Faithful departed

When Andy Warhol claimed, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” what he really meant was that no one would really care.

Enter the reality that is Celebrity Big Brother, or simply, “Don’t Bother.”

X: Let’s go over the roster of the celebs shall we… Okay, that’s about it. 

Y: Say who?

Z: Exactly.

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Recently I watched a few episodes of an equally ill-fated reality TV show called Artstar. It had eight artists stuffed together in a New York studio for a month, like a kibbutz on a strict diet of boring parties and high art theory, subjected to the idle gaze of high-definition TV cameras.

Both shows are sluggish spectacles at their finest — Dolby awkward and Technicolor dull. To rephrase Marshall McLuhan, “The tedium is the message.” Starlets assume notoriety is some kind of a prerequisite for success, a by-product on eternal hold since they seem to be more preoccupied on what to do to get noticed. It is an ordeal to watch so-called “self-respecting” (i.e. self-medicating) celebrities and artists stay awake for the TV world only to put the real one quickly to sleep.

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In contrast it was difficult to feel sheepish or sleepy in Braziers Park, nor travel in one’s slumber. There was so much art to do, life to enjoy, people to meet, farmspace to dance on, booze to drink, ideas to explore, and most usually, sheep to count. There were pigs, too, and chickens, and a blind dog named Bob. To a certain effect it seemed like a tableaux straight from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, minus Napoleon the Boar and million-dollar gross sales. But Braziers could not be more different from this satire of totalitarianism, or in the case of the two reality TV shows mentioned, allegory of human commodification.

Braziers is a conscious experiment in living together, like a commune, but formed not by political ideology nor material property but artistic practice and social engagement. It is an artist-led initiative set up to introduce artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to each other, and to different means of production and practice.  This year we were 35 artists brought together from all over the world to live and work alongside each other for 16 days in August in the idyllic setting of Braziers Park, in the Chiltern Hills, Oxfordshire.

What is Braziers? It is not an “it,” not a solid thing that I can touch or even describe. Braziers is a proposition. An invitation. An invitation for a group of artists to be more than the sum of their parts... to allow your practice to rub up against the practice of others... to play with concepts not your own but without the anxiety of losing your identity. There is the space to work without theory, without the urge to kill potentially embarrassing ideas before they have a chance to develop, without the need to have answers to questions you’re still formulating.  — Russell Martin

We lived in a beautiful castle previously owned by the family of the legendary singer and rock icon Marianne Faithfull. It is appropriate that the spirit of the workshop is collaboration and experimentation, since one of the original muses of the manor is known for her experimental lifestyle and collaborations with such iconoclastic artists as Tom Waits, William Burroughs, PJ Harvey, David Bowie, Metallica, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, and, on a romantic note, Mick Jagger.

Our cover of their times was pretty amazing, our band members as equally gifted, romantic and nuts: 35 non-celebrities and non-art divas hailing from places like Colombia, Denmark, Palestine, Switzerland, United States and Senegal.

Now that our 16 days of sunlight are over (no “limelight” and TV cameras, just a chipped and misshapen mirror ball, and a hermetic, non-televised barn), I seem to be getting a lot of psychic flashes from all the world, possessed by the friendly “ghosts” of Braziers…

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I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet. My partying seemed to go on a little even beyond Braziers. I’m now a physical and emotional wreck and trying desperately to get back to some normality. Some nights I can’t get to sleep until the sun is starting to come up. Then just as I’m about to fall asleep a giant sushi ball starts rolling towards me to the sound of stomping feet on a dance floor, dancing along to the sound of a single note on a guitar. I fall backwards into a dark and stormy talent contest where the hosts are a chicken and a pig wearing wigs. By the side of me someone is taking a long exposure of a line of Coke cans. From the castle Snow White sings along to Madonna and the Arabs dance in line as they wait to eat frittata. This is not the pantry club. See you in my dreams if not sooner.           — Max Mason/the author

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I’m not sure if this normal life is all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve gone back to working nights so there’s a certain symmetry somewhere but staying up all night talking to fat hairy men with moustaches about disease and intricate signaling systems; well, it’s just not the same. Had an argument with a pompous businessman and his equally pompous girlfriend; told him he should go to Braziers for a couple of weeks to become human again but I don’t think he got it. (Maybe there’s a future government grant in this, sending obnoxious businessmen on a workshop to make them understand empathy.) Broke an escalator at 5 a.m. the other day, which didn’t go down too well. Something to do with my hand shaking when using the key. The boss asked me what I was thinking of. I thought about telling him about the sushi fields and wooden tables and fires with blinding smoke and feasts that fed thousands every day and talent shows and dying pigs but then thought, he’s not going to get it, so I told him it won’t happen again.   — John Hughes/the author