Interview between John Slyce and Peter Jaques

John Slyce: Can you begin with the performance of the work.
Peter Jaques: More performed than performance in photography past tense. This kind of performance is not for the audience to see; the performance results in a photograph. This is Performed Photography. I was reading a lot of Murice Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus which made me see this myth as almost an allegory of photography. This then lead me to try and do something. I took Ovid’s text of Orpheus and Eurydice and recorded myself speaking it. I then descended into a basement I had lined with photographic paper and was in complete darkness. I made a cocktail of chemicals, which was a mix of fix and cyanide and used an old-style quill pen to apply it to the paper. As I was writing in the dark I did not have the usual link between the eye and the hand used in writing, so the marks became more instinctive and/or gestural. For the final insulation of the work, I started with a fine black and white print of the entrance to the basement. I printed the opening of the basement full photographic black to almost be like an inkwell. Then I had the actual pen that I used in the performance stuck upon the wall. This pen had corroded and was rusting away from the chemicals. I saw this pen as a signifier of written language and it stood for that.

JS: So the writing element is with chemicals instead of light?
PJ: One of the main elements of photography is light. By taking away this main element I would be destructing photography, but still making a photograph. I want to see what the limits are of making a photograph. Within the myth of Orpheus, the light, or lack of light and the looking and/or seeing is very important. This was one part of the allegory.

JS: Go back to the performance element in the basement. What more did you bring to that type of performance without an audience?
PJ: The audience is in the dark. I had a dog down there with me also. Her eyes and mine were the only ones down there. The dog was acting three parts, and probably had the hardest part to play. On one hand, she was the audience, the Other and the Gaze itself. Lastly she was caricature as Cerberus, one of the guardians of the underworld. There was no camera present as that would have been an extra iris which I did not want.

JS: So the three elements were in conversation with each other to reconstitute the performance but also become the object?
PJ: Yes, sure. They work and speak to each other in different ways as well. The voice recording I used in the basement was present as well and the audience could pick it up and listen.

JS: And what are you working on now?
PJ: What I’ve done since then is The Twelve Labours of Hercules as a performed piece again. Hercules is arguably one of the greatest and most famous heroes of Ancient Greece. The majority of people have at least heard his name, and probably know more than they think they do about him. I decided I would set myself twelve tasks in a performance scene that would correspond with his great myth. I was interested in how, during ancient times, these stories or myths were never written down but passed on by word of mouth. They were spoken around the campfire and then someone else would then retell the story with their own slight variations. It was said that Homer was not one man but a whole family of Homers that had been telling these stories for generations. Then eventually, someone wrote them down into Ancient Greek. In Roman times they were translated into Latin and changing still. And then we come to Modern times when they have been translated into English. You can go into Waterstone’s and find at least three different versions of these stories, which seem to bear only the title in common. I then tried to read and rehearse the twelve labours so that I was able to remember them in my head. I then went into the dark and tried to write down as much or as little as I could remember. I saw this as a kind of palimpsest and what I was doing was adding to the composite with my new addition. I am taking it from memory and then putting it back into handwriting that is more or less illegible. These performances resulted in twelve 20”x24” photographs. I used this paper as it is a very photographic size. I wanted them to be very crisp and perfect, working alongside the sort of sharp perfection associated with photography. I want them to be predominantly photographic. This is very important to me. As a viewer, you could not tell the labours by looking at the picture; the pictures are more to do with my labours; Hercules is only a sort of vehicle for me.

JS: And is that where you were at?
PJ: Pretty much. To get to the labours of Hercules, I’m doing 12 boxes which include work or effort, each one I did from memory and one each day. This is V: The Cleansing of Augean’s Stables. I washed and rubbed over the writing, washing away my labours with labour.

JS: Yes, what is left is relatively illegible but still a graphic mark of labour. The piece turns on the ability of the viewer to recall that oral memory, or verbalise the memory.
PJ: Yes, one must tell the story.

JS: You’re inscribing it once again there.
PJ: I’m activation memory in the viewer – that’s one thing I’m interested in.