“David gives me hope. David is too good and too true to be part of the art world. The world wants to be on holiday...
David is on guard duty... He is hitting the right spots where truth is, where truth is located.”
Richard Demarco, CBE
RESERVED is part self-constructed and part contribution from a live performance, involving a small group of strangers, in front of a larger viewing audience and in collaboration with the wonderful musician Prof John Kenny.
This was my first live performance work which we filmed.
Offering a response to perception and understanding in considering Jonathan Swift’s classic book Gulliver’s Travels.
I asked the performers, whom I never spoke to or met until one hour before the event, to be naked, other than wearing a clown’s mask. Who would feel the greater unease …the naked figure standing before an audience with their face hidden or the individual within the crowd, fully dressed, and exposed to another’s nakedness standing directly before them in public?
When we consider Michaelangelo’s ‘David’, when first presented only a few
short years before the term ‘clown’ was created in the English language and
now five hundred plus years later, some still consider this marble (innocent) masterpiece as being uncomfortable viewing. Yet the highest cathedrals and most regal European palaces have always offered the nude primarily as a symbol of purity, innocence and divinity …and the clown as the jester often to amuse rather than educate or worship. Modern day is the creator in presenting the clown as a threat.
Our protagonist, the clown, takes us on a journey and whose actions suggest considerations of our daily life and the diversity of experience.
The initial installation itself began in a very differently form. A grouping of perfectly regimented chairs all in line, all measured equally apart and facing the same direction except for one chair. This one chair was askew and seemingly out of place, a misfit of sorts, it stood somehow alone amongst equals.
The performance ended in a trail of apparent chaos, scattered chairs, yet the chair that initially stood uneasy in the crowd seems to be only correctly placed and functioning one. How did strangers initially react when entering the room and seeing this apparent chaos of recognizable utilities scattered randomly in a place unexpected. Was this an act of vandalism, was it an accident would it make more sense seeing the walls surrounding the piece offer small prints of a clown …a suggestion of mischief?
The scattered chairs formed a path visitors would wander through, a path strangers have part created and now a still moment resulting from their actions.
PLEASE NOTE THIS FILM CONTAINS NUDITY
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