Marcus Coates

Marcus Coates in conversation with Adriana Marques and Erica Burton
picnic bench, battersea park

Adriana Marques: Considering your past work of animal imitations, I’m interested in how you progressed into Shamanism?

Marcus Coates: It did feel like a big jump actually. Usually I'm filming my isolated performances. This recent film Journey to the Lower World was designed around the skills I’ve learnt (animal becoming) and how I could use them in a social context. The work followed on from my experiences during the Further up in the Air artist residencies in Liverpool where artists were living in a tower block.

Erica Burton: Your bird impersonations are amazing. Sometimes, as a viewer, you wonder if they are actually just recordings?

MC: Well actually, I’m quite bad. I don't think most people would know or recognise the real thing if they heard it. It used to be a big cabaret act in Victorian times attracting huge audiences, and up until the 80's there were people performing bird imitations on TV, like Percy Edwards on Blue Peter. I think it’s a lost skill. I have a very limited repertoire, for me it's about making a sound that is recognisably non-human. Birds and animals are a very obvious area for me to investigate, I've always been interested in where the limits between human and non-human are.

EB: Do you loose your consciousness when performing or are you always aware of being human?

MC: Well of course, you can’t escape your humanness, but the point of my work has been to explore the degrees to which you can test that boundary and entertain the possibility of becoming something else. I think there are degrees of common consciousness. Humans are very similar to each other, so we feel we know what it is like to be each other, but that dog over there, there’s no way of knowing what it's like to be a dog, so what we do is project our own humanness onto it, so that we can relate to it. That way, we are able to have a relationship with it, defining the world through our experience of ourselves.

AM: So do you see inhabiting a different consciousness as a mental process, rather than changing the shape of your body?

MC: I think one often leads to and is connected to the other. Initially it's very physical, an attempt to bypass thought. In this way I’m exploring corporeal physicality, a beingness. Probably the closest thing we have to share with that dog is that it’s a mammal, I’m a mammal, it’s moving, I’m moving, it knows how it is to be, and I know how it is to be. So it’s really about exploring that at a very elementary level. With Shamanism I believe it is a process of physically 'becoming' and an inextricable imaginative process that explores one’s idea of the mind and experience of an animal.

AM: In your new film, where you perform a Shaman ritual for a small community audience, with a full deer skin strapped to your back, and mentally journey to the animal world, is that process about you experiencing and becoming an animal, or is it very specific to Shamanistic processes?

MC: The idea was to look at the historical context of Shamanism and how it also requires skills to inhabit another consciousness. I wanted to test my process and abilities within the framework of Shamanism and current Western culture. What defines it as a spiritually authentic process, and can these traditions ever be relevant to us? I was actually very cynical about how traditional cultures have been appropriated by our culture, often in a seemingly superficial way by people who have learnt how to practice self-helping rituals on a five-week course.

EB: Is that what you did?

MC: No actually I did a two-day course in West London. I learnt how Shamanism has been adapted for Western use. It seemed that we are keeping only the nice bits, when actually a lot of the rituals in their traditional and historically accurate form could be violent, misogynistic and dangerous. These rituals and skills evolved out of traditional cultures because there was a need from the community. Part of my work was to see if that need existed in Liverpool, and if these skills were appropriate or effective.

AM: Was there a real belief in that community (Liverpool) that there was going to be something authentic and spiritual? Did you literally bill yourself as a ‘rent-a-Shaman’?

MC: I offered my services to them (to try to locate information for them from the Lower World via animal spirits) and that I would do that to the best of my ability. I informed them that the government sponsored me, as the residency was paid for by the Liverpool Action Housing Trust and the Arts Council. I liked the idea of being a paid social conduit, performing a legitimate community service, as a traditional Shaman would do. I primarily had to concentrate on performing the ritual itself, as it was my first and it was a one-off. Whatever happened, that had to be it, there was no second take. I set up the documentation so that my control over it as an aesthetic process was limited and secondary to the ritual and needs of the community. I didn’t want to go to a middle class audience or an art audience that would be overly tolerant. This also felt like a risk as their response could have been unsympathetic or hostile. I took a very specific Shaman procedure, that of the Tuvak Shamans from Siberia. I didn’t tell them I was specifically doing a Shaman ritual or that I was making a piece of art, although they knew I was an artist. When I asked the residents to prepare a question for me to ask the animal spirits, I was hoping for a very functional question about how their lives were going to change after the demolition of their flats and their relocation. But their question: “Who is our protector for this site, and what is it?” made me nervous, as it had such spiritual connotations. Documenting a performance like this is fairly futile if you are trying to relate the performer's subjective experience, rather I chose to emphasise the response to the performance. It had to be about the viewers in the gallery identifying with the viewers in the flat, in that way they experience the same questions and doubts about the process.

AM: Do you think the distinctive humour in your work makes it more accessible?

MC: I took the ritual and occasion very seriously but I didn’t want to take myself seriously, because I wasn’t in a position to. It was up to the audience how serious the event was. They laughed all the way through, which made the film very comical. I was also sceptical of an over sincerity and earnestness that can come with spirituality. New Age rituals can seem trite and irrelevant, based on an unknown culture with essential ethnic accessories and merchandising. It’s an odd thing to enact versions of ancient rituals that have no basis in our ordinary lives. I know they were supposed to be separate and extraordinary, but rituals have always been rooted in some aspect of familiar culture even if it's humour.

AM: But you have your antlers, and custom-made deer costume?

MC: That’s true. I thought about being business-like, wearing a suit, but for the audience it had to be quite arresting and transformational. I needed to be able to flick between two worlds of consciousness and the deer was a good prop or disguise to conjure that. Maybe there is something truly universal about any aspect of any cultural ritual that can be made accessible and useful to anyone.