Airfield
Château de Sacy, Sacy-le-Petit, France,
I4 July, Bastille Day during the P.V. for Richard Wilson’s exhibition Ricochet/In-Off
20 years after Airfield took place in her Château, Hermine Demoriane sent me a write-up of it by Hugo Williams in Times Literary Supplement. He had written it at the time and described how I had ’liberated’ the helium balloons into the air by ‘lightening their loads,’ with various means such as ‘slowly tearing, eating, scattering or setting fire to their various anchors.’
This re-ignited my memory of that work, which I had almost completely forgotten, where the balloons were meant to slowly hover as their ballast lightened.
In a similar way, by reading the description below of a performance in Tilburg, which also had been almost a blank until then, it jumped back to life. 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.
Airfield
Château de Sacy, Sacy-le-Petit, France,
I4 July, Bastille Day during the P.V. for Richard Wilson’s exhibition Ricochet/In-Off
20 years after Airfield took place in her Château, Hermine Demoriane sent me a write-up of it by Hugo Williams in Times Literary Supplement. He had written it at the time and described how I had ’liberated’ the helium balloons into the air by ‘lightening their loads,’ with various means such as ‘slowly tearing, eating, scattering or setting fire to their various anchors.’
This re-ignited my memory of that work, which I had almost completely forgotten, where the balloons were meant to slowly hover as their ballast lightened.
In a similar way, by reading the description below of a performance in Tilburg, which also had been almost a blank until then, it jumped back to life. 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.