Marina Abramovic performs Art must be Beautiful, Artist must be Beautiful in 1976.
Future Classic is a participatory exhibition running throughout the Spill Festival. Members of the public are invited to submit key influences that they feel are important to the development of contemporary performance. Here are mine - what are yours?
Popular culture
Huggy Bear Huggy Bear were 1990s underground punk rock revolutionaries. They set out to challenge tired musical ambitions and gender politics. Seeing them perform their gender agitating anthem Her Jazz on Channel 4's The Word was one of the first things that made me want to make work live in front of an audience. They were brash, snotty, sexy, and clever. They largely refused to engage with mainstream media, or accept any indirect means of communication with their audiences. They scrawled words like "bitch", "slut", and "prophet" on their arms in vivid red lipstick. It was through their writings that I was first introduced to the work of Helene Cixous, Kathy Acker, and Patti Smith. They were angry, articulate and vital.
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille Story of the Eye is a beautiful anti-morality tale, a kind of road trip for the perverted. I first read it after seeing Björk cite it as a major influence in an interview. I had no idea what it was about, and asked my mum to buy it for me as my Christmas gift. Its images have stayed with me, and influenced generations of performance-makers. It's a blueprint for forbidden desire and should be on every secondary school reading list.
Live forms
The Nuyorican Poets Café It was on the Late Show that I first saw the Nuyorican Poets Café when I was about 14. It was a raw, bare-brick performance space in New York City's East Village. It's a place where language is performed as vital energy, a genuine fusion of different black, Latin and white cultures played out in complicated real-time. The Café epitomises the potential of the urban environment. I visited it in 2005 and the energy is still tangible.
Visual arts
Marina Abramovic Marina Abramovic is the most important performance-maker of her generation. Her work is raw, brutal, and enduring. She speaks of what it means to be human; to be a body in space and time.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Gonzalez-Torres made emotional and political statements through a language of sterile minimalism. He poked glory holes in the objective, "white cube" aesthetics of minimalism, and revealed it as the highly subjective and privileged terrain of the white, heterosexual male. His touching memorials to his partner, and slowly disappearing art works were the bane of the ultra-conservative American right wing. While Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano were easy targets, Gonzalez-Torres was the enemy within, just out of sight. Something was out of line, but you just couldn't quite put your finger on it.
