“The immediacy of a moment in time that you can’t rehearse. An unscripted, honest event. It’s not fiction. Once it’s been done before it becomes fictive. Not an honest moment in time.”
This is one of Camosun Visual Arts instructor John Boehme’s MOs in regard to his performance art. Whether he is performing in Minsk, Belarus, Northern Ireland, China, or here on Camosun’s Lansdowne campus, Boehme always tries to stay true to his own process as an artist, regardless of what social structure or normalcies say.
“I don’t really care,” says Boehme with a laugh. “I do what I want to do. If the work demands that I do something, then I do it. Whether or not I’m considering the audience… I don’t, really.”
Boehme says that his art isn’t about entertaining somebody; it’s a work of art, which means that even though things have changed—such as the acceptance of nudity in a public exhibition—Boehme still strikes a balance between the times.
“There’s no way you could do that in public [anymore],” says Boehme. “I mean, people do. It’s more open in China than it is here, having done work across China. We’re like a police state here—very conservative with abstract thought and abstract construction. You want to work in the box.”
Where the show is, and the culture of that place, influences the show significantly, says Boehme, pointing out that performance art is not theatre by any means.
“There are no rehearsed activities. It’s performance art,” he says, talking about the specifics of his show Doing Things n’ Stuff: An Accumulation of Actions, Relics, and Recent Work and More from John G. Boehme. “There’s images, there’s some video projections used in performances, there’s sculptural objects, manifestations of performances that have happened, and relic objects, meaning objects that derived and were made during an action or a performance.”
One of the photos in Boehme’s exhibition is of him sitting at a table set for a fancy dinner. Seems normal, right? Something you might see every day? The difference in this piece of art is that the table is at the bottom of a tailing pond in Northern Ireland, a site used in gold mining to separate the gold from the rest of the earth using cyanide. In the photo, Boehme is eating a ploughman’s lunch—traditionally consisting of bread, cheese, onions, and pickles—covered in gold.
“I ate the gold covered in encrusted ploughman’s lunch while drinking Goldschläger,” he says. “All of the gold was ingested and then I left my own gold-encrusted tailing in the hole in the ground, not unlike a tailing pond, so it refers to the activity that’s supposed to take place there: leaving a tailing, then covering it up.”
As part of the exhibit, on October 10 Boehme is considering doing through performance art an homage to his father, who passed away on September 22 of last year.
“I’m thinking about doing some kind of a sound homage—a durational sort of sound performance,” says Boehme, explaining that this could take place over “three, four, five, six hours, using the spoken word.”
Boehme’s work comes from a variety of interests pertaining to the world around him, he says.
“I’m interested in social contract theory,” he says. “I’m interested in how we identify using language and paralanguage—gestures and all that—just how humans interact with one another.”
Doing Things n’ Stuff
Until Saturday, October 12
Free, Open Space
openspace.ca