Beach Performance
“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.”
Joseph Beuys
Today I made a beach performance with Yannick Soyez documenting it. I was dressed as the German artist Joseph Beuys reading a book of my drawings with black arial font on a white hardcover titled Am I Going in Circles? The, book is about grappling with self-doubt and creativity and collided it with the idea of one of my favourite songs by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam performed on MTVs unplugged. I changed the title of my work to Joseph Beuys don’t want me for a sunbeam and the Nirvana song was originally written by the Irish band the Vaselines that Kurt covered. It’s one of my daft art jokes.
Beuys healed Germany after the second world war by using fat and felt as metaphors for healing and drawings that had an incredibly sensitive pensive line.
I love Kurt and he was one of the most gifted song writers of all time but its just his drug use and suicide which made me very sad.
“Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They’re no good at all.”
Kurt Cobain
I guess the artwork is about self-healing as much as trying to have an integrity with how I deal with others. I was a little disappointed with how the photos turned out as we did the shoot early in the morning so when I had the ocean behind me the sun cast a shadow on my face.
