Nigel Rolfe

Among the numerous performances presented during Franklin Furnace's first decade, the work of English-born artist Nigel Rolfe remains vivid. Rolfe, who has lived and worked in Dublin since the 1970s, had already carved out a distinctive niche for himself in Europe when he came to New York for the first time to perform Drawing at the Furnace on 6 December 1979.

While Rolfe's work was certainly rooted the traditions of early '70 s body art and '60s actionists, his work differed. Rolfe used his body as both a drawing tool and as a performative sculpture, directly confronting and interacting with elemental materials and environments rather than employing the body as the site of the action itself. He defined sculptural performance as a process in which the artist directs the material employed within a given space, with all the conditions of the process being of equal importance. He saw himself as a demonstrator of visual changes rather than as a "performer" in the common usage of the term. In describing this process as "sculpture in motion" Rolfe stated, "I believe that we have a fundamental and primitive material understanding which transcends social codes [. . .] and my work often deals with the building of balance in materials followed by an often violent disturbance and collapse [. . .]" (in Apple 1979). These "real time" acts of physical stress were often pushed to the limits of endurance, as demonstrated in Zone.

Over several days Rolfe covered the floor of the performance area with a precise "drawing" of alternating, evenly spaced stripes of white flour and powdered brick-red terracotta clay dust, running vertically from the back wall toward where the audience would sit, and bordered on either side by a rectangular "holding" area of dust—white on the left, red on the right. This became the ground for the culminating performance in which Rolfe's naked body met the field of dust and transformed both the landscape and his body. On the evening of 6 December, Rolfe lay down parallel to the first stripe and slowly rolled his body across the striped pigment-dust and flour, from one side to the other and back. He continued this action repeatedly with increasing effort, over and over, each time blurring the lines and blending the colors, leaving imprints where the force of his body impacted the ground. Gradually the original drawing was replaced by this new drawing, and the two colors blended into a fleshy pink. At some point one became aware that the dust would soon be clogging Rolfe's ears, nose, and mouth, making breathing difficult and inhaling dangerous. This sense of elemental risk reinforced the visceral immediacy of the piece.

Although Rolfe was certainly not the first male artist to engage in such tests of endurance and stamina, his work seemed to strive beyond the preoccupation with his own body's limits and capacities. In retrospect I find in it parallels with Japanese butoh in its primal energies and imagery (the white-coated, loincothed body), and its underlying political implications.

This political aspect became more apparent in Rolfe's performance The Rope in April 1984. Taken in part from the complete work The Rope That Binds Us Makes Them Free, it was about and for Ireland, not only for its current period of political strife and unrest, but for its long history of oppression. In describing the impetus for the piece, Rolfe stated:

In Leitrim, a county towards the North-West, we found cottages left long ago with everything intact. Like the Marie-Celeste floating in a deserted and barren landscape. Tea by the hearth, food on the table, the bed just slept in [. . .]. From one of the cottages, I took a ball of sisal twine covered with creosote. To bind my head with this ball.

(Rolfe 1999)

Subsequently, the work became about "those places, a memory, an echo of distant voices" (Rolfe 1999). But more: a symbol of Ireland itself.

Again the performance involved the interface between the material—in this case the creosote sisal twine—and the body. The reference is both more clear-cut and more brutal: separating the head from the body by binding...