I’ll Bathe Your Tears With Diamonds  1993/95
Sterischer Herbst, Graz,  Beaconsfield, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris

Since the early seventies I have made works that bring intensely visually and aurally alive spaces to silence and darkness. This has often involved various ways of destroying tape recorders and light bulbs.

In Graz as part of Sterischer Herbst, and at Beaconsfield as part of Nosepaint, 1993, I made an installation using suspended bright light bulbs and twenty tape recorders playing James Brown’s recording of The Bells.

‘The bells are ringing and their sail is going to sea

Yes I know why they’re ringing

They ring on for me

Oh yea’

Using a propane burner, I slowly reduced the space to one light bulb and one recording which I finally extinguished.

Text from drawing for Polyphonix 14, Centre George Pompidou 1995:

9 cassette players, each with a continuous loop tape repeating one word:
1) c’est  2) la 3) sub- 4) stance 5  )dont 6) la 7) vie 8) est 9) fait  (this is the matter from which life is created)
They are all switched on at the beginning of the performance and one by one the sound is destroyed until there is silence.
1) A hammer 2) A water pistol 3) + 4) suspended from the ceiling and swung together 5) A funnel of meths is released onto cotton wool and a lit candle
6) A wire mesh cage and small explosion 7) A saw 8) wrapped in clothe until muffled. 9) A funnel of honey mixed with blue pigment is released

I received an email in 2004 from the Dutch artist Toine  Horvers who went on to do the performance he talks about here:

I would like to do a program with registrations of performances, and i want to start with things that I saw and that stayed in my mind for some reason. One of those things is a performance that you did many years ago in Tilburg, …. You had 5 second hand cassette players that you ‘killed’ in a ritual way. On the cassettes you shouted ‘help’. While killing them – in 5 different cruel ways – the machines shouted ‘help’ until they were not heard any more.I know the whole story in details, and I told it often to other people. It was a beautiful, clear and shocking performance, and because of this clearness it was not theatrical and open to many thoughts and explanations. Now i ask you if you have a clear registration of that performance And if not I ask you to allow me to tell the story in front of a camera or maybe thats something that you yourself would like to do. In my own work I deal a lot with texts and oral describtions of situations related to time and space. So I would find this a nice solution, dealing with the fact that some of those things are from so long ago,  that it could only be presented again in an oral way, like with so many stories.