Culture

“Canker” by Audrey Baldwin
5pm, 22 March 2012
Blue Oyster Gallery

That’s your preview so far for Audrey Baldwin’s performance art piece “Canker”, which features as part of the Blue Oyster Gallery’s Performance Series for the Visual Arts section of the Fringe Festival. While perhaps not as comical-sounding as all that, the onomatopoeia portrays a more or less accurate picture of what will be happening during Baldwin’s incredibly original performance piece: licking. A lot of licking.

Encased within her sculpture made of toffee, Baldwin will be literally eating away at her creation from the inside out as the audience watches on. While it may seem unbelievably bizarre and peculiar, Baldwin (who studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury) says the “ideas and abstract leanings” that inspired her to work on “Canker” have actually been on her mind for some time now. Her long-time fascination and fixation on the mouth as a “site for expression and intuition” has, as an artist, directed the themes in her work for the past few years, and pointed her towards the performances of such artists as Marina Abramovic and Janine Antoni. The latter’s artworks particularly involve practices of using the mouth as a “sculpting tool” to recreate and reform artworks, which has heavily inspired Baldwin’s own concept of “Canker”.

The audience response will undoubtedly be one of the most interesting aspects of the performance. Here’s where the distinction between performance art and more static forms of visual art, such as paintings and sculptures, come into play. Obvious as it may seem, the relationship between the artist and viewer becomes so much more intimate through performance art; Baldwin comments that the personal nature of her artwork is achieved through eye contact that encourages the audience to become less passive and take on a much more “vital” role in the performance. Overall they become “implicated as active participants in an event, a happening, a shared experience that is often intangible.”

Asked if she expects or desires any particular reaction from her viewers, Baldwin remarks that at the very least, she would like to instill a “gut reaction in [them], whether it be a giggle, grimace, a sympathetic cringe or the spark of a memory from the enveloping smell of toffee.” Certainly it is likely that the nature of the action itself – eating and licking – will provoke some kind of strong reaction. The sexual connotations will not be lost on viewers – let’s face it, we’re all randy students and I bet you thought about it the minute you read the word “licking”. But while Baldwin doesn’t outright allude to any particular sexual idea implicit in her performance, she does admit that “ideally I’d like to make [the viewers] uncomfortable in some way, and get them wondering just why that is.”

Sex jokes aside, there are definitely strong themes behind the concept of “Canker” that Baldwin considers fundamentally important to the work. Directly referring to the performance as a “labour of lunacy”, Baldwin explains that the process of extracting herself from her toffee sculpture is more important than the (hopefully!) eventual escape. Consumption, which plays out both literally and figuratively in the act, emphasizes the way in which Baldwin as the artist becomes both object and subject, at once constructing and deconstructing the art piece.

It’s all pretty thought-provoking stuff, to be honest, delivered in a completely amazing if unexpected medium. Bet you won’t look at a toffee apple the same way afterwards.