Artist's Statement
My aim as a performance artist and sculptor is to use humour and irony to highlight issues and concerns relating to the exclusion of members of disenfranchised and unempowered groups, including non-humans.
I seek to question the priorities and value systems colluded on within the establishment, and enforced by dominator culture via the media; while examining the validity and tenability of an exclusively anthropocentric status quo.
Vulnerable and under-valued individuals are harmed by the mistrust and misconception of a supposed popular view. It may be that those who are damaged by society further harm themselves through negative interactions with significant others and their environment.
Parallel and related themes in my work include the notion of the Outsider in society and also in art. I am engaged in an examination which seeks to qualify the value of an individual creative response, and the validity of a minority view.
In my performance work I try symbolically to heal the harm I see around me. To teach, heal and represent the spirit world was once the remit of the shaman, and also to reintroduce a spiritual, magical dimension into the equation. My view is that the contemporary performance artist, not the priest, is the natural inheritor of the Shaman’s role.
The ‘avatar’, Boo Simulacrum, I employ in my work engages in seemingly ritualized activities that are reminiscent of those employed in Shamanism, whilst referencing the language of established artistic practice. These activities focus on concern for the natural environment.
An Interview With Boo Simulacrum, 2010
MW: How long have you been an artist?
BS: I’ve always been an artist. I seem to remember, as a small boy in the sheds of old men, playing at making things: toy cars, forts, little houses. I seem to remember cutting myself with a knife, crying. Then later in the woods: dens, dams, tree houses, bows-and-arrows. I was always the best at making things; the old men helped me. Children are sculptors. When older, I became a metalworker: copper, iron, silver, all symbolic metals. Then I became a doll-maker, I made a doll of Beuys, another old man, and performed a ritual with it, because I wanted to make contact with him and become a real artist. It worked, and that was when I was really born, and here I am.
MW: Why are you creative?
BS: If I weren’t creative, I wouldn’t be anything at all. Without art I am nothing. When relaxing, my hands make, they work on their own. When thinking, I am thinking about art, about making. I dream about making art. I am actually an embodiment of art. I am creative and created, though real.
MW: Do you consider yourself a real person?
BS: Baudrillard spoke of the Hyper-real, suggesting that a construct is an idealised version of the real, and therefore secondary in significance to the real. Humans create and shape their world with language, thought and meaning, to me the idealised version is more real than real.
This idea is allied to that of the ‘artist’s myth’, like that of Joseph Beuys, who claimed to have been shot down by Russians in WWII, then found and treated by Crimean Nomads and their Shaman: wrapped in fat and felt, and sledged to safety. I am your myth. Without me you are not an artist, you are an artist, I am real, we are indivisible.
MW: What’s your context?
BS: Socially engaged/environmental performance art and sculpture. Maybe I'm now more a social sculptor/sculpture.
MW: Do you really think art can change society/the World?
BS: Terence McKenna said: “Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind… If the artists, who are self-selected for being able to journey into the other… cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found”[1]
Beuys said: “I have come to the conclusion that there is no way to do anything for mankind other than through art.” [2]
I seem to remember doing a lot of work as an environmental worker: planting native trees, felling foreign trees, removing fences and much walking in the wild, counting birds and animals, watching their behaviour and reporting that data. Frustrated by limited results, I saw that I was just one man, and could change things only a little, but through influencing others, spreading the message, I could effect a much more positive outcome for the environment.
I still plant trees: I help out in a tree nursery where I live. I see planting trees as one of the most positive creative acts possible, and I see it as continuing the work begun by Beuys with ‘7000 oaks’. Anyone who plants a tree is an artist, and the resultant living sculpture is more useful and beautiful by far than any monumental piece by Serra. A forest all the more so, and far superior to ‘Lightning Field’ by De Maria.
MW: Thank you, I think we now know who we are.
BS: I do, I’m not so sure about you, though.
[1] McKenna T. Opening the Doors of Creativity www.matrixmasters.net/blo#BCEAA
[2] De Domizio Durini L. The Felt Hat, Joseph Beuys: A Life Told. Milan: Edizioni Charta; 1997.p 42