Mark Fisher
"Oh my God," says a young woman catching sight of him as she steps off the bus. She blinks disbelievingly and moves on. "Why’s he in that chair?" asks a middle-aged man. He doesn’t stop to find out. Others walk by without noticing or give puzzled double-takes as they pass. A few stop for a closer look before continuing with their Christmas shopping. Directly across the road at Castigliano Collections, where the windows display nothing more untoward than bridal gowns, the staff - Brenda and Yvonne - are most intrigued. "I called over and asked what he was doing," says Yvonne. "Why is he doing it?" "I’m unsure of the purpose," says Brenda. "I believe he’s an actor or a performance artist, but we’re still unsure of why he’s in McCormack’s window and what the outcome is going to be. Who’s it going to benefit? I suppose it’s a different take on a Christmas decoration. He was attracting quite a bit of attention on the first day - pure curiosity and nosiness." The man attracting the curiosity is David Sherry. He is not an actor but an artist and this is the kind of thing he does. Previous "performances" involved him carrying a bucket of water about for a week, avoiding all physical contact for a month (not one of his girlfriend’s favourites), hanging around in shops until he got thrown out, avoiding eye contact for a week, employing someone to brush his teeth for five minutes a day, applying for as many inappropriate jobs as he could and walking around with balsa wood planks attached to his feet. He’s attracted attention for these and other such interventions that subtly disturb the rhythms of everyday life, but it’s not all he does. The free-thinking graduate of Glasgow School of Art also draws and makes videos and is working towards his next gallery-based exhibition in February in San Francisco. First, though, he has this self-imposed ordeal to get through. Every day until Christmas, he will spend five hours in McCormack’s window watching TV and munching through packet after packet of biscuits. It’s only been a couple of days and already he’s developed an aversion to Rich Tea biscuits, Jaffa Cakes and Danish pastries. Despite the bemusement on the street, McCormack’s general manager John Wiggins is thrilled by the idea. "I love the fact that for the last 67 years McCormack’s has had a Christmas window full of snow, keyboards and guitars and now people walk past and see this guy sitting eating mince pies. The reactions on people’s faces are comical. We just think it’s fun, interesting and challenging." SHERRY, WHO was nominated for the Beck’s Futures prize last year, is in the window thanks to a commission from BBC Three. The digital channel has rounded up four artists to contribute to a project called Christmas Visions, displaying their work in shop windows across the country with additional material on the internet. Fellow Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley has made an animated video for a hi-fi shop in Leeds; Hannah Starkey has produced a digitally manipulated photograph for a furniture shop in Belfast; and Abigail Lane has transformed a monumental mason’s shop in London into a giant snow dome. Digital viewers of BBC Three can press the red button after 9pm to see Sherry in action. Or, more properly, in inaction. Because the whole point of his performance - if performance isn’t too strong a word - is that he doesn’t do very much. He just sits and eats. It’s a response to the bloated inertia of the Christmas holiday period, a time when slobbing out in front of the telly becomes a national sport. "It’s a real research process into biscuits," he says in his soft Northern Irish tones when he emerges from the window, insisting on getting a bowl of soup for nutrition after two hours of snacking. "I wanted to eat cake, but cake is saturated in fat and you cannot spend a day eating a chocolate cake. You’d just drop out. It really turns your stomach." Contrary to expectations, Sherry is not trying to make the obvious, Geldolf-style Christmas point about over-indulgence, rampant capitalism and starvation in the developing world. And although his sugar intake is reminiscent of Super Size Me, the documentary film in which Morgan Spurlock subjected himself to a life-threatening diet of McDonald’s burgers, Sherry is not trying to break any endurance records. He is content to go home for a normal life each evening. "The comment on Christmas indulgence is not there," he says. "What is there is that I always seem to need stuff around me - to be doing, eating or consuming in some fashion. I’ll leave the radio on and open a bag of crisps, read the newspaper and listen to the stereo. Before I know it, I’ve got six different things going on. What went into the work was me realising that I had this mentality of consuming everything." He sees his performance, benignly and non-politically, as a way to think about how all of us relax. "I’m just re-enacting what I’d do on holiday - slumping out or whatever," says Sherry, who has come to appreciate the value of doing nothing as a result of sitting in the window. "It’s a parallel to what I’d usually do. Most of my work is like that. When I employed a woman to brush my teeth, that was just tweaking a parallel of normal everyday life. This woman came round for five minutes each morning, so it became quite normal. It was like a parallel existence to normal reality. This performance is quite similar to that, looking at normal activities, behaviour and actions." It turns out that the performance is not just about the artist’s actions. For Sherry, the experience has become an inadvertent lesson in human anthropology. Watching the behaviour on the street through the glass is a revelation. He’s had people mooning at him, others rapping on the window and someone with a piece of paper saying "You’re not as good as David Blaine". So what’s it like sitting in a shop window all day? "It’s fine," he says, relieved, all the same, to be out and able to talk to someone. "I get nervous thinking about it, but when I’m actually doing it, it’s quite chilled out. Sometimes I get lost in a movie and then suddenly I turn around and see a guy in the street. I realise I’m supposed to be making a piece of art and I’m getting caught up in The Shawshank Redemption or something." He is unconcerned about how people react to him. The purpose of his art is to break the pattern of daily life, so it doesn’t matter whether the response is laughter, anger or bewilderment. "I always make performance works that are behind closed doors or a normal part of life. Sometimes I think what I’m doing is barely art - it’s a job. When I’m making performances I give myself a job, like the job of carrying around a bucket of water or averting eye contact with anybody. I wrote a rota of what I should or shouldn’t do within the artwork. This project is just the same: it’s a five-hours-a-day job." He is amused by the contradiction in being actively involved in an inactive occupation, busy doing nothing, and that’s just the kind of conceptual joke that underpins Sherry’s art. "The humour in my work is there because I don’t take myself so seriously," he says. "If somebody says ‘That’s not art’, I’m not bothered, it just means it’s not working. I’ll make something funny before I make it intellectual. I don’t think this work is particularly funny but some people laugh as they’re walking past or take photos with their mobile phones." His only concern now is to get through the festive season as swiftly as possible. After all, Christmas Day is going to be a busman’s holiday. "Finishing Christmas is going to be like ‘Thank God, back to normality’," he says. "But if I wasn’t doing it, I’d be on the wind-down to Christmas, so it’s nice to get a piece of work out of it." David Sherry appears at McCormack’s Music,
Bath Street, Glasgow, every day until Christmas, 10am-noon and 2pm-5pm.
See also www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree |