The heart of Noel Sheridan's performance piece, Not Waiting, was a long, rambling, extremely funny and sometimes profound monologue which kept an enthusiastic audience engrossed - and guessing - right to the end. Soberly attired in black suit and white shirt, he sat at a desk facing the auditorium and launched into a discursive account of making a film piece when he was based in Australia in the 1970s.
"Why did I make it? Well, I made it because I ticked the box that said: Will you make work?" The film featured the unlikely conflation of a snippet from Flann O'Brien and the visualisation of an anecdote about the early European settlers in Australia. This involved their exploitation of the Aboriginal method of communication by message stick. If a settler found he had a troublesome buck to contend with, he would dispatch him with a message stick to some neighbour, who would in turn send him to a further neighbour, and so on until the young man was hundreds of miles from home. The message which he delivered to each successive settler read: "Keep this bastard moving."
Considered from a different temporal and cultural perspective, post Marcel Duchamps, this seemed like art to Sheridan, notwithstanding the cynicism of the original gesture. His description of making the film was also a comprehensive deconstruction of the film, and the process, and he gradually broadened - or narrowed - his canvas to concentrate on the "situation" of making a performance piece in the here and now.
He ingeniously dragged the people and events of the 1970s into the auditorium, into the collaborative space created by our collusion in his enterprise; or should that be his collusion in our bid at being an audience? Without this collusion, there was no performance, but how could we be sure there was one anyway? You're only in limbo, he pointed out, as long as you don't know it's limbo. If only all performance art was this good.
Live Art at the Project continues today and tomorrow at Project @ The Mint. To book, phone Callsave 1850 260 027.
