ANIMAL CAGE
Performance: Nagano, Japan. March 2006.
Duration: 4 ½ minutes
Presented as part of NIPAF 06

This was a companion piece to ‘The Wild Boy’ durational performance at the Showroom Gallery, London in 2005. My intention was to further explore the avant-garde’s relation to the ‘primitive’.

Where Francois Truffaut / Jean Itard used a ‘wild boy’ – Victor of Aveyron – as a receptacle for his desire to penetrate and disrupt (Victor’s) silence, John Cage with his infamous performance piece, 4.33, was concerned to reveal that silence itself is an impossible, essentially fictive ideal. Famously, Cage entered a soundproof anechoic chamber and reported that he could in fact still ‘hear’ his own nervous system and his blood circulating.

It is interesting to compare this with deaf people’s experience of ‘silence’. Whereas one is not exposed to external auditory stimulation, nonetheless the body’s internal traffic and habitual patterns generate a sound-image that chimes with and responds to environmental factors. This isn’t simply tinnitus (which purportedly stimulates the hearing part of the brain in the absence of external sound); nor is it synaesthesia – an auditory effect triggered by sight or acoustic memory. In fact there is no term for the way that deaf people ‘hear’ and this is reflected in the still-prevalent usage of the word ‘deaf’ to mean ‘ignore’ (ie, ‘to be deaf to. . .’ or ‘turn a deaf ear’). It is in such ways that deafness is commonly perceived to be a form of nothingness and the follow-on from this, ultimately, is mainstream society’s perception that deafness is a physically primitive condition in comparison to hearing.

In 4.33, Cage simply returned the audience’s acoustic perception back onto themselves to force them to actively listen to (their own) ‘silence’. In fact, whilst the pianist held off from playing anything for the duration of the work, the audience produced a soundtrack of their own: nervous coughs, awkward rustling and other ambient sounds.

In ‘Animal Cage’ I presented a version of Cage’s work in the guise of a nude, wild-haired ‘primitive’. I climbed atop the piano, lifted its lid and then dangled and slumped around in the manner of a bored zoo exhibit for ‘about four and a half minutes’. As an act of veracity to the original - since I don’t hear the audience’s ambient sounds – I provided small nervous coughs, a sneeze, a yawn, some sighing – perhaps also the sound of my bones cracking as I stretched?