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[Introduction] |
1. Y Maes - The Field"The timetable of the whole event and the nature of the performance was […] interrupted by an impromptu happening after Mario Merz had completed his piece for piano, lazer [sic] beam, rose and coal sacks. He moved towards Paul Davies who at that moment was holding something like a railway sleeper above his head. On it were burnt the letters 'WN' ('Welsh Not') which referred to the punishment for speaking Welsh in school and enforced within living memory. As it happened the chorus of the national anthem was coming through the loud speakers and although Merz does not understand Welsh he gave out phonetic improvisations as he moved around Davies. Paul Davies had already had an argument with a middle-aged man who had emigrated from North Wales to New Zealand and was now accusing the native artist of “stirring it up”. […] It showed too that Davies possesses a power of feeling which he expressed both symbolically and in argument and which was most relevant to the Eisteddfod. He felt enough to be a kind of flagellant. In a year prominent for its Union Jacks [1977 was the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee] he was inventive enough to wrap himself in that flag and then to struggle out of it. I heard comment elsewhere that both the Coronation Jubliee [sic] and the National Front [a far right-wing political party] had produced better performances than those at Wrexham. But Politics aside, such things depend on financial backing and critics express double standards with regards to this. But the South Wales Echo of “What a Shocking Waste of Money”, and what the Daily Express called “The Fine Art of Wasting Money” as well as the Daily Telegraph's more conservative hint that “Wall Stunt Starts New Grants Row” only serve to register a higher record than would a polite review in the arts column." (Ivor Davies, 'The Welsh Arts Councils Performance Pavilion at the National Eisteddfod', in Link 9, Autumn 1977; reprinted in Bala 1999, p.66)
Paul Davies (with Mario Merz) at the National Eisteddfod, Wrexham 1977, Photo: © V.Davies In ways more than one, Paul Davies' (involuntary and unofficial) appearance at the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham in 1977 can be regarded as a seminal event for contemporary Welsh art. Critic Shelagh Hourahane has called Davies' action, Spiral Gag, in which the artist struggled free from his symbolic imprisonment in a British flag, 'the inception of a self-conscious contemporary Welsh political art' (in Bala 1999, 79). The act can also be considered the inauguration of a self-conscious Welsh performance art. Performance art had evidently been made in Wales before - artists Rob Con and Ian Hinchliffe, for example, had created a series of joint street actions around the country in the mid-1970s, among them a performance in the Brecon Beacons National Park during a snow storm; well-known English performance practitioners Roland Miller and Shirley Cameron had created work in the context of the famous Barry Summer School, which in the late 1960s was offering courses in fine art and improvised jazz based in a small port on the outskirts of Cardiff; and Welsh artist Ivor Davies, painter, activist and protagonist of the destruction art movement, had staged performances in Swansea as early as 1968. Paul Davies was probably the first artist, however, to utilize the idiom of performance in order to articulate within a simple symbolic action a complex nexus of issues concerning cultural domination and political resistance that commented very directly on the Welsh situation. As fellow artist Iwan Bala, like Davies a member of the Welsh artist collective, Beca, claimed for the work of the group: '[Beca] was the instigating force in the politicisation of Welsh art, and one that focused international trends and methodologies into a language that highlighted specific concerns in Wales' (Bala 2003, 23) - in Davies' case this focus was expressed in the language of performance art. The location at which the event occurred is hereby highly significant: the National Eisteddfod (Eisteddfod Genedlaethol) is one of the oldest, most poetic and most political European festivals. The word 'eisteddfod' literally means 'sitting' and originally described a medieval contest of poets with rules and prizes. These days, the National Eisteddfod has grown into a weeklong festival of Welsh culture to which the Welsh-speaking community makes a pilgrimage en masse each year. This is not just the place where awards are given for rhyming and singing, but also where books, records and political campaigns are launched, and where over the years the visual arts have enjoyed an increasingly high profile. I can think of few other occasions at which innovative art and conservative folklore, radical politics and cultural traditions co-exist in this way. What seems to hold this eclectic mix together is an acute awareness of the performative nature of Welsh culture in all its facets. What the Welsh themselves refer to as y pethe (the 'things'), considered to be central to a traditional Welsh identity, such as religious singing and preaching, oratory, poetry recitation and choral song, have always been thought of as inherently performative, and they are all still celebrated at the Eisteddfod today, as are their contemporary equivalents of pop music, poetry slam and political speech. It is to these cultural performances that particularly Welsh-speaking artists turn time and again as material for their work. Poetry reading turns into political demonstration leads to art action - their difference is often impossible to identify in the highly performative context of the Eisteddfod. Even the format of the Eisteddfod has a performance dimension. There is no fixed location for the festival; instead it travels up and down the country, each year located at a different site, alternatively either in the North or the South. All activities take place in a makeshift village of pavilions, tents and stalls. The Welsh term for this site is Y Maes (the 'field'): peripatetic and provisional, ephemeral and decentralized, the Eisteddfod Maes is more a conceptual place than an actual location. The term has obvious connotations in the traditionally rural economy of Wales, but it also resonates with ideas of openness and (as in 'field-work') with the close anthropological study of culture. As such, the 'field' as trope has figured in much Welsh performance work, on and off the Maes. The Eisteddfod in 1977 was the first time that performance art was officially represented at the festival - and the outrage that Merz' and Davies' work created meant that for a long time it also remained the last. But performance art has nonetheless retained a presence at the festival, sometimes within, sometimes outside of its official structures. At the Eisteddfod in Bro Dinefwr in 1996, for example, Welsh experimental theatre company Brith Gof decided to ignore the sanctioned spaces for presenting art work on the Maes and hired a commercial stall, where they showed a durational performance over five days, which became infamous for its use of male nudity. Since 1994, Cywaith Cymru.Artworks Wales, the national organisation for Public Art in Wales, has commissioned a special project, usually with a performance focus, at the Eisteddfod every year. Some of the most innovative arts practitioners working in Wales today, such as André Stitt (who performed a walkabout on the Maes, holding a sign with the words Fi'n Dy Garu Di [I love you], making encounters and exchanges with the people he met), Peter Finnemore (who installed a shed on the site that became a venue for alternative ceremonies to the official pomp and circumstance of the Eisteddfod), Simon Whitehead (who presented Cysgod, an audio walk around the festival led by a horse) and David Hastie are among the artists who have in recent years received commissions to create work for the Maes.
Peter Finnemore and Elfyn Lewis, In the Year 2525, National Eisteddfod, Llanelli 2000, Photo: Emma Geliot Much of this work has centred on the question of language. In Wales, where only around 20% of the population still speak Welsh, the survival of the language has become a daily struggle. Again, it was the Beca group, this time led by artist Tim Davies, who expressed this struggle in a performance piece at the National Eisteddfod in Bro Colwyn in 1995. In an outdoor performance/ installation event lasting eight hours, participants took it in turns to recite sounds of the Welsh alphabet 'which, for them, were imbued with particular associations, while Davies ritualistically burnt these “ineffable symbols of sound” on to large squares of woollen blankets which, as they were completed, were displayed around the stage.' (Martin Barlow in Bala 1999, 152-3). Davies, who comes from a Welsh speaking-background but does not speak the language himself, attempted to engage 'with that elusive spirit hidden within the letters of the language that he himself has lost.' (Bala 1999, 156). Literature cited: Bala, Iwan (2003) Here + Now: Essays on contemporary art in Wales, Bridgend: Seren. [Introduction] [Y Maes/The Field] [Y Tir/The Land] [Y Ddinas / The City] [Y Ty / The House] [Postscript]
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