Mandy Morrison: What influenced your decision to create (performance) work that would interact in a public sphere?
Peter Walsh: While I would prefer to work quietly in a studio, I have found that my desire to communicate the political, economic and technological realities of contemporary society has pushed me towards public performance.
Mandy Morrison: What influenced your decision to create (performance) work that would interact in a public sphere?
Peter Walsh: While I would prefer to work quietly in a studio, I have found that my desire to communicate the political, economic and technological realities of contemporary society has pushed me towards public performance.
I began as a painter in the early 80s when I was living in Baltimore and progressed into organizing events and writing about other artists work. During a 20 year process, I moved to experimental film, writing and curating to creating video installations to street stenciling and eventually, by the year 2000, to performances in the street and at non-profit art venues. At each step I was driven by necessity in what I now recognize is a global phenomenon of artist-initiated strategies for local empowerment. Public performance allows me to speak clearly with complete strangers about politics, power, economics and art.
MM: Audiences tend to be both fascinated by as well as intimidated by confrontational work. What benefits does the viewer derive from this experience and how do you think this can affect a larger politic?
PW: I have frequently used humor to bring difficult ideas into the public realm. In one performance I recreated a P.T. Barnum advertising stunt by circulating bricks around a city intersection as a way of creating a public discussion of economics. When people stopped me to ask what I was doing, I told them I was “creating a scale model of the world’s economy.” A good laugh is disarming. And in this case it was effective for getting strangers from different backgrounds to open up to a political discussion. Once the dialogue began, I was able to explain the piece and listen to their thoughts, sending them back into their day with some ideas to mull over. I tend to come out ahead in this exchange of ideas. For every idea I give out, I can receive dozens in response.
MM: What types of performances or experiences have been the most provocative and meaningful to you personally (or in the case of a group, collectively)? Why?
PW: One large problem with this kind of provocative live work is that there are fundamental breaks between what I experience as an artist, what other individuals who participate in a project experience and the symbolic experience that the work might have for those who experience the documentation after the fact. Sometimes my experience as a performer has far exceeded a project’s ability to communicate. My “Plebiscite2004” project, which invited people in New York and London who couldn’t vote for a U.S. President, to do so, was astonishingly successful in terms of communicating one-on-one with other people on a topic affecting the entire world. I’m still stunned by the profound beauty of watching individual people happily empowered to speak their mind by voting. And yet it had no effect on the actual election.
It’s not unusual for a performance to be better in the re-telling than for those who were there. Most of what we know as performance art history falls into this category.
MM: Do you think that American culture as a whole has become more passive regarding the political issues affecting them or merely preoccupied?
PW: Neither. The Bush II era has politicized many Americans. Having said that, power elites of all stripes work together to suppress political participation. The biggest problem for Americans, including myself, is that we are awash in a sea of data and yet we don’t have easy access to useful information. Sadly, it frequently takes dead bodies (and lots of them) to break through disinformation.
MM: Do you think that contemporary artists and the art community as a whole generally veers towards certain types of practices for reasons of fashion, conviction or economics?
PW: As in any field of endeavor, people interested in a sustained practice come to do what they do because of conviction and necessity. Fashion blows through in regular gusts and is a natural part of the process. It can be entertaining or it can be awful, in which case you just ignore it because it will be gone soon enough.
Bio:
Peter Walsh is an artist and a founding editor of the acclaimed arts journal Link. By taking his work on the road to locations such as Slovenia, Puerto Rico and London, England, he has created a performance-based art practice that allows him to enter into complex dialogues with complete strangers in public spaces.
