Tatton Park Biennial: Sited Commissions
video and performance
DAVID BLANDY is developing a series of filmed performances in which his Barefoot Lone Pilgrim attempts to live out aspects of the samurai Hagakure amid an English recreation of a Japanese Tea Garden.
A series of aphorisms from the elderly Yamamoto Tsunetomo, The Hagakure advises younger Samurai how best to carry out their lives. Transcribed in the early eighteenth century, the work suggests that one should ‘tether even a roasted chicken’ and ‘continue to spur a running horse’. It is a defining book of conduct both on and off the battlefield, and is the inspiration for David Blandy’s Barefoot Lone Pilgrim as he works through Yamamoto’s words in the Japanese Garden.
A white Englishman in a re-created Japanese Tea Garden in a private country estate, now open to the public – the strata of meanings and cultural positions is impossible to navigate with any degree of ‘authenticity’.
Blandy’s work for Tatton Park takes head on the problematic relationship between what may be real and what, perhaps more likely, we would like to be real. Ever more globalised and culturally mixed, our personas may be built more from our fantasies than our daily experiences. The Pilgrim works through his confusion, attempting to find an inner peace, in two films that show us his life through the changing seasons, referencing along the way films like Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage, Babycart in the Land of Hades, Sword of Vengeance, Babycart in the Land of Demons and Shogun Assassin. A Manga-inspired comic, illustrated by Daniel Locke, further illuminates the Pilgrim’s personal musings, and two live performances of the Pilgrim’s progress will be staged during the Biennial.
details from The Way of the Barefoot Pilgrim: Samurai
story written by David Blandy, illustration by Daniel Locke 2008, 32
page A6 comic
Biography
David Blandy's work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. Either as a white man mouthing the words to the underground soul classic "Is it because I'm black" in "hollow bones" (2001), or being taught how to make art by the deceased martial arts star Bruce Lee in "emotional content" (2003), Blandy is searching for his cultural position in the world. He often uses humour to ask the difficult question of just how much the self is formed by the mass-media of records, films and television, and whether he has an identity outside that.
Born in London in 1976, Blandy graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2003.
Recent exhibitions have included Köln Show 2, Vera Gliem Galerie, Cologne, Germany (2007); Role Model, The John Institute, Zurich, Switzerland (2007); Fortress of Solitude, Jerwood Platform for Artists, Cell Project Space, London (Solo exhibition 2007); Street: behind the cliché, Witte de With Gallery, Rotterdam (2006).
New commissions have included: Made Up, The Bluecoat, as part of the Liverpool Biennial (2008); Spike in the City, commission by Spike Island, Bristol (2007); and The Man who Fell to Earth, commission by Heron Mill, Cumbria in 2006.