About a performance

I was walking around town looking for a place to eat and this religious preacher starts yelling at people with a Bible on his hand. Comments were unavoidable. Craig, one of my mates said it would be nice to have him as a performer in the exhibition we are planning to do in Birmingham. But he didn’t mean it for real... He wasn’t willing to talk to the “voice of Christ” and ask him for a contact. So I did it. When I approached him he stopped yelling and listened. I asked for his card and he gave me his phone number, his name (Rashid) and his address. I asked if he was interested to do what he was doing in a gallery or a museum. To be honest I wasn’t expecting the answer I got from him: Yes, of course, it’s a call from God so I just have to answer. I am happy, he is happy with it, everyone gets what they want. Thom disagreed. He wondered if I wasn’t exploring the guy’s image. He asked me if I didn’t feel uncomfortable by doing that to him and religion. I’m not. I dislike most religions and I’m not going to put a label on the guy saying that you aren’t supposed to respect him. So I think we got a performance that will hopefully be unexpected. But will people listen to the poor man? Will anyone laugh? What matters to me is that we found it on the street and we are showing it just as we found the performance. To be honest it is quite similar to what happens with the sculptures we build with objects we collect from the skip (I’ll get some images of those in the next few days and post them here). Maybe I’ll explain to Rashid all these problems one day…

P.S. The close pathway installation was 100% skip art as you can tell from the rough look it has…