And for today... nothing, 1972 by STUART BRISLEY
Stuart Brisley (born 1933) is widely regarded as the "Godfather of British Performance Art." In the 1950s, he began his career as a painter and sculptor, and he still creates drawings, paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations today. However, when he turned to performance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his work broke new ground for performance art, elevating it to a new and exciting level, galvanizing his career and garnering critical acclaim. He embraced performance as an autonomous foundation for a new rapport between artist and audience, influenced by Marxist counter-culture politics since the 1960s. While new work is constantly being created, older works are still being exhibited and performed by younger artists who are paying homage to Brisley's revolutionary ideas.
And for today... nothing is the title of a performance art in August 1972 at Gallery House London as part of the exhibition A Survey of the Avant Garde in Britain.
Two previous titles Stuart Brisley had appropriated for performances referenced the Labour Party slogan 'You Know It Makes Sense' - where was used in the June 18th election. Stuart Brisley was interested in political propaganda language and how cliche contains truth while inviting mockery. The tagline And for today... nothing is the same as it was yesterday that takes away thought and feeling, leaving a void, nothing, an absence that may or may not have been commonly felt.
Stuart Brisley had been heading in this direction since his return to England in 1964. He was an unwilling returnee who later became active on the progressive left, coinciding with the emergence of political consciousness in the 1960s. In Paris and elsewhere in 1968, the international aspiration for greater democracy, a reformist desire that included radical co-conspirators, was defeated.
And for today... nothing (1972) was one of his first works to receive widespread attention. Brisley lay in a bath of black water, somewhere between sinking and drowning, in a darkened gallery bathroom surrounded by rotting offal with maggots hatching inside. This piece was repeated in 1973, but that time the water rose to create a full trap and his face was covered in a latex caul and pinned beneath a Perspex sheet. The wrought iron words "Work Makes Free," which were displayed above the entrance to numerous Nazi concentration camps, were turned into a 20-minute film. The movie begins with a long, ritualistic vomiting over the opening strains of "God Save the Queen" played backwards. It is a "bodily rejection" of the concept. The movie was intended to serve as a comparable depiction of the utter disgust that accompanies genocide.
Brisley had to give forced performances in the beginning. With little money, he would steal sand and tar from construction sites in Munich at night and use them to create art during the day. Later, when he was a resident of Florida, he would crawl beneath stilt homes to salvage household debris for sculptures. He visited the junkyards in New York State and called them "amazing places that were like huge cities."
Picasso was credited with saying, in 1945: "The transformation will be finished when the sculpture is placed on a rubbish pile alongside other broken items, and eventually someone takes them home because they're ideal for handlebars and a seat to mend his bike." Motivated, Brisley created site-specific sculptures out of scrap and put them back in the landfill. Brisley went back to England after his US visa ran out, a move he characterizes as "shrinking to fit." He experimented with "dematerialization" and "working with directions and moving towards nothing" in his work, reflecting this feeling, until he came up with the concept of “making actions instead of things. After all, I thought, we’re on the earth, we eat and we sleep.”
A portion of the bathroom's deteriorating; white tiles were painted over; black and white paint was splattered on the walls. With the bourgeoisie in mind, the mansion was constructed in the middle of the 19th century.
Although it wasn't particularly elegant, the Mormon Church had once owned this sizable, sturdy property.
Stuart Brisley utilized a third-floor bathroom for this project. A compact bathroom with a sink and bathtub and a south-east facing window. The space between the bath's end and a wall was filled with a shelf that had a cupboard underneath it. The bath was positioned at an angle to the wall containing the door against a second wall. Glancing in from the door, one would look diagonally right to the faucets at the head end of the bathtub. The wash hand basin was to the left and back of it. There was just enough light to create a twilight atmosphere because the door was partially open.
Artists have always sought to challenge convention and consider the purpose of art. Their bravery has transformed our perceptions of the world in unexpected and surprising ways, and it has opened up exciting new avenues for art. However, taking chances is expensive and doesn't guarantee success—at least not in the artist's lifetime. In the name of great art, some of the most revolutionary artists in history have faced public humiliation, imprisonment, or even death.
Stuart Brisley: the man who spent two weeks submerged in maggots
Brisley referred to his performance piece And for today… nothing. He was intrigued by the way Labour Party slogans were bound in propagandised language that seemed to neither inspire nor illuminate, having satirized them in two of his earlier works. This title was unique, creating a space where an exaggerated guarantee ought to be. He joined the progressive left actively in the early 1960s and saw firsthand how hopes for a more robust democracy were progressively dashed over time.
A mound of offal sat offensively, rotting away, as he struggled to keep himself from plunging too far below the surface and becoming totally submerged. More offal floated in the bath with him. The small room was packed full of the material and reeking of its decay.
The physical terror, the rotting meat, or the sound of the flies clattering against the window were not the most important aspects of Brisley's performance—he is regarded as the founding father of British performance art. The goal has always been to depict what it's like to live on the edge of death. Though there was decaying flesh all around him, he sat there looking almost willfully alive. “The action moved the concept to an extreme position, barely breathing just on the water’s edge,” he said.
“To live as one breath follows another or entering water to drown.”
Today, we're nothing.
Ana Pullitti
09:00 AM
Friday, December 8, 2023
Lisbon, Portugal
Artpendix Press
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