A dear friend of mine who has no relevant medical training once diagnosed me with clinical cynicism. This is a condition that I have lived with for a long time and have found that, whilst incurable, it is manageable. It does, however, become exacerbated by performance art. Rob Curtis, Abi Ford and Sarah Hall are performance artists. I met up with them on a cold November evening in the Hermit’s Cave, Camberwell, for an interview.

You started out training as Sculptors, what first appealed to you about performance art?

Abi - The eccentricity,

Sarah - The electives,

Abi - No it wasn’t just the electives, it was way, way, way, way before that

Rob - I think it’s because sculpture’s 4D anyway, so it encompasses everything...

Abi - No but I got into performance way, way before that – I think when I first started going to the circus is when I first started thinking – I really wanna be able to do that. How freaked out and amazed people would get. And the older you get, the weirder it becomes, it’s more extreme and darker. I think it’s when we were looking at the idea that anything can be a performance that I got interested in performance art.

Can you describe to me some of the performances you’ve done?

Rob - Maybe the most recent one in the lift?

Sarah - We set ourselves 5 minutes to make the costumes out of things we found lying around the studio, and they ranged from a pedophile, Cindy Lauper, to a kind of dominatrix . . .

Rob - Lingerie with dead animal parts.

Abi - We got into the college lift and stood there in silence, waiting for people to come in. Not corresponding or interacting with each other we were all just stood there.

Sarah - Lifts are awkward as it is.

Abi - Especially because when you get in a lift with someone, you stand there trying to look busy; or you cough; but you’re not busy – you’re just waiting to get to the next floor.

Rob - Just standing and making people feel awkward is one of my main pleasures in life. Not as many people got in as we’d hoped but the best one was a foundation student.

Abi - She’d never been up to the sculpture studios before. And that was her introduction.

Rob - Me with my clay penis hanging out of my trousers.

Is it important to you personally to have an audience to watch you, or do you want the public to watch you, or is it the act itself that matters to you?

Abi - The act itself.

Sarah - With the act itself, its difficult to say when it becomes art. You could be in your room on your own and the only record will be your account of it, so its possible that no one has seen it first hand.

Rob - Most of the time you hear about performances through word of mouth - so you’re never there at the time anyway.

Sarah - I mean Skip Bath . . .

Abi - Yeah Sarah and I got naked in a skip full of autumn leaves on Willesden road. The thing is, the only people that would have seen us would be people that were looking at the time.

Sarah - Or the bus . . .

Abi - People that were looking out of the window on the bus would have seen it, but we weren’t doing it purposefully to perform in front of them. Only people that were looking in the wrong place at the wrong time would have seen any of it.

Sarah - For me that makes it more special – it wasn’t “look at this”, more just a case of if you happened to be looking. If you don’t take the time to look around you, you miss so much.

Rob - Especially in Camberwell. It’s a little land of freaks. Like Willy Wonka Day in south London.

With performance Art, I often wonder where the art is.

Is it like conceptual art where the idea is king? Is it a durational kind of art that occurs during the performance?

Or does it come after, making you the art by being a tangible link to the unrepeatable performance?

Rob - I think it’s our connection to the piece. The fact that we did it is what makes it art. The same way as “why is Tracey Emin’s bed a sculpture?” it is because she selected the piece. We select what we do in each performance.

Abi - the thing with performance is it’s not permanent. Unlike a sculpture which is there and will be for a while. An installation will be there, a painting will be there; a drawing will be there. You don’t get that with performance. You’ve either seen it, or you’ve heard about it. We are the connection to it.

Sarah - Because the performance is a moment and someone is experiencing it, there’s almost some shame or awkwardness in witnessing it. It gets to the point where you either feel like you’re watching someone make a fool of themselves, or else you feel involved in it.

Abi - At times it can be quite voyeuristic for the person who happened to oversee a performance by chance. You can push boundaries and get away with a lot more in a performance. People respect you for doing something in performance that might be clichéd in sculpture, for example, because you’re physically doing it.

Rob - They know how embarrassing it would be to be naked in a skip,

Abi - But if you don’t care, and you’re doing it purely for enjoying the form of what you are taking on then there’s something to respect there.

A lot of people deride or dismiss performance art as sensationalist and attention seeking, what would you say to that?

Rob - It is.

Sarah – Exactly,

Abi - It is.

Sarah - But why is that any different from painting a really big picture? It’s only criticized because you can see the person doing it. With a painting it’s still attention seeking, it’s still all about that person.

Rob - A dead shark, how is that not attention seeking?

I feel though, that it’s more accepted in the other mediums.

Rob - That’s because they’re older. People have had more time to adjust to them. Performance is a relatively young art form. People are still questioning is it art / is it not?

Do you think people view it as a valid art form?

Sarah - It doesn’t really matter,

Abi - It just depends if you laugh or not. If you keep deadpan people will take you seriously. You start to giggle you’re screwed.

Sarah - Say if you painted a massive canvas of one lone breast and accidentally slashed it. If you go out and say that’s how it’s meant to be then people will respect you, if you go out and say it’s an accident then they wont. If you can make it serious to you, then you can convince people.

Abi - You can do the most absurd things in the entire world but if the viewer thinks that you’re dead serious about it, they will take you seriously.

Do you think then, it’s just a question of conviction as to how you can get respect?

Rob - Definitely.

Abi - Yeah it’s deadpan humour, it the English, its really English.

Rob - We’re such an introspective nation, they say England but it’s Scotland as well. Problems are dealt with at home. We try to force everyone to be awkward in public and deal with themselves. Like this guy who stood on the subway escalators and turned round to face people. No one would look him in the eye; they just turned away. That’s the most atrocious thing I can think of ever happening to me. That’s brilliant, that’s fabulous. Someone wants to look you in the eye and you wont look at them.

Lately there seems to have been a dramatic rise in the number of artists that are using performance, either as a one-off piece or as their chosen medium, why do you think it is in vogue at the moment?

Abi - Because it’s new and people love to test the water. Arts so much like a fucking fashion catwalk.

Rob - Whatever the avant-garde want.

Abi - Think; taxidermy was really, really in two months ago and now it’s cliché - how can it suddenly become like that in two months?

Rob - Performance is just so much more exciting than anything else at the moment.

Abi - It’s the same with sound art. Sound art’s coming straight through the rest of the mediums in terms of popularity.

Rob - Artists always try to stay ahead, to be at the forefront, like a technology and performance is strange, but it’s beautiful.

Abi - The Dadaists were doing performance art in their Surreal Theatre, it’s not new. The movements are just like trends that come in waves and it happens that performance is coming up at the minute.

Is performance a Gameboy or a Tamagotchi?

Abi - A Tamagotchi because you’ve got to care for it.

Sarah - You’ve gotta feed it and make sure it doesn’t die.

I meant Gameboy in the sense that it was a concept that survived and inspired the future of gaming for years to come, whereas a Tamagotchi very much had it’s day.

Sarah - You gotta care for it. Anyway you still see people now and then with a Tamagotchi.

Rob - I hope it’ll be a Gameboy; I love it too much to let it go now. I think people, when they do it, they fall in love with it and that’s what’ll keep it going.

Do you see performance as some kind of rebellion against, or challenge to the importance of the market in art? By making (performing) work that is intangible, that is momentary and therefore doesn’t itself exist in any purchasable form it undermines the market in some way?

Rob - No, I just do it because I love it.

Sarah - You can’t get away from it so it’s not worth trying to avoid it.

Rob - If someone would pay me to do stuff, I’d be happy to do stuff for money.

Sarah - With art you can’t strive too hard to be different to what is acceptable because the rebellion just becomes accepted. Look at the YBAs, the Chapman brothers; Tracey Emin.

Abi - What I think is nice about performance art is the fact that you can’t experience it again. As an artist your only coverage is going to be through press, or through someone hearing about it. Almost a traditional sense of how you should hear about things. Word of mouth.

Do you have anything coming up in the future where we’d be able to see you?

Abi - At the moment we’re planning our DIY very tongue in cheek Grotesque Burlesque tour in the New year for a month supporting ***** and it’s really, really bodged, obviously DIY,

Rob - Sarah’s the only one who doesn’t know about this and she’s the only one with any shame.

Abi - Instead of feathers we’ve got giant foam hands and shit props, Sarah - I’m really good at making rubbish props, I’m not joking.

What makes you want to keep making art?

Rob - The love of it, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s just beautiful. It’s not easy; it’s fucking atrociously difficult. I’ve never been so challenged in my whole life. But I love the fact that it pushes me to places nothing else would.

Sarah - The fact that there’s never any answers. Every single time is a new story. Your ideas and your work, there’s always something new to it.

Abi - I know that it will blow my mind every single time. Nothing else will. It’s better than sex. Sometimes. Maybe not. But I like that phrase.

Also in this series:

Introduction: Where is Performance Now?

Nathan Penlington & Poetry

Dolly Dewhurst-Marks & Dance

Agent Lynch & Burlesque