Up Close with Robert Ayers

Writing & Photography by Justin Negard

While Katonah resident Robert Ayers may be new to the local art scene, he’s somewhat of a legend in England. Originally from Newcastle, England, Ayers made a name for himself as a performance artist willing to do what others could only dream of (a show about a stripper, staging his own kidnapping, etc.). He’s also worked as a painter, an art writer and an art history teacher. His latest work, born out of COVID-19 limitations, features abstract forms in collage and paint. 

So let me make sure I’ve got this right. A bunch of boys kidnapped you in the botanical gardens?

Yes. Sort of. It was a piece of performance art set in the Sheffield botanical gardens. I called it “Regulation,” and I dedicated it to the fire officers who closed down my previous show. The performances took place at midnight; they were based on the idea that just because they lock the garden gates and you can’t get in, things, like nature, are still happening. Audience members would come into the garden, and the performance gradually became like a dream fed through the funny papers.

I had about twenty people playing parts, and I was the park ranger. At one point, a bunch of boys climbed over a wall, tied me up and threw me into a sack. They proceeded to take the group on an entirely different tour of the gardens. 

Was the audience expecting this? How did they react?

They loved it. But they had no idea what would happen. The local media kind of misunderstood what it was because I wrote a slightly jokey press release that said, “Are you interested in gardening? Are you interested in plants and what they do at night?” And the media took that absolutely straight, so the people who came to the performance thought they were going to learn about how to get rid of slugs from their garden.

However, once one of the local radio stations realized what was going on, they decided they didn’t like this kind of thing in Sheffield. So they sent the radio car to interview the audience as they came out of the botanical gardens and tried to get them to say it was a waste of money. And God bless them, these old men and ladies, they said, “That was really good. We’ve never seen anything like that before. We wish we could do this all the time!”

Why did the fire officers close down your previous show?

Well, I would often create sets for my performances. And you can’t make a room out of cardboard, paint it with gloss enamel, and then have the audience smoking cigarettes. The fire officers were really my downfall. 

But the riskiest performance piece of all was definitely the one about a stripper.

Should I even ask?

At one point, I was working as the artistic director of Nottingham Trent University. It was a fantastic job. However, I was also interested in slightly risque performance art. We ran a series of feminist performances, and a young British woman wanted to do a piece about her experience working as a stripper and a lap dancer in Queens. It was a fantastic piece.

Unfortunately, the men who ran the city of Nottingham could not make the intellectual leap between a strip show and an artist making a performance about having worked in a strip club. Meanwhile, the local newspaper ran a headline that said, “Local nude show goes ahead in the name of art.” I thought it was fantastic, and that the university would love it…They fired me.

Of course. I’m trying to picture you as a child. Were you into theater? 

I come from a very working class background in Newcastle. It’s such a cliché, but it was a very dour, industrial place: dark buildings, black smoke from coal. The main industries were shipbuilding and coal mining. Fortunately, my family was just above the level of income that meant I wouldn’t have had to go down to the mine, although we were pretty bloody close at times.

My parents decided that I must be an artist when I was like three years old because I could draw things mysteriously well. And that was what being an artist amounted to in this kind of background. I was also bright and fortunate to live in a place where the socialist city council at that time gave grants to poor kids with brains to go to a good school.

I went to this young gentleman’s school, but the school had no interest in the arts whatsoever. There was no real study of art and only a basic room for painting. My parents were incredibly supportive of my artistic ventures, but they were dead set against me going to an art school because only the kids who failed their exams attended those schools—people like John Lennon and Paul McCartney. 

I stumbled my way into pursuing a fine arts degree at the prestigious University of Leeds, which my parents didn’t mind. Yet my dad constantly asked me, “What are you going to do with this degree?”

So, what did you do?

I became a teacher. The day I got my BFA and finished art school, I was offered a job writing and teaching art history through a grant from the British government. The grant allowed me to travel for up to three years, but I had to return to England to continue teaching. 

So when I came to New York in 1979 as a grad student, I studied the history of New York performance art, and I began working as a performance artist, which I did until about 25 years ago. I was a performance artist who worked at universities to make sufficient money so that I could afford to make performance art.

Describe your early performances.

My performances were very studied, very serious. I was moving sculptural objects around a space. I would make shapes out of timber frameworks, paint them bright colors and then move them from one place to another. The idea was to get people to see me doing this thing and think it’s strange. I wouldn’t speak, and there would seemingly be an underlying logic to what I was doing. But it was about changing expectations and slightly jolting people out of their assumptions in the dark cities of northern England.

Where did you perform?

In public. I worked with a group of people, and we would occupy a building or buy an outdoor space. I did them in parks and derelict buildings; it was word of mouth. And then it suddenly occurred to me: it didn’t have to be this pretentious, ‘oh, look at me’ sort of thing. If I wanted a bigger audience, I needed to go more official. 

Eventually, art galleries and museums started commissioning me. We would move into these spaces and build fantasy sets. There were costumes and scripts. I began to view it as a fantastic means for storytelling where audience members were placed in situations to have experiences they couldn’t have anywhere else. I became quite a provocative spokesperson for performance art, and I even wrote a book about it, which became a kind of handbook on how to do it. 

So how does that translate to abstract visual art?

When I moved to New York in 2003, I went from a situation where I had all the resources of art schools and universities and, increasingly, museums and galleries behind me to a situation where I was living in a studio apartment on 82nd Street. 

My performances always had objects, visual things. I would give these little pictures to people or make signs for a performance. So there was always imagery involved. And Kurt Schwitters, one of the Dada artists in Germany after World War I, was kind of a hero of mine. He had no art materials, no paint or anything. He started making collages out of bits of rubbish, scraps and things like that. And so I thought, ’Why don’t I make collages like that?’ The streets of New York City are full of interesting things that you can pick up and stick together.

So for about 10 years, I worked on little collages, and then I transitioned to political art for a while. Then, shortly before COVID, it occurred to me that I wanted to start doing these collages again. I was living in Park Slope at this point, and I started finding things all over the city. A Sephora bag, a sneaker box, a Nordstrom gift box.

And then, COVID-19 happened….

Right. And nobody knew how you could catch it. I didn’t want to root around in the streets and pick up things I found. That was when I started drawing on the computer. 

I had this MUJI shopping bag. The “U” on the bag was such a wonderful shape. However, I couldn’t go to MUJI and ask for half a dozen of their shopping bags since the store was closed. So I thought that perhaps I could just draw it on the computer and improve it. I did, and then I started printing it out on cheap typing paper, which was creating these weird colors. I cut them out and glued them together. And so all of these “U shapes” that have become so important to my work actually came from one MUJI shopping bag. I made dozens more of these collages, and they became increasingly complicated. I started putting in stripes, bits of gold foil, and I would buy stuff online. 

What do you want people to get out of your art?

In a way, it’s similar to my original performance art, with the timber frameworks and bright colors. They’re both about changing expectations and encouraging people to think that something else could be happening. I want people to continually come back to my paintings and keep working things out. Why is that cream color not the edge? Why is that not the edge? Why is the edge not coming out over there? And, wait a minute, it’s doing that everywhere.

Robert Ayers’ work will be on display at Chroma Fine Art Gallery in Katonah from May 14 to June 16.

This article was published in the May/June 2024 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.