The lamb sat upright on an office-appropriate armchair, the back slant a modest fifty degrees. Artist and friend, Jame St. Findlay knelt before the chair. The back of his black shirt lettered in bleach the words ‘Generic Worker’. He seamlessly applied a prosthetic to the lamb’s face and then white face paint and hair spray to his furless extremities.
At seven o'clock, I took the lamb down through the building as ‘Onus’, bleached on my back the same, with another of the keepers called ‘Long Outstretched Helping Hand’. Down a private elevator, through a subbasement corridor and to the other side of the building, the lamb was guided and greeted. ‘Generic Worker’ and the other keepers, ‘The Girlfriend’, ‘Anonymous God’, and ‘I Am In Control’ readied the petting zoo. The lamb couldn't see the performance I took him to, he couldn't see past the bannister that lined the stairs where it took place. Nestled among the shins, knees and crotches of the ‘patrons’—attendants of the ‘Patron’s Evening’ at the Royal Academy of Arts. The lamb’s demure demeanour, gentle and loving, dissolved in the sweat gushing from beneath his fur. The potent sweat dissolved both his easy temperament and the skin on his face. While descending back in the elevator shaft, the lamb’s skin began to peel back, freeing itself from a fleshy underlay of unknown anatomy to the patrons and keepers. The lamb cried out, ‘Where’s the spirit gum, bitch!’ He baaed. The lubricated face of the lamb was reattached successfully in a quick and painless operation. Much like other cosmetic operations, future appointments were necessitated. A top-up was completed every ten or so minutes.
The lamb did many things; baaed, drank wine, crawled, caged itself and eventually died. The lamb was lifted from the petting zoo into a castor-equipped casket fortuitously kept in the room. The keepers took a moment to guide the funeral. Some read eulogies, encouraged photographs and shushed the drunken crowd; all from the peak of a shining, burgundy upholstered podium. Most unfortunately, in leading the procession, the lamb’s casket; his final basket; drew much attention. A beautiful clarinet piece bellowed throughout the room. ‘Where was the elevator again?’ A keeper asked, ‘Is it this way?’ We cried out, ‘Please! Excuse us.’ The keepers lifted the lamb’s body with much care from the wooden vessel, then tipped it on its end into the elevator. We laid the body at the foot of the erected monument on ascension to heaven (the free bar). We took the lamb for one final drink, each pouring out one of his favourite (white wine) onto his, at last, cold body. The keepers took group photographs, drank wine and took the cadaver out for a fag down the accessible ramp.
At the end of that tragic day, the lamb disappeared and was replaced by a white-faced Sam Froggatt. And in the interest of being completely objective, no holds barred—even for a friend—I thought it was actually amazing. Again, to be completely objective, I totally get that it’s hard to define a universal experience but there is definitely one; and it’s going to a hokey-pokey art school in Edinburgh to put together unserious, improvisational, performance art. Again, to be clear, we would all be in agreement to accept that Open Casket Petting Zoo was a universally nostalgic performance. One that brought together friends of ours all that we haven’t seen in months, years even, to have fun. There is no sentimentality here, I wouldn’t stand for that. The performance actives universal memories. In cold club venues on black tarp floors flooded with blood, shirtless, with a friend on a bench staring into the distance, white vignetting around the edges of our vision. In moving back into a dance floor in pulsating shrugs, filling out questionnaires for a fictional trend forecasting company, throwing fruit at your friend’s heads, standing naked on a rotating Lazy Susan, and kissing.
A quality of wrongness, of ‘What are we doing?’, embraced the brain.
The evening, in review, the ‘Patron’s Evening’—or whatever—is a cute site. Kind of nasty, stupid and fun. Where the po-faced, artists and otherwise, get to drink for free, eat marinated olives off of little spears and do what exactly? I don’t know. Have a look? We took off after the performance to be in the studios and galleries together and apart. The evening felt joyous, full of potent opinions, dramas, reunions, and a wheeled casket. I didn’t see anything else. I saw my friends and experienced a performance from the inside out, reversed. The cotton of the night, around my neck and armpits, rubbed uncomfortable and yet familiar. A quality of wrongness, of ‘What are we doing?’, embraced the brain. ‘Oh, we’re acting now!’ A swelling, welling outpouring of love in an otherwise gross aesthetic category. One with leathered skin and wet faux fur
The evening reminded me of another universal memory, when Sam, five years ago took to our collective bare chests, stood in a bath, with a camera onlooking, and licked our nipples—each one coated with a swollen, gelatinous psyllium husk and chia seed. The evening reminded me of that tender, disgusting, ‘deep’, kind of humour.
After the lamb's untimely death, in the petting zoo room; far from his pen, constructed from yellow scissor-fencing, with a cage inside; I looked at him laid in the casket. I was trying to act. I was trying to imagine if the lamb's actor was dead in there. What a horrendous way to go, I thought. Laid in a casket at a fake funeral covered in faux fur and face paint. Everyone acknowledging a death that doesn't belong to you. The audience has likely, once, likely more still, attended a funeral. Memories laced that evening. Each member likely has experienced, once, the death of a loved one. The audience laughed at the absurdity of the funeral for the lamb. Yet, the audience still bowed its heads and lowered its voices. Perhaps only for the fact that it's art, but perhaps too for the conventions of the funeral.
Our collective memories of our collective experiences at funerals and art schools rushed back in wild, disconcerting forms. A realness brushed up against a fiction. I was speaking earlier with a friend. I asked, 'What would you do if they just died? One day, they were just gone.' Speculative mourning comes to mind, memories that haven't yet happened. It's a weird thought for a restaurant. It's followed up with, 'It can just happen, it did just happen, to me.' We are audiences and audience to memories and action, strange or otherwise, universal or otherwise. Pretty obvious thing to say. All fitted like a reversed shirt, choking at the neck and pinching under the arms. A simmering nostalgia.
It took burying my friend as part of a faux funeral to feel it. Somewhere sheltered in the cloisters between memories.
—Andy x
Somewhere Sheltered in the Cloisters Between Memories, Open Casket Petting Zoo