All salutations and respect to Stuart Brisley! Never mind that he is now in his 83rd year, the only concession that this pioneer of the most physically and mentally demanding durational performances seems to have made, is to break up his new 24-hour live marathon into four still-gruelling six hour chunks. These started on Wednesday (2 March) at the David Roberts Art Foundation Studio and continue daily from 12pm for the rest of this week, ending at 6pm on Saturday. The the artist—who performs under the alter-ego persona of R.Y. Sirb, curator of the Museum of Ordure—is by no means taking it easy. During my visit Mr Sirb was a non-stop destructive/constructive dynamo: dragging around piles of tied-together chairs and boxes; hurtling wheeled platforms across the room to crash into each other; and all the while scraping, tapping and rubbing every conceivable surface. At one point, he became a blinded, sinister presence in blacked-out glasses and groped his way to sit precariously on a wobbly chair balanced on a table top. Here, he then proceeded to treat his body as a percussion instrument—the rhythmic slaps to the head, accompanied by a manic grin were especially disconcerting.
The overall title of the piece is DRAWN (2016)—but as in drawn out or hung, drawn and quartered, as much as artistic mark-making. Another oblique reference is the suitably violent Greek myth of Procrustes, a rogue Attican blacksmith who apparently adjusted his victims to fit the size of an iron bed by variously stretching their bodies or clipping their legs. So far, thankfully, things have not become quite so extreme over in Mornington Crescent. But—with an artist who once spent two hours a day for a fortnight, submerged in an icy black bath surrounded by rotting offal—anything is possible.