Nigel Rolfe has been seen naked covered only in paint, dressed in a crisp white shirt plunging into the dark waters of a peat bog, wrapping his head in rope, and raising a gold-leafed fist to the world. He charmed a sceptical nation on The Late Late Show during the Gay Byrne years, and his work was seen by more than 600 million people as part of the concert to free Nelson Mandela at Wembley Stadium, in London, in 1988.
Yet of the globally successful artists working in Ireland today, Rolfe must be one of the most deliberately low-key people you could meet.
An odd thing can happen when you’re watching performance art. It’s easy to start to think, this is stupid – what am I doing here? And from there it’s a short step to make a transfer: this artist must be stupid – what are they doing here?
This has to do with barriers. When we meet someone with complete sincerity and vulnerability, a first instinct can be to reject the feelings. But we rationalise that it’s our barriers that keep us safe. Misnaming our uncomfortable emotions allows us to sidestep what we perceive to be a risk. Taking it can open up new worlds, however.
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We are sitting in the Green on Red, Rolfe’s Dublin gallery for 30 years. On the floor are sheets of paper with prints of the outlines of plants. There are marks of blue pigment and paint, loops of ribbon, a bowl, an upended chair. The blue is a deliberate echo of the work of Yves Klein, and all are the remnants of Rolfe’s performance on the opening night of Still Even, his latest exhibition.
Around us are framed images, photographs of flowers, prints. From elsewhere the sound of a bodhrán plays. Rolfe has previously recorded with Christy Moore and Sinéad O’Connor. So if some of the work is finished and framed, and some is the aftermath of an event that you may have missed, where, and what, is the art itself?
Many artists will tell you that the viewer completes their work by bringing their own reactions when it goes on public display. Most prefer to create in the privacy of a studio. So does the art lie in the making of it, in the finished work or in the interchange between art work and viewer?
As those familiar with the work of the likes of Amanda Coogan, Alastair MacLennan, Áine Phillips, Fergus Byrne and Alanna O’Kelly will know, performance art brings all these elements together, with an immediacy that can be tricky to meet emotionally, especially for the more avoidant of us – myself included.
For starters, there is a problem with the name. Rolfe agrees. “I started doing this before ‘performance art’ existed. Artists were doing it, Yoko Ono was doing it, but it didn’t have a name.” He went to art school in 1969 to “academicise being in music. I played in a blues band from when I was about 16, and got successful at it, but somehow needed to study to become formal.”
It’s an essential thing. In the here and now. It’s not a design, it’s not theatre, it’s not dance.
— Nigel Rolfe
He still plays the blues, but back then he enrolled at Farnham, in the south of England, “where the staff had come from Hornsey [College of Art]. They’d been kicked out for supporting the student sit-in in 1968, so they came down and brought the London art scene with them. Quentin Crisp was a model there.”
A tall man, Rolfe is softly spoken. He is wearing black, with black fingerless gloves, and the intensity he brings to his performance is carefully modulated in conversation. It’s like watching a very strong person knowing they have to be gentle. He speaks of Ono, Marina Abramovic, Derek Jarman, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys: greats of the art world, but colleagues to him. “It was called Action Art, and Fluxus, with Ono and Beuys – people trying to make art vital.”
It’s not just the much-discussed shorter attention span and abstraction from the real world that makes Rolfe’s work matter. In our current highly performative culture, the sheer authenticity of performance art can offer a corrective.
“It’s an essential thing,” he says. “In the here and now. It’s not a design, it’s not theatre, it’s not dance.”
He also agrees that it’s not comfortable either, especially for those who prefer their art definitely finished, framed and glassed-in. Nonetheless, many of those more formal artists became supporters. “William Scott came to performances, [Leon] Golub in New York.”
Of course performing in public makes any failure highly visible. “It messes up sometimes,” Rolfe says. “But there are the ones that are magic, you achieve something.”
As with the land artists of the 1970s, such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, another impetus was to avoid the commercialisation of the art market: to sidestep valuation through monetary value, to try to get back to something more real. He describes the landscape around Farnham, and in Wiltshire: the Vale of the White Horse, Stonehenge – before the fences went up – and Avebury, an almost mythical village inside a stone circle.
It was that sense of the mythic and ancient that brought the Isle of Wight-born artist to Ireland in 1974. He has lived here ever since. “It was a stupid romanticism,” he says. “The idea that I was moving off the edge of Europe.”
Instead he was struck by the immensity, and the intensity, of the Troubles. “The work shifted because of it. They called it the ‘drip drip war’: every day one person, three people died.” Work that had focused on ancient symbols became politically engaged. “I was trying to live in a place where my kind had done this.”
Since then Rolfe has sought out the humanity of situations, and called out its opposite through his work, a stance that led to his part in the Nelson Mandela concert, held about 18 months before the release of the imprisoned South African anti-apartheid activist and leader.
Artists had been invited to create video works to be shown while the stage acts were changing over. “It was a wonderful line-up. Jenny Holzer, Derek Jarman ...” Windmill Lane produced Rolfe’s video of a black hand on a white face. “I was the third one. The fourth was Jarman, who had a black guy and a white guy kissing, and the BBC controller pulled it. The rest of the artists didn’t get shown. In the event catalogue,” he continues, with a wry smile, “I’m opposite Whitney Houston.”
Insightful ideas and famous names dot about our conversation, although Rolfe is definitively not a name dropper. Performing Rope for a London audience of the great and the good of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Brian Eno and Cleo Laine were also on the roster), he recalls being seated “with this bloody great rope on my head. And all this money, the unbelievable amount of money that supports the museum, [the people] all came up and touched me. Beuys had this thing about the chair: the arse of the rich sits on the fat of the chair; and all these hands were reaching out, it was like being touched by these very things.” He walked out.
Rolfe describes his self-imposed role in the art world as “selfish and lonely”, although he has long-term and loyal friends. He got to know Abramovic early on although, as with Gilbert and George, he believes her level of celebrity creates problems. The cult of personality prevents the “stepping off”, into something deeper during a performance. “It’s like you’re always being you.”
He picked up the habit of intense professionalism from Laurie Anderson. “I was doing a festival, and I’d made a point of getting there at eight in the morning. She was there at seven, waiting on the steps. And I thought, If I’m going to do this I need to be really organised. If you want to be on the edge you can’t do it casually.”
All this meant that in 1983, when Rolfe was booked for The Late Late Show, he arrived early. “So I find the studio, and say that I’d like to start to set up, and Gay Byrne was in there. He asked me what I was doing, and I said I was trying to get organised, and he said, ‘So am I,’ and this thing started between us.”
So engaged was Byrne that by the time the show went on air, Rolfe’s performance segment was extended, and during the subsequent interview – “I was covered in pigment” – any anticipated ridicule was absent.
He describes some of the things that can happen during a performance. In Sweden someone set a pit bull on him. “And the pit bull thought I was the alpha male and just lay down. People pick up on something if there’s a heart in it. Because they’ve got a heart. The world is full of problems, of violence. It’s about communication. You can’t hold on to the past, and you can’t get to the future. Look with your eyes now. What do you see?”
Still Even is at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until April 3rd, with a closing performance at 7pm on April 1st. Nigel Rolfe’s talk on Joseph Beuys is part of the Heinrich Böll seminar on Achill Island on May 2nd. His European Dream will be on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art later this year to coincide with Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union
