Performance Art

During the 1980's, I hung out with a group of artists linked to the Brixton Art Gallery in London, England. Through their influence, I developed a form of performance art which included elements of political protest, media relations and Speakers Corner.   I did several pieces in both England and Canada.

During this period I was also making sculptures out of human bones and organs. This performance was an advertising campaign to get more art supplies. I knew that many people had preserved human organs lying around their homes. I wanted to meet people who would sell me these legally preserved organs.

I did this event in January 1986 in both Reading and Brighton, England.

Due to legal problems arising from a sculpture I made with a pair of human foetuses, I was becoming frustrated with the British justice system. So in 1988 I did a one day event where I marched up and down in front of the Director of Public Prosecutions office on Queen Annes Gate in London. On my head, I a wore a helmet and cage that contained a live rat. The guy walking behind me is a photojournalist from the "Daily Telegraph".

For a while, I lived in Plymouth, England. While I was there, I did a little performance piece that explored people's desire to kill living things. I pushed the baby buggy along the High Street. The buggy contained clear plastic cups which contained live slugs, snails, worms, beetles and other types of bugs. People could freely kill a bug of their choice by spraying it with an insecticide.

I was given a bottle of preserved human tonsils by a friend of mine in London. He was hoping that I would make a pair of earrings out of them. Instead, I decided to eat them.

Preserved in alcohol, they made a wonderful canape. By eating this hors d'oeuvre at 1:30 PM on 19 July 1988 at the corner of Erskine Road and the High Street in Walthamstow Market, I became the first cannibal in British history to legally eat human meat in public.

A year later, I publicly ate a slice of human testicle next to the Lewisham Clock Tower.   England is a marvellous country because it has no laws against cannibalism.

This is one of the first performances I did when I returned to Vancouver in 1989. I wanted to learn how Canadians felt about killing garden slugs. I greatly enlarged the word "kill", which was printed on a box of slug bait, and made a sign out of it. I spent an afternoon in October meandering along the South Granville Gallery Row talking to shoppers about the ethics of killing slugs.

Sniffy the Rat was originally conceived in London. The sole performance took place in downtown Vancouver on Saturday, 6 January 1990.

Using a pet store rat that was being sold as live snake food, I built a device to humanely crush it and make a diptych with the splatter. My intention was encourage a public discussion about the ethics of killing rats.

On the day of the performance, an animal rights group stole my equipment.   Sniffy was safely returned to the pet and I was chased by an angy crowd.