Remembering Performance

What's Welsh for Performance?
Beth yw ‘performance’ yn Gymraeg?
aims to uncover and archive the history of Performance Art in Wales

Ivor Davies in conversation with Heike Roms and 'stills from 'Adam on St Agnes Eve', Swansea 1968

At its centre is a series of publicly staged conversations, entitled an Oral History of Performance Art in Wales and funded by the Arts Council of Wales, which is devoted to artists who have shaped this history since the late 1960s. Much of it is currently confined to half-remembered anecdotes, rumours and hearsay - the series uses the primarily anecdotal approach as the starting point for a more reflective "oral history" of performance art in Wales. Extensive documentary material is screened at each event, and artists are asked to explore the disparities between their memories and the documentation of their work. By inviting the artists to articulate their memories in public, often in front of an audience of past witnesses or collaborators, the conversations propose that these artists’ stories are not providing us with the only authoritative version of events but that remembering performance must be a communal effort. And the conversations themselves are, of course, performances that leave behind documents, which in turn become material for the archive.

Heike Roms. Let us start by showing a short film document that was made of the performance in Swansea in 1968. This is an 8mm black and white film without sound, about 5 minutes long. Ivor, could you give us a bit of context for what we are about to see?

Ivor Davies. The performance was called Adam on St Agnes Eve because it was done on Sunday 21^st January 1968 and prepared during the winter of 1967. I generally used to prepare performances quite carefully. Here is a score which lists the sound, the cues, the explosions and the timing of the explosions, the lighting, the projections, the performers, the actions and props, other objects that were used, and then times it exactly. 7.30 it began and 8.05 it was supposed to finish. I wonder if it would work if I said what was happening in the film, oh yes … This is the beginning. 7.30. Recording of birdsong, which I’d taken from the ornithological society, and red and green spotlights on the floor, which give this feeling of a forest. [In response to a performer appearing on screen] I really don’t remember inviting him …

HR. Who was he, do you know?

ID. I don’t know who he was.

HR. But is he in it? I mean he’s naked and painted.

ID. Well he’s in it, yes, but I didn’t ask him to do it. That kept happening - when you tried to organise something very precisely, of course, things like that happen… There’s a large paper screen across the front of this big room in Swansea University. There’s an amplification of silence 10 minutes later and a blackout followed by gunfire and sounds of war and then a tape recording of children playing and also projections on the screen. The white screen had projected on it the details of anatomical figures and of Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve and a nude figure of a girl wheels forward an operating trolley and a man dressed in a surgeon’s outfit [the artist Ian Breakwell] comes forward to cut the screen. Various boxes, some entirely covered with lips, some entirely covered with eyes move around with figures in them – two by two slides are projected on the screen. A pianist enters, sits at a grand piano and plays a chord at the same time as each cut is made and there are three explosions. There are actually all together I think nine explosions, they are carefully punctuated. I think the pianist had red light shining on her and it grows stronger until the fourth explosion. The projector continues to show slides, there are about six cuts made in the screen with a scalpel. The piano continues throughout the performance, lights flash on to accompany the cuts. It’s difficult to read the writing after forty years but these various instruments are handed to the surgeon and the cuts are made to very specific parts of the body, the right arm, the left arm … [Film ends] Well that’s the end of that. It probably sounded as if it was nothing to do with the film but that’s what happened.

HR. You have mentioned explosions, gunfire and cuts. The work that you were making at the time was taking place within the context of what is known as ‘Destruction in Art’. Not really a movement but more a sort of critical gathering of people who were interested in destruction in a broad sense. What was there in the element of destruction that interested you? ID. I had actually been using destructive elements since about 1956 in paintings. I used broken eggshells as part of the surface, which would disintegrate and fall away, and rusting metal.

HR. Destruction in Art was also a very politically aware movement. Gustav Metzger, one of the major protagonists of Destruction in Art, who I know was also influential on your ideas, wrote about how Destruction in Art responded very directly to destruction in society. It was post World War Two, the experience of the Holocaust, which for Metzger was part of his own biography, and also the atomic bomb and the anti-nuclear movement in Britain, all of this created the context in which Destruction in Art arose. Did you in your work also respond to those kinds of political issues?

ID. Well, I did to some extent … I’m trying to really genuinely think what I thought at the time. I think my politics at the time were a bit vague, I think they were more anarchistic than straight left-wing socialism.

HR. You joined the committee that set up the Destruction in Art symposium in London in 1966.

ID. Yes, Gustav and I worked together on that. One of my former students called Peter Holliday took me to see Gustav doing a performance in London in about 1965 I think and I was so impressed by the extreme that he was going to. The performance was a projection of liquid crystals and he had a lot of ideas about destruction that interested me. Peter, who was then a lecturer in History of Art at Ravensbourne College of Art, in March 1966 organised there a small Destruction in Art symposium, which included Mark Boyle, Gustav and me. What I’m trying to do now is to not embellish and I’m trying to avoid vanity and to try to actually tell precise facts but the facts are distorted by memory. Gustav was really central in organising the committee for the following Destruction in Art Symposium in September that year in London and he got a lot of support from artists. In those days people didn’t give financial support for that sort of thing, you’d more likely be fined than get a grant … I was lecturing in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh at the time and I had one or two anonymous phone calls saying how disgraceful the thing was.

HR. There seems to be a big step from doing paintings in the way that you were describing … working with the surface, with the temporality of the materials and how materials deteriorate and so on to actually doing this kind of three dimensional performance with explosives. What interested you about the event structure of these kinds of works? What was it offering to you as a painter that painting wasn’t able to offer you?

ID. It was a kind of fulfilment of a wish I’d had five years or so earlier to try and have a kind of proscenium stage and to have objects coming out into three dimensions and to have movement and struggle and so on. Also before 1966 I used to take the Tulane Drama Review. Mostly it was about theatre but the one outstanding one was the one published in Winter 1965, which was about performance.

HR. It was a special issue on ‘happenings’ wasn’t it?

ID. Absolutely, Kaprow, Higgins, Young, activities, events, all of that. I never read it properly to be honest, I looked at the pictures and I read bits.

HR. So was the encounter with that work mainly through photographs or did you actually see anything live?

ID. No I never saw anything I’m sorry to say.

HR. One of the things about performance is also the way in which it is contingent on the presence of the audience. In these pieces you made we see the audience sitting, watching the performance on stage, so it’s quite a theatrical, spectacular kind of arrangement. What was the relationship with the audience there?

ID. At the time I never thought about it. I thought it would be good to have an audience to watch it obviously but it did come more from a theatrical way of thinking. Also, the other difference between a lot of performance work and what I was doing was that I withdrew physically from the event in order to try and control it. A lot of performance artists placed themselves and their own bodies at the centre of the event but I wanted to be like a painter, or a theatre director or a film director, orchestrating something …

Ivor Davies in Conversation with Heike Roms

HR. So how did the destruction element relate to the world as it were? Did you feel that through these pieces destruction was brought into people’s lives in a more direct way, making the destruction that was all around them more physical as an individual experience for them?

ID. Yes, I didn’t want to make it something which was very obviously narrative, but to make art which went beyond that and suggested many other things. It suggested the idea of the degenerate society, which produced obsolescence itself, the sort of inbuilt obsolescence that Vance Packard writes about in his book The Waste Makers. I think, though, a lot of the ideas occurred to me after the event. There was a more instinctual application of some creative element in building up a sequence of explosions, in seeing a representation of the human body destroyed by explosions and I didn’t plan it out ideologically beforehand.

HR. What really strikes me about this work is that there is a high construction element involved in this so there’s really a tension between this constructed environment that you’re creating every time and the destruction of that environment.

ID. Yes, I was interested in the kinetic art aspect of things and the organic change of creation and destruction and movement and so on.

HR. You made a series of these performances, or experimental theatre pieces as you called them at the time, in the mid- to late 60s, in Edinburgh, Durham, Bristol, and, of course, in London as part of the Destruction in Art symposium in 66. The Swansea event in 1968 then is the first time that you brought this work to Wales. You are from Penarth originally and then went to Edinburgh to work in the university. So how did the invitation to do something in Swansea come about?

ID. John Plant was the person who was organising the students union festival at the university and he’d invited Gustav Metzger to do a piece of sculpture there and then I was invited. There was a very big audience, two or three hundred perhaps. And it seemed to go down quite well because the students were very open minded, interested people. I felt that when I had done my first performance in Edinburgh in 1966 that the people were art lovers and maybe it didn’t quite go down as well with them because the destruction in art might have been confused with the destruction of art.

HR. Although in the Swansea piece you actually do symbolically destroy an art work, although not the original, of course. You have the Dürer reproduction there with a figurative representation of the human body in a way that is very familiar to us through visual art history. So the Dürer is projected and gets cut open by the surgeon and then the real bodies of Adam and Eve step through that.

ID. The real bodies of Adam and Eve are exposed. They just stand there.

HR. So there is an element of destruction, of destroying a painterly figurative representation of the body.

ID. Yes, I suppose there is a virtual destruction of a sort, also of the human body.

HR. One of the things that struck me when we were watching the film of the Swansea performance earlier on is that these 8mm black and white films and also the photographs give a very distorted version of what the event was like. You were describing the symbolic colours you were using and then you see the film, which has a very particular quality in itself, but all of those colours are lost. So a lot of your work from those days has now survived in black and white. Is that something that bothers you?

ID. When I saw the films in black and white for the first time I was very pleased because they’d become transformed into something else and the black and white seemed to make it more dramatic and give it more of a unity in a way.

HR. So does it not trouble you that people are looking at this work from the 60s through that documentation?

ID. Well, there’s not much choice really – and maybe if it could have been better documented it might be slightly less interesting in some ways. It’s like a recording, a sound recording of a piece of orchestral music … it’s from one viewpoint only. Also, I kept all sorts of other things, even the tickets and everything from that event, an obsessive sort of collection of ephemera.

HR. Are you aware of people in Wales responding to this work in the 1960s, having seen it and maybe creating work of that sort in the aftermath?

ID. Absolutely nobody.

HR. Was this then one of the last pieces of this kind that you made or were there any after the Swansea event?

ID. I’d have to look up old diaries for the dates of these things but it was one of the last.

HR. Why do you give it up in the end why did you then move back to painting, to etching?

ID. Several reasons all in one. I think first of all it was quite nerve-racking. Once in Shepherds Bush, I was staying in somebody’s house and I was constructing – this was in 1966 – an organ with organ pipes so that every time I pressed a key an explosion of a different sound would come out and I think the explosive materials I was using were unstable and it began to ignite and explode. So I rushed out into the street and got the fire brigade and they took it away and destroyed it in the arsenal at Dulwich. It was disappointing but there we are.

HR. Do you think that the spirit of the practice – both the interest in time and in the temporality of materials as well as the stance against the timelessness of art, was that something that you carried on in your painting work?

ID. Oh yes, quite definitely. I’ve always been very interested in the actual methods of making paintings permanent and I’ve been fascinated by the chemistry of pigments and the effects they have on one another but I’ve also been interested in the opposite, in how they can deteriorate and how very natural sort of deteriorations can happen, deliberately. In the 2002 Eisteddfod I exhibited a piece which was made of a stretched sack cloth canvas with my grandfather’s shotgun. I sawed a family bible in half and penetrated it with the shotgun. I called it The Writing on the Wall Destruction of Language and Communities and so I was really doing something destructive but more specifically political.

HR. That’s probably the work that most people will associate with you, where destruction becomes then very specifically about a Welsh condition. Were those kinds of issues already informing some of your earlier work in the 60s, which you were doing largely outside of Wales?

ID. It’s very interesting because I’ve always, from the time I was in school, painted subjects to do with Wales. But really it wasn’t until the 60s in Edinburgh that somebody told me ‘you know the Welsh language is in jeopardy, there is a danger of the destruction of the very substance of your thoughts’ … I thought Welsh was a language like any other and people spoke it and I never thought that it would be or could be destroyed. But even then I didn’t do anything about that particular aspect for maybe 10 years I suppose. But I gradually became conscious – the thing that brought it out in me was definitely seeing Paul Davies at the Eisteddfod in Wrexham in 1977.* When I saw Paul holding up the railway sleeper, I thought this is a truly extraordinary person, I thought he really is quite brave and extremely radical because, at that time, Welsh subjects in art were totally unseen and you wouldn’t be able to exhibit them in galleries. So I approached Paul afterwards and I asked him if I could join Beca.**

HR. Beca has probably been the most obvious kind of continuation of the spirit and the political nature of the work that you were doing in the 60s...

To finish, I am very interested in the role of rumours and hearsay in performance history. Many people have told me that Yoko Ono came to Wales once to do an action. People actually remember her arriving in a Cadillac, to do a piece at the National Museum. She worked with you at the Destruction in Art Symposium. Are you aware of her doing anything in Wales?

ID. No, I think it was Peter Jones from the Welsh Arts Council who invited her once. I don’t remember the story very well. But she didn’t come to perform, instead she sent a cardboard cut-out of herself in a taxi and it was then decided to send her a photograph of a cheque.***