Brian O'Connell has a one-to-one naked encounter with performance artist Franko B, who starts a month-long residency in Cork
I'm sitting in the main hall of the Brady Arts and Community Centre in London's East End. Within earshot the local Bangladeshi Musical Society are giving Oklahoma the Bollywood treatment, while a young couple from Hackney are measuring the function room for their wedding reception. Upstairs, tenants from the local council estates are engaged in a pottery workshop while Hedayet, the porter, bemoans the lack of etiquette in public service. A social worker talks football with a disaffected youth and the café does a brisk service in Halal food. It is, in short, the type of inclusive arts centre governments salivate over and the local community around here just take for granted.
So here I am, a 29-year-old Irish male, weighed down by generations of Catholic dogma and unfounded artistic aspirations, about to get naked in a room with a man I've never met, whose sole purpose is to ask me, rather crudely: "Why are you here?" At any moment I expect a dead relative to appear, thrusting a spade in my hand while giving me the mother of all hidings.
Ask people to define performance art and the responses usually vary from "naked freaks who scream leftist politics", "failed actors" to "decadent and elitist liberals who use art to get on the capitalist ladder".
Earlier this year I went to a performance art event where artist Ron Athey impaled himself on a medieval torture instrument and I came away thinking that Bernard Farrell wasn't that bad after all. In other words, it's not what you'd call a spectator sport.
So, in an effort to compound my lack of cultural schooling, I was invited to London to be given an exclusive performance of Aktion 893, a new piece by one of the world's foremost performance artists, Franco B, who takes up a month-long residency in Cork as part of its designation as European Capital of Culture.
The previous incarnation of this work, Aktion 398, involved Franco sitting in a room naked, while the audience was invited to spend 10 minutes in discussion with him. This time around it's the audience's turn to shed our slacks while Franco gets to keep the cashmere.
I take a ticket and wait to be called; 10 minutes later I find myself undressing in a white room with two chairs. The windows and boards are blacked out to keep out prying eyes. As the last piece of clothing falls to the floor I assume the position, on a chair, and try figure out what's the best way to sit without over exposing myself, so to speak.
The door opens and a tattooed balding middle-aged man walks purposefully in my direction. Scenes from Deliverance race through my head, as a mouthful of gold teeth flash me a smile and I scan the room for accessible exits.
"Why are you here?" booms an Italian voice. Why indeed I ask.
BORN IN ITALY, Franco B spent much of his formative years in orphanages throughout northern Italy. Abandoned by a mother who couldn't cope and a father he never knew, he was raised mainly by the Red Cross, eventually fleeing the country and arriving in England, broke and bothered. A degree in fine art helped channel some of his frustrations, but in the early 1990s he became internationally renowned for his bloodletting performances, where he bled from various wounds in front of sell out audiences. Nowadays, at 45, he doesn't bleed all that often. Tonight he begins his residency in Cork with a performance of O Lover Boy, giving Irish audiences a chance to witness the bloodletting first hand.
"I don't do blood performances as much," explains Franco. "I guess, in a way, I am infamous for these performances but in practice my body of work is far broader. You can't just let blood without poetry, painting, sculpture or framing to back it up. It's not a case where I woke up one morning and thought I want to bleed. The blood strategy was an attempt to make work that mattered to me. It is about using my body physically and metaphorically as a site for things that matter, such as beauty and ignorance and shame and society. It's not a stunt or spectacle".
Yet despite such protestations, for many the thought of spending time in a room observing someone bleeding profusely remains just that - a spectacle.
"I can't dictate how people respond. I have only ever done this performance three times in Europe and it's one year since I last performed the piece. I approach it the same way as a painting. I lie on a bed, which is covered with a three foot by two-foot canvas and bleed from needles inserted into my arm by a doctor, the same type of procedure is routinely used when people are giving blood. I give about half a pint of blood. It's not about limits or seeing how much my body can take. An integral part of the performance is ensuring that I don't lose my dignity. It's about beautiful images."
Live art is very much rooted in the notion of the body as a canvas, which is there to be used and abused for art's sake. Since the late 1970s, when performance art took hold, artists have sliced themselves with blades, hung themselves off meat hooks or, in one instance, had a loaded gun pointed to their head during performances. Rembrandt it ain't then.
For Franco B, though, the reasoning is quite simple: "I have always used my body as a site of my work, so if you look at blood as being like tube paint, then using my blood is the most democratic means I have to work. I have a right to use my own body and I choose to exercise that right. Blood is life and is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago or even 200 years ago for that matter. It's not my job to say what I do is better than other art forms. It comes down to the fact that I employ a different strategy to make work fulfilling my needs and limits. Essentially it's about choice and how political, culture and economic influences work on a person. It's about language and you don't hear people saying one language is more effective than others, so I don't see why that thesis should be applied to art."
"WHY ARE YOU here"? he repeats. And I'm back in the room in the East End and it's just him and me and I start feeling a sense of empowerment. There's nothing left to hide. I'm baring all. And so I begin telling a man I have never met that I'm there because a year previous I hit rock bottom. I tell him that alcohol had me beat hands down. I tell him about the loneliness and the isolation and the desperation and the thoughts of suicide. I tell him about not being able to look at myself in the mirror. I tell him I'm here, naked, because I'm alright with myself now. Life is good, I'm grateful. He cries. I cry.
"It's what gets you out of bed in the morning, that's what counts."
"Yeah," I nod, as we part and he flashes me one of his big metallic grins and I feel as close to any human as I have ever felt.
Franco B is in Cork for a month-long residency as part of Cork2005. For more information see www.cork2005; www.granary.ie; www.franko-b.com or phone 021-4904275