On hands and knees, her paint-scuffed boiler suit pulled down to her waist and her breasts bared, the dancer is being covered with paint. She jolts as the cold paint hits her, hands smearing it on to her torso and down her back,finger-painting it over her face.
I thought the dancer was about to have her wet body pressed on to the canvas she was crouching on, just like one of Yves Klein’s living female stencils in his highly theatrical Anthropometries live painting-performances made over 60 years ago. Instead, Florence Peake’s performer has a microphone shoved in her face and she begins reading the first of several hand-transcribed fragments of art historical commentary, going on about solipsistic pleasures and the abstract surface, grim parodies of sexual union and something about Cézanne’s 1877 painting The Eternal Feminine. It is all a jumble of windy wordage culled from the art books and catalogues whose open pages are strewn about on the floor nearby. All these books on Titian, Courbet, Vermeer, Magritte, Pollock, and other white male canonical artists – and their equally canonical critics – are the sort of thing painters or art historians might keep lying about the place to give them inspiration or a bit of intellectual heft.
Luckily, Peake’s Factual Actual uses the text as a kind of parody. Originally performed at the National Gallery in 2021 where there was no nudity and no paint slathering – that was left to the Titians and Tintorettos on the oxblood-red walls in the nearby rooms – Peake has extended and developed the work in the bare and dramatic space of Dilston Grove, a former Clare College Mission Church on the edge of London’s Southwark Park. Her show there is a performance about painting, and painting as performance.
Painting always has this performative aspect. The painter going back and forth to their canvas, pacing between the turps and the rags, the painted bodies and their live models; all the muttering and squinting and sighing, the carting about of stretchers and bolts of canvas, the clattering and hammering and cursing, the method-acting, the torment, the high seriousness and low humour. All that activity, somehow, has worked its way into the gestures and movements and sounds of the work.
Seven large, unstretched canvases are hung by arrangements of pulleys and ropes from the beams of the high, vaulted space. Sporadically raised and lowered by Peake’s performers, who bend to their ropes, pulling and leaning like yacht crews to their sheets, the canvases ascend, descend and are laid flat on the white, reflective dancefloor that has been installed the length of the nave. The canvases are covered in paint: slovenly blue skies, rough yellow deserts, purplish expanses and bits of bodies. Sometimes the dancers are exposed; at others they hide under them, or are wrapped in their folds. Here’s a live foot, there’s a painted arm. The canvases slide on the dancefloor as they’re moved from position to position, making a sound like a tide sliding over a beach. One minute they’re shrouds, the next sails or a row of humanoid bundles.
At times the action breaks into slapstick. One dancer makes her way from one end of the nave to the other, encumbered by painting stretchers whose canvases have been torn off. She trips and stumbles, gets her legs entangled as she clambers between the wooden frames, banging and clattering along. She’s like some sort of mendicant, or a painter dragging their history with them. I’m sure I looked just as absurd, all those years I was trying to be a painter. It is both painful and funny to watch.
Another character has her head and torso hidden behind a complicated mask, whose layers and planes are a jumble of florid, painted shapes. The moiling brushwork depicts guts and emotional turmoil, all of it topped by a big pink brain. She can barely get about unaided. At one point she takes a microphone and drags it over her costume. The rustling and scraping is picked up by a tape-loop machine that turns the sound into a kind of repetitive musique concrète. Other performers take the mic and add to the soundscape. There are whoops, rustlings, oceanic surges, scrapings. I think I hear tap-dancing.
All this takes place with the lovely daylight falling through the high windows. There’s an odd sense of open-ended ritual, and ideally I’d like the performance to keep on developing, hour after hour, day after day. Who knows where it might lead? Instead, a limited number of performances will take place over the show’s run, before it travels to the Towner Eastbourne, and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. Peake dedicates her show to her mother, the sculptor Phyllida Barlow, who died last month, and it is impossible not to see the trace of Barlow’s own performative approach to materiality, space and making in Peake’s work. Her sister Clover also worked on the costumes. It is a family affair.
Across the park, in the smaller Lake Gallery, the walls are completely covered by a scroll-like canvas. Forty-five metres long, Ensemble has its origins in a series of workshops Peake conducted last winter with local community groups. She involved the participants in a kind of mark-making process derived from what is described as a kind of dance technique. Whatever trace of this activity is left in the canvas is hard to tell. Peake reworked the canvas back in her studio, riffing on the marks and gestures that had already been made there. There are bodies and bits of bodies everywhere. Here a group of hands, there an inverted figure, now a jumble of clustered limbs, areas of darkness and swipes and blobs and delicate scrabbling drawing. As with Factual Actual, it all feels open-ended, and not so much incomplete as suspended. What a performance it all is.
• Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble is at Southwark Park Galleries, London, until 2 July.
