PERFORMANCE

Belfast, Northern Ireland : 1978

1 hour performance at Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery.

November 1978


MacLennan, dressed in black in a dark room, enacts a performance involving chicken feet, a cement mixer, chicken heads, projectors, trays of slides, cement filled barrels, tapes of whale song, and scrim fabric laced with chicken feet.

‘Perhaps this performance articulated most strongly a new concern: the notion of victims of mankind, not just among mankind. Also a new strategy evolved with greater clarity, that of wounding the viewer. This time the two main sensual weapons were Noise and Smell, Sight being frustrated by lack of light, causing lack of acuity of vision.’

Text from ‘Alastair MacLennan: Is No’, ed. Stephen Snoddy, 1988.