Burning The Books

‘A circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal , parts that derive from nature, the group, the race or the Gods’ (Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World’)

Off I went onto the streets, with a single lottery ticket to give away, a totally out of character behavior which made me smile. I decided that I would walk into the centre of the main precinct – Liverpool One – sit myself down and give it to the first person whose gaze I met. I sat on one of the central seating areas and looked up into the eyes of a young woman selling the Big Issue. I promptly offered her the ticket as a gift. She explained that she had recently arrived from Rumania with 2 children and we had a chat about how it was to land in Liverpool. Even after assuring her I didn’t want anything in return, she refused to accept the ticket but thanked me warmly for offering it to her. I then offered to buy the Big Issue in exchange for her accepting the ticket. She immediately accepted, provided that we split the proceeds if she won any money, scratched off the numbers and giggled when there wasn’t a match, shrugging her shoulders and wandering off. The story that would have unfolded if it had been a match would have been an interesting one…

I sat and rolled up a cigarette. Now I had a Big Issue to give away and wondered what the next exchange might be. I looked up to see a huge procession of people moving towards me. It was the Jesus Army, with purple flags, beaming faces, singing Jesus versions of Beatles and football (‘We love you Jesus, we do…” )songs . I knew I was in Liverpool. Someone from the procession was giving out flyers and handed me two. Instinctively I offered my Big Issue to them in return. We began a conversation and I decided to join the Jesus Army for half an hour and see where it took me, flyer-gift in hand. The disarming thing was there were people on both sides flanking the procession and joining in with the songs, like they were old time musical hits. It was a totally feel-good experience at that moment and I launched wholeheartedly into the centre of the procession, enjoying my disguise.

A woman with 3 children started speaking to me, asking me how I had found Jesus. I explained I was just a guest and was technically a Muslim, but my spiritual practice stood outside of mainstream religion. She looked puzzled then lit up and explained how she had converted from Islam to Christianity and now lived in the Jesus Army community full time. Although it was interesting to hear about what she felt was missing from one faith that the other provided for her, after a while it became slightly uncomfortable as I realized it was a preliminary conversion conversation and I felt the urge to run away. I said politely said goodbye and sat down on a bench, folding one of my fliers into a paper aeroplane and lighting another cigarette.



The main appeal of Present In Public for me was how timely it was, given where I was at in my own life and practice and the wholly integrated and refreshing way in which Tim proposed to work with us to enable us to devise individual works within the context of a group process. This happened over 8 weeks through a series of gift-and-exchange-based tasks and interventions which included us all spending 24 hours together in a ‘research and exchange process’ between the Bluecoat, the streets of Liverpool and his house in Anfield, weekly pairings of artists for the artistic equivalent of co-counseling (my view!), an anonymous blog in which we were all expected to choose another artist’s project and write on it, gifting our perspective while the work was still being formed, and many more playful moments including singing each other to sleep, receiving small gifts from Tim which could be a call to action and writing each other letters as a send-off before the final performance day arrived.

One of our first tasks when we arrived for session one was to take to the streets and indoor spaces of Liverpool on a busy Saturday afternoon with a set of optional research exercises, such as ‘make someone an offer they can’t refuse’, ‘offer something to someone that would be appropriate in a different space but isn’t appropriate where you are’ or ‘be still in the space until something is given to you’. I’ve worked with gift and exchange exercises to create work before, but never ‘naked’, i.e., with no build-up /assistance/materials/reflection time, as in The Gifts (2010), It’s what draws me to live art practice – the light-footed, in-the-moment nature of it.

With a time limit of 3 hours, I decided to go out onto the streets, with the intention to literally be led by my feet and these research exercises foremost in my head… feeling immediately out of my comfort zone and at that time still a smoker, I took out my tobacco and realized I had run out of papers. I went into the local supermarket to get some and at the counter I noticed the lottery ticket stand staring up at me, as if inviting me to action. I never play the lottery, I’m kind of against it in principle. I looked up at the cashier, bought some rizlas, asked for a lottery ticket and found myself offering her the ticket as a gift. She looked at me with a mixture of alarm and bemusement, politely but playfully refusing. ‘But what if it’s a winner?’ I insisted. Her line manager hovered behind her, curtly informing me that employees were not allowed to accept gifts. Of course. The cashier winked at me and joked that if it was a winning ticket, she’d gladly meet me after her shift to split the proceeds and spend them. It became clear that I had to keep the gift moving though and that was what shaped my encounters over the following hours.



Where to begin?

There is a massive backstory to this project, which reflects both the rapidly changing and extraordinary socio-economic climate we are living in, the historical threads that underpin it and within that my own personal and at times intensely painful experience of the impact of financial and associated emotional debt on mine and my family’s life over the last few years.

It was never my intention to make a work about debt, my/our last taboo. I have tackled birth, death, cultural displacement and loss in many forms, through a number of live and public installation projects over the last decade.

I went through a period of intense questioning – intensified by cuts in public funding – as to whether a complete change of direction was approaching, perhaps a complete move away from ‘making work’ at all. All I can say is that, to some extent, this project was gifted to me in unexpected ways, which will be narrated through the course of this blog.

On November 12th 2011, I was one of 6 artists out in Liverpool city centre making live work under the auspices of Present in Public, (PIP), a programme of gift-based interventions curated by Tim Jeeves through Giving into Gift,supported by the Bluecoat /Arts Council England and now in its second year. It is defined as ‘. a meeting point between artists, their peers and the public… the beginning of a conversation around ideas of generosity and reciprocation and how these themes manifest’.

The proposition which drew me in when I read the callout was of PIP as ‘ an interrogation that shifts focus between dissecting the common conception of gift as an altruistic act of generosity and the darker undercurrents within the concept – feelings of indebtedness, unwanted gifts and the potential for the abuse of generosity by individuals, institutions and the state’

Both the chance to unravel the darker sides of gift and the chance to do this in parallel with other artists with a related focus, facilitated by someone immersed in the subject from a live art perspective ticked a lot of boxes for me. The fee was minimal, (£500) barely enough to cover our subsistence, but this was open and it was clear that the value lay elsewhere, something I can rarely say about many other public commissions that I have seen offered that expect artists to give blood for rapidly decreasing fees and pay inordinate proportions of their budget to intermediary agencies (but I digress..). In the case of PIP, the scale and expectations of the project were in direct proportion to what was offered and there was a degree of transparency (including the publishing of the budget on the website) that was intended to reflect on and feed into the core concept of the project.