Jason W.F. Fitzpatrick hopes to “stir things up a bit and
challenge the way people think” at Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery this
Saturday night, by deliberately making himself and others feel
uncomfortable. Fitzpatrick talks excitedly of his plans to rig up a
“floaty, kind of bouncy stage” out of pink insulation and gyprock, upon
which he’ll lie half naked, while Halifax artist Amber Thorpe gives him
a tattoo of his own design, and Toronto printmaker Dax Morrison takes
prints from his blood- and ink-covered back.
Gallery-goers can expect to be immersed in the sounds and smells of
a tattoo parlour. “We’re going to mic the tattooing,” says Fitzpatrick.
“We’ll have a gun and we’ll make it louder…the sound is completely
irritating,” he adds gleefully.
Part of the excitement for Fitzpatrick, 38, arises from the fact
that prints may not turn out as planned. “There’s this tension in the
performance that it may not work,” he says.
“Plenty of things could go wrong,” says Morrison. “With this kind of
printing, it’s kind of up in the air. What happens if there’s not
enough blood?”
In the Bite and Burn series which Fitzpatrick performed
across Canada, “the tattoo artist was really into making Jason bleed,”
jokes Morrison. “This guy just loved the idea of pulling Jason’s skin
and pushing it together…those prints were pretty juicy.” But whether
or not Thorpe, who has never worked with Fitzpatrick before, will make
him bleed enough during Bite and Burn Encore remains to be
seen.
Fitzpatrick hopes to create a tension-filled atmosphere by
forbidding dialogue between himself, Thorpe and Morrison while on
stage. Though he’s the event’s creative mastermind, Fitzpatrick
jokingly calls himself “just the meat,” as he leaves control of the
final product to other artists. A local alternative band, Realiser,
will also play before and after the tattooing and printmaking, adding
yet another level of tension in that the audience can’t easily talk to
the artists before or after the show.
“It’s kind of become this freak-show act,” Fitzpatrick jokes.
But Fitzpatrick didn’t always throw himself into uncomfortable
situations. “I had a really hardcore advisor…she was disappointed
with a lot of the things I was doing because she thought I was Mr.
Comfy,” he says about his work during his MFA at the University of
Windsor. Fitzpatrick’s Seven Roses exhibit at the Khyber in 2003
sounds pretty comfy indeed. The piece consisted of him making stew and
shovelling sand, a far cry from having his skin slapped around to
induce bleeding.
His recent work focuses on tattoo performance art, because tattoos
have been an important part of Fitzpatrick’s life since the age of 13,
when he gave himself his first with a needle and India ink. Bite and
Burn Encore is partly inspired by the three previous Bite and
Burn performances, which paid homage to the tattoo culture of his
youth, revolving around the theme of acceptance though ritualism.
“In North American culture, there are no rituals for manhood,” he
says. “We created our own whether we knew it or not. Tattooing is one
of them. If you get a tattoo, you’re one of the boys.”
The exhibition, which continues until February 8, will include a
video installation playing clips from the past Bite and Burn performances. Tour shirts, modelled off death metal shirts from the
’90s, will also be on display.
But Fitzpatrick thinks of all his work in sculptural terms. He drew
conceptual inspiration for this piece from German artist Joseph Beuys’
sculptures from the ’60s. Like Fitzpatrick, Beuys’ sculptures were made
from non-conventional materials such as cloth, fat and dead
animals.
Fitzpatrick hopes his new prints will also honour the work of
artists such as Vito Acconci (who taught in Halifax during the ’60s and
’70s), who had a profound impact on him while taking his BFA at NSCAD
in the early ’90s. He’s scoured the NSCAD lithography archives for
inspiration, while making sketches for a new tattoo. The final details
for the tattoo won’t be worked out with Thorpe until just a few days
before the performance.
Jason Fitzpatrick’s Bite and Burn
Encore performance, Saturday, January 10 at MSVU Gallery,
7:30-9:30pm, 166 Bedford Highway. Exhibition continues until February
8. Not squeamish? Look for a review of the performance at thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2009.