It's a BLOG silly!
Start at the BOTTOM!

Performance: "ENGLANDS"
Old Trafford, Manchester, England UK
April 9, 2007

Well here we are all caught up to the present now. I've been in Manchester now for about a week, staying at Dwanelle's and having a smashing time. Yesterday just for the sheer bloody joy of it I did a three-hour performance about gender issues in sport. I almost called it "Spectacle/Receptacle" but - fuck that - I'm in a good mood these days so ENGLANDS it is for me mate in all their - er - its glory.

Performance: "Tyneside Tease"
Proctoscape Projects, Newcastle, England UK
March 29, 2007

After all the Sturm und Drang I pulled off in Rochdale, I was glad to get a last-minute invite to do something in Newcastle immediately after my residency at CO3 finished up. This was a fun one, just me wearing some teen slag wear, riding the buses all day coming on to men who were with their wives & girlfriends. Just some good clean fun really.

By the end of March I'd gotten into the swing of things & my work was getting more ambitious again. I was still thinking Nordic thoughts, thinking about the north as I'd starting doing in Namibia. I started working with fire again in a big way. At first I was trying to recreate some fires associated with counter-terror activities, ie burning windows of Baader-Meinhoff seige, bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the massacre of Branch Davidians in Waco, but eventually I realized I was aiming for the Ur-counter-terror-drama: the massive conflagration at the end of Lang's Ring Of The Nibelung. I messed up the memory card of my camera and lost most of the photos of these actions. Here's a photo of one of the later ones though - gives you an idea anyway.

Performance: "Trouble At Valhalla Bed-sit"
Chaos Out Of Order, Rochdale, Lancashire, England UK
March 20, 2007
Cardboard, pressboard, illustration board, chalkboards, foxgloves, rosemary branches, legs of mutton, Herb Alberich & The Tannenbaum Brass lps, fire, smoke & petrol.

By early March I'd settled into a routine at CO3, making paintings in the morning, walking down to the veg shop in Ealees to buy some grub for lunch, then a nap & at night I work on some writing or do a simple performance or two. Most of these I didn't bother to document, I think I'm just not so keen on putting every single thing I do under the microscope so to speak. Anyway Dwanelle took one of this perf, one of a series. Love that Patrick McGoohan, eh?

Performance: "The Scarecrone of Romney Marsh"
Chaos Out Of Order, Rochdale, Lancashire, England UK
March 2, 2007
Horses & guns, oh my!

Performance: "A Taste Of Honey" - collaboration with Jake Husko
Chaos Out Of Order, Rochdale, Lancashire, England UK
March 8, 2007
Honeybees, lawn furniture, junk mail, bear scat, silk thread, sterno, rusted iron & Herb Albert & The Tejano Brass lps.

I don't know what got into me, but right after finishing "Safe Harbour" I immediately started painting, which is not something that I generally do. It must have been Bruxi's influence. Anyway I ended up with just a handful of finished ones. Here they are.


All untitled.

Here's the first thing I did at CO3. It's a sequel to the "Distant Shore" observatory I made in Namibia in January (see several posts below) and it's also a tribute to the roots of the English working class, especially The North West Group.

Installation: "Observatory #4: Safe Harbor"
near Chaos Out Of Order art center, Rochdale, Lancashire UK
February 12, 2007
Raw cotton, cotton fabric, wood glue, spar varnish, iodine.

A lot of people have left comments asking to see a photo of what I look like when I'm not making performance art. Well okay I don't know why I'm in the mood to let you see me like this - & I'll probably change my mind later & take this post down - but anyway - here's what I look like - or anyway it was how I looked yesterday. Dwanelle took this shot of me at the park on an uncommonly beautiful day for Manchester this time of year.

I'm just going through my photo files trying to sort them out in order. Here's some casual shots from CO3 - here's a little impromptu barbeque / picnic that was going on when I arrived at the main residence complex. Here's (L-R) Victor Bruxi who's a painter, Jake the groundskeeper, & Dima, the son of the photographer Pic Ho who was also a resident but was leaving the same day I got there.


And here's a photo from late February when some of us headed for the Cotswolds. That's local installation artist Paul Haywood up front, French painter Marie Bisque & Josefina Glum, the performance artist from Leipzig.

Back at the caf, realizing how behind I am with all this, trying to get back into the swing. This might be a little disorganized as I try to catch up as quick as I can. A little random.

Here's a couple poems I wrote - in February I think.

ARGEMONEA

small membraneous scales or bracts
on the receptacle, composite, glume
&c of grasses furnished with chaff,
that part or texture of the ovule
where all the parts grow
together hollowed out like a gutter,
a phrase expressing the essential
marks of species
genus &c
of the texture
of parchment
which distinguish it
from all others

DICENTRA

texture of green grains
in the leaf-cell, exposed
to light, giving color its due,
coloring matter
in plants, especially
when not green,
or when liquid like
eyelashes, fringing, beset
on the margin by bristles
rolled inwards from the top
like crosiers, as the shoots of ferns,
the flower-clusters of heliotrope,
ash-grayish
whence the name and general outline
of a thing divided by a circular line
around the sides and furnished
with a tendril coiling like virgin’s-bower
or like the scar left
by the fall of a leaf

Wow. Sorry for not posting for so long. It was kind of a whirlwind two months in Lancs. at the art center where I was in residence: COOO (or CO3) which stands for Chaos Out Of Order, near Rochdale. I'm just now finished up with my residency & staying in Manchester with my friend Dwanelle and her roomate Antoinette. I met Dwanelle at CO3 during one of the artist talks (not mine) & she invited me. CO3's a billiant place & I did some fabulous work there & everything seemed to make sense for once, but the center itself is a heritage site & there's no internet there, so I couldn't keep up with this blog while I was there. So here I am at Dwanelle's or actually at the local caf where there's wifi. Wifi mofo. Anyway I'm just getting back in the swing of things so I'll start off simple here with a photo of the building I stayed in at CO3:

Today Prof surprised me with a commission invitation he'd arranged for me in England, in Lancashire, a residency at an art center outside Manchester. Well it's not the North Pole but it's well on the way. Here's a snap I took of Prof "re-enacting" handing me the invitation. I think he looks distinguished with his mustache don't you?

Leaving Namibia, I traveled by bus to the Congo, to meet my old mentor, Scott MacLeod, who now owns a small nightclub, La Porte Rouge, in Matonge, a rough suburb of Kinshasa. It's a tiny place that reminds me of something out of a Thin Man film. Nick & Nora, that sort of thing. I made a little musical performance about a fictitious actress named Violette. It wasn't until later, when I saw the photos of this performance, that I realized it had been as much of a love-song to Guy Maddin as it was to "Prof."

Performance: "La Chanson de Violette"
La Porte Rouge, Kinshasa, Republic of the Congo
February 4, 2007
Voice, violin (Elmer Barrow), tape loops

I've been spending every night watching the heavens within (through the perspectives of) my "observatories." The unfamiliarity of the star patterns made me feel "on edge" - literally - as if I were on the edge of the planet. As if everything dropped away from the Namibian shore and into the blackness of deep space. Which in a way it does. It's a kind of vertigo. As if I were standing "upside down" on the planet? Of course not but isn't spatial orientation one of the most basic of learned ideas? I mean, it is learned isn't it? And at a young age, so it's sunk deep in. I still think Mercator even though it's more of a Robinson world now. Up is up.

I always think of the cover of the English version of The Little Prince at times like this. One step and it's all over. It's always frightened me. Now here in Namiba that childhood vertigo is resurfacing, leaving me a little dizzy. Which is funny because I've dyed my hair like Kim Novak.

It's hard to be Causasian and in Namibia and not feel like a movie star (not necessarily Grade A). I wonder if Angelina Jolie's orgasms were more intense here too? I wonder if she kept adopting babies because she was scared for them here? I wonder if giving birth here felt like something was falling off your shore and into deep space?

Every day here now feels like a falling off. I think it's time to leave. I've even made already my good-bye piece. It's about this idea of "north" that I was describing a few days ago. Even with all this other business of babies falling into outer space etc., I've been continually thinking about North. Kind of like a neural Robinson grid overlaid on Mercator synapses.

My good-bye installation consisted of a large oval train tracks, 3km in circumference, on which runs (it's a permanent installation) an old steam engine pulling four railway cars. There is a complicated water-intake system incorporated into the rails and wheels, to keep the boiler full. The power is solar, from special panels mounted on the roofs of the four carriages. The train puts forth a tremendous head of steam and moves very quickly around its closed course, much too quickly for anyone to manage to board the train. Inside each of the four carriages is a complex installation involving film loops, audio, vitrines, relics, bones etc. - installations which no one besides me will ever see. The first refers to Elizabeth Nietzche's Nueva Germania colony in Paraguay, the second to Hendrik Witbooi's theft of Hermann Goering's father's horses, or rather, to Hermann Goering's daydreaming about Hendrik Witbooi's theft of his father's horses, while riding in his private train car. Inside the third car, Jules Verne and Raymond Roussel smoke tobacco, play scrabble, and quietly enjoy their vehicular utopia. The fourth car holds some objects, letters, jewelry and photos that refer to an event in my life that no one but me knows about, something that happened that I chose not to ever talk about. And that, now, of course, no one will ever be able to see.

What people can see is the exterior of the train, speeding in a near-circle day and night, and something else: the entire interior of the oval is covered with oceanic sheet-ice as it cracks upon the shore. It's an entirely Arctic scene inside the time-space vortex created by the rapidly circling train. The reason the ice doesn't melt is that it's all styrofoam, thick slabs of it, several acres worth. Of course it's my appropriated version of General Idea's fabulous Fin de Síecle installation which I saw many years ago, my homage to that piece and maybe more importantly, to Haacke's Germania. General Idea loosed my heart so that it fell away from the shore as I stood there on it, while Haacke - well, did something a little different, a little more cerebral but equally as appreciated. The title refers to the Caryl Phillips novel. These four installations will race pell-mell behind their racing steam locomotive until life slides off the planet and the sun grows dark.

Installation: "Observatoire #3: A Distant Shore"
near Kolmanskop Art Center, Luederitz, Namibia
January 30, 2007
Steam locomotive, railway passenger cars, railroad tracks & ties, styrofoam

Everything has to play itself out eventually, even the body. After I gave up my obsessions with clay skeletons, I staggered around looking for other materials. Anything that didn't require saliva, frankly. I found some rusted things etc and started making these little structures I thought of as 'observatories." In fact I did some complicated math & lined them up so that you can actually predict the movements of celestial bodies. For instance that the sun will come up in the east on such and such a day in 2011, etc.

Installation: "Observatoire #1: Là-Bas: Territoires Inconnus"
near Kolmanskop Art Center, Luederitz, Namibia
January 15, 2007
Oil barrel, found metal objects

Installation: "Observatoire #2: Verschillende Manieren Om Te Kijken"
near Kolmanskop Art Center, Luederitz, Namibia
January 19, 2007
Oil barrel, found metal objects

The harshness of the landscape, and its relative lack of features - by which I mean relative to my own experience - forces me down into my own body like a rodent seeking moisture below the arid surface. The body (and the breath - hot and flat) become central not only to my work but to my - my everything: my thoughts, rants, dreams, day-dreams. It's all blurring, becoming the same. Featureless. Relatively speaking. As the thermometer tops 40 celsius, I start working with a kind of clay, barely an adobe because of the sparcity of even dead vegetation. It is slow and tedious work. There is not enough water to "waste" on something like "art" so I crush the soil by hand and mix it with my spittle. Of which there is little. Only a little spittle. (yes the heat makes things get silly sometimes - or stupid might be better word - anyway thank god for anisette). Obsessed with the body, I make row upon row of these clay "skeleton" sculptures.

Installation: "Lost Ballets (for Antinova)"
near Kolmanskop Art Center, Luederitz, Namibia
January 1, 2007
Dust & spittle, dimensions variable

The "Carry" performance really took me to the limit. It's been taking me a couple months to recover. "Carry" made me think very deeply about the idea of "North." (Isn't that the name of a radio play by Glenn Gold?) I'm still thinking about "North" - all the time, really - even though I'm really far away from the north. In fact I'm at the Kolmanskop Art Center in Luederitz, Namibia. When they offered me a last-minute residency, I thought maybe it would be a good place to continue my recovery from "Carry." But maybe it's too far from the north. We'll see. Anyway it's pretty bleak here. Not much outside stimuli. Quiet time for the soul to recover in.

Performance: "Carry"
near York Creek, Alberta
August 26, 2006

Performance: "Latitude"
Basinski Park
Calgary, Alberta
August 8, 2006

Performance: "Longtitude"
Basinski Park
Calgary, Alberta
July 20, 2006

Performance: "Treatment"
My studio, Calgary, Alberta
June 30, 2006
I've started to make private performances, completely private, just for myself & automatic camera. And this blog I guess. When does the performance actually happen? When I do it? Or when you see a picture of it?

Installation: "Disaspora"
Mary Bethune Art Center, Airdrie, Alberta
May 30th, 2005

Drawing done on KLM flight 1253, Amsterdam to Toronto, April 27, 2005.

I've realized that I miss Alberta. I'm thinking of moving back, maybe this time to Calgary. Here in Hamburg, Spring is starting to crack us all open. It hurts. Now I understand what Eliot meant when he wrote "April is the cruellest month, breeding life-likes out of dead ground."

I'm really getting kind of tired of roaming around Europe, living out of a suitcase, trying to make art that means something. All the festivals & art centers & artists are starting to look alike. I'm just really tired.

Installation: "Scapital Flow"
Hatston Arts Centre
Kirkwall, Mainland, Orkney
March 29, 2005

Installation: "Borderless Europe"
Ausfall 2006
Bremen, Germany
March 17, 2006

Soon after I moved to Hamburg, my mum died.

Following our old family tradition, I wrote down her name on a piece of paper, put it into a jar, in this case an old honey jar, and buried it down among the roots of an oak tree deep in the forest.

I also made an installation for her:

Installation ohne titel
Kunstakademie Stimmersdorff
Breitlingen, Germany
February 26, 2006

Installation: "Hohenfeuer"
In the mountains near Garmisch-Partenkirchen
January 20, 2006
One final installation as a "goodbye" to Bavaria before I moved to Hamburg.

The enthusiastic response to "Echo" kind of drew me back to some of the issues I'd been working through with the "Autistic" performances. I delved back into catastrophe but this time I was interested in something very different, & I explored this by making installations instead of performances.

Installation: "Miserere"
Stadtsbezirkskabinette fur Kulturarbeitbayern
November 5th, 2005



Installation: "Economic Union"
HBK, Waldhaus, Germany
November 10th, 2005
I spent all winter making similar work.

Installation: "Passing Fancy"
Galerie Skoda, Cheb, Czech Republic
December 19th, 2005

Installation: "Konvoi Orion"
Kervinen Centrum, Tornio, Finland
January 11, 2006

Performance: "Echo"
The E533 autobahn, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen
October 14th, 2005
Obviously a kissing-cousin of the "Autistic" series, this was to my mind more political & more formally elegant. The Germans really liked it apparently.

Guess what! I'm posting from Germany!

Thanks to Prof MacLeod's recommendation, I was offered a residency here at the Stadtsbezirkskabinett fur Kulturarbeitbayerne in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

I'd been wandering around Winnipeg sort of semi-stalking Guy Maddin when Prof called me about this. It was a real god send.

They are very kind here & are not upset that I haven't made any work yet. I'm just trying to go slow.

Installation: "The Long Goodbye"
My studio, Grande Prairie
August 31st, 2005
I made one final installation before I moved out of my studio.

I realized that I'd never posted a photo of Professor MacLeod. So here is one I took myself:

Performance: "Flood Stag"
McDonald Art Centre, near Hythe, Alberta
August 16, 2005
I was melancholy, unsure of my next move, sure only that I wanted to leave Grande Praire - & maybe even Alberta! I started thinking about the past year & realized how important Professor MacLeod had been to me - beyond just the work. I decided to make this piece for him - for his eyes only. It was a 24-hour piece & I was in tatters for a week afterwards.

Performance: "Transported"
Ganick's Pub, Grande Prairie, Alberta
July 27, 2005
I also found time to make this performance back home in Grande Prairie. After all the bombastic stuff, it was nice to get back to something really simple. In a way this was a coda to "Landlubber." And maybe a kind of goodbye to Grande Prairie.

July was a busy month for me. I did three performances. Obviously they'd grown out of the "Autistic" series but these were a little different, all land-based instead of vehicle-based. They were static not mobile. Without the trope of the automobile, these became catastrophes for catastrophe sake only - just meaningless events that made a lot of noise & light & put my body at risk.

Performance: "Brink"
Grasslands Center for the Arts
Lethbridge, Alberta
July 8,2005

Performance: "Blowout"
Red Deer Regional Airport
near Red Deer, Alberta
July 12, 2005

Performance: "Not Having A Very Good Day"
Hardcourt Arts Centre, Edmonton, Alberta
July 23rd, 2005
(actually this performance did refer back to the "Autistic" series. I drove an auto into a crane-like structure)

Performance: "Autistic 4"
Widow McDonald's farm, near Hythe, Alberta
June 21, 2005
Maybe it's because Tim pissed me off with his "Ass-tistic" performance, but I really pulled out all the stops on this one. Cow-shit = methane = boom! Who knew?

Tim crawled out of the woodwork last week to do a performance parodying my "Autistic" series. He's just making an ass out of himself & I'm really glad we aren't together anymore.

Performance: "Autistic 3"
Route 27, outside Grande Prairie, Alberta
June 12, 2005
Pablo agreed to help me with this one, but I'm not listing him as collaborator because all he did was follow my instructions & didn't provide any creative input. We managed to total both vehicles.

Performance: "Autistic 2"
Lambert Expressway, Grande Prairie, Alberta
June 5, 2005
I got such a charge out of "Autistic" that I started doing a series of similar works, all exploring the border between control & catastrophe. In this one I set fire to the "fire-retardant" fabric of a rental car while driving in circles around Grande Prairie. This shot was taken (by my new friend Pablo) just seconds before I was forced to jump out of the driver's seat.

Performance/Installation: "Autistic"
Final Project, University of Halibut, Alberta
Eaton Street, Grande Prairie, Alberta
May 22, 2005
I hadn't really spent any time thinking about my final project while I was in bed eating percocets, the deadline just kind of came flying up on me & I realized I needed to do something quick. So this just came to me in a flash. I think it had something to do with my "Landlubber" performance, some kind of psychic residue or something. Anyway my mind just filled with the images & sensations of disaster or disasters. All kinds of disasters: tornados, blizzards, ships sinking, bombs going off etc. Maybe I'd watched too many Guy Maddin movies during my bedridden period, taken too many narcotics, had too close a call with my academic career, I'm not sure. Anyway it just came to me that I was very privileged, being white, able to go to college, living in Canada which is pretty danger free really, having both parents still living & still married, and having a small trust fund so I don't have to work at Javacide. I mean, I really had it made & I instantly knew that I had to let someone rear end me on a freeway off-ramp, I had to to this as my final project, a kind of make it or break it type of thing. So I sent out invitations to everyone saying my Final Project performance was going to be at such & such a place at such & such a time, everyone was supposed to wait in the BP station at the foot of the Eaton Street off-ramp & look up the off-ramp at exactly 4pm.

Somehow I timed it perfectly - I had decided not to try to arrange or control anything - it was either going to work out or it wasn't - make it or break it - and it worked out perfectly - I followed a moving-van type of truck till it started to pull of at the offramp (I picked Eaton Street because of all the truck traffic that exited there) then I whipped around it, driving on the shoulder, sped up ahead of it, let it catch up with me near the bottom of the ramp & then slammed on my brakes, letting the truck smash into the back of my car. Off course the truck was slowing because of the oncoming merge with traffic & because of my earlier reckless driving, so the impact wasn't enough to be fatal for anyone. The truck driver was well-strapped in and, as I had anticipated, never in any real danger. The truck's hydraulic brakes worked well & basically the front end of the truck just squashed down on my hatchback, pretty much crushing it. Everyone was absolutely astonished when I jumped out of the car and took a bow.

Of course there was plenty of controversy, but the police couldn't really prove anything, technically the truck driver was at fault for rear-ending me & was happy enough that I (a) didn't sue him (he was an independent operator) and (b) paid him cash for repairs to the minor damage done to his truck bumpers & brakes &c. The University administration was furious but based on the strength of Professor MacLeod's arguments (it turns out he is much more famous & influential than I'd thought!) they allowed this to stand as my final project & - after I finish my incompletes this summer, I'll be able to graduate.