APEMAN PERFORMANCE

The performance requires three ‘actors’ plus a plant in the audience, one of whom may or may not be Stewart Home. The first performer introduces the second performer as Stewart Home, after giving an outline of Home’s ‘career’ and explaining that everything Home does is designed to raise doubts in the minds of onlookers. The second performer, who may or may not be Stewart Home, then begins to make various remarks about his desire to step outside the Hegelian limits of avant-gardism, while insisting that this must be a matter of social practice rather than a merely theoretical ‘solution’. At this point, the plant in the audience interrupts to state that the performer on stage isn’t Stewart Home. After a certain amount of arguing, the plant claims that he is, in fact, Stewart Home.

The advertised performance then takes places, a memorised anti-theatrical recital of various texts by Home. This may be done by any of the performers, who may or may not be Home. The longest and final passage recited consists of a description of a skinhead being given a blow job while the boot boy recites from Abiezer Coppe’s A Fiery Flying Roll, an incident that is mimicked on stage. For this, the performer should be partially screened, so that it is unclear whether or not he is getting a blow job from an assistant. Prior to this ‘climax’ the audience will be informed that ‘Home’ is to recite for as long as possible against the distraction of oral sex. At the end of the recital, which may or may not be successfully completed, the performer will ‘reveal’ that rather than being Stewart Home, he is actually Luther Blissett.

This is the script for Stewart Home’s notorious Apeman Performance, first acted out in the spring of 1997 at the San Georgio theatre in the beautiful city of Udine.

Art/Anti-Art