Over the past few years, Eddie Peake has been propelled to prominence by his ambitious, often sexually provocative use of live performance, dance and specially composed music, which he frequently combines with paintings, sculpture and architectural installations. Peake first attracted attention by staging a naked five-a-side football match at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2012, while studying at the RA Schools. Before graduating, he created dance performances for the Chisenhale Gallery, Tate Modern’s Tanks and Performa 13 in New York, as well as having his first major show at White Cube; he is the first young British artist to be taken up by the gallery for some time. Now, the 34-year-old, who also runs a cult club night called Anal House Meltdown with fellow artists George Henry Longly and Prem Sahib, has produced a multimedia gesamtkunstwerk for the Curve, a 90m-long gallery at the Barbican, London—his largest show yet.
The Art Newspaper: How did you work with the Curve’s very particular shape?
Eddie Peake: The main idiosyncrasy is that although it’s one unbroken space, you can’t see it all at any one time, so it has an inherent narrative quality. A sense of narrative and wandering, and a manipulation, in the best possible sense of that word, of the viewer’s journey through a gallery—their gaze and their expectations—are all things that I like to make emphatic use of in my work, so I feel very much at home in that space. There is also a commentary on the Barbican’s architecture. I really love its labyrinthine quality. So there’s a large, maze-like, plastered-wall structure with windows and smashed holes, which directs the viewer’s gaze on to other works and directly implicates the viewer as a part of the show.
Then there are the live performers, who are synchronised with sound and videos.
The film is half-an-hour long, and is a newly made montage of my own new and old footage; the performance is also half-an-hour long [both are looped constantly throughout the show]. They are timed so that the live performance and the video are a kind of pas de deux. Sometimes they synchronise, then at other times they may be doing different things, and then at other times they might even have a dialogue.
Do you consider the viewer to be an active protagonist?
To my mind, the viewer’s experience of a show is a work in itself. But I really don’t like audience participation, so I’m talking about something different. I don’t really consider the viewer to be an active protagonist, but simply by virtue of the fact that you walk into a gallery, you are part of the work. And I like the fact that the viewer in a gallery isn’t afforded the opportunity to be passive; you are on display as much as the work is, especially in a performance situation, and I like playing with that. But I want this to be done in a way that the audience is party to. I can’t stand it when I feel that I am part of a joke that I’m not aware of.
You’ve said that you “create situations that push what people consider to be OK”.
One thing I am always drawn to in art is when something feels incongruous. If something feels as though it’s the wrong thing to be happening in a given space or context, then that feels as though it is the right thing for me to make as a work.
You often appear in your work: is there a particular reason for that?
It’s about using what’s immediately available, and I think it lends credibility to my desire to work with other people. I also enjoy it: I have an extrovert, show-off impulse and I just want to be involved. But since 2010, when I did a piece for the internet [Ciao, made in collaboration with Paul Simon Richards], I’ve wanted to step outside the work and to see it more objectively.
At eddiepeake.com, there’s just a photograph of your penis. Why?
It’s been there since 2006, when I left the Slade. I wanted to have a website but I definitely did not want one that was an archive of my work. I wanted it to function as a work. So it’s a piece of work, and it’s called eddiepeake.com. I like the fact that I’ve had this website for nearly ten years and there’s only been one image. I see that as a reaction to the plethora of imagery that we are bombarded with every day, specifically online. I’m not being a grumpy old Luddite; I love looking at imagery, but I do feel that a certain kind of dilutedness has happened to the power of imagery as a result of the plethora that we encounter online. I like the commitment it requires to say: “No, my website is going to be just one image—and I’m going to stand by it because I think it’s a powerful, beautiful image.”
Your use of sexual imagery seems to confound conventional sexual stereotypes.
A constant theme in my work is to do with sexuality and desire, but often not the usual imagery you’d expect to see filtered through a male gaze.
Certainly not a heterosexual one…
I don’t call myself heterosexual. I’d rather just say I have a girlfriend. I remember reading Judith Butler’s [1990 book] Gender Trouble, where she paraphrases Simone de Beauvoir as saying that there are as many sexualities in the world as there are people. I subscribe to that view completely. Imagine what the conversation would be if we didn’t have the words gay, straight, bi, trans—or even woman or man. I think those terms have been unhelpful and quite dangerous, sometimes. What I’m interested in is the transcendence of categorised normative sexuality and, by implication, other things: normative roles in society, race, art.
You have made oblique references to artists including Michelangelo and Poussin.
For me, the history of art is more like an ongoing wrestling match than a total embrace. I don’t like tradition—I find it frustrating and limiting. It’s the biggest cliché ever, but I just want to be able to move in any direction. Tradition and history and academia are things that bind us culturally to a particular way of thinking that makes one thing acceptable, but not another.
Born: London, 1981, to the artist Phyllida Barlow and the artist-writer Fabian Peake
Education: BA, Slade School of Fine Art, 2006; residency, British School at Rome, 2008-09; postgraduate degree, Royal Academy Schools, 2013
Major performances: Touch (2012; Royal Academy of Arts), Amidst a Sea of Flailing High Heels and Cooking Utensils (2013; Tate Tanks and Chisenhale Gallery), Adjective Machine Gun (2013; White Cube), Endymion (2013; Performa 13)
Lives: London
Represented by: White Cube, London; Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome
• Eddie Peake: the Forever Loop, Barbican Art Gallery, until 10 January 2016
More rising stars to see in London this week
Jon Rafman
Zabludowicz Collection, until 20 December
Part of the “post-internet” generation, the Canadian is best known for his ongoing project 9-Eyes, which tracks the cameras used by Google for its Street View website and captures the images that Google often removes, such as traffic accidents. Here, he presents immersive interfaces between the real and the digital; one work uses the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.
Ben Rivers
Camden Arts Centre, until 29 November
Fresh from his recent Artangel commission, Rivers is showing films including two slow-burning new works. One focuses on Rose Wylie, an artist who worked in obscurity for decades before attracting huge attention in recent years; the other is a elegiac portrait of the Pacific island of Tanna, filmed just before it was devastated by Cyclone Pam.
Rachel Rose
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, until 8 November
Rose, the winner of the 2015 Frieze Artist Award, has her first big solo London show at the Serpentine’s newest space. The US artist makes video collages, fusing her own material with found footage to create poetic, beguiling narratives. For A Minute Ago (2014), she combined a sequence of a cataclysmic hailstorm in Siberia with her own footage of the architect Philip Johnson’s Modernist Glass House in Connecticut.
Prem Sahib
Institute of Contemporary Arts until 15 November
One of a group of artists to emerge from the RA Schools alongside Eddie Peake, Sahib uses the cool, severe language of Minimalism to explore emotive subjects. He uses everyday materials evoking public spaces (the nightclub, the gym) and suggests intimate encounters; his anodised aluminium “sweat panels” appear saturated in condensation, with hands pulled through the mist or bodies pressed against it.