Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019)
Interview with Mark Wallinger

Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019) is a year-long programme of interviews, podcasts and contributions from some of the artists who participated in the twelve editions of the celebrated Evening of Performances. Highlighting the evenings’ extraordinary legacies, we will be exploring what the next wave of contemporary performance can become with the artists who have shaped it so far.

Mark Wallinger interview

the Roberts Institute of Art: What was one of your first performances?

Mark Wallinger: My first performance was Sleeper (2004) in Berlin while on a DAAD fellowship. I used to drive by the Neue Nationalgalerie and it was then a slightly melancholic under-used building. Berlin City Council was pretty much bankrupt at that time and this building was missing some lights and various things. And it just struck me that if it was illuminated at night and had some kind of presence that would be compelling because it would no longer just be this big glassy dark thing that it was for much of the year and something which had become part of the furniture and iconography of Berlin. And then the bear, I think, came to me because of various reasons, not least because the bear is a symbol of Berlin and there were these rather naff, fiberglass bears everywhere as a sort of city branding. There was also still a bear pit behind the Markische Museum…. But walking around this gallery in a bear suit in the early hours was kind of as a result of a number of decisions and factors that meant that it gathered an inevitable momentum.

RIA: And did you get much public interaction?

MW: Yeah, yeah! And it was almost entirely positive. Really! I think one might have got different reaction in in the UK. I think people are a bit more open minded and forgiving of displays of contemporary art in Germany! They were quite flirtatious with the bear… I remember one time, a bunch of kids turned up on BMXs with cans of beer, and then they started beginning to stick things on the windows and I thought maybe it's time to take a break… when I came back up 10 minutes or so later, they’d left this message, written on bits of cut-out Haribo bag and pasted on the glass in such a way that I could read it. And it said, ‘We Heart the Bear’. People also left honey…

RIA: What was it like performing in a bear costume?

MW: Outside it was about minus seven, but inside the bear costume it was equatorial. I had to go down into the belly of the beast for breaks, because most of the museum is subterranean. And I had this guy, who was my dresser, and I’d get out of costume and for 5 or 10 minutes to cool down and then carry on.

It was nearly two years after I proposed the idea for Sleeper until the performance so I had had plenty of time to imagine how it might be, whether indeed I might become incredibly bored. But that that wasn't the case for a moment, I got into a sort of rhythm. I found that if I could think of something that was a motivation to do the thing after next, you know, then I just kind of got on with it. What I liked about the performance is that you can be yourself, give yourself permission to behave in certain way. I was never going to impersonate a bear; I was always going to be a bloke in a bear suit. Another thing that I used to quite like to do was to feign sleep: if I knew someone was watching me then I pretended to be asleep for almost 10 or 15 minutes, and then if they were still there after I ‘woke up’, that was a victory.

I guess the most difficult thing to get used to, what freaked me out, was wearing the head which was very heavy and claustrophobic. I thought, Christ I’ve only got a week to get used to wearing this thing and when I put it on, I wanted to take it off immediately. I’d been given this apartment in a suburb in Berlin, in which to rehearse. And during that week I was alone in this apartment — once, bizarrely, watching the presidential debates between George Bush and John Kerry, wearing a bear’s head.

And the other thing that only became apparent after the first night of the performance was the heat. It got so hot in the bear suit that sweat started dripping into my eyes, and there's was nothing I could do about it. So, the next day, I went off and got a couple of sweat bands and I thought that might do it. I didn't realise what that did was sufficiently cut the airflow so that by the time I was going up the stairs and emerging into the gallery my glasses would steam up and I couldn’t’ see anything, so I started the performance by crawling.

RIA: Well, that is often the case with performance, isn’t it? There are always these often quite amusing and everyday bodily things that get in the way of that whole gravitas associated with performance. And in many of your works you have these absurd, funny as well as quite melancholic gestures or actions that sit alongside moments of reverence, almost something religious and profound. Can you tell us a bit about these kinds of moments that were important to the making of the work?

MW: Yeah, I suppose if I feel my work is any good, it’s got to have some hook that's really got into me, you know, so that it isn't just an intellectual response to certain things.

So, for Sleeper, there was this East German film, The Singing Ringing Tree that got serialised on the BBC and people of my age were absolutely traumatised by it. In the 60s, the BBC decided that they needed to cut down on the American imports that they were showing, and they scooped up a lot of East European films and serialised them. And as with The Singing Ringing Tree, they kept the original language but had a narrator talking over the top of it. And this film was an entirely set-bound, dark, Grimm-like fairy story. And part of the story is that the Prince, in order to win the hand of the wilful Princess, has to find the ‘singing ringing tree’ before sunset. He is so full of himself that he says to the dwarf who guards the secret kingdom where the tree lives, that if he doesn’t find it in time he can be turned into a bear, and he duly pays for his hubris. And because this film was serialised over a number of weeks when you came back to it the next week, which is quite a long time when you're a child, he is still a bear! And then again, the following week and he is still a bear. As children we are so used to stories in which this transformation back to some normal state occurs and you are reassured but, in this case, you can imagine that he will never come back as the Prince. This feeling was similar to the terror of early Doctor Who; losing yourself forever as a result of your own imagination.

Also, when I was in Berlin I thought I’d do some research at the zoo. It was quite melancholic. The brown bears are on a sort of moated island. And they had a little sign saying that because the progeny of these bears can't be released into the wild as they’d be a threat to humans, and because there are enough brown bears in zoos around the world, they've all been sterilised, which was really, deeply depressing. And then you get there, and the bears are sleeping. And that’s a phenomenon that I thought was kind of interesting, because it takes you back to being a child, when you go to the zoo and the bear or the lions are asleep. It's not like they’re not performing, you don't demand to get your money back; you are simply fascinated by their behaviour.

RIA: So in many ways Sleeper is a performance about what the limits of performance can be, and also how certain signs, like bears, become overdetermined with references and associations.

MW: Yeah. And Berlin is such a loaded city and a city with scars. In a funny kind of way, if the bear’s appeal lies in if it has a personality or at least some notion of a purpose or whatever then that would release it from all those kind of standard, conventional readings. In this work, I didn’t want to tie up a sign, like the bear, with a bow. I seem to be fascinated by the liminal; it’s those margins where things happen. There are also the delineations of genre, of typologies and sometimes I can waste too much time concerned about the definition of them….you have to undo everything about an established way of signifying. And that disjuncture is so precisely disturbing, there’s an edge of cruelty: we know how words can be used and that they aren’t reliable as our messengers out there.

RIA: This refusal to tie things up neatly is central to your Evening of Performance, MAKE ME THINK ME. In it you talk about a moment of stage fright when language seems to disconnect itself from the body and takes on a mind of its own, and how language always eludes attempts to streamline and rationalise it. Like our bodies, it leaks and falls apart. For instance, you write ‘Those words from the past which have always seemed so inflexible, obdurate, touchy about interpretation; when called upon to summon up the future turn out to be flaky under pressure, untrustworthy, evasive, treacherous like photographs.’ Can you tell us how this text came about?

MW: I wrote that text after a Dia Art Foundation invitation to give a talk in response to one of the artists in the collection. And I thought it will have to be Bruce Nauman. And the event became a kind of two-part performance. I wrote a piece that became the MAKE ME THINK ME performance, but also another written component that I had recorded. At that time, Tate Modern were showing Nauman’s Mapping the Studio, the multi-screen video work documenting his New Mexico studio at night and I went there every day and kept a diary. For Dia, I played back a recording of this diary which I delivered as a whisper and I then employed an actor to deliver MAKE ME THINK ME. So I sat at the back of the audience at my own event.

RIA: Why did you choose for these texts to be performed, because something like MAKE ME THINK ME could also just be a text on its own?

MW: I think it was kind of going back to so the Speaking in Tongues [trilogy] in which my Blind Faith character is overcome by a text. I set myself to learn to speak the opening six verses of John's gospel [as in Angel 1997] phonetically backwards and then the Victorian hymn I found [in Hymn 1997] and Ariel’s song [Prometheus 1999] — these are all known texts, and so the idea of being taken over, speaking in tongues, gave me a way of being and delivering them. And so, I think, in a sense, I was trying to find a voice for MAKE ME THINK ME and the performance at Dia was consistent with that.

RIA: And why did you choose an actor to perform the text?

MW: I’m quite a nervous public speaker but that led me to think further about the talk as an event. It was piece of writing that took Nauman as a stepping off point as much as it was about Nauman and I wanted to hear it in an American voice, and the other part was me speaking in a whisper, something that was more intimate or confidential.

RIA: Have you performed it [MAKE ME THINK ME] yourself?

MW: The only time I've delivered it was as part of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine in 2008, and I was as declamatory as I could be. A lot of the text is about American power, and I didn’t have an accent for that. And so, I tried to be slightly alien to myself –– there are those capitalized snippets from Nauman’s neon works and I would shout those parts out.

RIA: Would you perform again in like a different kind of setting?

MW: Yes I would...

RIA: Would you like it to be closer to a reading or a performance?

MW: I think I conceived it as a kind of lecture which would place it somewhere in between. Yeah maybe it should be delivered from a lectern at the sort of conference naked Borat would appear at.

RIA: Would you perform Sleeper again?

MW: Actually, in 2014, there was some pressure on me to do it again, but it was important for me to say, no, that was it. It had to be a once only thing. Otherwise, it becomes a performance in the terms of a scheduled theatrical thing. And the fact that I came, disappeared, and never came back was important.

RIA: would you even categorise it as a performance?

MW: Yeah, performance is good. I am quite proud of the fact that it is quite mute and avoids slapstick. For MAKE ME THINK ME, it has requirements for its setting, staging, event status. Whereas for Sleeper it can just happen…

RIA: Yes and in MAKE ME THINK ME there is this tension between the reassurance of ritual and the security that comes from that, and then the liveliness, but also the horror of things that don't repeat and aren't ritualized; when things go off the rails.

MW: Yeah, I think there is also something about Nauman where he has found a way to start again on certain fundamental things. There’s a piece of his, Revolving Upside Down (1969) I put in The Russian Linesman show [Hayward Gallery, 2009] where he pirouettes awkwardly from foot to foot around the studio and by dint of simply flipping the video upside down, he tells you everything you need to know about gravity and poise. And it’s just that flip that realizes all those things you take for granted and actuates them and that’s a really marvellous thing. And in the rest of his work, he has a way of tackling things we are well of, things that seem almost axiomatic or cliched or a done deal, and takes them apart and looks at them anew.

RIA: He does it in a way, as in your work, just by slightly tweaking rather than torturing something; very gently moving something that is already there and allowing it to come into being. Is there also a sense that when something emerges it never does so completely, the revelation is always partial, there is always a remaining mystery?

MW: Yeah, it's very hard to do what he does without it being a flimsy diagram of the bleeding obvious. And that reference to the cast underneath the hotel chair [in MAKE ME THINK ME] — I mean, that is probably the most unconsidered space in the entire universe. And he’s got us to pay heed to it.

RIA: Can you say a bit more about how you responded to and evoked Nauman’s work in this text?

MW: I meld me talking, him talking, other references. [I tried to work with] the style of the bad joke, the joke as a routine in Vaudeville. It’s there in Duchamp, in Beckett and in Nauman, with the clowns etc. and it’s a world view that comes with a particular tone of voice.

I was also trying to feed in as well a kind of American culture, or how it is experienced from here and how it has colonized our imaginations. And so there is a sort of critique of the American way. So [the work] is as much a tribute and homage to Nauman as it is how he could be seen from this side of the pond. It also became about things other than Bruce Nauman. I’m not even sure people knew it was about Bruce Nauman at the performance.

RIA: Are you working on a new performance?

MW: No. I might go so far as to write down ‘performance’ in a notebook….it’s pending.

RIA: What compels you to make a performance?

MW: Well, I suppose that up until now, it's when there's just a complete imperative that I should do it or no one else is going to do it. And I guess I've been hoping that one of those things would come along. You can't really force it.

RIA: It almost feels like the studio is not a space where you would think of a performance?

MW: Yeah, exactly.