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 Recipient of numerous awards, author and performance artist Fiona McGregor is an important voice in the literary and artistic world. Her most recent performance work, You Have the Body, has astounded audiences in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane and Melbourne. The work involves McGregor being tied to a chair for eight hours, her lips stitched together. Seeing the work is at once a horrifying and beautiful experience. Her most recent book, Strange Museums – A Journey Through Poland, has garnered the highest praise from author Christos Tsiolkas and delivers a level of intelligence and insight not found in your average travel memoir.
Rachel Cook spoke with McGregor about her performance work, writing, her heroes and why she’s perplexed with Tim Winton.
You Have the Body is about unlawful detention, was there a moment or a particular situation when you thought, ‘I have to do a performance on this issue’?
No, it came to me much more slowly. My stuff begins with my own personal obsessions. I’m a very claustrophobic, hyperactive person and I’m working with my fears when I’m working with performance. So I suppose I respond to incarceration with a really visceral anguish. Also, I was particularly struck by the laws of 2005 [Anti-Terrorism Bill which allows people to be held without trial]. Like most people, I was so fed up and angry at that stage and that those particular laws just snuck through with very little discussion. I could feel myself being drawn towards doing a performance around the idea of incarceration, and then it just came together conceptually with that legislation. That legislation was like the grit that went into the shell that was already sitting there, waiting for something.
The emotional reaction I had in the 10 minutes I spent with you during the performance was more intense than I think most performers could ever hope to achieve. I felt shock, immense sadness, nausea, redundancy – I became completely aware of my own humanity. You’ve had a lot of feedback, has there been any that surprised you?
Yes, in fact in Melbourne somebody said, ‘I wanted to slap you’ and I thought that was one of the best bits of feedback I’d had because it seemed to me that she was admitting to some kind of impulse that a lot of people may have had, but not been able to articulate because they were frightened.
Basically, to me that was about someone realising, ‘My god I’ve got so much power, what do I want to do?’ and you know it was kind of a really taboo thing to admit to. I really like it when I get really brave feedback and criticisms, but I guess I wasn’t prepared for the depth of emotional intensity until I began doing the performance. I actually thought people would leave the room quite quickly.
Did anyone do that?
Yeah, people do every time and they might leave already having gotten what they need out of it so it doesn’t necessarily mean they are turning their back on it. But it was amazing for me to do, because of that question of humanity. I actually come out of there loving humanity a lot more. I see people in a really raw state.
I think that’s what happens for the audience, too, because when you go into the third part, where you are watching others in the room with you, you feel this incredible bond with them. Why did you decide to include that element?
Because there is a whole ambivalence around power in that performance and there’s a transference of power and a questioning of liberty so the audience begins as the prisoner in a way and so they are disempowered and then they gain agency with me clearly; although my hands are free so I am not as disempowered as I seem, either. And then in the third part they are completely the spectator, they have complete power but in a way they have lost the power that they had with me. There is a constant shift and questioning of that, and surveillance is a really important part of incarceration. There’s this dichotomy of being isolated but also being looked at.
What sustains you through those eight hours?
It’s just really amazing, the energy I get from people. It’s like going into a form of meditation, but it’s a meditation that is contingent on all of the feelings of the people who come through, and it’s very rich, and quite intoxicating and quite overwhelming when there is a lot of traffic. I can get bored sometimes, but that’s all part of it.
You were working in the performance duo senVoodoo for eight years. After working with AñA [Wojak] for so long, what was it like to make the transition to solo?
It was really good, it was timely. I was ready to do it, I needed to do it and that’s where I want to be for a little while. The first solo I did was the intervention [Dead Art] at the MCA and because it was a situation where I got arrested it was kind of a baptism of fire about getting out there on my own.
What about your interventions, can you tell me what they’re about?
The first one, Dead Art, was really about the lack of live art in that institution and as a whole how marginalised live art is and it’s a way of claiming public space because institutions like the MCA or the Art Gallery of NSW or the National Gallery they are pretty rarefied spaces and it’s a way of democratizing them and reclaiming them for yourself as an artist.
I was particularly impressed with Dead Art, because when you are in those spaces you are completely aware of the money and privilege that is surrounding you and it was a really simple way of bringing that home…
Yeah, they are elitist, which is a shame, and I just think the arts are a little safe and there is the relentless commercialism of the arts industry. So the interventions are a way of cutting through that and having a lot of fun with it, and also connecting in an ironic way with people because it’s a secret performance no one can actually come and see. But then there is just the most massive connection with people when you do something like that, they feel they have ownership of it, too, because you have broken through this barrier…
And spoken on their behalf too…
Yeah, and had a bit of a laugh at this precious ivory tower. The biennale one [‘Revolting’ with Sarah-Jane Norman staged at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2008] was similar, but a bit more parochial in a sense. It was about taking issue with that particular biennale, which was really Eurocentric and really nostalgic. I reckon that 60 per cent of the work was historical and that’s just ridiculous; it’s a contemporary arts survey and it was not reflective of our region.
One of the things you talk about in Strange Museums is the connection and the respect the Poles have for art and you lament that this is not the case in Australia. Are you disillusioned by this country’s appropriation of arts funding?
The thing I do have a problem with is that there is a corporate model and people in head positions are treated like CEOs and people in top positions at the Sydney Opera House are paid six figures, as they are at the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Dance Company, plus the head of Carriageworks. It’s really feudal, you know: you’ve got the serfs, who are the artists, and these people who are in these distant castles who have holiday homes and have overseas trips every year and it’s this other world…
While making massive decisions about people’s lives and work…
Completely – and also sending out emails, in the case of Carriageworks, asking for people to come in and do voluntary work for them. I don’t know why there isn’t more discussion about this. I don’t know why that is considered to be the most efficient structure; because, for instance, why couldn’t some of that money instead subsidise ticket prices so we can get more people into the theatre?
I just went to my first Sydney Theatre Company show in ages and it wasn’t full and it probably wasn’t full because tickets are too expensive. So I find myself as an artist who earns fuck-all money agreeing with the notion that’s bad for us: that the arts are elite in this country – not for any reasons that the anti-artistic people think – but because even I can’t access art in my own field because it’s too expensive. And I don’t think it is like that in Poland and it’s not like we’re the worst off in the world, but I think we could be a lot better.
Strange Museums is a travel memoir and a departure from your previous books. Was it easier or harder to write?
It’s the easiest thing I have ever written. I have a lot of trouble with structure and because I had already taken the journey there it was the whole backbone of the book and I didn’t have to invent anything. All I had to do was remember and be honest, so it was a lot easier than writing novels. Writing novels for some reason is really psychically difficult for me, emotionally difficult and confronting.
In the book you talk about how you felt your sexuality was invisible in Poland and the struggle with labels – and it is the eternal dilemma. How do you reconcile this, if at all?
I would prefer no label, but that’s just utopian. If I have to have one I choose queer, because it is the most inclusive one and because it’s got a bit of irreverence about it and it’s the most fluid.
Looking through your MySpace page I was pleased to see your comment on Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet because I also detested that book and I find his popularity as an author infuriating. Why do you think Australians love authors such as Tim Winton so much?
I think Tim Winton propagates the Aussie battler myth and it’s about white, Anglo Aussie battlers. I think people love that myth because we are not very comfortable with our own wealth. There is an egalitarian myth in there which we hang onto for grim life because we haven’t come to terms with our past in terms of Indigenous genocide. And I think that that’s what he is selling. He is also obnoxious to me, because I find him really evangelical with his Christianity. There is this kind of quasi-mythical, cheesy Christian stuff that comes in and I think it’s really glib.
That’s there with how he writes about blacks, too, like they are fauna, just part of the landscape – and he is a rampant misogynist. He has this thing about older women and younger men and in so many of his works there are these predatory older women who have a sexual licentiousness which is really evil, and they get punished, like in Cloudstreet, the woman gets raped and the guy’s reaction is, ‘Oops, was that a rape?’ I am just gobsmacked when I read this stuff that it just goes unremarked and people just expect sluts to be punished and everyone including women are OK with that.
I was interested to learn that your hero is Iris Webber, the 1940s underworld figure. I came across her a few months ago and she’s an amazing character. Why is she your hero?
Because she’s intriguing. She is a total maverick – and there’s another one of those terms, speaking of larrikinism and egalitarianism, which is really overused and not deserved in a lot of cases, but I think she is it. She was married twice but she did have open relationships with women. She was known to the coppers, because she was a thief and she also used to get busted for busking. And she actually got done twice for murder. In one of the cases she was protecting some chick from her hideous gangster boyfriend, who had come around drunk with a razor and went for Iris and Iris shot him. And she was open about her sexuality and she was really smart. She was from a poor background, but she had this amazing handwriting and amazing grasp of legalese. She conducted her own defence twice. How this woman, who wouldn’t have had any education wrote these letters is mind-boggling. And basically she was this really funny, totally wild woman.
Books by Fiona McGregor
Au Pair
Suck My Toes
Chemical Palace
Strange Museums
myspace.com/fionakmcgregor
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