Martin O’Brien – interview for Staging Decadence
“I should be dead but I’m not. […] Now I’m existing in a different time. This is the zombie time, the time of the animated corpse. I feel immortal.”
Martin O’Brien has anticipated or returned to these words or variations of them throughout his career as a practitioner and researcher. Although he has only been embodying and enacting zombiedom since 2015 – the first being a performance called Taste of Flesh / Bite Me I’m Yours (2015) – all of his work from 2011 onward speaks to a time of persisting through sickness and death. He has cystic fibrosis (CF), and was told by doctors that he would not live past his thirtieth birthday. The time lived since is what he calls ‘zombie time’ – a life lived longer than expected, a chronic time of and for the unwell – which was evocatively explored in a film re-released during the pandemic called The Unwell (2016), where he plays sixteen different zombies stumbling through a deserted town, their movements punctuated by persistent coughs. The sick denizens of this post-apocalyptic society ‘should be dead’, but in this place they not only survive, but thrive.
Many of O’Brien’s performances put his experiences of CF into dialogue with sadomasochism (SM), situating his work in the shadow of another performer, Bob Flanagan, whose collaborations with Sheree Rose in the 1980s up until his death from CF in 1996 had a significant impact on O’Brien’s own creative and intellectual development (you can find an interview with Rose on this blog). O’Brien has since gone on to develop a number of collaborations with Rose honouring Flanagan’s legacy, culminating in The Viewing (2016), Sanctuary Ring (2016) and The Ascension (2017), although Rose and O’Brien have been working together since 2011. O’Brien, Flanagan and Rose might form an unholy alliance that traverses generations and transgresses commonly-held beliefs about ‘appropriate’ capabilities, orientations and desires, but they also make space for a wry smile amid states of abjection and gruelling periods of endurance and intensity.
As O’Brien addressed during the pandemic, the nature and stakes of peopling a post-apocalyptic society with the unwell have taken on new resonances, prompting him to develop a new piece reflecting back on the chronicity of the pandemic and his own creative practice in the years leading up to its global spread: The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) (2021). In this interview for Staging Decadence, O’Brien reflects on how the pandemic lent his work a particular kind of timeliness, not least given the interruption it posed to how otherwise healthy people relate to mortality. There is more at stake in O’Brien’s practice than a singular experience of chronic illness; rather, as O’Brien explains, it has to do with how health and sickness come to be valued as such, with what might be said to constitute a normatively productive or ‘useful’ body, and with the establishment of a society that might serve as a sanctuary for the sick, the weird and the rebellious.
Martin O’Brien, The Last Breath Society (2021). Institute for Contemporary Art, London. Photo by Holly Revell.
Your own body is central in your practice, but at the same time you frequently collaborate with some very interesting people. What do those collaborations do to the centrality of your body in performance?
That’s a great question, because people often think about my work as solo practice, but it is very collaborative. My work with Sheree [Rose] is the most prominent collaboration, but most of my practice is collaborative in different ways – for instance, in working with Suhail [Ilyas], who’s a filmmaker and musician, who I’ve been collaborating with since we were at art school together at Dartington [College of Arts]. We’ve been collaborating for over twenty years. That sort of relationship is a really interesting one, where someone with a different skillset comes to bear on how art and performance is made. Our video collaboration [on The Unwell] was a really exciting development in my practice when I started to think about a different way of making, like editing. It feels strange to say, but having all this material and seeing all these images and placing them together, moving and stitching images together in a different way to performance, started to offer a different vocabulary for how performance can be made. That element of expertise is really exciting.
Martin O’Brien, The Unwell (2016). Stills from film by Suhail Ilyas.
Secondly, the process of working with other people just makes it fun and exciting. It’s a way of engaging that isn’t like the image of an artist sat alone in a solitary mode. Something that I always talk about with Sheree is that her practice, over the past forty years, has really been about collaboration. All of her work is collaborative – first with Bob, then with me, as well as other collaborators. That’s the way that she’s able to think through or do something. It’s that sense of community and bringing people together – particularly with her and the nature of our relationship, and the performed relationship in our S&M performances. It’s that theme of agency, and what can happen with a body, and what a body goes through. I’ve spoken a bit about the politics of consent and choice before, a body giving over personal agency to somebody else, where the infliction of pain transforms something oppressive into something pleasurable, funny, silly, humorous, but also political. Different kinds of collaboration offer ways of thinking that are not just about me and my body, but something wider and bigger.
It makes me wonder whether you think of yourself as one of Bob Flanagan’s collaborators. It’s a posthumous collaboration if it is [Flanagan died of CF in 1996]. There’s an explicit engagement with Flanagan’s work in the ‘Death Trilogy’ pieces that you’ve developed with Rose, via Flanagan – like The Viewing (2016) – but is it useful to think of this as a kind of post-mortem or posthumous mode of collaboration?
Yea, totally. Sheree certainly thinks of it as a three-way collaboration between me, her and Bob, with her as a central point, but it’s about this collaboration across generations and epochs, the boundaries of life and death – a posthumous collaboration. Amelia Jones wrote an essay about these ideas. The thing between Bob and I does feel like something more than a response to what he did. It’s more than a response, but it can’t be pure collaboration, because he died, but although there was no ‘getting together’ it does still feel like collaboration, through Sheree. The Viewing really explicitly tried to finish something that Bob and Sheree couldn’t finish because he died. They conceived of the ‘The Death Trilogy’ in 1994 and completed the first part [called Video Coffin], and then Bob died, so there were these two unrealised works that Sheree and I then realised in different forms – our own versions. In 2015 we did Dust to Dust in Los Angeles, which is the second part of the trilogy, and then in 2016 we did The Viewing in Liverpool at DadaFest, which was the third part of the trilogy where I become Bob, in a way.
Martin O’Brien, Sheree Rose and Rhiannon Aarons, The Viewing (2016), DaDaFest, Bluecoat, Liverpool. CCTV footage stills.
These examples come across to me as afterlives of performances – reanimated performance, or maybe simply an animation given the particularities of your work with Rose… But a deadness-made-live nonetheless. I’m wondering how this connects up with your interest in zombies. On the one hand you have an engagement with ‘dead’ performance and a performer who died at the end of the last century, bringing both to life – so there’s an art-historical engagement with the dead-made-live – and on the other you have a recurring engagement not with the Haitian and African-diasporic zombie, but with pop-cultural zombies. That particularity seems important – the flesh eater is what matters.
Yea, so the figure of the zombie or the undead started to come into my work around 2015, when I was approaching 2017, the year I reached 30 – the average life expectancy of someone with cystic fibrosis. So approaching that time I was really thinking obsessively about death, which is something I’ve always done, but now in a different way – a politicised death – and trying to think philosophically about what it means to be reaching this point at which I was sure I would die, and what would happen if I didn’t die when I reached thirty. As it got closer it became pretty clear that I wouldn’t die, I was doing pretty well health-wise, but I was thinking about what to do when I no longer had death as that thing I was sure would happen then. The figure of the zombie, particularly in pop culture, became really important for me. I obsessively watched pop zombie movies and TV shows, and what struck me was how camp these zombies were, which I loved: stumbling, bleeding, but wearing the costume of the person they used to be, staggering through the streets. They’re completely useless on their own as creatures, so easily destroyed, but when you get a mass of them they’re able to bring down civilisations, and destroy cities, and crush capitalism. There’s something really Romantic in that idea as well. So I started to think about these bodies that hold both life and death within them. They’re post-death, but also alive. There’s something philosophically important about that.
So I started to think about this idea of ‘zombie time’. A rough definition of what I mean by that is a temporal experience of living longer than expected, and what that shift is when you move beyond the death date. Now I playfully say that I’m a zombie, with tongue-in-cheek! There’s been some funny headlines… The BBC did a podcast on me and named it ‘The Artist Who Believes He’s a Zombie’! I was like, come on! It’s a playful thing – wink wink nudge nudge – but there is also a serious thing in there around the politics of that figure, the one who should have died but continues to live. What does that do to one’s temporal experience?
The idea of zombie time became even more relevant over the past couple of years, when the pandemic started. It initially had nothing to do with the pandemic, but all of a sudden everybody’s temporal experience started to shift and transform, so I started to think about what it means for everybody to be now placed in a strange relationship to mortality, especially toward the start of the pandemic when nobody was quite sure what was going on, who might die if they got this disease, and who might suffer from it. It got people thinking about mortality in ways they might not have done before, and also in relation to their loved ones. It felt like the world was thrust into zombie time, when everybody’s temporal experience was shattered and torn apart. There was a shift in how people understood death, and their own relationship to it.
There’s a lot I’d like to pick up on here, but maybe to start with – that broadening out of zombie time as a collective state, could you dig deeper into that? A quote that you come back to in a few performances is the idea of death of being behind you [as someone who’s living past their life expectancy], and no longer in front. Are there different kinds of zombie time at stake here, or is it that society at large has a closer proximity to zombie time?
Part of it feels like zombie time is about a changing relationship to death, where it becomes part of embodied experience rather than an external thing. It’s in the body, rather than elsewhere. It’s not a Grim Reaper anymore, but a lived experience that we are living through. I think it was Foucault who talked about the idea of the sick living body being an anticipation of the corpse it will become. [1] Zombie time shifts that a little bit. Instead of the sick body being an anticipation of the corpse, it’s a corpse that’s been brought back to life. It is a corpse, but a living one. But yea, I think maybe you’re right, that there may be different kinds of zombie time going on here, but the pandemic brought about a shifting relationship to mortality. Death became part of everybody’s lived experience all of a sudden in a way that it wasn’t before.
Can you walk us through how that shaped the tone of The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin)? You touched on this earlier, but something that often gets underplayed in commentaries on your work is how amusing it can be. That humour is balanced against regimes of hardship and intensity, but it’s still balanced. In The Last Breath Society, it felt like that humour – and I know there were several iterations of it – but at least on the afternoon I attended it was definitely not amusing, and nor was it trying to be. It felt like a serious meditation on a point in the pandemic, and a meditation on where you were at in terms of your journey as an artist.
Do you remember what point you came?
I’m not sure… It wasn’t the first sharing. Some point in July 2021!
The rhythm of that piece was four hours a day of performance, for eight days, with access to an installation before each performance. Each day had it own feeling and atmosphere and rhythm, and that changed each day, with each one developing on from the previous one. Some days really were like these meditations. They were really slow developments of images of collapse and rebuilding into other things, and there were other days when there was more lightness and laughter in them. But you’re right, there was a heaviness across the work as a whole. We’d just come out of lockdown, and it was one of the first live things that people would have been to see. People were just starting to put things on live again. It felt like, wow, what a thing to come and see – something about death! And trying to process everything over the past year and a half. COVID was a ghost in the room. It wasn’t about COVID, but it did do this thing of processing feelings about it, sitting in a space with images that came out of that year and a half.
The work was initially going to be quite different. It was planned to happen before COVID was even known to any of us, and it had the same title. It was just going to be a one-off four-hour performance, for one day, but with the pandemic I started to rethink what the work was going to be. All of a sudden the cough [Martin coughs twice – a rasping cough that punctuates all his performances] had a totally different cultural meaning that had just shifted completely. And the corpse and the dead body… the work is something else now. I’d made a piece before COVID that seemed to speak to the cultural context of COVID, so I had to rethink how to manage and work through that. That’s when the work became an eight-day durational performance with four hours a day. We commissioned ten different artists to make videos in response to core ideas around zombie time, breath, COVID, and those ten videos were displayed in the space as part of the work. I was trying to think about community and togetherness in a time when we can’t be together. The work originally was going to have live performers with me, but I stripped all of that out. I just had my body – and Zack [McGuinness, who assisted Martin in delivering key actions] – and instead artists would put videos in the space exploring ideas of gathering when we can’t be together. It’s a bringing together of a semi-fictional society, ‘The Last Breath Society’, and an invitation for everyone to be part of this society: a place where we can think about death, and where we can decay together.
Martin O’Brien, The Last Breath Society (2021). Institute for Contemporary Art, London. Photo by Manuel Vason.
Does that speak at all to Susan Sontag’s writing on the kingdom of the sick?
Yea, I think it does. I didn’t really engage with that work for a long time, as I wasn’t really sure about it, about the concept. But the more time that’s passed it really speaks to me in thinking through what this world is. The Last Breath Society is about entering into this cult, or secret society, which is in the healthy world, but that is also there as this separate thing. So there’s this acknowledgment that we live on a different cloud, or have a different life, or experience of life. Being sick is a different temporal experience to other people. It took me a long time to figure that out, because I’ve always been sick. I didn’t have that traumatic experience of becoming sick and having my life change. The idea of it being an alternative, a different kingdom, didn’t really make sense to me then – but it is something different in terms of temporality. Even if my experience hasn’t had that shift from the healthy to the sick, I’ve always lived in the kingdom of the sick. But the experience of being sick has always been a stable one throughout my life.
You were talking there about inviting audiences into a cult – a cult of decay and sickness – and there are various other notions that you’ve been drawing on that I want to thread together. Firstly, the zombie on its own being useless – they aren’t motivated by being useful, or productive, or having a particular goal or outcome that they want to pursue, other than satiation – but they also can become a horde more interested in the opposite of all these things. They have a taste for the abject and your zombies also have a taste for uncommon pleasures, and embracing or hastening the decline of business as usual. All of this seems to me to speak to decadence. Not pop cultural zombies in general, but your zombies, specifically…
I’d never really thought in those terms, about decadence, but your invitation and hearing about the project made me ask what this relationship to decadence might be. I’m not a historian, but I do speak to the idea of finding pleasure in death and illness, but as survival strategies. I’m not trying to die here! But it’s trying to take enjoyment in the excess of our body and its mortality as a survival strategy, as a political strategy as well. That feels like it relates to decadence, especially the way in which you’ve written and talked about decadence.
Key to that in relation to your own work is its intersectionality, particularly how sickness relates to queerness, and queerness to sickness. There’s nothing inherently decadent about relating sickness to queerness, but I do think that’s where decadence comes through for me in the specific context of your own practice.
Totally. You know, it’s so complicated. The two of them in my own practice seem to undermine one another, as well as doing something interesting to one another, and that’s where the politics of the intersectional feels hopefully useful in my practice. Queerness and pleasure in sexuality can undermine sickness as victimhood or becoming the triumphant hero in sick representations, and it stops people picking up a really obvious narrative around illness. Finding pleasure in the bodily processes of illness as a queer act feels like it does something politically to undermine the ways in which illness is commonly represented or read. I also feel the reverse as well – that the sickness prevents the work from becoming a practice of simply celebrating sexuality. It stops it from becoming a pretty Pride-like event, and instead turns it into something darker, and that isn’t really palatable. I enjoy that; it’s always on the brink, and can’t be read easily. It also prevents the work becoming autobiographical. People talk about my work in relation to autobiography, but I say the work isn’t really autobiographical. You don’t find out anything about me or my life. The work comes out of life experiences of sickness and queerness, but you never find out the story of that life. I try for the work to do something beyond that, approaching a wider thinking through of what illness and sexuality ‘is’ for bodies, and what the political situation might be of living as a sick queer person.
Given this resistance toward reducing your own practice to a one-dimensional autobiographical reading, what would you want your legacy to be? You’ve spent a good part of your practice honouring the legacies of others – like Bob Flanagan’s – but where do you place the significance of your own emerging legacy?
Oooh, that is the question! A few years ago I started to really think about legacy and what happens when I die. I think that was part of the reason why I moved more toward video work, as it can exist after I die. I wanted something to be there, to be left and available and not just as documentation of live work, but seen in the form it was designed to be seen in. But the other thing I’ve been thinking about is corpses, and what might happen to my corpse, and how I might continue to perform posthumously, with my corpse – my physical remains – becoming art. I’m not sure what that might be, but something that uses the flesh after death. That doesn’t speak to legacy so much, but it does speak to how the work might continue after passing away.
I should maybe clarify – I wasn’t intending to steer you toward contemplating the ultimate end, although I totally recognise it seems like that! [Laughter]. I mean, one of the things you’ve got me thinking about now is Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon at University College London, which is a pretty macabre work given that his preserved skeleton is now permanently on display. I don’t think you can see the skeleton itself – he’s dressed, and they’ve given him a wax head – but still… I guess what I meant to ask is where you’d place the lasting significance of the work you’ve been making. Lots of other people have talked about why they think it’s important, but what makes it potentially significant for you?
I think it might be to do with community – not community practices, but the ways in which the work might bring people together into a cult or a world where weird people can gather together: the weirdos, the freaks, the monsters, the strange characters, can descend into this world together. Sheree and I did this piece in Ipswich, Sanctuary Ring (2016), which was in this old church. Outside the church is this big ring, and people running from the law could hold the metal ring, and if they held the ring the police couldn’t arrest them. If they held the ring they could gain sanctuary from the law in the church. That’s where the title came from. The idea was that the church would become a sanctuary of sickness, for people to claim sanctuary. So maybe it’s something to do with that, and that’s where the legacy is going on, with ‘The Last Breath Society’ continuing for decades, becoming an actual society where people find sanctuary in sickness.
Notes
[1] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Routledge, 1973), p162.