The Blindboy Podcast - Jolly Fauntelroy

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

A history of performance art, Coffee, Toilets Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ja bless you bousy goals. What's the crack with ye? Welcome to episode 32 of the Blind Boy Podcast. Em, what am I doing right now? I've got a sore hand. I inadvertently pierced my palm the palm of my hand with a canary island date palm with the fronds of a canary island date palm which is a it's a house plant that I bought for the studio area I mentioned a few podcasts back

that I want my studio to look like a cross between. Blade Runner and the film Naked Lunch. So I was trying to. Imbue. My studio with a Naked Lunch vibe. By purchasing. A Canary Island date palm. Which.

I don't know. It's a type of. It's a palm tree. Commonly used as an indoor house plant. It has air purifying properties. But this palm tree, they grow to about 5 feet indoors in Ireland. But in hot countries like, they're as common as sycamore. But they're protected by very sharp fronds and I bought this canary

island date palm in home base a few weeks ago and as soon as I got it home it started kind of dying it started going brown and flaccid so after a few weeks I'd had enough of this and I was like I'm going to rescue this prick of a plant this palm so I decided I'd had enough of this and I was like, I'm going to rescue this prick of a plant. This palm. So I decided I'd move it to a larger pot. And as I reached down to its trunk to transplant it, one of its gowly fronds pricked into the palm of my hand rather deep. You know, it was a strange little pricking. You know, very, very precise,

like a porcupine spine, straight into my skin, about an inch, and then straight out, no blood, no nothing, so I just have a dull ache, in my hand,

so that was the podcast, I'll see you all next week, I jest, you cunts, if you're listening to this it's coming quite means it's coming quite close to the 25th of May 2018

unless you're listening to this in the future which is quite possible on the 25th of May we are having a referendum in this country to repeal the 8th of May, we are having a referendum in this country to repeal the 8th Amendment to hopefully allow for free, safe, legal abortion.

So this is my final plea on the podcast. Get out there and vote on the 25th of May to repeal the 8th Amendment. Please do that. And while I have you. I'm going to promote a gig.

Em. I'm doing a rubber bandits gig. In Waterford. In the Theatre Royal. On the 22nd of June. And. Just come along to that. Because that's probably the only.

Rubber bandits music gig. that I'm doing this summer, to be honest. The rest of the gigs are podcast gigs. But, I'm just kind of, I'm resting the music gigs for a while, you know. Haven't done one in a while, to be honest. Getting too much crack out of writing books and podcasting.

But 22nd of June, Waterford. along so I've been an unmercifully busy fucker um the past week or so because I'm absolutely conkers deep in writing my second book which is thrilling, fucking thrilling experience, I love it, but it's also mentally draining, you know, I'm, I'm on a few thousand words a day, you know, I did 6,000 words last weekend, and yeah, it's, it's, it's mentally and spiritually draining, but not draining in the exhausting way it's not a negative thing it's more like

if you went for a mad run you know if you went for a mad run and you just feel satisfied but noticeably tired because you just ran so that's where my head is at

I'm gagging for a bit of video games, to be honest. I'm dying to play some fucking video games. I haven't sat down and played a decent video game in a year and a half. You know, I haven't, not a bit of Grand Theft Auto or something like that. Haven't done it in a fucking year and a half. But,

you know I talk about writing quite a bit and the process of writing and my own process not just writing any type of creativity and it's mad how you know I write from a state of flow which means that ideas arrive to me autonomously from the my unconscious mind but these ideas have their roots in maybe things I've read or learned or experienced from before I call this practice feeding the unconscious if you're a creative person do not beat yourself up over taking a day off to read something or watch netflix because that enjoyable experience will eventually end up influencing your work in some way but anyway this is the point i'm getting to i think on was it the first ever podcast i

think possibly the first ever podcast i think I could be wrong I read out a story that I'd written from my my book called did you hear about Erskine Fogarty um if you have not heard that first podcast I'm gonna spoil the plot for you now so yeah I'm gonna spoil that story so if this is the first podcast that you're hearing please go back to the start unless you want that story spoiled but for everyone who has heard that story Erskine Fogarty

allow me to spoil it for you it's just it's about a fella who called Erskine Fogarty who has a bit of an existential crisis but his way of controlling the chaos of his life called Erskine Fogarty, who has a bit of an existential crisis. But his way of controlling the chaos of his life is to build a raft made out of facts, made out of information.

You know, it's a wooden raft made from a couple of sheds, and he writes facts on it. And then at the end of the story, Erskine Fogarty just enters his raft on a river in the hopes of sailing out onto the Atlantic and when I wrote that a year ago or whatever I was like fucking hell where did that come from you know what part of my unconscious did that come from and I came across a story uh this week well not a story a real thing that happened and i'd heard about i'd read about this fella years ago and i realized

that must have been the inspiration for fucking erskine fogarty's fact raft and it's a fella who goes by the name of what was his fucking name Bas Jan Ader B-A-S-J-A-N-A-D-E-R and he was an artist specifically he was

a conceptual artist and a performance artist now that's the type of art that most people when they see it they go, fuck that, this is not art, this is nonsense bullshit. But one thing about art that you have to remember, which is very important, art is, art doesn't have to please you you know specifically modern art art isn't about aesthetic beauty art is about post-modern art it's about creating conversations it can be about pleasing somebody it can be about confusing someone it can be about angering somebody it's about eliciting a reaction and for that

reaction to spark conversations about humanity or society or whatever but anyway this jan aider led who would have been operating around the late 50s early 60s was a pioneer of conceptual and performance art. He was Dutch and his parents were, his dad was a Calvinist minister and during World War II, his family kind of secretly provided refuge for Jews when the Nazis were hunting him down in the Netherlands and eventually his dad was caught and brought out into the woods

and executed by the Nazis for harbouring for saving Jewish people and Van Ader's work or Jan Ader's work it's incredibly sad he would deal

you can look back retrospectively It's incredibly sad. He would deal... You can look back retrospectively and say that a lot of his work was about the theme of mental health. One of his most famous pieces is called I'm Too Sad to Tell You, from the early 60s. And it's a three minute, silent, black and white video of just him crying and a few photographs along with it and postcards that he sent to his friends and the inscription on it is I'm too sad to tell you and the purpose of that piece is just um and I say purpose and not meaning, because, you know, what is, you know, you don't really, there's no meaning, but the purpose of it is to elicit a conversation around, a very human conversation around sadness.

I mean, it's fairly blunt. I'm too sad to tell you, and it's just a video of a dude crying. And the art is the conversation of, you know, why does this make me uncomfortable? and the art is the conversation of, you know, why does this make me uncomfortable? Do I want to ask him? Do I know anyone else in my life who's like that? That type of stuff, you know? That conversation becomes the art.

Because in postmodern art, meaning is no longer in the authority of the artist. Meaning occurs kind of somewhere in the space between the artist and the observer. This was summed up nicely by Roland Barthes. He wrote an essay called The Death of the Author, which explores that theme, that the author no longer exists because the audience can create multiple meanings.

Therefore, what the author themselves say it means is irrelevant in a postmodern society. But what got me thinking of van eder and how he relates to that story of erskine fogarty like sadness was it was a central theme to his work um some people often wonder people often wonder was you know his own mental health or a desire for suicide a central theme to his work because some of his pieces um as a performance artist he would record it via photograph so the art would be the performance but the recording of it was mainly photograph occasionally video for his later stuff but like he has a piece where he's sitting on a chair and it's balanced on a roof of a house and he allows himself to fall off

it or another piece where he's kind of hanging from the branch of a tree until his strength falls and it drops into a stream or he steers a canal into a bicycle and this is a theme in his work where forces of nature eventually drag him down right but what van Ader is most kind of famous for is his final piece of work that he did whereby as an act of conceptual performance he wanted to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Cape Cod to England which is a phenomenally long journey right that is nuts but he wanted to do it in the smallest boat that had ever embarked on that journey homemade boat as a piece of art so he did 1975 so he hopped onto the 12 foot boat on his own he had a radio on it I believe

and was kind of contacting back or whatever but after 3 weeks he completely disappeared 1975 disappeared and the boat itself was found a couple of months later off the coast of Ireland. South West Coast.

Which is... South West Coast would be down the Waterford direction, you know. And he was never found. And to this day... Nobody knows what the intention of that performance was. Did he truly intend to sail to England on this tiny boat as performance art? Or was his final piece of work

his suicide at sea? And we'll never know. We'll never know what the case was because all you've got is an empty boat and that's what i think i read about him a couple of years ago and my story erskine fogarty where he goes off into the atlantic on this homemade raft i do think it was inspired where he goes off into the Atlantic on this homemade raft I do think it was inspired by

fucking Jan Ader you know so I just want to remember him in that moment em cause that's how the unconscious creeps up on you

I would have taken a day off to do go on a Wikipedia haul or a bit of reading two three years ago and then goes deep into my unconscious creeps back up to influence a story a couple of years later and I'm not even aware of it it just feels right

in my heart in the moment of flow so what I want to talk a little bit about this week I think is performance art and conceptual art because if you've been listening to this podcast a while you know i like to democratize art because art is seen as for good reason seen as very inaccessible and highfalutin and up its own arse and it can make people quite angry because art can make if you're uninitiated and you don't have the language or you haven't studied it sometimes people just it makes people feel excluded

and stupid and angry and it shouldn't do that and part of the reason that art does that is because of the often unnecessarily verbose language around how it describes itself

I never see the fucking point in that I like socially engaged art, I like art that speaks to everybody and there's wonderful great fruits of the mind behind what we would see as the most inaccessible art if

it's just spoken about in a different language. What I love about performance art in particular is it's a response to capitalism in art, right? When you see fucking, you know, a painting there by the artist Amedio Modigliani, who's a fucking fine painter, it sold there a couple of weeks ago for about 160 million. And most people look at this and go, why are these paintings selling for millions and millions and millions? That's not really art. That's the art world, which is separate to to art that's commodification of art that's something so rare that it has value and the people who are spending this money a lot of them are doing it for like tax write-offs if they're not doing it for tax write-offs

it's a snobby rich people right rich people who want to have status amongst other rich people right rich people who want to have status amongst other rich people it's kind of like anybody can buy a Ferrari but not everybody can buy taste and that's often what fuels the art world but performance art

is a direct rebellion against that type of excessive capitalistic commodification of art Is a direct rebellion. Against. That type of. Excessive. Capitalistic commodification of art. Because you can't buy a fucking performance. You can't buy a performance. You can't sell it.

So what that does. Is it allows the artist. To take. Ownership of art itself. Because it can't be bought and sold. How do you buy. Someone going onto a fucking raft and disappearing

you know and it's art because the art the artist says it is art the context and intent of it the closest kind of most people have seen there was a documentary on Netflix called The Artist is Present.

And the most famous performance artist in the world, I would say, is Marina Abramovic from Serbia. And she is the subject of the documentary The Artist is Present. It's a retrospective of her career. If you haven't seen The Artist is present on netflix or whatever get a squint at it it's fantastic um marina abramovich's most prominent piece of work or most prominent performance is one called rhythm oh i think it was in the 1970s. In the early positive, it was the 1970s. But what she did is,

you can also call it Rhythm Zero, by the way, but I call it Rhythm O because I'm from Limerick. But what Marina Abramovich did in this performance piece, she went into a gallery, right, in Naples, I believe it was, and stood in her regular clothes, like all black. In front of her, she had placed 72 objects on a table. And they were like, there was perfume, there was bread, there was scissors, a scalpel, a metal bar. There was a gun and a bullet.

And she just stood there. Right? With no kind of... For as long as she wanted, she just stood there. And the audience were invited to do with her as they pleased using the objects. Right, she placed instructions on the table. It said, there are 72 objects on the table. You can do with me as you please. I am the object.

During this period, I take full responsibility. And it was six hours, actually. It was a six-hour durational piece. So over that six fucking hours the visitors interacted with her body and they started off being gentle touching her tickling her with the feather and she would not react you. Then kind of smearing her body in honey and then, you know, using the scissors and the scalpel to remove her clothes until she was more or less in the nip. Doing all sorts, you know.

Until eventually somebody, a member of the audience, put a bullet into the gun and pointed it directly at her temple at which point the somebody intervened and the the piece was over that was it and what you have there is that's participatory art that's what you don't know what the fucking what the art is you know you do not know what it is the audience and the artist the artist says i am the art is, you know, you do not know what it is, the audience and the artist, the artist says, I am the art, I am the object, the audience create the art there, the conversation, it's about morality, it reminds me personally of the Stanford prison experiment, which was an experiment done in Stanford University on human morality,

where they got one group of students, they created a fake prison, and they got one group of students to be prisoners, and another group of students to be prison wardens. And I think within a week it descended into chaos, and one group of students were being physically abusive to the prisoners because they'd been dehumanised. And that's the conversation around Abramovich's piece that's why that is art do you get me and when you're thinking of art too think of art as what art can do and why it's important is it's a way of having a conversation

about society humanity whatever but doing it without words doing it in a different way doing it in a way that subverts spoken language to reach different emotional parts of ourselves. If you just had a thought experiment using language or a debate, if the debate was what would happen if a woman stood there with a load of objects and people had to interact, you're just thinking about it, that's a thought experiment, but art puts that into practice. And through using actual human participation

in the controlled kind of environment of a gallery, you get much more complex answers and conversations and results. That's why art's important. But the value of rhythm O, rhythm zero, for me, it's a participatory piece that can't be bought or can't be sold and it it questions what what what is what is society you know what are the rules of society what is kindness within society how far will people go and the answer is someone would put a fucking gun to her head if permission is allowed and if you you could be sitting back there going that's fucking mad how is that art but that does

what i would say in 1970s what a painting can't do maybe a painting could have done that in 1913. But like when Picasso exhibited his piece Garnica, which was a grotesque representation of the bombing of Garnica during the Spanish Civil War, there were riots. Because there was no media. Lads, there was a fucking riot in London when a man wore a top hat for the first time.

Because there was no media, this was really shocking, but in 1970s it can't, because society had developed, we had media, and it, for me, it's just a fucking, it's a very harsh comment on it, when you think of things like society's kind of entitlement and dehumanization of women's bodies and you know abramovich herself explicitly i am the object she has dehumanized herself in that language to possibly trigger dehumanization in the people participating with her but also it's a frightening probing question into genocide

do you know I'm always rattling on about Sigmund Freud's book Society and its Discontents where he tried to understand how genocide happens or other studies into we'll say the Holocaust we'll say the SSocaust we'll say the ss are not even the ss

the regular german soldier these people in their thousands committed psychopathic acts of violence against jews and it was one of the most horrendous spectacles of recent human memory. Not every single one of those SS guards or German soldiers were psychopaths from birth. Not even a lot of them would consider themselves to be bad people. Freud would say that there's a very evil darkness in all of us that gets released once we can dehumanize the other person right remove their humanity therefore they become an idea and you can do whatever you want to an idea and also various levels of permission crowd mentality humans will if the crowd doesn't moderate the general behaviour humans will descend into violent chaos

if the person beside you is kind of going yeah that's ok, what about this yeah I suppose that's ok and what about that, yeah fuck it that's ok and what if I put this bullet in this gun and put it to her head and then finally someone

said no that's not okay and the piece was over that's why that's art that conversation and i'm not excusing the fucking nazis there by the way and what i'm trying to point out is that you know psychology probes into the darkness in humanity itself not just the minority of genuine psychopaths it is the capacity for psychopathy within all humanity carl jung called it the shadow side and the importance for all of us to take ownership and recognize the shadow within us so that we don't unleash that chaos. So that we can self-moderate when shit goes mad and there's a group mentality. And not all performance art is

kind of as frightening and as harsh as we say something like Rhythm O by Abramovich. There's wonderful absurdism too. And humour. The artist Joseph Buys, who is a gas cunt. He's got a beautiful piece called Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare. Where he, it was again mid-se-70s he just got this big giant glass box in a gallery and put a lot of honey all over his face and covered his entire head in gold

so he just had this golden mask and then had a dead hair and did this very long performance piece the observer is outside the box looking in and it's just this man with a golden head explaining like the history of art whispering it into the ear of a dead hair the hair's like a rabbit i had to explain that there now i'm not assuming you're thick it's just that if it was on a page you'd see that it was spelled H-A-R-E. So over the podcast, I'm going to point out that a hare is a rather large rabbit, and Joseph Buys had his head covered in gold, and he was whispering into its ear. He also had a lovely piece, and again, you see the evidence of the humour in it. The piece was called I Like America, and America Likes Me.

And he'd never been to America right ever and they were you know he was making tracks and making a bit of noise so the Yanks were like come on over and do a show in New York Joseph will you so he was like I will I will but he obviously had a kind of a contempt for America you know he's German and it's the 70s and he had a contempt for America so I don't think he wanted to actually be there, so what he did is he flew to Kennedy Airport where the second he got off the plane he was met with a stretcher and he was covered in felt like a carpet, his feet never touched the American soil, so he was taken by stretcher immediately to a gallery in New York and for three days in the gallery space it was him covered in felt with a fully wild coyote which is like

a small American wolf but a wild dangerous fucking. And boys stayed in the space, just him and the coyote, and kind of preserving himself, you know. That's genuinely dangerous, you know. You don't know what, that coyote could go nuts. The coyote could decide to ravish him. So boys, you know, kept himself safe, but also communicated with the coyote.

And at the end of the three days, it ended with Joseph Boise and the wild coyote actually becoming like friends. And once that finished and him and the coyote banded, he was loaded onto a stretcher, taken to the airport, flown back to Germany. And he never once set foot on american soil and never returned so that's some proper gascuntism and you know from my caravaggio podcast i adore painting and i'm not shitting on painting but that joseph boys piece you know that speaks to me that speaks to my sensibilities i i enjoy that that excites me and if you're wondering like how does art go from you know painting and sculpture to that type of madness and in my opinion it can all be traced back to dada

and i've spoken about Dada at length because I think it's the most important art movement of the 20th century and Dada started started with a man and a woman a husband and wife

I suppose Hugo Ball and Amy Hennings in around 1915 1916 with the opening of

a thing called the Cabaret voltaire in switzerland now 1916 you know height of uh world war one so switzerland was neutral so a lot of artist refugees from europe got the fuck out of where they were and went to Switzerland. So you had a huge concentration of highly creative people from Europe in one space at once. And the whole crack with Dada as a movement was, it was, you know, a purely modernist, almost post-modernist movement. It was a response to the irrational madness of world war one which was the first industrial machinated war whereby hundreds of people could be killed at once with a machine gun or a bomb or gas and the world had never seen this this was so irrational that

the data movement said art is on hold we cannot paint anymore how can we paint how can we write poems how can we communicate meaning through beauty or terror when the world itself is so irrational so we must only respond with utter irrationality and silliness and that's what dada was so cabaret voltaire it was like this mad lunatic theatre. Where anything could happen. But. Often what they found with performances. At the Cabaret Voltaire.

Is the audience. Would get so enraged. And pissed off. At how absurd the performances were. That they'd just throw things at the actors. And. That would become kind of the artwork, the anger of the audience. The audience would rush the stage.

And the Dada movement started to notice, this is participatory art. It's not necessarily the performance that's the most exciting part. It's the audience getting stuck in and losing the rag. And it takes me to a spectacularly boiling hot take that I have that I expressed on an earlier podcast. The Data Manifesto was published

one month after the... It was published in Zurich, but one month after the 1916 Rising in Dublin. And I like to view the Irish 1916 Rising as an unintentional, large-scale, site-specific data performance piece because of its sheer irrationality. Large scale. Site specific. Data performance piece. Because of its sheer. Irrationality.

This was. A spectacular. The 1916 rising. The GPO setting in particular. Was a deliberate. Spectacle. Of. Failure. It was supposed to fail.

Padraig Pearce called it blood sacrifice it was a ragtag group of untrained Irish citizens rising up against the most powerful army in the world knowing they're going to fail and doing it in a post office The most powerful army in the world. Knowing they're going to fail.

And doing it in a post office. A phenomenal. Bizarre. Irrational act. As a response. To the phenomenally bizarre irrationality. Of British occupation. And the irrationality of the 1913 lockouts, you know,

and that's a hot, hot, hot take, hot take, but it's the type of thing that keeps me awake at night, I cannot stop thinking about, the 1916 rising, and then the data manifesto coming out, a month after, something was in the zeitgeist

of the time like the comparative mythology I spoke about last week something was in the zeitgeist whereby you can frame the 1916 rising comfortably within dadaist theatre

I digress but this takes me on to I suppose I won't say my favourite but the performance artist that I find most interesting because it's a controversial figure and this is the artist

Chris Burden Chris Burden came to prominence with his performance piece called Shoot in 1971 and basically what it is, he went into a small gallery with a small audience, stood against the wall his friend took out a rifle aimed it at his arm and shot the artist Chris Burden, shot him through the arm for real ambulance called

very well could have actually died in the moment and that is the performance art piece that brought him to prominence and it's controversial because that really calls into question what the fuck is art is this art and what it was what the intention of it i suppose was 1971 would have been the height of the Vietnam War and the Vietnam War was the first war to really play out on television

you know, on colour television too this was 70s America and every night on the news you know, there was footage of Vietnam and bodies getting shot and Chris Burden was concerned with the how media and how the portrayal of war through media essentially desensitizes society to violence. And through that desensitization, it then,

it allows greater permission, you know. The lens can dehumanize. When the news is essentially presented as entertainment, it can desensitize us. So Burden's intention was, I'm going to get shot in a fucking gallery with a live audience to confront that audience with the reality of

the violence of a gun being fired into human flesh. And it caused a lot of shit it caused a lot of fucking shit another Burden work one year after shoot and this is where it gets far more controversial because

at least with shoot the artist Chris Burden gives consent for himself to be shot. And the person shooting him consents to shoot. Even though no one was arrested. They should have been to be honest because you're firing a gun into someone. A police report was filed. But in 1972, Burden performed his piece called TV Hijack. So he was invited to be interviewed on a local Californian TV station, right, so it's cable access or whatever you call

it. It would have had a limited enough audience, but it was an interview on Californian television. So a lady called Phyllis Lutjeans was due to interview Chris Burden about his work. So he brought his own video crew with him and they also recorded the interview. So when the interview began and Phyllis Lutchings started to ask him questions, Burden jumped out of his seat took out a knife got behind Phyllis Lutchins

the interviewer and held it to her throat quite tightly a sharp knife to a woman's throat and demanded that the interview go out live at that moment he said that if the interview didn't go out live

he was going to do something crazy so the interview went out live at that moment and however many people were watching in california were confronted with a man with a knife to a woman's throat and phyllis lutchings since that interview has said like she was genuinely terrified they didn't know this is the man who had been shot for art what was he capable of so he threatened to kill her on air, he threatened

all of the crew and then finally took the knife away and destroyed the set and destroyed the show's copy of the tape and that was his art piece why he wasn't arrested i don't fucking know but that was the piece of art and what it calls into question is i don't know elements of control around the media again how violence is portrayed

but you know that piece that doesn't sit but, you know, that piece, that doesn't sit with me, you know, ethically, that doesn't sit with me, the, that woman wasn't informed, she spent part of that performance genuinely fearing for her life, and even though she wasn't physically harmed, don't think you'd be getting away with that nowadays, physically harmed don't think you'll be getting away with that nowadays you know later that year he performed the piece 747 at lax airport los angeles he got a revolver pistol loaded it up and stood near the runway and as a plane took off he opened fire on the airliner none of the bullets hit because it was just a little revolver

it was kind of he was really firing a gun at a plane some critics called it an act of terrorism this is the early 70s too there was a lot of plane hijackings again he wasn't arrested this was a performance piece this was his art firing a real gun at a fucking plane in 1974 he started to expand more into using video and he did a few

pieces which he called uh tv commercials and he figured that he could you know, using money by ad space on local TV. So you can see this on YouTube as well if you type his name in. So he just kind of hijacked television to do some weird shit. He read out a couple of poems. He read out a promotional video where he compared himself to Michelangelo, Picasso. That pissed off a lot of people. That got people, got their art world nearly more angry than fucking nearly threatening to slit the woman's throat on television. When he compared himself to Picasso and Michelangelo.

Which is interesting because that's a nice critique of the art world. And he did one called Full full financial disclosure where he read out i think it was how much money he earns and how much he was worth how much he paid for the commercial and then a piece called through the night softly where people just turned on their tv and it was chris purden with his hands behind his back crawling over 50 feet of broken glass with his hands behind his back, crawling over 50 feet of broken glass on a street in Los Angeles. A few months later, 1974, he performed his second most famous piece called Transfixed, in which he genuinely crucified himself to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. He nailed his hands to a Volkswagen Beetle, the back of it, and hung

off it while the engine roared for two minutes. And I don't know, for me, I often think about that piece. I mean, Volkswagen Beetles in 72, the Beetle adverts were very iconic at the time, the graphic design on them was class, if you look up Beetles adverts from the 70s you'll know what I'm saying, they within graphic design and advertising they're famous, they pioneered a font called Futura and they had a very distinctive look and a very clever way to advertise the Beetle and the Beetle as a result of the advertising campaign was one of the most popular cars in America at the time even though I think it was designed by Hitler was it designed by Hitler after an egg not sure about that but I think it was I'm nearly sure Hitler

designed the Beetle if not Hitler he took credit for it but it was the Nazis so what I think Burden was trying to do with that piece you know crucifying himself to the most popular car in America it's I don't know calling into question iconography and worship

and how the beetle had become the new kind of Jesus. Was it before or after the Beetles compared themselves to Jesus as well? Because there's also that that would have been in the public consciousness. John Lennon made a comment that we're bigger than Jesus, which caused uproar in America and conservative Christians burned the Beatles records. So I wonder, is there a correlation between the Volkswagen Beetle and also the Beatles and the Jesus comment

and all this stuff that would have been floating around the zeitgeist at the time? I'm not sure about that because I need to check the... No, it would have been, yeah, 74. So the Beatles would have nearly have been quit by then. so the Beatles would have nearly have been quit by then so yeah it's fair to say John Lennon's bigger than Beatles comment would be relevant to that Chris Burden piece where the mad cunt nailed himself to a Volkswagen the last Chris Burden piece I want to speak about because I'm working towards a pretty hot take with this it's a piece from 1980 called big wrench and it's a video piece and it's quite disturbing and chilling so it's a video of chris burden with a green screen image

behind him of he's first off he's holding this massive wrench huge wrench about two three feet long and behind him are images of this giant truck this like american big rig truck right and the dialogue that chris burden is talking about is he's basically saying i bought this truck last week i was was obsessed with it, it's this big massive truck, I'm obsessed with its power, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take some acid and my intention is, I'm going to get in this truck and then he goes on to mention that his girlfriend recently left him and she's living out in the desert with her new boyfriend. And he basically says. I'm going to get into this truck on acid.

And as an act of revenge. I'm going to drive this truck into the desert. And I'm going to kill my girlfriend. And her boyfriend. And he didn't. But this was the piece. It was a video piece. A direct threat.

I am going to roll over violently use this big truck as a weapon 1980 and in interviews with his girlfriend I can't think of her name now but

in interviews she has said yeah she was fucking terrified she didn't know what he was capable of she didn't know whether this was real and that he was going to try and kill her with this truck so where's the hot take well if you look at what does that remind you of

what do the themes of Chris Burden's shit remind you of right beheading a woman on television threatening to spectacular fucking you know shooting on camera using a truck

as to kill people firing guns at airplanes it's ISIS that's what ISIS do and the interesting thing is is that if chris burden was around today performing his art that is basically has no actual consequence you know he didn't shoot down a plane he didn't slit a woman's throat okay fair enough he got shot he didn't roll over his girlfriend in a truck. Chris Burden's work today would be irrelevant

because ISIS are doing it, okay? ISIS actually roll people over in trucks. They actually cut heads off in high definition on the internet for anyone to see if they want. They actually blow up planes you know and what's going on there what's the crack i don't believe that you know from looking into isis and seeing their propaganda i don't believe there's somebody in isis who is familiar with the work of Chris Burden and is trying to recreate it

that is not a possibility and if it is, fucking hell but it's not again it's the zeitgeist why is this artist Chris Burden in the 70s and early 80s, why is his

artwork so similar to what isis are doing now and i think you'll find the answer in a an artist and philosopher called guy de board who was a member of an art movement called the situationists and de board wrote a seminal text in 1967, I believe. Yeah, 67, which is a few years before fucking Chris Burden. He wrote a piece called The Society of the Spectacle. Okay? Now, regular listeners of this podcast will have heard me speak before about the philosopher Jean Baudrillard,

hyper-realism and hyper hyperreal simulacra well the society of the spectacle was kind of the precursor to that that was this the seed of that type of thinking and guy de bord's piece the society of the spectacle argued in 1967 that society okay modern society um that kind of true reality as we live through hyper real representation um which is it's a tough one to explain the easiest one is wars. Wars don't happen. Wars happen on television. We see a copy of the war. We see an edited copy of it.

Advertising sells us an edited copy of a better version of ourself. We then see ourselves in that. We reflect ourselves back to it. Everything in our society is a very large theatrical spectacle because we live so much in media and now today now that's 1967 so you're dealing with newspapers billboards television now we've got social media so our entire lives is this massive spectacle so what the board and the situationist movement that came out of the board writing kind of suggested art should do is to kind of cut through this spectacle through a technique called detournement which involves using using the spectacle and using

spectacular images and language to disrupt its flow and that's what chris burden was doing chris burden's work if vietnam was the spectacle of war and that you know people weren't authentically feeling and empathizing and being compassionate with the actual murder and humanity that was happening on the other side of the world because they were only engaging with the media representation and television chris burden shooting himself into the arm was a way to detour that spectacle and make it real make the blood real so you can smell it and that's what isis do isis use beheading videos to engage with the spectacle. When ISIS commit acts of terrorism, they don't, like, they want spectacle.

They want spectacular terrorism. That's why they use trucks. Do you know what? That's why they blow themselves up they want their terrorism to look good on the news they want it to cut through the spectacle to truly affect us because if they engage in old school terrorism like the ira where they're just blowing up buildings we've become desensitized to that through the spectacle so you have to keep being creative cut someone's head off using the language of hollywood cinema and only through the language of hollywood cinema where we have become desensitized by desensitized by violence

will a beheading actually work through that cinematic language that's what isis do Will a beheading actually work. Through that cinematic language. That's what ISIS do. They're using the spectacle against us. They become superhero villains. Do you know. And that's why.

Chris Burden's work is so similar. To the terrorism of ISIS. I'm not fucking saying ISIS is artwork. Far from it. I'm not saying that. Chris Burden had intent and context. He was calling it art isis is straight up terrorism but they're both using the exact same mechanisms of the spectacle because that's the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is zeitgeist is just a word for the general mood and feeling of society at one point.

And that's what ties the two of them up. Like I said earlier, my hot take on 1916 Rising and Dada. 1916 Rising was a genuine military attempt, yet it had a lot of similarities to Dada, because they both came out of the same zeitgeist. They were both responding to the irrationality of modern war, and now, you've got Chris Burden, and ISIS, many years later, doing the same type of shtick, because they're both responding to the spectacle, so that's this week's fucking hot take, you cunts, Jesus that was a long one this is without doubt the most highfalutin

up its own arse podcast yet out of all the episodes and I hope it wasn't I hope it wasn't too highfalutin because like I said at the start I'm trying my best to democratise artistic thinking and take it out of,

fucking, arsey intellectual pricks, you know what I mean, this shit's really interesting, it's really thought provoking, and interesting, and this shit is the, it's the toolbox of an artist,

you know, you gotta know this shit, if you were to, create art, but, I hope that this ends up in a I want a pub in Kerry

talking about Joseph Buys living with a coyote in a box that's what I want democratising the fucking shit so we'll probably do an ocarina pause now will we? democratising the fucking shit so we'll probably do an ocarina pause now will we or it's nearly an hour in

now it's very late for the ocarina pause ok every week in this podcast em every week what I do is there's digital adverts inserted by the app Acast to sell you some bullshit so you will either hear a digital advert

or my magnificent Spanish clay whistle called an ocarina. So please sit back and reflect for the ocarina pause. On April 3rd, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil.

It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! year it's not real it's not real what's not real who said that the first omen only theaters april 5th rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets

are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play.

Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com There you go. That was the ocarina pause. I hope you heard that and weren't sold some shit. And

yes, of course, subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review. Recommend it to a friend. Go back to the podcast leave a review recommend it to a friend go back to the start if this is your first if this is your first one of these podcasts

I'm very sorry because that was a really that was a very self-indulgent podcast I hope you enjoyed it though but yeah

if you enjoyed the podcast please support it through Patreon patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast I do four podcasts a month

it's about five hours of content I do this essentially for free I love doing it it's fucking brilliant. Not a hope if I was an RTE. Would they let me do one hour.

On the history of performance art. Not a fucking hope. And I'm grateful for that. But if you enjoyed it. And you're feeling generous. And you'd like to give me the price of a pint. Or the price of a cup of coffee. Once a month.

Go to patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. And give me a few quid please if that's how you're feeling if you're not feeling that way and you want to continue listening for free that's totally okay too this is a sound soundness model um you can if you want you don't have to if you don't want to thank you usually i do kind of questions and all right i'll take one question i'm just concerned for time because it's like an hour of talking there i'll do one question maybe two okay we'll see how we get on jack says coffee and creativity i don't seem to be able to start any creative work without a nice hot cup of coffee beside me it's my way in to a state of flow and has almost become a ritual at this

stage my mind is tepid and unimaginative without caffeine you spoke before of examining one's relationship with alcohol i definitely use coffee to feel different maybe that's fine how's your relationship with caffeine well i drink about fucking 19 cups of tea a day and there's caffeine in that and i might have one or two cups of coffee regarding any substance jack it's your relationship with it if you feel dependent upon it right even if it's something as harmless as coffee i would suggest you take a look at that relationship because it's probably covering up something emotional

just looking at your language there you know I don't seem to be able to start any creative work without a nice hot cup of coffee beside me it's my way into a state of flow I would ask you to examine that language because that language to me sounds it's almost like it's a little bit lacking in confidence you know that possibly the caffeine is there as an excuse for your mind to get into the work so genuinely challenge yourself and try and do some work minus caffeine, okay?

There's nothing wrong with the caffeine, just your relationship around it. Don't allow any external stimulus resolving internal disquiet, okay? I could be wrong, who the fuck am I? I don't know. On the subject of caffeine and creativity and I think I was nearly going to do an entire podcast on this because it's a wonderful hot take there's a theory that there's a period called the Enlightenment right

this happened around late 16th, 17th century but mainly centred around Europe. It's the age of discovery. It's when Europe officially kind of left the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. So anyway, the Industrial Revolution came out of the Enlightenment. It's when Western Europe turned towards science and scientific discovery.

And a lot of shit happened in the Enlightenment it's when people started to appreciate kind of history, history wasn't really appreciated in medieval times but in the Enlightenment it was astronomy, chemistry biology

Charles Darwin, it all came out of the Enlightenment. And then obviously the Industrial Revolution followed it. But there is a hot take that at the beginning of the Enlightenment in London, coffee houses started to pop up with the British expansion down into Africa. Coffee came from Somalia, I believe, at the start.

And then some coffee seeds got robbed and brought to Indonesia. And that's where Java comes from. From the island of Indonesia and Java. But anyway. Some people say that the arrival of coffee in London and Paris. And fucking other European cities. Which led to coffee houses. Was responsible for the spark of creativity that started the enlightenment because before coffee people were going to pubs

and drinking and when drink was happening intellectuals and thinkers were not really exploring intellectual thought they were getting drunker and drunker, but caffeine caused many people to discuss ideas in a furtive fashion, which led to a revolution in thought and technology, and yeah, that's a lovely kind of hot take that I read once, I should have saved that one for an entire podcast, but I was too excited by your question, Jack. 63 minutes. All right, we'll take one more. Actually, just to go back to that, because another very hot take, and I can't think of the source where I heard it,

but some say that fundamentalism in Christianity, which is the practice of accepting the Bible as absolute gospel fucking truth like a manual to be followed that this came about because of the enlightenment because humans started to put trust in books and reading and evidence and the scientific method

that this led to a type of religiosity whereby the Bible was also considered to be the absolute, unfettered, unquestionable word of God and that fundamentalism arose as a consequence of the Enlightenment. Can't remember where I fucking heard that, so don't take my word for it. Brian Fahey asks,

Why is there such a difference between the construct of toilets in different countries especially noticeable are the airport toilets in scandinavia for example there is full floor to ceiling hard black walls for each toilet to ensure privacy in other countries it's the opposite you're lucky if the walls of the toilet start at the level of the toilet and you're not looking at the fella sitting on the toilet next door. I don't know Brian. I'll take a stab at it. I would imagine it's.

Cultural attitudes to privacy. Right. And privacy is an interesting one. Because. Privacy is a recent concept do you know a very fucking recent concept now that's tough for for us to kind of understand well it is and it isn't because we fucking share everything on the internet but we say

personal physical privacy is a very modern invention 300 years ago children grew up watching their parents fuck each other okay if you were everyone was fucking poor right so you lived in one room and you grew up as a child with the experience of your parents having sex in front of you you took shits in front of people if it was indoors

and you and it was raining you couldn't go outside we did not have personal privacy until advancements in architecture and also the industrial revolution with the emergence of a middle class that could afford actual houses that had rooms the notion of privacy was something for the elite people who had the money to have a house with rooms in it but the vast majority of people did not have rooms they had one fucking central hall where everyone ate shit and fucked in front of each other so if that notion of privacy is fluid across historical timelines i would wager that it is also fluid across cultural timelines but i don't know i'm just having a guess okay i'll leave you off this week there was a lot to take in

um if this particular podcast wasn't your cup of tea if it's like if you don't want to hear about the history of performance art it's grand i'll probably be back next week with something about fucking dogs or pigs. You know, last week it was about a dog saint and Christ with a pair of tits on a statue. So, it'll change up, I'll change it up. But I enjoyed this week's podcast because that's genuinely the shit I'm really interested in, you know. I'm very passionate about art, I'm very passionate about fucking the theory behind art, and why art exists, and all of that,

that really gets me going, and my head is going 90, because I'm writing all week, non-stop, so go in peace you bastards have a lovely week and as always look after yourself and I think last week I signed off urging you to indulge in a bit of mindfulness

the simple practice of whatever it is you are doing notice the act of doing it whatever it is you're doing notice the act of doing it whatever it is driving your car wiping your hole eating an ice cream rubbing a dog truly engage in the moment notice the feeling on your body the smell the fucking the quality of the air whatever enjoy it in the moment and avoid giving in to kind of the mindlessness of everyday everyday living where the day just fleets by and your experience is not rooted in present reality but rather in the chaotic cacophony of the thoughts in your head

which are often just worries about what has already happened and what may or may not happen in the future fuck that

because that's not real you can't fucking you can't grab that one by the belt and give it a wedgie but you can give the present moment a wedgie so please do you beautiful boys and girls Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

night on saturday april 13th when the the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30 p.m. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.