Page 47 - Art Review

BB It is. BB Because keeping your twenty-year-
old sharp teeth bared is hard work.
rs So it’s been a few weeks since we last saw Eventually you just want to go back
each other at People Pie Pool. What do you to loving art. And I think that’s
make of it all now?
an inevitability about being a punk.
BB It could’ve been a fever dream for It’s not a sustainable thing. So commem-
all I know. The whole experience was hell orating Dadaism is a strange thing.
for me. It’s been half a year of working If you’re going to commemorate
on this goddamned thing. My studio is That model, the Marx Brothers model, which something that happened in 1915,
filled with debris and all I’ve heard in response is essentially three hyper brothers who were you know that by now all those punks are
is ‘good job!’ That’s meaningless to me. all forced into the vaudeville circuit by their old and on their yachts. Maybe the true ones
I’m too callous for all those niceties. The only pushy mother – this is something I live by. You are dead. So the act of historicising Dada
comment I remember is one woman came know how I am. My friends and I have a certain is against Dadaism itself. The very notion
up to me and said the performance reminded type of brat-pack thing, and at the drop of a hat, of Dadaism is an uncontainable wild beast,
her of The Eric Andre Show [surreal television I can create a reverberating fugue of calamity and now it’s being commemorated? Someone
show on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim]. with them. Me and [Matthew] Thurber will like Tristan Tzara, a wizard, the trailblazing
And that’s exactly what I wanted. go nuts and then Billy [Grant] will join in, and father of it, he knew true Dadas are against
for a few seconds you have the Marx Brothers. Dada. It’s so Tao… or what’s his name?
rs Organised chaos.
rs You think of a lot of your work through the lens rs Lao Tzu.
BB It’s all mashups and unlikely combos. He’ll of Dada.
have someone who’s doing speed metal vocals BB God bless you.
against a priest reading from Corinthians. BB I couldn’t help but think about how Dada rs So how’d you address this?
is celebrating its 105th birthday. Dada is old.
rs The same kind of juxtapositions going on in It’s a grandfather, and I wanted to commemorate BB Well, initially I just wanted people to
your show.
it. But then I started thinking about people like go crazy onstage, having conniption fits, but
BB I’ve been doing this stuff like since high Stravinsky and Schoenberg. These were revolu- I realised that everyone had already seen that.
school, since the 80s, collaging people together. tionaries. But once they had achieved the badass, That’s not Dada any more. So I started hiring
I’d do Dada-inspired performances with poets transgressive work that put them on the map, people who would not be seen as freaks, or
and dancers and a brass quintet scattered in the both of them went back to making traditional punks. Sober-minded people. But the funny
audience. I wanted to simmer all different atti- classical music. thing, the physicist talking about supercolliders,
tudes. I wanted a smorgasbord. I wanted endless rs Neoclassical. Why do you think they’d do that? and the lecture about cryptocurrency – these
confusion, and I was obsessed with Dada. subjects are far out.
rs What did you pitch to Performa as the commission? Park Nights: Brian Belott, with Billy Grant, Jamian rs Did you actually direct anyone?
Juliano-Villani, Matthew Thurber and Tyson Reeder
BB I told them Charles Ives [composer], Ernie (detail), 2016, performances. Photo: Yousef Eldin. BB I just wanted people to do whatever would
Kovacs [comedian] and the Marx Brothers. Courtesy Serpentine Pavilion, London excite them most, whatever makes them most

January & February 2018 47