PERFORMANCE

7 hour performance at the Triskel Art Centre, Cork.

13 June 1981

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MacLennan is naked, strewn with dead fish, his hands tied behind his back, dragging a broom along the floor. His face, hands, genitals and feet are blackened with paint. There is red and white pigment on the floor. Around the room, dead fish are bound to pillars and dropped on the floor.

‘MacLennan walked making two types of marks: with his bare feet and with the broom, which partly erased the footprints. The pigments on the floor formed a pattern, superceded by the pattern of the walk, thus activating thoughts about surface order, re-occurance of events and duration […] Any possibility of innocent joy is displaced by the introduction of dead fish. As in some previous works dead fish stand here both for religion and for ecological concerns. Both are bound together by the immoral disregard with which they are treated.’

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