Stuart Brisley: the man who bathed in maggots for two weeks
Somewhere in London in 1972, a series of bizarre things happened in a bathroom. It was small, on the third floor of a property previously owned by the Mormon Church. The normality of the setting – one bath, one basin, a south-facing window, made what performance artist Stuart Brisley did somehow even stranger. In this cramped room, he sat fully dressed every day, for hours, over two weeks. He drew the water just high enough to lie in a position between drowning and floating. By the end of the performance, maggots were squirming in the water with him.
Brisley called his performance And for today… nothing. Two of his previous works had skewered Labour Party slogans, and he was intrigued by the way they were bound in propagandised language that seemed to neither inspire nor illuminate. This title was different, leaving a vacuum where an overblown promise should sit. In the early 1960s, he’d become an active member of the progressive left, watching on over the years as aspirations for a stronger democracy were slowly quashed.
“The title,” he said, “Suggests something of an underlying fatigue in the aftermath.” So there he sat, in bathwater he’d blackened with pigment, intent on highlighting the kind of political precipice Britain sat on. “The bath was filled just below the rim,” he recalled on his website. “I was immersed just below the surface apart from my head. The water level ran around the head immediately below the nostrils. Breathing in when the body rose up to float, breathing out sinking down establishing the border between water and air.”
As he battled to maintain a balance between full-on submergence and peeking too high out of the water, a heap of offal sat offensively, rotting away. Another was heaped into the sink. Floating with him in the bath was yet more offal. The tiny room was teeming with the stuff, thick with the stench of it rotting.
Brisley recalled that particular horror almost breezily, matter-of-fact in his observations. “During the two weeks of the performance,” he wrote, “Flies laid eggs on the meat, which hatched out into maggots. Those on the shelf at the bottom of the bath migrated into the bath towards the end of the work on one or two days.”
For Brisley, who is widely considered the godfather of British performance art, the most significant element of his performance wasn’t the physical horror, the rotting meat or the buzz of the flies clanging against the window. It was always about illustrating what it was like to straddle life and death. The room was surrounded by decomposing flesh, but he sat, almost wilfully, living. “The action moved the concept to an extreme position, barely breathing just on the water’s edge,” he said.
“To live as one breath follows another or entering water to drown.”
