'In Montenegro, I had somebody literally lift me off the wall I was performing on and carry me away'

TALK TIME:Performance artist Amanda Coogan

Performance artists have a reputation, even among other artists, for being slightly out-there. How do you explain what you do to, say, taxi drivers or people you meet at weddings?Well, performance art is quite new. It dates back only as far as the 1960s or 1970s. But it's very much accepted as a medium now. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, has just appointed its first director of performance art. In layman's terms, when I'm talking to my aunties and uncles, say, I'll talk about sculpture. I'll say that my work as a performance artist is very pure. Instead of having a marble, or stone, or wooden sculpture, I am the sculpture.

But when I was a writer at an alternative magazine, relatives had a hard time getting their heads around that. You paint yourself gold, hang potatoes from your neck and stare out at the sea . . .I know. The great thing about that particular piece, though, was that it was in a public space, on the Clontarf seafront. So people were walking their dogs and there was genuine interaction with Joe Public. I think Irish people love watching things that are live and in the now – be it dogs running around a track, fellas whacking a sliotar in a field or Cork and Kerry battling it out in Croke Park. It's all about the now.

If I’m sitting there with my own body weight in potatoes on top of me, who knows what’s going to happen next? A dog could pee on me. I could faint. In Montenegro, I had somebody literally lift me off the wall I was performing on and carry me away.

Was that an act of performance art or a criticism?Oh, I think he was just being fabulously macho. There was a huge crowd around and we were in this beautiful castle and I was throwing milk into the air. I think he was just being a big feckin' macho lunatic.

Tell me about this show you're curating in the new VISUAL centre in Carlow. Accumulator is a conversation with six artists. It's almost like when you're a kid in school, and someone draws a line and they pass the paper on, and the next child draws another line and so on. It's collaborative. But the exciting thing about this is that it's live performance. The big coup for me is to get Alastair MacLennan to come down, because he's a hugely influential artist, not just in performance practice. I'm also excited about working with Declan Rooney, who's from Tullow. We studied together in Berlin under a hugely important artist called Marina Abramovic, as did Yingmei Duan, who's also appearing. Chinese contemporary art is exploding at the moment, but she came to Berlin to do a masterclass with Abramovic. So it's a great opportunity to see her.

In your own work, you've used a lot of sign language in the past.Yes, both my parents are deaf. So it's probably all their fault that I do what I do! My upbringing was in the deaf clubs, surrounded by all of these people waving their arms in the air, while we hearing children could run around screaming and roaring, because nobody would give out to us. But my parents are very proud deaf people, proud users of sign language. And I'm very proud to be from that community.

Being raised with sign language must have influenced the direction you've taken as an adult?Hugely. I mean, sign language isn't just about waving your hands. It's about full body expression. So all my life I've been used to communicating through the body and receiving the world through the eyes.

Now I have to ask . . . Most performance art I’ve stumbled upon has tended to be heavy on one particular element. One lady took all her clothes off and danced on egg shells. Another took all her clothes off and climbed into a bag. Another took all her clothes off and brandished a faucet suggestively. There’s a pattern emerging here . . .

People do get a bit frightened of performance art, and tend to assume that it will involve people taking objects and inserting them places they shouldn’t go. Yes, there is nudity. But it’s not meant to be sexual or anything like that. It’s used as the basis for colour. Clothing is used very specifically too. What I would suggest to people is that they pop into the National Gallery and check out how many paintings of semi-clad women there are. And that’s the correlation that I’d draw.

You mentioned the GAA earlier – do you think there’s much crossover between respective audiences?

Well, there’s one at least – me!

Accumulatoris at the new VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow town, until November 28th