Early Akshun: Belfast
Andre Stitt: Substance, ISBN 978-0-9559228-0-0
Belfast period 1976-1980
Neil Jefferies- During your years at university there was a turn from painting to live art as the main medium for your expression, could you explain how this transition came about?
Andre Stitt- You know what's interesting about that question, one doesn't consciously think that at the time and even on reflection I'm not sure if it was a case of 'oh OK that's not working for me and so I'll do this other stuff that will work better', it was part of a process. I can't really distinguish; when people ask me when did you make that decision, because for me it was part of an on going process. I think all art practice is a process and things evolve; maybe tangents occur, trajectories, parallel narratives, paradoxes, dead ends, and outer-limit explorations caused by taking risks and meeting challenges. What happened to me was I found myself in an 'Art' environment that allowed for a certain degree of experimentation beyond the tradtions of art school teaching. I don't want to suggest it was totally revolutionary. But it was to a certain extent, given the location and the context of Northern ireland at that time. Certainly the territory I would start to inhabit as far as making art is concerned was made fun of to a certain degree. That reaction gave me an indication that perhaps difficult and uncomfortable questions where being posed by the work that questioned the sort of art making that had been taking place previously in Belfast. I think some of the new art strategies employed by few of the teachers and students were a bit intimidating and threatening. However new methods of art making were supported by members of staff who were strong enough in their own practice to have an authoratitive voice. It was still a Fine Art course, and as such, had large areas of painting, sculpture, and printmaking which were the bedrock of the school. Actually it's interesting because nothing much has changed - these disciplines remain, and as such, are still fairly traditional, persistant, secular and non-threatening. Fine Art courses remain fairly unremarkable in this respect and these disciplines show no real seismic shifts.
However what can be remarkable is that you do get certain conditions were periods of disruption and perceptable change through disruptive experimentation can exist. It was fortunate for me that this just happened to be one of those times in the 1970's in Belfast.
You have to understand that it was a different environment, [to a contemporary university art course,] it was more open, looser and you weren't tied down to continual assessment, so if you were so inclined you had freedom of explore new ways of makiing, thinking, doing etc.. It was that point in the 70s in which a lot of information was coming through from the 1960s and influencing the making of work in the 70s. It was progressive and allowed for conceptual ideas to get into a performative space. A lot of work was about questioning the means and production of making art and its relevance to the society one inhabited. The personal was the political.
That was the problem I had with the canvas which was in a sense tied in to the studio practice which was in a sense hermetically sealed within the institution, and if it ever moved outside it would be to another institution like a museum or gallery and I wasn't interested in that.
I was interested in what was happening in life, I saw a separation from life when I was making the painting. Simply what was happening was that there was this exploration and experimentation and I was becoming really aware of my physicality and my body and what I was doing on the canvas. I became aware that I was activating something ealtional to the canvas. The sort of materials I was using were industrial paints so there was this sense that it was something to do with labour. The idea of carrying out work and allusions to industry . That influenced how I looked at art, that art was creative work. That it should be seen as such and not be seen as something separate. It wasn't separated from the rythmns of labour, the work in our every day life.
I came from a poor working class back ground our received hero's were Marx, Kier Hardie, Nia Bevan. My Dad was a socialist, in the Trade Unions, actually I think he was a closet Trotskyite. It has been reported in the family that as a young man he was in the Communist Party. Through this early education in class struggle I believed in the rights and equality for all people. However I would define myself much more as anarcho-communist, I also believed in breaking down the class structure as a means to affirm autonomy and responsibility without governance. I came to believe in the communal and the individual responsibility for the collective.
By the time I was in art school I was really angry at the inequality around me combined with the powerlessness of living with the esculating civil conflict that by this time in the mid-seventies didn't seem to have any kind of resolution. In fact of course the situation had become worse and I wanted to rip all that out of the canvas.
The impulse and I guess what you might call 'the gift' for making art had been there as a child. I had always made art, drawing, painting and assemblages. Ever since I was I child I knew I would be an artist. It was part of a social, living process and on reflection I could say by the time I reached art college I had already had an art education of sorts. By the time I got into art school I wanted to see were I could take it, what I could do with it. How I could articulate these fundamental concens I had grown up with.
So, the materials I was using reflected this. Working on the canvas with industrial paint, burning plastic, burning wood. These materials had a relationship with what was going on in the community. Shops were being bombed out, there were fires everywhere, people were being shot. It was the height of civil unrest in Northern Ireland and growing up at that point, especially as a teenager, you were traumatised by it. I was physically trying to get these emotions out and also trying to find a way to get it out even further then merely the art context.
I had gone through both figuration and abstraction and ended up there in Belfast Art College with is raw emotional abstraction as a process of negation - 'gaffer' taped masked areas, mixed with bight yellow and red industrial paint mixed and worked upon stretchers made of industrial black plastic that would end up extruded, burnt, corrupted, slashed, and stuttered with my body indentations and flailings.
What was great is that the art college allowed me to do that, Alistair [Maclennan] and another tutor Adrian Hall supported my activities. To the point where Adrian Hall actually wrote a letter to the dean when I burnt my paintings outside the school stating he would resign if the school expelled me.
The school authorities were serious about having me suspended for anti-social behaviour - what a laugh when the city centre where the school was situated was being bombed and burnt ta'fuck!
I have always been endebted to Adrian Hall for that. An exemplary human being, it really took a lot of guts considering he had a young family dependent on the income from his job at the school.
That was on the BA undergraduate course in 1978, prior to that in 1976 I was on the Arts Foundation course just up the road at Jordanstown Polytechnic. It was there that I became aware of the existence of Alistair Maclennan simply because the other students would be saying 'lets go down and look at this crazy guy from Scotland on the streets of Belfast'. Almost like it was a dare; that it was so weird that this guy called himself an artist.
Most of the students would laugh at Alastair, actually quite a number of the other teachers would also take the piss out of him. I think they were really threatened by him although he was always very passive in his performances. I found it interesting what he was doing. It was a real provocation and I don't mean that in an overlty violent way. I felt it was really positive and challenging; it provoked thought, debate, interaction, and somehow exposed our parochial predjudices. Seeing and experiencing Alastairs presence was important for me; it lent a legitimacy to my own emerging practice. Having said that I would not descibe this as an epiphany, it was more like another ingredient in a total super mix of potentials and possibilities.
On this Arts Foundation course I was making 'interventions' and not thinking to much about them. They were what I thought of as 'action art'. There wasn't any grand strategy about any of this, these activities or interventions were impulsive social gestures. Eventually they evolved to become a series of covert actions where I graffitied 'art is not a mirror, it's a fuckin'hammer' on walls and upon the streets around Belfast. This culminated in 'akshun' I mentioned earlier; the burning of my paintings in the city centre in 1978 outside the art school. During this tie in about 1976-77 I was also going around writing and spray painting on walls things like, 'This wall is boring at 15.30 on Tuesday 29th January…' etc..'. and using stencils with short texts such as 'ask - reply' on them. I think the first conscious 'art action' I made was in 1976 when I would walk around with framed reproductions on string hung around my neck. These were of 'Guernica' by Picasso and paintings by Van Gough and Constable which I had deliberately tore out of library books. I had the word 'boring' stencilled over them. These interventions were self-consciously provocative. I was questioning what this all meant, the meaning of art, its cultural and economic value, its reproduction and ideas of originality.
I was trying to work this out for myself as much as anything, and trying to understand what relevence it had to the context in which we were living in at that time. There was also something oppositional about these activities, anti-authoritarian I guess. This was also a time of teenage reaction in the seventies known as 'Punk'. Don't forget I was still in my teens and being that young and so full of energy, art and punk music fused together for me in a convulsive assertion of political reckoning, power, emotion and gesture.
It was like osmosis; I was absorbing all this stuff and then spewing it out in forms such as actions, provocations, interventions and through traditional mediums such as painting. But also finding non-traditional ways of articulating my ideas and feelings through the materials. I'm not convinced these things just suddenly appeared. They were bound to happen given my propensity for seeking attention. The 'art actions' I started making evolved out of a constant need to connect. I think it came out of a certain gregariousness. They were also part of my formative experience through working class struggle, civil rights and the cultural permissiveness of the visual and sonic landscape of my childhood in the sixties.
As art students in the Belfast warzone of the nineteen seventies we felt alienated, disconnected and marginalised from mainland British culture. We lived in a vacum; insular and distorted. Outsiders where afraid to engage. Political and parmilitary collusion meant that in general; artists, musicians and ersatz pop ambassadors did not visit Northern Ireland.
Our interpretations of contemporary art were appropriated through printed text, image and hearsay. Then something weird happened: the radar ever so slightly registered a twitch. Joe Beuys paid a visit. Even invested in an autonimous artists intiative called Art Research Exchange. Alastair Maclennan took up a position at the art school. He then proceeded to dismantle the perception of art making through regular interventions in public spaces outside the security of the art institution. His reputation preceeding him, we were in awe when Stuart Brisley came to town and violently propelled himself across a room during a performance. The next day Brisley witnessed my own liberation in central Belfast where I burned all my paintings in a kind of spirited public exorcism.
These formative incursions of self-empowering art as liberation put the zap on me. Through these artists' example the context became the centre; the centre became wherever we where. We were connected.
Networking and distribution assured connection and engagement. Art made and influenced by modes of documentation, capture systems, dissemination, argument and outrage informed subsequent breeches.
Inspiration also arrived through documents of 'art actions' by the Viennese 'aktionists', Gunter Brus & Rudulf Swarzkoger, COUM Transmissions, Gordon Matt-Clark, Kerry Trengove, Chris Bruden, Hugh Adams' 1976 Southampton Performance Art Festival and through the pages of Avalanche, Studio International, Mark P's 'Sniffin'Glue', Gen P-Orridge's & Peter Christopherson's definitive 'Annihilating Reality' and the International Mail Art Networks.
To me, these documents of performance art and art action, usually in the form of black and white photography and primitive photocopy, required my participation and response in their captured drama. They were like a rehearsal for all the questions about situations in the social world I could not articulate. These images dared me to find my own solutions, they inspired me to collaborate in their reflection.
As a painter at art school in the seventies influenced by the expedient dissemination that performance art belched out I became interested in the idea of art activity as process and document. I saw my painting practice as document of performed activity - slippage, spillage; gesture as evidence or trace of an existence in time and space.
Neil Jefferies- Was the situation of living in Belfast and the issues related to it always something you wanted to make work about, did your paintings relate to these issues, or where they things you were becoming more aware of, in the sense you wanted to analyse and make work about them, at university age as you begin to create live art.
That's interesting because at what point does someone make a conscious decision that these are the issues? I don't think that's what happened to me, it was so obvious and so much a part of who I was. I was a product of a unique enironment. I wanted to reconcile how I felt about the environment and the situation; how I fell about 'the troubles'. I was terribly confused. I was talking too the Declan McGonagall, [an international curator who brought a lot of performance art to N.Ireland] who was a student at Belfast Art College a few years before me. He said it was interesting that a a lot of students were making paintings that were actually very violent. It was as if everyone was holding in this anger and trauma and it found some sort of release in their painting. His peception was that students were very quiet, uptight, almost too polite, yet the degree show of the year he graduated the paintings were full of violent biomorphic forms. It literally exploded. Well I'm sure you can read the psychological interpretation there in connection to how life was lived at that point in 'the troubles'.
My own generation at that art school were students that started to open up. As a teenagers we were fed up and going to art school soemhow enabled us to deal with our frustration and anger. My year was predominently working class. I met another graduate from my art college recently who was in the year above me, and she said it was scary how cohesive our year was. Apparently, she said, we did everything together; we were viewed as a gang by the rest of the school. We worked together, ate together in the school canteen, shared houses, had parties, played in bands together, lived in the went to the pub together, we were a gang of about 20 students who really did kind of cut everyone else out. Kind of weird thinking about it now, because on reflection we were really some kind of mini community that protected itself. So there was this cohesive and supporting organism. Beuys would have loved that! We would go off and make shows together in Dublin, travel to London and do stuff, go to punk gigs. We even went off to Amsterdam and North Wales in pursuit of making what we thought to be radical art - I mean we were making site specific art moving in to public space, fascinating looking back on that now. We take that all for granted now, but really we were so cut off at that time, getting on a plane was a big thing, we seeemed to travel by boat and bus a lot. This constant leaving and going back - not knowing where we belonged but obviously belonging together. It struck me how powerless people felt and how angry this powerlessness made people feel.
It was a life-death situation and you could not comprehend what the rules were, the territory of Belfast was very strange, it was a war zone city and you were continually stopped at security checkpoints and searched, you had to always carry ID, there was constant harassment which almost became boring. There was a strange banality to it. In the end wether my fellow graduates went on and became artsist was irrelevant, what was important was that at that specific time art elevated us, and enabled us to rise above the depressing banality of the civil conflict.
Regarding what substance informed the painting it was a case of absorptin casting out fear. I absorbed issues of the Civil Rights movement in Nortehrn Ireland as a ten year old in 68-69. That triggered the current period of civil conflict - what we euphemistically call 'the troubles' - social inequality magified through religion - the protestant and Catholics divisions - disenfranchisement and colonialism - all these thgins got absorbed. They were part of my being, my fabric, my body, my language. That created an inner termiol which I objectified trhough painting. Initially this was really quite controlled until I got to art school.
When I think about it, even the stuff I was doing in secondary or high school was in some way related to these issues. Art was always my main study, it was always what I was going to do. There were these paintings I was making of windows when I was still at school. I was interested in graphic design and representation, due to the influence of pop art. These paintings of windows, they were very flat, clear and formalist. There was also a structuralist influence, the colours also refelected an interest in to Mondriaan I think. I was interested in control of the image by making it very flat, graphic and almost anodyne as opposed to rendering an illustration of what I saw out of the real window [in Belfast]. In a sense I tried to change the external environment by changing how it was represented on the canvas. I wanted a controlled version of reality, something more palatable, possibly like an advert, yet more minimal, perfect. I think it was about feeling powerless and finding that I could create another version of reality, one in which I could be in control. That was definitely an early comment on how painting and art related to life, it helped me become more socially aware. That there was a social comment implicit on the way the image was conveyed.
Neil Jefferies- Private rituals and conditioning are mentioned as an important part of your early practice. You also mention your interest in tribal peoples such as those of North America who influenced you. Can you explain these tribal influences and conditioning performances were realised.
To make the decision that you are looking at a set of actions that have a social relevance and if they are repeated in a certain way under certain conditions they begin consitute some form of ritual activity; that created a meaning for me. I was interested in trying to find a spiritual understanding that was outside of religious dogma. I had grown up in an environment permeated with religious dogma. This had converted itself into ritual blood-letting in which people were killing each other. This society, this culture, was permeated by rituals; the calendar was set by the ceremonial. There was a continuity of ritual activity throughout the year utilised to condition and inform identity and to repress and uphold a social and cultural hierarchy.
There were: religious, quasi-religious, para-military orders and sectarian groupings; the Church, Catholic/Nationalist, Protestant/Loyalist, all developed their own rituals to confer identity. These 'orders' integrated relgion with politics along with social and cultural ideology through ritual to establish depedency. Ritual was ubiquitous, and used to affirm righteous power and control by being a conduit for dominent ideologies.
The protestant environment I grew up in had its own rituals. There's the Loyalist Orange Order with their rituals of agression and submission consisting of marches, bands playing, drums, flag waving and intimidation.
There are even designated public holidays in which to carry out these rituals; officially sanctioned by the social control processes of government.
Ritual permeated everything, it really did. So, it was not that much of a leap for me to develop ritual ativity or behaviour as a means to make and inform art. It was almost something completely intrinsic to my own identity. I remember thinking at the time that a combination of art and ritual could produce a de-conditioning. That I needed de-conditioned from all these horrible negative influences that my culture had inflicted upon me. That I was indeed brainwashed by it all, to some extent. I was laso beginning to percieve painting as an activity invested with ritual- that painting, as a ritual or ritualised activity, was a kind of performance.
Like most things in my experience, it was something that developed intuitively and unconsciously. The ritual aspects of my work acted as a structural mechanism to investigate my own issues and concerns. As painting evolved into a more obvious form of 'live' performance, it further became an exploratory processes whereby questions could be posed using 'ritual' as a device to explore particular social living conditions and conventions. I remember my first realisations were along these lines: Why do we follow ritual? - They create stability, they perpetuate a self knowledge and an identity. OK, so that was a start - then what? Well, I started consciously exploring, inventing and developing 'personal' rituals that would, I hoped, lead me to some form of catharsis, understanding, realisation, possibly a transcendence of my own conditioned identity.
I was interested in the appropriation of ritual and indeed investigating ritual activity from different cultures that had some relationship to the issues I was exploring. One example was the exploration of the 'Ghost Dance' based on an indigenous religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems during the 1890's. As the 'Ghost Dance' spread from its original source, Native American tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs, often creating change in both the society that integrated it and the ritual itself. The ritual acted on several levels simultaneously - response to the impact of Europen settlers, appeasement, liberation and transecendence. This sort of ceremonial and ritual activity, not unlike certain cultural activities in Ireland, were outlawed. I was also interested in the 'Sun Dance' and in fact these rituals were incorporated into a series of akshuns I carried out in a derelict church in Belfast during 1979-1980. Both employed duration activity to the point of exhaustion. The 'Sun Dance' also incorporating body piercing as a means of achieving transcendence and ecstacy.
For me there was a whole range of associated issues that pivoted on the dominent practices of 'white' authority through power and possession. At the heart of these formative explorations was a concern for the abuse of human rights in realtion to self-empowerment and identity through a creative langauge.
There was a book I got a hold of at the time which was actually banned by the British Government. It really helped me to understand the nature of colonisation, imperialism, and trauma caused by colonialism. This book by Dr. Rona M. Fields was really important for me. It was called, 'Society Under Seige - A Physcology of Northern Ireland'.
"Psychological genocide is the mandated destruction of a group with the explicit outcome of eradicating it's symbolic power and it's capacity for perpetuating it's own identity."
This book had a profound effect on me and enabled me to understand - in parallel with making 'ritualised' performance akshun - something that had a correlation to other 'victimised' social groupings. That other cultures used ritual as a means of liberation for transcending trauma. That ritual activity provided a ceremonial place and space for spiritual and redemptive qualities to emerge; for healing to negate victimisation and transform it into empowerment.
I became interested in communities, social and cultural bindings and groups that had experience of disenfranchisment and marginalisation. I identified these as being inside and outside own environment and having an oppositional relationship a dominant power. In my own case this was the British government, the British Empire, a powerful force that has degraded people, that has destroyed people, carried out torture and genocide around the world. We can see this as western institutional corruption, systemic and identifiable with 'capitalism' . Today we can of course most readily identify it with the subversion of the concept of 'democracy' by the USA and the acquisitive agenda of American Imperialism.
I was looking at my identity as both a result of and a response to colonial power and dominate British power indoctrination. I wanted to investigate this through appropriation, by any means possible, ritual activity that refelected my predicament. That this idea of utilising ritual as a mechanism might allow me to create Akshuns that in turn could become ritualised. I wanted these ritualised 'art' akshuns to allow me to transcend my current and learned condition, to break through to another level. I thought of it in terms of a transcendence, it was both practical and spiritual. This was also how I approached certain structural concerns and why I did a lot of intense duration work. Working in private without an audience allowed me a sanctuary of sorts in which to experiment through ritualised akshun states of physical, mental and pehaps spirtual conditions. Preparation for these activities was crucial; and included fasting, drugs, physical exhaustion and, repetative tasks to attain 'altered' states of consciousness.
At the time I was reading texts by Jung on alchemy, symbolism and archetypes; Paul Radin's interpretation of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, The Golden Bough by Fraser, Mircea Eliade on Shamanism as well as Castaneda, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Funny, but it made sense that these writers would also sit easily alongside my other major interests of the time such as quantum theory, anarchism, and situationism. In fact all that stuff was being digested and spat out in a eclectic and esoteric combination that made up my daily diet at the time that also included writers such as Artaud, Bakunin, Colin Wilson, Gary Snyder, Kerouac, and Philip K Dick, studiously arranged to a soundtrack by the 13th Floor Elevators, The Stooges, Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division and Scott Walker's 'The Electrician'.
So, by creating these 'rituals' I was looking for a way to decondition myself, to affirm my identity, one that would be outside my own culture. At the time I thought that I was reconstructing an identity outside my culture that was oppositional. That is why I had the interest with indigenous North American cultures, it may sound a bit spurious now but in those days it seemed potent, genuine. You have the topology of mythology, nationalist mythologies, ….protestant mythology and how those mythologies re-enforce tribal identity.
I was looking for an alternative that might be more hoilstic, pure, I suppose. A way to use other knowledge that concerned itself with harmony, healing or resolving conflict - physical conflict or communal conflict, mental illness, physical illness. I was grasping at things to try and find order in this disorder I was inhabiting in my daily life in Belfast.
I felt if I created these self initiation rituals, I would be able to have some sort of power over my situation. However, what was interesting was that it brought me to an unexpected realisation. I realised my condition was actually a kind of trajectory out of shamanic practice and that centered around the archetype of the 'trickster'.
This was the recognition that everything was paradoxical. That in fact I should inhabit the shadow, and that I should expose and embrace the shadow side.
All this sounds serious and of course it was, but it was also fueled with humour and absurdity. I had a card printed: 'I've been brainwashed (by myself) again'. That was me recognising the 'trickster' within, the possible delusional state that might also activate liberation.
' I have power' - 'You don't really have power you only think you have power'.
And so I thought if I could in some way understand this I would in some way be free
(maybe no power is the ultimate power) that's the paradox, and so the ritual was coming out of my culture and at the same time relating to other cultures being twisted and reformed and appropriated in to something that was my own, and in a sense maybe it was about affirming my own power and affirming my own individuality, if your within a culture like Belfast you cant be too individual or else you become the outsider, instead of being afraid of that I embraced it, I had recognised I had always been the outsider, even if I was in the middle I was still the outsider, I think that was because of the way I thought about things and the away I manifested these thoughts in to ways of making art, that's what made me different , I was in it, but also an outsider, that's were the trickster came form, someone who is an insider and outsider, that all came through working through these rituals.
This went on for a long time and probably still does, and there are elements from part of that era that still inform and affect present work, I don't think the rituals were a comfort zone there was a structural quality to them risk world be, see where the challenge would be and that is were the importance lies, making shore I challenge myself.
There was a lot of deep subconscious anger that needed to be realised, and I think there still is in Northern Ireland which much of the population of, still some trauma that hasn't been addressed. Its sort of been smeared over, there's a surface but I wanted to get below that surface and see what was underneath and I think that made people very insecure, it made me afraid too, I was in unknown territory, paradoxically you are very vulnerable even if you are feeling very powerful, this led me in to a cycle of ego feeding, the only way I could feel powerful was to create performances which in the end destroyed me. That was ultimately were the rebirth came and I ultimately needed to reach that point, in terms of that self initiation it was a contemporary shamanic situation, I came to this death situation and then came out the other side, I now have a very practical view of what happend, I don't like the term shamanic these days, I didn't go through any formal shamanic apprentice, it was all self intimated, it is argued by some that that is relevant in its own way, but I would still not say I am some sort of shaman that can heels people, though up believe in the healing powers of art.
Neil Jefferies- One of the most important in the private or semi-private series of ritual actions is those done in the derelict church for camera, how did these pieces work in relation to this reconditioning, how did they affect you during and immediately after and do you think there were any tangible positive affects on you yourself from doing them or do you think they merely made you dwell on the situation more?
What's interesting is that these works never happened in isolation the works in the church happened over a period of a year, there was also work going on outside the church, work in the street, work at home, networking, mail art, that mail art was transforming as it helped me move away from Belfast and helped put me in touch with other artist. So thee was a lot of other work happening, the work in the church was interesting, it still affects me now, when I look at the images these day it take me right back, I guess you could call it nostalgic, and I guess that's part of it, it was an innocent time when you first explore the territory there was no major discourse of what I was doing, I was just doing it, when I look at old photographs, I still see the works reflected in what I do now, they affirmed a position, just by pushing myself to limits and working thought the Aksions.
The referral to the immediate environment was not an obvious statement, it was a series of layers, how you identify some one as part of the community, the situation I lived in was about a series of layers, how you identify a person, whether they are friend or envy, how you identify with the urban environment of Belfast, how you interact to people on then street, my awareness was heightened and that was intrinsic to being a person in that environment, the rituals weren't specific, I did not go into the church thinking I was going to look at one topic, it was never like than, it was about a series of layers and exploring through those layers, making art is not about making a bunch of statements, I could just get on a soap box and say what I think, it was very much about exploring material, can a colour have a symbolic meaning, of coarse it can, red, white and blue, colour of the British flag, colour of loyalist culture, then that is worked in to each action, maybe I have that in my pocket, my be not, in that church I found some bunting, flags that go around a marquee, these became part of various actions, all the material I used in the church and I brought stuff in, I was creating layers in the church, something was installed, it became a moving and living work, paint was peeling off, the roof was coming in, it was a complete art work, I can now take a piece of work like the 'Institution' in chapter and see links to the stuff from the church, I had very strong experiences acnes and that continues to follow through, there was nothing explicit. I must say afterwards I always felt brilliant, it was like reconditioning, I felt like it was loads just coming out of me, I felt incredible freedom. When I look at these images I can really see the power instilled in them, Tara [Babel] who took the photographs was important, we were together for a number of years and this work was also very much about our relationship together. She was making her own work, but she would always be in the church with me, she came from a similar background from me and there was often this dialogue between the performer and the photographer in the work. Sometimes when we now talk about the work she comments about how strong the power of the work was. I has an image digitised recently, it was me at 7'O clock in the church making this walk in the cold along this red pigment, naked, by walking along the line the pigment was being rubbed in for several hours but what you see in the digitised version, you can see my breath, and when I saw that it transformed me to that situation. This then made me start asking questions about what time is, feeling these moment so acutely, my mind is saying I cant be there but part of me is saying why cant I be there, because actually there is a reality to that, I don't think its just a memory, is this real, that was a question we often asked to each other, is this moment real, is this, is this real, [Stitt taps and points at a number of objects around him], maybe if you start reading quantum physics it could turn out not to be. I think that if anything comes out of these works it was a sense of power, growth and autonomy, and some kind of reconditioning.
Neil Jefferies- in the case of 'The Church' pieces of 1979 and 1980 from what I can gather there is a very strong imputes on found objects, is this a correct assumption and to what extent did you only use found objects and why?
It was a bit of a mixture, interestingly enough what I did was make use of what was there, and there was much there, piano, bunting, plaster, wood, slates, broken glass, things like that, what I did bring in to the space each time was a bag, I thought of it as a bag of tricks, a shamans bundle, it was a bag of objects that held a relevance for me, it might be a stone I found, a ball, a piece of wood, cup hooks, a hammer, tape, pigment, feathers, knives a lot of very odd sort of material, it was an army holdall, a sausage shaped army surplus bag, I would take the stuff out and continue, I had pens to mark on my body, so interestingly enough I was editing a piece that was for a performance in Sydney,[coyote] the piece obviously was about [Joseph] Beuys but I had a bag that related to me, this guy was recording what I was doing and said, 'André is going over to his bag of tricks,' already I was consciously seeing this bag as I bag of tricks, so ultimately the material was partly there and partly not.
Neil Jefferies- Right from the start of your performance practice there is the intention to make both interventional public work and set performances. Why did you chose to work with them both?
Well if I think about early pieces it was all explorative, what happens if I do this in front of an audience what happens if I do this in front of the public, how do people approach it. Working with the audience can be pretty confrontational too, you have an audience there and you start doing things to them. I always wanted to explore this relationship, its usually more intense if the audience is in the room, not always but more often then not, out in the public streets, it can shift dramatically, it could be quite scary and dangerous but you could also be completely ignored, but then its all abort risk, in think the violence that appeared in my work in the 1980s was some kind of attempt to gain control. The control in my own life was slipping, so I needed that deluded situation of holding power over the audience.
It was purely for explorational reasons, what I did, what would it mean to do this, how would it affect me, how would it affect other people, it all sums up to how I can read an environment and how can I place myself in that situation.
Neil Jefferies- Was there a conscious development towards more political and confrontational work during this period?
Well that was the environment, when I started travelling and making actions in other places the anger propelled me, probably to be more explicit, I was angry at the English for ignoring the situation, being bored with it, and its reporting of the issues in the media, I guess it did perhaps become more explicit, perhaps, as I say you know, [its so hard to remember] you know I was doing lots of different types of work and Im not shore if I was consciously making it more explicit, I think that was just the condition.
Neil Jefferies-Can you briefly explain how your work began to change when you moved to London?
Well its simply because that formative experience of living in Belfast, when I moved to London in 1980 just became a layer, or imprint on the environment I was in which was London, no matter were I went those issues were transposed, they were dominate issues, though they were not necessarily specific to Belfast, and that is the important point, they are general human conditions.
All I know is that those formative experiences helped to teach me to question the situation, to try and understand the situation, in more generic human terms, I can imprint my experience, or bring my experience to any situation and relate it to that, it doesn't matter if it is China, eastern Europe or south America those issues are still prevalent, the abuse of human rights, the human condition, the search for understanding, love and compassion, these are all very clear human concepts, there all inherent in who we are and what we do, the globalisation of these issues which is entirely contemporary. In reference to [the] tourist which I made in London, some actions had specific relations to Northern Ireland, at that point what was happening in the civil conflict of Northern Ireland was spilling out in in to Brittan as a whole, bombings in London, Birmingham, it was all over the place, the environment I lived in was one in which I was still the outsider, living in a cultural situation. Being labels as Irish whether I was protestant or catholic it didn't matter, my accent gave me away, I had to shut up in a lot of situations in case someone recognised my accent, in London there were still signs that said 'no Irish, no blacks, no dogs', so when you see things like that you can see the prejudices of your own country being transplanted somewhere else, I was still living with the same set of circumstances but in a different environment, those circumstances said a lot about the colonial context in the colonial heartland, the post colonial attitude. It was a layer but then within that there were a number of explicit links made in works. There was 'Duck Patrol' done with Tara as we ran around the streets as British troops there was a lot of fun with that, I remember that action, we did it over a number of weeks, there was a lot of people running about s**t scared all they saw was this flash of something happening, something running past them, and the duck calls, they through something militarily was taking place on the streets of London, there were also guys just shouting at us they were very angry at us. Something like the tourist is probably more about the condition of not belonging I was feeling I was not belonging I was merely a tourist it also dealt with anthropological issues and the ethics of tourism, to do with the early proportion of other cultures, it was about the rank consumerism of the era. All my work reflect the time in which it happens just like now my work reflect the time in which are inhabiting.