Therapy

I've just returned from the Harkers Building, providing music with Adam for Graeme Walker’s evening art performance.

The title: Therapy.

Having spent four months preparing a month-long residency in the space, he was told one day into the project that it wouldn’t be permitted. Fire regulations. Health and safety.

So today we were treated to an evening with Graeme, exploring the artistic repercussions of such an emotional ordeal. As guests entered they were greeted with this notice. An appeal to donate charitable funds to the Graeme Walker fund, a struggling artist, facing hardship in the modern world. Look at him, his sense of humour is fairly apparent.

On entering the large white room in an old warehouse/new art space, one finds it dark with the sound of rain, oppressive and familiar. Much like today in fact. I myself, struggled over in the most horrific of storms.

Turning to the right to find a large projection onto the wall of recently captured rain footage. Bleak torrential downpours in the Byker Wall. Graeme performed a 'singing in the rain' dance, bedraggled with his wild beard, a large yellow mac and a bucket of dirty water and a mop. Mopping the marked out area before him as the footage pummelled him. I could well relate to his portrait of artist as a young man, tiredly struggling through the weather, performing menial tasks, to the marked boundary. The yellow painted line seemed particularly symbolic of his battle with bureaucracy, and the humble figure we saw mopping conveyed his stoic humility.

Throughout the evening, myself and Adam were on hand to provide musical accompaniment. I had a simple drum kit and brushes, and an acoustic guitar with loop pedal. Adam had a beautiful old wind organ and a small glockenspiel. We played an extended minimal loop drone piece with Graeme on drums, to start the proceedings (to an almost empty room).

Graeme then took himself to a desk with a typewriter with an empty page. Words he hasn’t written. A newly painted chair that he hasn’t sat on. A dustbin with a self-portrait painted upsidedown on its side, and containing all of the rubbish he created during the day’s set up, kicked in disgust during the performance.

Following this was a therapy session with members of the growing crowd. He had set out a comfort blanket with a selection of self help manuals. ‘How to Change Your Life in Seven Days’ by Paul McKenna, being the obvious favourite. He had various people lie down while he read random passages to them through a temperamental, barely functioning microphone. The fact that it was my microphone made me squirm, like I had contributed to this fuck up. But it seemed particularly apt, given the frustration, despair and humourous edge to the evening.

He gave therapy, reading particularly horrific advice from trash-pop-psychologists while we threw in jazz rhythms, disturbing organs and glock plinkings. “Get a job, get married, have kids, keep some good friends around…”

And then onto the finale. The entire back wall showed crudely painted lettering, reading:

I’M OK

He took the mop and brush, and very patiently mopped the ground before it - again, up until the yellow line. We let him do this in perfect silence. It was hypnotic, watching him work methodically, doing a task I know very well from the pub. Then with the aid of a ladder, he took a paint brush and proceeded to cover the words “I’M OK” with a hilariously bland magnolia/beige-coloured paint. This took a long time, so myself and Adam played two more extended loop pieces, finding variations and texture in a single chord. Everyone watched patiently as Graeme crudely erased the thinly vieled excuse, still visible beneath the horror that is beige. We droned on. And when he’d finished, he distributed badges to those in the crowd. ‘I’m OK’. Bright red on bright yellow.

As he left the room, we continued to play for another five minutes, taking in what was left of the room. The mopped floor creating a visual mirror for the pasted-over everyday phrase, denoting very little but that of keeping up appearances. I’m ok.

And that was that.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Graeme’s playful sense of humour is wonderfully apparent throughout the day, though there was an exquisitely awkward atmosphere in the room, where it seemed that people were unsure as to whether to laugh, or be disturbed. Was talking appropriate? Was this a performance or a gallery? Why are we watching a man in a yellow rain mac, halfway up a ladder, painting a wall while two mismatched longhairs play the same chord over and over?

Obviously the last few months have been hard for our G, but it seemed that this wasn’t going to let him become ultimately depressed and uncreative. He produced a space and a show that was open, interactive, loose and improvised; and visually and intellectually challenging. It was a pleasure to be part of it. A catharsis for the pissing rain that I myself had to trawl through in order to get there. A celebration of the process of creation in adversity. Of allowing personality and will and humour to triumph when times are hard, money is short and health and safety are on the case.

To be honest, I feel like I’ve rushed this write up. But I’m tired and it requires more brain cells than I think I’m capable of mustering at this particular midnight.

So, for just two pounds a month…