Mike Fitzpatrick, interviewing Amanda Coogan.

Mike Fitzpatrick is the Director of the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland.

Image addict

Outside her Dublin city studio the ‘entertainment’ is ever present. Her studio was recently trashed and I can’t help wonder what the intruders’ thought of the images that fill the space. As I leave, she shows me the signature of the intrusion; her name scratched on the street wall outside. ‘Maybe’, she remarked casually, ‘it’s time to move on’.

MF: When did you discover performance?

AC: In Limerick School of Art I had studied painting and realised it was not what really engaged me. When I moved back to Dublin I became more interested in the process of making rather than the product, I was collecting piss in jars, bodily fluids, this lead me then to investigate performance practice. Around that time people were getting video cameras for recording family events and it dawned on me that I could play around here, to work with performance using video and photography. I returned to College at NCAD with a series of questions. I wanted to know the mechanics of performance. How to control yourself in front of an audience? How to formulate an idea? How to structure it? How to structure it as a live piece, How to document it? What are the rules? Are there rules? What are the guidelines, do you only photograph live pieces or do you take them back into the studio to photograph. Do you make a video that performative? These were the initial questions.

MF: Since then have you found the answers?

AC: Each piece warrants its own methodology. There are some pieces that are completely live and I have never made any documentation of them. Some pieces the only documentation is one photograph, some video only and there are some pieces that have a video element, a live element and a photographic element and these are related by theme but are differently manifested.

MF: Was moving in front of a camera the means of developing your performance practice?

AC: It is more about a means of looking at the action. I don’t care if it’s me or not who is doing the action its just about controlling the situation. Its difficult working with the camera and creating both the performance and the photography or video which all have to be perfect. It’s a means of examining the process.

MF: Tell me about your early work?

AC: Post Performance Chocolate Cake is the piece that still has reverberations in the practice today. It was a performance for the conclusion of my MA in Germany where I eat a chocolate Cake as quickly as possible. Its four years ago now, its over, but what I have kept from the performance is a snap shot a friend made of me as I ran down the street away from the gallery and its like a photo from a celebrity magazine of someone drunk or in distress.

MF: Or with their guard down?

AC: I am standing there with the cake and vomit running down my face in a very beautiful dress and what ever is left of the nice make up. And that snap shot reference of post performance is still relevant to my practice today, that immediacy.

MF: Is it the physical act of performance, the theatrical nature of it or perhaps the conceptual or emotional breath of the medium that excites you?

AC: During a performance of Reading Beethoven at PAC Milan in 2003 there was a tangible exchange of energy between the audience and myself. During the performance, that lasted three hours, I broke through a physical barrier and soared beyond pain. A power or energy was successfully transferred to the audience - they feed me and they in turn feed from me. The energy looped between the performer and audience and bounced around the building. The question of pain and endurance is a pertinent one here. The performer goes through the experience demanded by the performance not in a masochistic but hopefully in a shamanistic way.

MF: In order to prepare yourself for these performances I believe you have participated with Marina Abramovic’s ‘Cleaning the house’ workshops, what were they like?

AC: It’s a boot camp for Performance Artists. No talking, no sex, no physical contact, no smoking, no hair washing, no eating, no nothing for seven days. There is shit flying physically as well as metaphorically - that is when you come out of your self pitying morose to actually notice the people around you because we have to take a vast amount of laxatives to flush the system, ‘purge baby purge.’ Thank god there is no talking allowed; the vast majority of us would kill each other.

Natural hallucinogens start kicking in. You wake in the morning to the rattle of a wooden spoon on a saucepan - the body starts to shut down with the lack of food and all you want to do is stay in your warm bed but instead you’re whipped down to the river for a skin-screamingly, ice-cold dip.

Slowly, the outside world begins to fade; all the mind’s junk starts to disappear; the ego has left the building. I’d wake in the middle of the night with images flashing through my head; midnight images that I have been trashing out ever since in the studio.

MF: Much of your work falls into two specific types, those which are glamorous and very beautiful and contain strong art historical reference on the other hand, works that are very transgressive.

AC: I formalise references, sometimes I take something that is from a tabloid and render it with glamour and explore the art historical references that could relate to the image. In another context in making a performance like the fountain I want to transcend the limitations of simple aesthetics, in the hope that through performance I can elevate a simple functional act such as public urination into a transcendental experience - the shame becoming shamanistic –That particular performance was a shocker to make, I found it extremely difficult.

MF: I recall it was also unsettling for the audience, where did the idea for the Fountain come from, apart from the obvious Duchampian reference?

AC: There are two direct references. On one of my first weeks of moving into this studio I walked out onto the street to see a woman pissing up against the doorway, her skirt hitched up and the urine flowing out from between her legs, the image stayed with me, but, the piece really comes from the Anne Lovett story. A teenager secretly pregnant went to a grotto on a freezing January night and gave birth, in secret, with the statue of the Virgin Mary watching over her. Both mother and baby died in the event. It’s an iconic feminist story, a tragic story and quite specific to Ireland. At the time I made the Madonna series and the fountain in conjunction - it was Anne Lovett giving birth and the Virgin statue looking down on her witnessing it. I’ve never shown them together but they were conceived as companion pieces. The initial impulse to make a piece is often very different to the resulting work.

MF: When you talk about your work particularly the photography you refer to your image as ‘She’?

AC: As a performer your constantly confronted with the artist /model dilemma When I develop an idea I become the physical means of developing it, I as an artist have to remain detached to look at the images created and see if ‘she’ is actually the right image needed for the work. I find I have to pull the pieces away from myself, I constantly vacillate between the appropriate behaviours of a ‘nice’ girl, while challenging the notion of respectability. I make some pieces that are hard for Amanda the person to take but Amanda the artists pushes them on, its important to challenge yourself and push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

MF: What is ‘she’ like to work with?

AC: She is there, she is handy she will put yucky stuff on her that will make her skin irritated, give her a rash or a bruise, none of her friends will!

MF: Do you ever fight with her?

AC: Oh totally, she an ould bitch sometimes.

MF: This is the artist or she the model?

AC: She annoys the artist a lot sometimes

MF: Why is this, is she limited in ways?

AC: I get annoyed with myself when I waste weeks, days and hours because she, the artist is not getting it right behind the camera or she, the performer is not getting it right in front of the camera. That’s just damn frustrating, in saying that though this aspect of the work is an important process, you build up the piece as you re-take and re-take the photograph. I have been known to take eighteen months to make a photograph, both the artist and the performer were to blame, I was tearing my hair out.

MF: Tell me about the Madonna in blue.

AC: It’s a little postcard sized, holy picture; it comes form a series of work called Madonna. Madonna ultimately or centrally manifests as the performer standing at a height, it has to be a height, a statuesque height - a church or an outside grotto or public sculpture that kind of height. At IMMA I stood on a high fireplace in other places I stood in high alcoves, the piece works site specifically. It’s a durational, tableaux vivant performance; the audience comes in as the performance is in place and when the audience leaves the performance stops. I have performed this piece for up to 2 hours what happens is that you, with concentration, go into this very other world space, I don’t know how to describe it, you go beyond yourself you go outside the body, completely outside yourself

MF: What? Like you’re floating over the room!

AC: Yes, you’re hovering over the audience and it’s only with the audience you can do this, without the audience you wouldn’t be fucking able to. It’s not possible. It’s they that are the key.

MF: Recently you have created a work using a sign interpolation of Gil Scott Heron’s iconic song ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’.

AC: I don’t literally translate his words into sign language. I reinterpret it into a contemporary context for the Deaf community in Ireland. When he talks about specific things relevant to American politics of the time “pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay” or “pictures of Roy Wilkins.. who had saved.. this suit for just the proper occasion” I translate it and make it specific to the deaf community in Ireland. I talk about the nitty gritty of deaf politics here; who holds power and who has the right using anecdotes of oppression of the Deaf here. It’s a different experience for a Deaf ISL user to see this piece because they don’t know the context and cultural references of the Heron’s music.

MF: Being the daughter of Deaf parents your life has always had a visual primacy?

AC: Since I was born I have had to communicate everything through my eyes and my body: love, pain, happiness, sadness, hunger, and satiation. Following the strict rules of visual communication, we express ourselves through the body all the time; I’m from a manual visual household.

I think as an artist it’s very important to come from what you know and from there strive fro the universal. So in my case, what I know is being socialized by two very oppressed people, who happen to have a different language and, because of the implications of the language, have different ways of behaving. What is a norm in the Hearing world is not a norm in the Deaf world and vice verse. Some people claim that to be a different culture, it depends on your reading of the meaning of culture but we, in the deaf community, talk about being part of a linguistic and cultural minority. The issue is I am not that person, I can hear. But I have been socialized, its like a hang up, I have been socialized to understand oppression, to know it and I suppose I haven’t worked it out. I’m like the white child born to a black family Nina Simone talks so well about it in her song “Mississippi goddamn”.

All I want is equality for my sister, my brother, my people and me/

Yes, you lied to me all these years/

You told me to wash and clean my ears/

And talk real fine just like a lady/

And you’d stop calling me sister Sadie/

MF: You are working on a Deaf opera right now?

AC: Well the initial Beethoven Solo came after doing a sign language interpreted performance of ‘The Gigli concert’ by Tom Murphy at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. I was really excited by the idea of translating music or embodying the musical references, I took Beethoven’s music into the studio and played around with it resulting in Reading Beethoven. Later the energy of the piece really exited me, the hysterical energy or sheer power of the energy of the piece and I though it could be even more powerful if I multiply the performers by 100. I made it live with that number recently in Liverpool and called it The Headbangers.

MF: So now you are working on an opera.

AC: Yes but it is really fresh at the moment, far too soon to talk about it..

MF: What are your other preoccupations right now?

AC: The destruction of glamour, the deconstruction of iconography, the image of a Celebrity deglamourised. Look at paparazzi images catching celebrities in compromising positions. Compositionally they offer a fresh uncontrolled image - icons brought down to earth; tripping over, vomiting, sweaty – I love it, I am an image addict, an image slut.

Mike Fitzpatrick, January 2005.