When someone throws out that term, they are are speaking of the toil and expression of Rock Stars, Broadways Dancers and aging Stuntmen. Of Actors, Stand-Up comics, Trapeze Artists and Lion Tamers. Perhaps you may be a little bit more pretentious than your neighbor and you term 'Performance Art' as differing from the more mainstream 'Performing Arts'. You would then only use the 'Performance' term to refer those (supposedly) avante-garde and (supposedly) intellectual 'happenings', that range from public poetry readings and naked gardening, to Street-Theater and suspending one's self in a clear perspex box for a week. Even the fool standing right now at the entrance to Covent Garden Market, painted entirely in grey and frozen in a pose whilst he waits for someone to throw a Pound at him so he can reward them with the amazingly complex and brilliantly challenging action of moving an arm or some such shit, is a Performance Artist.
I don't limit my examples to such boundaries. I believe all Artists are performers. I believe all Artists need someone to observe their creation; someone to express to and someone to effect. Therefore, there is no Art without Performance.
Over the past 100 years or so, many greater minds than this here waiter have questioned and challenged the age old question 'What is Art?'. From Dali and Duchamp, to Man Ray and Warhol and across to Basquiat and Banksy, you could find far more complete theories and examples of answers to that question than anything I could provide you with. However, what I am confident in is my opinion that regardless of whether you do or do not appreciate or enjoy someone's oil on canvas or another's formaldehyde shark, they need an audience and it's reaction to their work to truly feel they are expressing their Art. Even in the act of creation, the Artist is always conscious of and working to and for an audience. He or she imagines how others might perceive and react to his or her provocations and imaginings.
I am currently working on a book. Sure, it's not something I am embarking on with a view towards a career or source of income, but I would really like it to be read. As i am particularly more egotistical than the next fellow, I hope and believe it to be worthy of visual study by a good number of people. Even in several languages. I (and perhaps my Grandmother too) really do think I'm that good.
But i digress.
I don't aim for the book to be finished for a while. Certainly, the disaster that will become known as The 2012 London Olympics, will have been and gone before I am close to completion. But, I really want to perform My Art for you. The problem is that a book is only truly expressed in it's entirety, yet I really want to show an audience something now.
Well, here's my solution: I'm going to perform some it for you now.
'Don't Wanna Go Home' is essentially a mosiac of short stories that link up with each other in order to create one larger novel. It is told in the first-person and reads somewhere between a Travel Journal and a Memoir. However, it's a fictional, narrative, love story, that's happens over the course of an eight year period. I'm going to share one of the early short stories with you. I have just recently completed this chapter that occurs somewhere in the first third of the book. I have already shown it to a few folk, so if you've already read it, I'm sorry to repeat. As the book jumps around in time, each chapter is titled with the year it occurs in, so as to help the reader with context. The book begins with a short introductory paragraph that works as a sort of disclaimer. I've included it here.
Don't Wanna Go Home
This is not a memoir. Neither a biography nor written documentary. This is a love story. A work of fiction. Personal knowledge or recognition of any of the following people, places, events or stories as actually existing or occurring in the authors 'real life', is purely coincidental.
2001
We always had music on. If you heard us, you may not have said it was at an extreme volume, but to us it was loud enough. The weather and nature dictated what we played. The gambit of styles and genres could be quite wide, however the climate outside and our response to it at that precise moment, informed the album selection.
It had rained non stop for three days. Not a drizzle, nor a wavering and cursive weight of downfall. It had rained a heavy, firm, full and total deluge for 72 hours. Without pause. On the fourth morning I awoke to a sun high and alone in a clear sky. The rainforest that extended from the beach’s edge, right up to where our driveway curved around the back of our home on stilts, was still displaying the tell tale, soggy signs of the flooding that had just passed through. The rain must have only ceased a few hours earlier and the sun would need more time yet to dry up.
My head still foggy with sleep, I wandered out to the balcony over the garage and stared mindlessly at the dense and lush green spread out in front of me. Half imagining steam rising off the ferns and short palms, one first thought pushed through clear :
“Mushrooms! Perfect mushroom weather.”
Almost too perfect.
Armed with this introduction of the meteorological character, you will understand why we were blaring a particular Dylan live album, recorded in Paris in the lateish 70’s. It has a ‘sun shining through after a dark thunderstorm’ quality to it. To us anyway.
There was four of us and said Dylan album packed into the rented Japanese hatch-back. I knew where I wanted to go. I just wasn’t sure how to get there. I had been taken there by a long-term local to pick Magic Mushrooms a couple of months earlier. He was the one who taught me how to identify the so called Gold-Tops and the climatic conditions they loved the most – wet or dewy ground sweating under a steaming morning sun.
I was certain I’d recognise by sight the patch of rolling hillside and tiny creek dribbling over rocks at it’s foot. There aren’t many roads that snake around behind the town on the mountain-rise named Bangalow, so if we drove around patient enough, we’d stumble upon it.
Live at Budokhan comes as a two CD set. It took us as long as the double album to find the public grazing spot we were looking for. Not that long at all.
Seated next to me, on the cramped back bench-seat, was The Babysitter. In the front and driver seats of the little Honda was a couple of Jewish Hippies from down south. They were far more befitting of Byron Bay than us. The Babysitter and I were just irresponsible. They were irresponsible and spiritual. The archetype of the town’s ethos.
I’d known them both since the first day of school. When I looked at them, I thought only of the good school memories. The times we laughed. Really laughed. Probably because we were subjected to so much mental strain and constraint, when we released we really let ourselves go. In retrospect, it’s impossible to tell if we were actually as supremely and intellectually witty as we imagined ourselves to be. But, even just glancing at them now, years after we had left that place for good, I still filled with the same careless warmth of rocking back on a rickety old wooden school chair and howling until my sides hurt. All it took was one word, snapped out in some indistinguishable Eastern European accent and we’d be set off again and again.
I liked hosting them. So did The Babysitter I think. We felt privileged to live in such a desirable location, nestled around the outlays of Byron. The small jut out on the Northern New South Wales Coast always seemed to have less of a supply of rooms and camping spots than a hungry tourist demand required. It felt good to be the ones on the inside, connected, with our names on the guest-list. Like the town, we did not have as much room as was requested. So one of the boys ended up pitching a tent on the patio extended sideways from the living room, whilst the other slept on the couch. They infected us with their adventure/vacation spirit and for the whole two weeks they were up, we felt as if on holidays without having to leave our own house.
“This is it!” I yelled over the closing strains of The Times They are A-Changin
The Hippie driving pulled the car off to the side of the red dirt road. The tiny, trickling creek I had been searching for, was now a gushing, crystal clear, 20-foot wide river. It came as a bit of a shock at first. Other than The Babysitter, none of us were what you could call ‘In touch with nature’. Obviously such a three day deluge would fill and widen the creeks and alleys through the valleys. Obviously, something as extreme as the just passed downpour would have an extreme consequence. Obviously, this works as a metaphor for life itself, but as I mentioned earlier, all of us were on the extreme side of irresponsible and not the greatest at recognising consequence.
A solid concrete, one car lane wide causeway draped over this newly gushing river. On one side of the water was dense scrub, sprawling up a hillside. The other was lush, green meadow, pushing up into a triangle point where the road extended in a S-Bend around from the overpass. The surrounding hilly terrain created an amphitheatre effect, with the clearing of this little meadow being it’s stage in the centre.
A sign beside where we had pulled the car over, announced the patch as being a “Public Grazing Spot”. I’m not sure how one would have brought cattle here to graze – other than marching them directly down and around the road from somewhere beyond. Neither, being somewhat new to Country-Life, did I even understand the need for a public grazing spot. Where I had come from, if you didn’t have somewhere to house you wares, you didn’t have any wares. Regardless, this sign did serve to reassure us that we were not to be trespassing on any individual’s property and, as such, there would be no sudden appearance of an irate farmer, brandishing a shotgun and red face and shouting obscenities. Exactly like what had occurred on our last little expedition a week earlier.
The sun was hot and high by now and the cool, clean waters of the river ever so inviting. We stood leaning over the low, wooden post and wire fence that buffered the meadow from the road. It was The Babysitter who first, slipped through the steel wires, floated down the ascent in her pure carefree way and in one fluid motion, de-robed and plunged naked breasts first into the rushing, chest-deep waters. The two hippies, mouths part ajar, eyes alight with bemusement, turned to circumspect my reaction. I shrugged, mumbled something about ‘Byron-Style’ and leapt over the fence following her example into the water.
All four of us splashed around for an hour or so, completely forgetting the whole aim of our sound-tracked car ride. Previous to my exodus up north, i had been an incessant talker. Whether reminiscing and predicting or opining and rebutting, i could go on non stop for days. The visitors from whom i was, had re-awoken this increasingly dormant aspect of my personality. The babysitter was our collective, quiet and observing audience and in those revitalising waters we took turns to perform as orators, historians and storytellers for her.
This would have gone on all afternoon if i wouldn't have spotted that first Gold-Top, erect and proud, growing out of a small mound of cow dung by the creek's edge. i shouted across to the others and in an instant we remembered our mission.
Picking mushrooms is an immediately nostalgic experience. No matter what age one is, the wonder and joy of coming upon one or several of those tiny fungi sprouting up, drives one into a childlike state. Imagine telling a 7 year old that you've hidden chocolate around the house and whatever she finds she can eat. That type of slightly muted hysteria that grips her is exactly the same that's fueled every picking trip I've ever been on. Only afterwards, after the spoils are brought home, does one return back to an adult consciousness. Hence the 'Immediate Nostalgia' that it brings on - one feels a distant memory warmth for something that only happened minutes earlier.
In my experience, before and since, if one whole day of searching were to find us a dozen mushrooms - which would be enough to keep four folk like us amused for a couple of days - this would be considered a very successful day. Some days you could drive around from previously proven hunting ground to the next and find nothing at all. Well, this day was to be a day like no other. They were everywhere. Each step we took, resulted in a discovery of another couple of mushrooms. we spread out over the meadow, lost in an unconscious, manic delirium. If i tell you that we pulled out twenty mushrooms each, you'd never believe me.
"Twenty mushrooms each?" you'd ask, "What would you do with that many mushrooms?"
Good question. One we were circled around pondering ourselves. As we stood there, gazing out at the dozens upon dozens of still unpicked mushrooms surrounding us, i noticed a thin, fallen twig slowly moving towards us.
"Brown Snake! Brown Snake!" I shouted.
The others turned to where i was pointing and we all turned back to eachother for a split second pause. Silently, our collective adrenaline levels rose and peaked even higher than it had been coursing moments earlier. With an almost audible explosion, we bolted in a deranged sprint up the incline. Somehow, we all leap the fence and piled back into the car.
Four pairs of shifty eyes flickered around the hatch-back, all waiting to see who would break the silence. It was The Babysitter who burst out laughing first, but we all followed close behind. One of The Hippies started the car and we drove off with a shopping bag full of bounty, but leaving an enormous amount of unpicked treasure behind us.
Mother Nature had sent us a small, slithering and deadly sign that we had taken all we had needed and that we should leave the rest. That's a line from 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. The Last Waltz was the album that took us home.
