xx CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FRAGMENTED HI/STORIES
Great Britain / 1999 / 60'
Performance
”The intention is to perform the Acts every
seven years. I am not due to perform till
2020 so I am making an exception for an
exceptional festival.”
– Marcia Farquhar, 2016
Intimate bodily functions and extreme
physical actions are the basic material for so
much of what is classified as performance art.
So too are the unseen human lives, played
out behind closed doors. The ‘privacy of one’s
own home’ has always suggested some slightly
awkward adult behaviour. I felt I had to
somehow imagine another way of dealing in
intimacy. Acts of Clothing was the result of this
thinking. I thought about getting dressed – the
often absurd attempt to get going, or keep
going, as enacted in the daily effort of putting
on clothes, and the desires that these everyday
choices represent.
In ’99 I thought of myself as old. I had
turned 40 the year before, and considered
my wardrobe in the light of this new age.
I remembered Mary Kelly writing about
retiring her leather jacket after the age of 40.
Some of my clothes no longer fitted, but were retained for sentimental reasons. Others were
there because they looked so lovely hanging
emptily. Their emptiness was full of their own
histories. This was my intimate possibility. I
arrived at the idea of exhibiting my wardrobe,
and, going further, of dressing and undressing
and dressing again, in front of a live audience,
decoding and discussing these 25 years of
clothing as I went. I liked the idea of a middleaged
woman up on a homemade catwalk in
a public space, challenging the size, the age
and above all the silence of the fashion model.
Anyone of a certain age could do this.
It is not a vanity exercise. It is rather
something slightly wonky, Beckettian, a
recollection, a rumination, a rummage even.
In English.
Organisation: City of Women in collaboration with Gallery Škuc.