestige - tarpaulin, digital print on petrol station receipts and pen on card.

Dimensions variable 

Performprint: Fremantle Print Award

Peformprint statement:

Bearings, beauty and irrelevance talks about the inconsequential nature of art, text, and performance. In this work we are trying to highlight the aesthetic and ephemeral qualities of such activities through the combination of printmaking and skateboarding.  The performance of skateboarding and the art of text are two activities whose agencies are inherently purposeless though this is also their strength, their beauty. Bearings, beauty and irrelevance is an attempt to articulate this duality – the meaningful and the meaningless.

Logistics:

The work is performed within the gallery directly on the floor. A circular ink (thick ink) bed should be prepared in the centre of the 3mx3m performance area. The ink should be applied directly onto the floor with a spatula and rolled out using a print roller. We have supplied a circular stencil and ink for the ink bed, four carved skateboard wheels (which the skateboarder will have to mount onto his board in any formation) and an indemnity contract (in the form of a wearable T-shirt) which the skateboarder will have to sign with white ink and wear during each performance to clear Performprint and FAC of an liability. The T-shirt becomes the property of the skateboarder.

A skateboarder will ride through the circular bed of ink repeatedly for 10-20 minutes generally keeping within the square area creating the work. When the ink has sufficiently spread across the square the performance is finished and the print vestige is left.

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