Amanda Coogan on Silence – Culture File

My final piece for Culture File’s series on ‘Silence‘, is an interview with performance artist Amanda Coogan. I don’t want to preempt the piece by writing too much about it. I will say that of all the conversations I’ve had this year, both on mic and off, this was perhaps the most personally meaningful. Amanda is an unusually sincere person who seems truly present in the moment. There are people I occasionally meet, whom I feel honoured to send time with, because they are present without pretence or defence. Perhaps those moments are why I’ve gravitated towards jobs that involve attempting real conversation – psychotherapy, music journalism, whatever the heck I do now. In those moments I’m reminded that life can be more engaged and meaningful than our fears and shibboleths usually allow.

Download: Amanda Coogan on Silence

Below is a transcript of the Culture File piece, and I’ve also made available a largely unedited recording of our interview. Our discussion spanned a variety of topics from the relationship of performance art to shamanic practice, to Irish societies treatment of the other, the evolution of performance art, as well as embodiment, the abject, and the phenomenology of performance.

Download: Amanda Coogan Interview (unedited)

Amanda Coogan Interview Transcript

(IN THE KITCHEN OF AMANDA COOGANS STUDIO AT THE

SCHOOL FOR DEAF BOYS, CABRA. SOME KITCHEN NOISES)

GARETH

I love your shopping trolley.

AMANDA

I know, I’m like an old lady!

GARETH

I think we always think of em, performance art as so

glamorous.

AMANDA

Oh yeah it’s super glamorous (LAUGHS)!

MUSIC: FROM AMANDA COOGAN VIDEO ’WE SHALL GLORIFY’ (VIDEO

AVAILABLE AT AMANDACOOGAN.COM

GARETH (VOICE OVER)

I met Amanda Coogan at her studio, on the grounds of

saint Joesph’s school for deaf boys. Her work over the

past two decades has explored the body, femininity and

the relationship between artist and audience, viewer

and participant. Amanda began by giving me a crash

course in what makes Irish performance art and her work

in particular, unique.

(AMANDA COOGANS STUDIO – QUIET SPACE, NO NOTICABLE

BACKGROUND NOISE)

AMANDA

Performance art is a relatively new form of practice.

It’s about a hundred years old. But really came into

it’s own in the sixities and seventies. Irish

performance art practice is very much based on the

psychological self, the psychological body going

through actual experiences, real experiences. I work in

whats called durational performance. Durational

performance for me is anything over three hours. And

what happens in long extended periods of time (and I’ve

done up to twenty four hour performances), is that the

body is taxed. The body has to go through some

endurance. It is difficult, physically, emotionally,

psychologically, and that is what you are presenting.

And that is what the audience are enabling you to do by

being there.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)

Amanda’s work is notably free of the spoken word, and I

asked her why she’d chosen to exclude this most direct

mode of communication.

AMANDA

It’s a very particular choice that I’ve made in my

work, not to use speech. Not to use words. I am asking

the audience to come into a very particular embodied

experience with me. So consider the body. When you’re

looking at a body who’s presenting itself publically,

(as an audience memeber) you feel that empathy, you

feel that sympathy, you feel that communion with that

body. The body is the filter that we read the whole

world through, so your bodily experience informs every

way that you understand and concieve the world and

experience the world. It’s a radically different

experience to just the head, so for example I have an

older piece of mine called yellow, where I scrub the

dress that I’m wearing. And the audience members would

often rock in the same rthymn as my scrubbing. Simply

letting it wash over them. I strongly believe that if I

utter a sentence or a word, that brings people out of

the embodied experience, and brings them into the

rational self. I think there’s place for both of those,

but I ask my audience very much to be in the moment, in

the present moment, of the embodied experience with me.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)

Amanda Coogan isn’t just a notable performance artist.

She’s also one of the only people in the country to

have been a hearing person, raised through Irish Sign

Language, and this unique perspective has had an

inevitable impact on her work.

AMANDA

Irish sign language is my first language. Both my

parents are deaf and activists in the community. So I

suppose it makes pretty simple sence that as an artist

I’m very much engaged with embodied practice: Physical,

visual, manual practice. To utter something in sign

language, you must use your body, and to recieve

something in sign language you must use your eyes. Not

that it isn’t a rational language either, of course we

have vocabulary, of course we have sentence structures,

we have thoughts, it’s as rich and deep a language as

English or any other spoken language. It’s manifest in

a radically different way. The body and our bodily

consitution and experience is the major filter to how

we experience and live in the world. So the deaf body,

or the body that uses Irish Sign Language or any other

sign language, has a radically different filter onto

the world.

GARETH (VOICE OVER)

A hearing person, finding out about Amanda’s unique

background, might almost inevitable ask themselves the

question, what it must have been like to grow up with

’voiceless’ parents, in a presumably quiet home.

AMANDA

…People would often say that I would have come from a

silent world, it couldn’t be more opposite. Actually

deaf people are super noisey. But it’s really

interesting noisey, because it’s not a noisey that is

communicating. It is an accidental noisey. I was just

working with 42 deaf people in the Project Arts Centre,

a couple of weeks ago, on a piece called ’You Told Me

To Wash & Clean My Ears’, and they’re so noisey! You

know walking up the stairs, slamming the door, even

using sign language is noisey… Or they ’utter’ the

most beautiful sounds. That are not indicators of

communication, they’re literally the body making

sounds, because there’s no filter to stop doing that.

So sound for me I suppose has never been related

directly to communication. But it’s almost a musical

phenonena. In my familial home, when I was growing up

was very noisey. And even now when I return to my

parents house, the cooker makes noise, the fridge makes

noise… There’s often an alarm going off, when you

come into the house, and it could have been going off

for days (LAUGHS). It doesn’t make any odds to them. So

sound, as we understand it as hearing people was very

different to me when I was growing up. There’s no

silence, you go to Achill looking for silence. It’s a

different quality of sound that we hear. John Cage’s

famous four minute piece actually makes us as the

audience, hear the world.

MUSIC: THE END OF ’WE SHALL GLORIFY’ RISES GRADUALLY UNDER

AMANDA’S VOICE

AMANDA

We don’t hear the instruments not being played, what we

hear is the atmosphere. All the people gathered in that

particular concert hall, different bodies breathing,

shuffling, there is sound. There is always some kind of

quality of sound. I very much realise, our kind of

adventure to look for silence, is a fools gold. There

is no such thing as silence.