| Tract Live A rt |
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| Site specific live art and performance in and around Penzance, Cornwall, over three weekends. Summer 2006 | ||||||||||
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| Information on this site will be updated as part of the Tract Live Art Programme | ||||||||||
Kira
O’Reilly
Over a period of four hours on the second Friday of Tract, viewers were escorted, one at a time, from the gallery shop to a back alley in the middle of Penzance. They were then led through a small door and down a corridor to an old disused social club. There it was explained that they could ‘touch both animal and human flesh’ and were given latex gloves in order to do so. They were then sent in, alone, to witness the performance inthewrongplaceness.
Dimly lit, with dark red carpeted floor and cheap fake-wood panelling, the club had the aura of a seedy soho brothel or sex-cinema. In the furthest room overlooking the statue of Humphry Davy and Market Jew Street, Kira O’Reilly, who was naked, was lying on the carpet with a recently slaughtered pig. There was a faint smell of blood, and no sound except that of traffic, and of Friday night-pub goers who would not have been aware of her presence in the room only a few yards away from them.
Kira’s limbs were entwined with the dead pig’s, and because their skin colour was so close it wasn’t immediately obvious which ones were hers. She moved slowly across the floor like a dancer leading a slightly smaller, more passive partner, rolling slowly over, occasionally heaving the heavy carcass up in order to move it. Her hair appeared dampened by a mixture of sweat and blood, and her skin pale.
She looked completely absorbed in the activity to an extent that the viewer who was only 3 or 4 feet away from her did not feel threatened. There was still an intensity to the experience of watching it that was difficult to describe. The performance was too strange and too cold to be erotic. It was anxiety-provoking and a bit scary, partly because there was no boundary between performer and watcher, yet it still had a macabre beauty.
Kira’s performance could not have generated more of a media storm. Although largely ignored by local papers as a story too hot to handle, all the national papers picked up on it and ran stories on the morning of the performance, some with full page articles. Unfortunately they made no real attempt to engage with the content of the work, and their cursory handling of the issues amounted to a complete misrepresentation. The tabloids in particular emphasized the more salacious aspects of the piece, and used photos of previous versions of the performance featuring Kira in the nude. The coverage portrayed the performance as smutty, a waste of taxpayers money, and a violation of animal rights.
In fact there was no sense that any of the participants were being exploited, and indeed Kira appeared to treat the pig with extreme reverence and love. Importantly too, disappointingly for the tabloids, there was nothing smutty or titillating about it. In fact Kira’s nudity had a completely different meaning that was lost in the press coverage. The most useful point of reference here is Francis Bacon, the painter, who lived in Soho and, famously painted carcasses of animals, juxtaposing them with nudes. Kira’s work traversed a similar subject area. Because Kira’s relationship with the pig was so intimate, it seemed to be a symbol or substitute for a dead human being. The piece therefore became a very strong and haunting statement about mortality, and for the duration of the performance Kira seemed to be bravely confronting and indeed embracing her own death.
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