Active Remains of Performance Art
Performance is identified as ephemeral, momentarily in its make-up, often performed “for one Night Only” a “One Off.”
“You just had to be there” is often the tag line that is uttered as announcement to those who had missed out on ‘being there’ as a first hand witness.
I am rarely a witness I’m often the perpetrator, the activist being witnessed in acts of momentary living.
The annuals of witnesses and documentors accounts is a growth industry, there are probably more witnesses than perpetrators and the perpetrators are gagging to be written about, to be realised, to be immortalised in academic jingo, to be stitched and bound in doctorates and hard back illustrated books, that stack the cyber shelves of Amazon.com.
Or perhaps they are love letters of loss, longing & desire.
Perhaps they are post cards of ‘wish you were here’.
Perhaps they are stories that never would happen.
Perhaps they are words of transportation.
Perhaps they are recipes to assist in the making of beautiful meals.
Perhaps they act as birth certificates to actualise and recognise existence.
Perhaps they are guides through impossible terrains.
Perhaps they are sermons of the unimaginable imagined.
Perhaps they help us to understand.
Perhaps they are manuals for how to remember.
Perhaps
We need to remember.
How do we remember?
What remains but memory translated into words to be re-consumed by eyes and brains?
For tongues to flicker spittle across faces in acts of lectured baptisms of performance faith.
The witness off loads and scribes their accounts, framing the actuality of performance action into another language of “text” that go someway to adding texture to the reality of that which was missed.
What remains for the artist?
I love re-visiting the scene of performance crimes.
My crimes.
I often have to return to re-find, re-locate myself following the complete loss of being that often follows these
adventures into performance.
They are adventures.
Beautiful moments of tranquil meetings
I can hear you breathing gently in the dark
It is for me the most intimate moment of love war and peace
From where I’m standing we’re all in it together.
I have to return
Locate
Lost breath, lost blood, lost memories, lost accounts, lost actions.
It was your story I was telling.
The crime scene often begins empty, sparse, uncluttered, clean, and safe.
Immaculate Zones of potential.
There is an accumulation of sequences, an orchestration of rhythms, the compositional moments and choreographic instrumentation of fragments made into a whole in order to arrive at the point of
END.
Shaping space with a sequence of actions that matter.
It is a form of organic structural construction.
An existence within a multi-dimensional moment out of time
An impossible dance weaved in the silence of the hours before “It’s Show Time”.
Listening to the Beat Beat Boom Boom of every shard of fragmentary moments.
It is for me a “fucking hit”
Transcending survival.
At its best it recounts lost moments of tumbling, splitting, dragging over through in rock in rain in the late 70’s.
Falling like leaded water.
Breath.
Breath.
You
Breath
Dropped
submersion in the heaviest of lost.
What remains?
A blurring of a vague nothing,
Grasping for air,
Ghosts
Knock beat smack havoc trauma skin rock
Knock beat smack havoc trauma skin rock
How far will you go to keep living?
To remember the muscle memory of exquisite pain buried deep.
Are you alive ?
Are you alive ?
Are you alive ?
Placing that emotive actuality into performance space equates to living totally and unanimously on somewhere called
edg e.
‘At times, Mayhew’s work feels like the ‘growing pains’ of a seemingly
liberated generation for whom a sense of personal identity and integrity remained elusive.
What makes his witness of inner turmoil so poignant and powerful is that he
doesn’t opt for an exclusive introspection:
Mayhew’s journey towards self-knowledge encompasses far-ranging
confrontations with social mores at home and abroad –
he puts his emotions and his body on the line in order to challenge complacency and hypocrisy.’
Mary Brennan
There is only now
tomorrow is a frivolous unbalanced point of hope.
There is only now
Breathing.
Now.
What remains?
A blurring of a vague kind of nothing
I wasn’t there
I was there
Elswhere
There – suspended in a series of sequences of hope and communication.
here
It is a breathless form of existence >
Jumping from airborne position / leaping joy liberation freedom spirit
CAN YOU FEEL ME NOW!
Gagging on the air that rushes into your lungs
It’s a form of suffocation
Too much life to swallow
Is there such a thing?
The intelligence of the artist does not build walls to support an argument.
There is no argument.
There is nothing to argue about.
It has all gone into the invisibility of vapour.
The intelligence of the artist does not construct false securities, false positions, or false propositions or a false Babel.
The evidence of something happening is in the remains.
What remains?
Evidence of a performance crime
Where is the artist?
Found in the evidence of performance
The by products –
Remain
‘art’ as place is filled with boxes of
Remains
that I have been unpacking > searching through > seeing >
Living with >
Possibly clinging onto as evidence of an existence I was consciously lost in.
The pre performance time is conscious
It is beautiful
An articulation of the invisible silence that emanate from people, space
and place that enter into a sequence of performance locational patterns, maps, lists, and sequences.
A
translation of energy.
Where is the artist?
Gone
In a presence of “here and now and gone tomorrow”.
What remains?
Boxes of fabricated memories.
In my case a lot of blood soaked items, bottles of piss and shit, clothes saturated in something that was living warm identity.
The Body as fragments
Following the immaculate precision of imagining what could happen
I
Let go of social breeding and survive in the breathing patterns of instinct.
Picking up the pieces to see where I am, where I have been is found in the composition of objects that remain > These are documents of actuality, moments of time framed to generate a poetic performance response to performance art.
They are portraits of a living moment > art performing art >
They are arcane.
They are what remain as a visual visceral recorded account of performance.
They are reflection echoes of an ephemeral act.
They are evidence of a momentary split from time.
They are archives of a visual language visualised and encapsulated.
They are textured rubble re living themselves.
They are documents.
They are removed from the then and enter the now.
They are artefacts suspended as evidence translated into another language.
They are stories to be read by “second degree readers.”
They are to be translated and redefined.
That’s not what I meant.
They are landscapes of the self and the body at war.
They are stories to be read.
They are an objectified commodity to be consumed.
They are to be eye witnessed.
They are vertical not horizontal in their performative character.
They remain still.
They are materialistic.
They are riddled with symbols of a past event.
They are the body immortalised.
They are shameless innocent and actual.
They are a pleasure.
They are made in art.
“You just had to be there” is often the tag line that is uttered as announcement to those who had missed out on ‘being there’ as a first hand witness.
I am rarely a witness I’m often the perpetrator, the activist being witnessed in acts of momentary living.
The annuals of witnesses and documentors accounts is a growth industry, there are probably more witnesses than perpetrators and the perpetrators are gagging to be written about, to be realised, to be immortalised in academic jingo, to be stitched and bound in doctorates and hard back illustrated books, that stack the cyber shelves of Amazon.com.
Or perhaps they are love letters of loss, longing & desire.
Perhaps they are post cards of ‘wish you were here’.
Perhaps they are stories that never would happen.
Perhaps they are words of transportation.
Perhaps they are recipes to assist in the making of beautiful meals.
Perhaps they act as birth certificates to actualise and recognise existence.
Perhaps they are guides through impossible terrains.
Perhaps they are sermons of the unimaginable imagined.
Perhaps they help us to understand.
Perhaps they are manuals for how to remember.
Perhaps
We need to remember.
How do we remember?
What remains but memory translated into words to be re-consumed by eyes and brains?
For tongues to flicker spittle across faces in acts of lectured baptisms of performance faith.
The witness off loads and scribes their accounts, framing the actuality of performance action into another language of “text” that go someway to adding texture to the reality of that which was missed.
What remains for the artist?
I love re-visiting the scene of performance crimes.
My crimes.
I often have to return to re-find, re-locate myself following the complete loss of being that often follows these
adventures into performance.
They are adventures.
Beautiful moments of tranquil meetings
I can hear you breathing gently in the dark
It is for me the most intimate moment of love war and peace
From where I’m standing we’re all in it together.
I have to return
Locate
Lost breath, lost blood, lost memories, lost accounts, lost actions.
It was your story I was telling.
The crime scene often begins empty, sparse, uncluttered, clean, and safe.
Immaculate Zones of potential.
There is an accumulation of sequences, an orchestration of rhythms, the compositional moments and choreographic instrumentation of fragments made into a whole in order to arrive at the point of
END.
Shaping space with a sequence of actions that matter.
It is a form of organic structural construction.
An existence within a multi-dimensional moment out of time
An impossible dance weaved in the silence of the hours before “It’s Show Time”.
Listening to the Beat Beat Boom Boom of every shard of fragmentary moments.
It is for me a “fucking hit”
Transcending survival.
At its best it recounts lost moments of tumbling, splitting, dragging over through in rock in rain in the late 70’s.
Falling like leaded water.
Breath.
Breath.
You
Breath
Dropped
submersion in the heaviest of lost.
What remains?
A blurring of a vague nothing,
Grasping for air,
Ghosts
Knock beat smack havoc trauma skin rock
Knock beat smack havoc trauma skin rock
How far will you go to keep living?
To remember the muscle memory of exquisite pain buried deep.
Are you alive ?
Are you alive ?
Are you alive ?
Placing that emotive actuality into performance space equates to living totally and unanimously on somewhere called
edg e.
‘At times, Mayhew’s work feels like the ‘growing pains’ of a seemingly
liberated generation for whom a sense of personal identity and integrity remained elusive.
What makes his witness of inner turmoil so poignant and powerful is that he
doesn’t opt for an exclusive introspection:
Mayhew’s journey towards self-knowledge encompasses far-ranging
confrontations with social mores at home and abroad –
he puts his emotions and his body on the line in order to challenge complacency and hypocrisy.’
Mary Brennan
There is only now
tomorrow is a frivolous unbalanced point of hope.
There is only now
Breathing.
Now.
What remains?
A blurring of a vague kind of nothing
I wasn’t there
I was there
Elswhere
There – suspended in a series of sequences of hope and communication.
here
It is a breathless form of existence >
Jumping from airborne position / leaping joy liberation freedom spirit
CAN YOU FEEL ME NOW!
Gagging on the air that rushes into your lungs
It’s a form of suffocation
Too much life to swallow
Is there such a thing?
The intelligence of the artist does not build walls to support an argument.
There is no argument.
There is nothing to argue about.
It has all gone into the invisibility of vapour.
The intelligence of the artist does not construct false securities, false positions, or false propositions or a false Babel.
The evidence of something happening is in the remains.
What remains?
Evidence of a performance crime
Where is the artist?
Found in the evidence of performance
The by products –
Remain
‘art’ as place is filled with boxes of
Remains
that I have been unpacking > searching through > seeing >
Living with >
Possibly clinging onto as evidence of an existence I was consciously lost in.
The pre performance time is conscious
It is beautiful
An articulation of the invisible silence that emanate from people, space
and place that enter into a sequence of performance locational patterns, maps, lists, and sequences.
A
translation of energy.
Where is the artist?
Gone
In a presence of “here and now and gone tomorrow”.
What remains?
Boxes of fabricated memories.
In my case a lot of blood soaked items, bottles of piss and shit, clothes saturated in something that was living warm identity.
The Body as fragments
Following the immaculate precision of imagining what could happen
I
Let go of social breeding and survive in the breathing patterns of instinct.
Picking up the pieces to see where I am, where I have been is found in the composition of objects that remain > These are documents of actuality, moments of time framed to generate a poetic performance response to performance art.
They are portraits of a living moment > art performing art >
They are arcane.
They are what remain as a visual visceral recorded account of performance.
They are reflection echoes of an ephemeral act.
They are evidence of a momentary split from time.
They are archives of a visual language visualised and encapsulated.
They are textured rubble re living themselves.
They are documents.
They are removed from the then and enter the now.
They are artefacts suspended as evidence translated into another language.
They are stories to be read by “second degree readers.”
They are to be translated and redefined.
That’s not what I meant.
They are landscapes of the self and the body at war.
They are stories to be read.
They are an objectified commodity to be consumed.
They are to be eye witnessed.
They are vertical not horizontal in their performative character.
They remain still.
They are materialistic.
They are riddled with symbols of a past event.
They are the body immortalised.
They are shameless innocent and actual.
They are a pleasure.
They are made in art.
Images Photographed by
Roshana Ribin-Mayhew
and
Lyndon Lewis Mayhew Dodd
Roshana Ribin-Mayhew
and
Lyndon Lewis Mayhew Dodd