This is the Black & White performance with John-Paul Hussey in White & Daniel Mounsey in Black. It was first done in early 2011 in the cosmetic departments of Myer and David Jones in Melbourne. On that occasion we wandered around behaving like any other customer looking for a make-over. There are pictures on this website on the General page.
These images are from December 2012 during the Xmas shopping period in Melbourne. This time we directly interacted with the general public. Naturally whenever we passed all kinds of camera phones and digital camera came out of bags and back pockets. People seem to carry around these devices like they are cross between an hand gun and a dear-diary.
Snap, document, show your friends and it’s happening a billion times all over the world. One could wonder if there will come a point where there are more images documenting reality, than reality itself. It wont happen of course, because reality is constantly unfurling.
But never before have we documented what is around us so madly. Mind you, just because there’s a predilection for documentation, it doesn’t necessarily make everyone good at it. And these days everyone seems to be a photographer and most professionals would say photography is the poorer for it. But that’s another subject entirely.
Either or, they took them out and snapped away. This time though we decided to ask for a donation, accompanied by a small spiel that we were performance artists and we should ideally be paid for our efforts, and that not all images are free.
Most understood this request and we’re happy to hand over a few coins, but there were still a great many who refused, walked away or snapped regardless and thought us arrogant or foolish, even greedy and that really, since we were parading in public, we were therefore within the public domain and as an image we essentially belonged to them.
The people who seem to react most positively to this performance, were Asians: Japanese and Indians in particular, both on a religious and/or a purely aesthetic level. They seemed genuinely pleased to see us and asked no questions about who or what we were doing that day.
There were the inevitable questions of what the performance meant and many asked who we were, thinking that we might be part of some commercial promotion, advertising an event. Or we were already employed by the city, since we weren’t like typical street performers or buskers who remain stationary in one spot.
On the whole everyone seemed enjoyed seeing such a striking image pass through an otherwise everyday landscape…and that, regardless of the symbolism of black and white, was our a primary intention. To take the Art out of the galleries and theatres and bring it to people who would not necessarily go to these institutions.
Pics by Mark Burban aka pixelwhip.
