Franko B’S NRLA Memories (Or What Is Worth Remembering)

commissioned essay for the 30th anniversary of the NRLA catalogue 2010 © the author 2010

Franko B’s NRLA Memories (or What is Worth Remembering)

February 2001 Three months earlier, Bush had been elected (or not elected) as president of the USA. It is the day after my first performance at the National Review of Live Art. I think it is a new venue for the NRLA or it has just been redeveloped. Technically, the Arches is a large bar and nightclub. I really love the venue, although the staff are a bit snooty at first, but then they get used to the performances and crowd. I see some brilliant performances and installation work. Helen Ottaway’s Art Music sound installation is one of many in my mind and Kira O’Reilly’s Succour is another outstanding one. I perform Aktion 398, a scheduled ten hour, one-to-one performance. After four hours, the fire alarm goes off. The performance is suspended for forty minutes, during which time I’m naked, painted white and cold. Things are chaotic; the showers are freezing cold, I’m waiting in a corridor to restart the performance, which eventually does happen. I meet a boy but he is too shy or too scared.

It’s Sunday morning and I am in the lobby of the brand new Holiday Express in Glasgow, where I am staying (coincidently the fire alarm also went off here and everybody had to be evacuated to the car park at 7am). There is a news flash on the telly – there have been UK and USA air strikes on targets in Iraq, including around Baghdad. This is a big event for me. Bush is picking up where Bush Senior left off (actually, my good friend Seth tells me that Clinton was doing it too, but on the quiet). I’m upset about this and I decide to bring it up at the artist’s breakfast discussion the same morning. At the breakfast, somebody is talking about how it is to be a practising artist and being isolated and working alone. And now what’s going to happen after five days of being at the NRLA event – performance, international artists and visitors, curators from all over the world... what is going to happen now? Are we all going back to our lonely isolated existence? And I am thinking, yes, what about now? What about Bush now? I point out that there is a world out there apart from ‘live art’ and the NRLA in Glasgow. We agree.

I see my friend La Ribot (Mas Distinguidas) doing what she does best at the National Review. In front of me in the audience during her performance there is a group of Mexican artists that I met in Mexico City in 1998 where I also performed Aktion 398 as part of a programme that Lois Keidan set up to promote exchange between artists based in the UK and Mexico. If I’m right they have finally managed (some of them) to get the visa to visit the UK as part of this exchange, which was supported by the British Council.

On the first night there I meet Michael Mayhew, an artist from Manchester. In his performance, The Doctor’s Notes, he is telling stories, real life stories - his ones, and he gets very drunk during this. He keeps drinking and starts falling until I stop it by entering the space and I pick him up from the floor. I ask someone to help me. His friend Garfield comes across and we take him out of the room. The next day I meet him properly (I don’t think that he remembers what happened, but people have told him) and he gives me a life size plaster copy of an ear and tells me to leave it outside a building anywhere in the world, photograph it and send the image to him, which I did somewhere in New York City one month later, and six months before 9/11.

commissioned essay for the 30th anniversary of the NRLA catalogue 2010 © the author 2010

Some time in 2003 Nikki Milican contacts me to invite me to do a talk in 2004 and questions me on why my previous participation at the NRLA is not in my CV on my web site. I say politely that I don’t remember why. Anyway, we clear the air of any misunderstanding and I agree to revisit in 2004.

February 2004 I’m at the NRLA to talk about my work and to present a video installation called My Heart is Broken. Three years have passed. Bush and Blair have been to Afghanistan and Iraq and are still there. I meet Tehching Hsieh (Performing Life: The Work of Tehching Hsieh) and Raimund Hoghe (Throwing the Body Into the Fight) for the first time, UNFORGETTABLE, I also see Yann Marussich’s brilliant durational performance with ants (Self- Portrait in an Ant Hill), and there are also some brilliant platform artists’ performances and these are the highlight for me. Kate Stannard’s performance with projected images on bread is very intimate and beautiful (Missing Things), Zoran Todorovic works with soap, a product of his own fat, removed by a surgeon from his belly back in Croatia, where he comes from (Agalma) … Snail Boy, aka Paul Hurley (becoming-snail) is hot.

There are also some boring, self indulgent performances by more established, invited artists. Two come to mind, you probably don’t know who you are… During my stay, Nikki and I discuss the possibility to come back the next year as an ‘Artist in Residence’ (but on my own and with the possibility to invite the artists that I love) and I meet Colin Richardson-Webb – he is the new company manager of New Moves International and is cute and most importantly a much nicer man with a lesser ego than the last one I met in 2001, which reminded me why I didn’t put the 2001 experience on my CV.

Summer 2004 I come to Glasgow, to the Arches, to do a site visit with Colin for my proposed programme for my residency. Later we go to his house for dinner with his partner Deborah and their two dogs. I upset one of them by barking at it. It all looks promising…

2005 I am the Artist in Residence, a role that I take with relish. I propose some of my artist friends as part of my residency, both for the platform section and the ‘invited artist’ section. Vaginal Davis to do a party on the last night (which people are still talking about), Ron Athey to do a conversation with me, Dominic Johnson (who was then one of my assistants) also does a brilliant talk on the performer / filmmaker Jack Smith, and Lisa Skuret presents a video work. During these four days (apart from seeing work and meeting other artists) there are some amazing videos / film screenings in one of the arches at night, Tim Etchells is doing a talk and is brilliant as ever, Angela Bartram does a performance in the ladies toilet in the restaurant in the Arches, washing her mouth with soap (Mouthings), Lucille Power’s water buckets drowning piece (Submerged) is another memorable one. I perform Why Are You Here for the first time, and Still Life. I also do a salon on one of the mornings, open for everyone to bring what is important to them... Art, Politics and Sex. I meet a fabulous lady called Linda Montano; Linda’s book launch was one of my most memorable crazy funny moments, along with Vaginal’s party on the last night. A week later, I come back to be a mentor at the Winter School run by New Moves International.

2006 The National Review of Live Art has moved to a new site called Tramway. This one is run by the city council and their health and safety manager is a nightmare. I’m not performing this year but I know a few people who are. It seems that there is not the same atmosphere or quality as at the previous venue and the previous three times I have been there. I convince Nikki to let me be ‘DJ in Residence’ this year. It does not really work, mainly because there is not really a space to hang out in after the performances, unlike at the Arches (apart from the café), and also it is not the best time in my life. Beuy, my first ever dog, is five months old and is here and he is a star. The music doesn’t go down well; it is ‘too loud’ or ‘too techno’. Nikki keeps telling me to be more in the background, to allow this supposedly ‘amazing’ network of artists and promoters or deals happening between them, which are not happening anyway. Actually, there is hardly anyone around after the last performance at the end of each day, which is much earlier than when it was at the Arches. I miss the Arches, even the food was better there. Luckily my ‘brother’, Ron Athey, is back also to do a new performance, Incorruptible Flesh (il luminous). This is an eight hour durational performance, which is without doubt (together with Raimond Hoghe’s) one of the most beautiful, moving, memorable moments / performances I ever experienced in my times at the NRLA, and beyond. Again, the fire alarm goes off. Poor Ron is stranded outside, with a blanket barely covering him and a fag in his mouth getting freezing cold, but unfazed, he goes back and carries on after the building is reopened one hour later. Most of the work this year seems to be one-to-ones that most people cannot get to see because there are too many things going on at the same time. There is a lot of pastiche and bad experimental theatre work, which seems pretty weird for a festival about ‘live art’. Bizarrely, the largest and best space in Tramway is being used to screen video work, mostly what seems to be self- promotion from the teaching staff (including the Dean) of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art’s media department. This is so mediocre and different in spirit compared with previous years’ showing of students’ work from the same department in the basement at the Arches. Confused? Anyway, I’m not having a particularly good time, but Ron is here and it is Lois Keidan’s birthday. We have a surprise birthday gathering in a great cake shop just around the corner from the NRLA venue. We have nice cakes and then go back to do more queuing to see more work that I cannot remember.

One thing that I do remember during the four previous participatory visits to the NRLA, at the Arches in 2001, 2004 and 2005, and then at Tramway in 2006 was this amazing sense of community and camaraderie, and over all (excluding a minority of people here and there who came and promoted their own shit, but couldn’t give a shit about anybody else’s) there was a sense of generosity – with people, artists, participants, visitors, tourists, curators, producers – some of them friends, from all over the world – Croatia, Mexico, Singapore, India, Thailand, USA, Iceland, UK – you name it – over a period of five days. It was so important because one was left exhausted, but charged for another year and then could not wait for the next possible chance to come back again. For me personally, this, even if briefly, became something very special indeed because it did reinforce this overwhelming feeling, or assertion that one is not alone, ever. After all this you could not despair, thinking ‘what now?’

Thank you NRLA, thank you Nikki, and most importantly Mary, Colin, Deborah, Lois, Anthony, Manick, Chris, Cat, Helen, Steve, Michael, Linda, Vaginal, Richard, Daniel, Tim, Ron, Raimund, Angela, Lucille, Yann, Tom, Luca, Kate, Sam, Alastair, Lisa, Snail Boy, Kira, Dominic, Tehching, Manuel, Elena, Maria, and bloody many more. THANK YOU. WITHOUT YOU THESE MEMORIES WOULD NOT EXIST.