Slow Burn

The compulsively harrowing—but necessary—works of sculptor and performance artist Peter Roche (1957–2020) left behind an exegesis of tumult. As manifest in Night Piece, director Bridget Sutherland’s 2024 documentary on Roche’s life and career, his early performance practice initiated a prescient encounter with post-war existentialism and the period’s pervasive nuclear malaise. Later, this uneasy sentiment would be disentangled from the body’s visceral affect, as Roche’s vocabulary shifted to encompass sculpture charged with the threat of climatic and technological annihilation.

As a whole, Roche’s work can be seen as an immune response to the visible evidence of 'progress' around him, a movement towards comparable ease while the memory of scarcity and war lingered. Almost in honour of this traumatic history, the artist’s exuberant tearing and exposing of his own body was a stubborn reinstatement of what post-war society was anxious to forget. That actually, the technologies with which a new consumer paradise was being drawn were derived from the tools of war, that the difference between the shopping mall and the armoury was geopolitics (changeable like the weather), and that the materials of luxury could as easily be the dark matter of mayhem. Like the gifts in Pandora’s box, technology could exalt flesh as well as decimate it.

It is perhaps easy then to find a place for Roche’s body of work in the current zeitgeist, where this threat seems omnidirectional; if not ecological then geopolitical, and always existential. Sutherland, documentary maker and art historian but also longtime friend of Roche’s, elicits more in her choice of subject matter than a eulogy for a beloved peer (Roche died before the film was completed). In Roche’s fixation on the body’s vulnerability to forces beyond our control (citizenry as guinea pigs and chattel), Sutherland divines the apocalyptic fevers defining his and ensuing generations, ultimately positing Roche as their prophetic exponent.

One of Roche’s best-known works, Transformation (in which he had a doctor friend sew sheep kidneys to his body, 1979) highlights the lengths to which the artist was willing to go in service of intrepid endurances. It’s a conviction that doesn’t hold up well in our end times, where the self is totalised as a business, and even ‘edgy’ artists are expected to remain legible (read: marketable). Sadly, the possibility of exploring embodied existence as a theme is basically null and void in our networked traffic of signs and systems (where comfort and convenience reign supreme)—because every space is a performance space, whether you’re leaving the house to buy groceries or masturbating in your bedroom. Nowadays, there is nothing that isn’t tracked and counted, no action that can’t be subsumed into the molecular genres of homo economicus—thanks to the omnipresent self-portraiture of micro-content and social media. In his book The Agony of Eros, philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes today’s world as "over-positivized"—which here means filled with too much noise.⁽¹⁾ The ever-increasing speed of cultural production has dragged everything to the surface, coercing its bondaged users (that’s us) to perform at all times in the hopes that something will stick and become profitable. In this setting, contemporary performance art attempts to reach, but can’t, the transgressive potential of its art historical forebears. It can only ever be a branding exercise. Roche’s performance style—free of irony, hunting for the limit—needed the negative space of a pre-Internet world in which to occur.

Initially exploring the limits of his own body and selfhood, a professional and personal relationship with Linda Buis (1954–2015) set the terms for much of Roche’s early performance. Night Piece takes its name from a 1981 work in which Buis scaled, then traversed, the derelict and dangerous perimeter of an abandoned gasworks at night, guided by candles lit by Roche. A companion work was performed a month later outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum (Museum Piece, 1981), where Roche and Buis separately circumnavigated the museum's exterior with only their respective camera flashes as guide. Both works share thinking with the broader performance practice the pair were constructing, seeking out danger and risk through the playfully abject disruption of conservative gallery spaces. Inside the walls rather than on them, these works often took the form of alienating or deliberately objectifying members of the audience, punishing them with caustic and ritually repeated accusations, droning repetition, or creating in them unwilling spectators to the artists’ self-harm.

For the two artists, the relationship was not only the beginning of a collaborative journey into the bounds of the self, but also a reticulate lens on their gendered dynamic as a couple. In archival footage, the pair are seen standing sentry at the entrance to one of their notorious gallery events, forcing patrons into unwanted intimacy with the artists before being able to enter the space—a cue taken from Marina Abramović and Ulay. Liaison (1980), meanwhile, saw Buis and Roche running past each other from opposite sides of the room, always just short of colliding. They ratchet up the tension like maestro auteurs while refusing climax, opting instead for a movement so repetitive it eventually becomes ceremonial.

Here it is perhaps important to make some further notes on historical context. Like Buis, Roche was a child of the long tail of world war, navigating a society still figuring itself out after catastrophe. Where now our experience of war is mostly ambient, this goes some way to articulating Roche’s specific aims, or at least alludes to a narrowly avoided apocalypse as a significant contextual component. Roche’s early work was obsessed with the essential brevity of performance—with the body—precisely because what it meant to be a citizen of this new world order was still up for grabs. All around him were the last gasps of dated, shell-shocked notions in need of post-war vitalities. And in the necrotic turrets of Night Piece’s abandoned gasworks, it’s easy to see both artists touring the ruins of this dying world, perhaps beginning to sift meaning for a new one from the corpse of the old.

Roche’s later turn from performance to sculpture might be similarly described as an obsession with annihilation—as a fixation with the technological horrors of strategic warfare, and the state-making propagandas that normalise them. The twenty-first century loomed, and with it the atomised onslaught of new and terrifying global instabilities.

Trophies and Emblems (City Gallery Wellington, 1991), one of Roche’s earliest forays into sculpture, arguably retains his performance throughlines—suspending an ‘audience’ in discomfort, exposing gallery patrons to intimations of violence—  jagged edge both figurative and literal. The exhibition consisted of nineteen kinetic steel sculptures, like robot-golems, or the angular prototypes of a military weapons division headed by one of Orson Scott Card’s war-hungry adolescents.⁽²⁾ Visitors were greeted at the door by two Sentries (1990) (one male, one female), a mock military checkpoint that intermittently shouted “intruder!”. Necessarily loud, the intrusion of sound carried over from earlier experiments in gallery antagonism. The repetition of Roche and Buis’s replication of the Abramović-Paripović stunt is obvious here, and perhaps goes deeper than its parent artists did or could. In a sense, Roche’s sculptural iteration pairs the projects as sibling forms of resistance to overbearing states; one from the east, one from the west. When asked about his turn to object-making, Roche said: "Now my sculptures perform for me."⁽³⁾ And certainly, the works in Trophies and Emblems were lively, equipped with gears saws and motion detectors that interacted with the bodies in the space, responding territorially—and on theme, in imitation of the colonial escapades of land-hungry states. For Roche, the titular Trophies were the spoils of war, and Emblems the insignias of nationhood that bloodily-won territories are stamped with.

Where Trophies and Emblems was wrought in the steel of warfare, Tribal Fictions (Te Tuhi, 1995) took on the sinister gloss of Silicone Valley; the obsidian monoliths and latticed copper of the dot.com boom, the pewter of exponentially sophisticated servers manacling the world in surveillance networks. Tribal Fictions comprised a series of enormous black enamelled discs, patterned with used circuit boards. Some of these made nonsense shapes, while one represented a robotic, humanoid figure, perhaps pointing to the dehumanising effect of the avatar, the profile—of digitised bureaucracy and its compulsory bedfellow, surveillance—in service of a militarised economic totality. In this way, Roche’s round panels can be taken as world-pictures; the globe reduced to a calculus of profit and loss, winners and losers, victors and victims. Though still coded with movement, they are a far cry from the artist’s earlier sculptures that maintained performativity à la Len Lye. Instead, the comparative sluggishness of these works seems pointed, a way of saying that free movement is nearly impossible. That the planet has been immaculately territorialised. That states have weaponised amidst dwindling resources. In this anxious milieu of scarcity, citizenship requires endless documentation and consumable stats on a digital archive. A perfect storm of anthropogenic stasis.

In her catalogue text for Tribal Fictions, Lara Strongman observes how nostalgia acts as a prominent feature in technological design, used to tap into a residual aura of safety and homeliness to better sell machines that are, on the contrary, coded with compassionless, extractive violence.⁽⁴⁾ She uses this notion as a lens through which to explore Roche’s performance-to-sculpture pipeline, noting his substitution of the punk-nihilism of early performances—for example, Suspension Piece (Roche suspended himself from a significant height in Albert Park for an extended period, resulting in severe sunburn), or You Are Invited To Be Accepted (literally inviting spectators  to watch him drink and cut himself in a locked room at designated viewing times) both 1979—or these darkly prophetic emblems. Rather than a dulling of the artist’s rage, Strongman suggests that the brutality of Roche’s early work (and its intentional degradation of his own body) was instead transposed onto our technological captors. In this way, his sculptures draw attention to how the dream of industrial mastery has resulted in a cybernetic regime programmed with our bidding but, as for Pandora, unleashing calamity. For Roche, the existential meaning of bodily pain matured into an investigation of pain to the planetary body, his own living tissue merely a receptor for the mundane anguish of mechanisation.

As Sutherland’s own Night Piece makes clear, it’s one of Roche’s last shows, 2006’s Asylum, that operates as a key for everything that came before. In Asylum, Roche’s preoccupations with dystopian peril found possibly the perfect setting—Auckland’s waterfront silos—in which three sculptural installations, Meltdown, Flotilla, Whistleblowers, explored the dismal fallout of the nuclear Anthropocene. Like Trophies and Emblems, Asylum’s cursed objects revealed the true face of energetic industrialisms, the cataclysms hidden in convenience: for Flotilla, the gradual toxification of life-giving waters in a rancid irradiated pool lined with rubber; in Meltdown, the hum and crackle of something like a huge Giger counter giving deadly prophecy; and in Whistleblowers, three danger-red guards screaming warnings like shrill Cassandras.

Sutherland presented an analysis of this exhibition at the 2019 AAANZ conference, discussing Roche’s orbit of anthropologist Joseph Masco’s conception of the "nuclear uncanny."⁵ It’s a theme foregrounded in the artist’s sculptures, but equally applies to his work in performance—as riffs on the limits of the body and the ideation of the ‘human’ itself; what it means to be made and unmade in a time of technology, and the infuriating hubris of an industrial complex immune to sibylline warnings. Here ‘nuclear uncanny’ is taken to mean reality as transformed by the splitting of the atom, an event whose traces were never negligible. Rather, nuclear activity cannot be contained; forever leaking out of its intended uses. The uniquely human arrogance of lax nuclear hygiene is similar to the magical thinking that is wrapped up in consumerist-expansionist mythologies of progress, and blindly contends that our world will mutely absorb the ill effects that this pursuit of prosperity creates. Future generations will have to contend with the lethal remainders of our short-sighted methods, and in the reprieve between shrinking green zones, we imagine our descendants might wonder how so many people could idly consent to their own destruction in exchange for . . . iPads?

In conversation, Sutherland mentions how the silo setting of Asylum left her with a vivid impression of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film Stalker—specifically, its quixotic breaching of the "Zone", the inner sanctum where human desire is made manifest. In its own prophetic turn, Tarkovsky’s "Zone" heralded the uncanny partitioning of Chernobyl after its reactor disaster seven years later. Much like Stalker, Asylum was a glimpse into how quickly the post-war dream of prosperity devolved into nightmare, and one that inadvertently heralded its own demise—doubling down amidst warning signs by cannibalising itself, its citizenry, the environment. It is the berserker proliferation of petty desire that drives much damage, whether that be the desire of one nation to dominate or annihilate another, or the equally destructive desire of its citizens towards unchecked material acquisition. Better to self-immolate than admit defeat, better to gleefully court extinction than overhaul our faulty premises. So goes the dream of infinite progress.

To conclude, I put forward two thinkers whose contributions seem relevant here. Firstly Michel Foucault, who spent significant effort outlining a history of therapeutic fixations pertaining to human sexuality, and how the same surveillance measures and cold steel of medicalisation are re-fetishised as libidinal investments. Himself a BDSM enthusiast, Foucault’s work offers a compelling take on Roche’s trajectory—specifically as an artist lured by the idea of the body set in agonistic relationship with industrial impositions, whether material (war, mechanisation) or social (gender constructs, the individual as porous versus impermeable). Several of Roche’s early performances have an abject eroticism to them—his nudity and vulnerability, his submission to forces that might unknit him and afford him la petit morte (the little death, as the French say).  It is as if he were combating the somatic burden of coexisting with rapacious technologies, sublimating this psychic tension through artful endurance tests.

Then there’s Paul Virilio. Sutherland herself cites Virilio’s darkly ironic suggestion that a Museum of the Accident be included in any archive of humanity’s achievements—as the advent of sophisticated technologies heralds corresponding advancements in unnatural disasters.⁽⁶⁾ If Virilio were alive today, he might look at Roche’s oeuvre and be satisfied such a museum finally exists.

Unlike modern design edicts that occlude the totalitarian bent of our tech-ensnared world, Roche refused to prettify the inherently ugly. The artist spent his entire life dredging the muck and putting it on display—first through recourse to his own body, and later through sculptural avatars of aesthetic menace, through cold steel, and the malevolent glare of silicone processors soldering reality into homogenous bits. And finally, through the horror of nuclear apocalypse, the cultural amnesia of which (between the Cold War and now) seems proof of the depressing success of those design edicts—that a totalising, existential threat can be relegated as belonging to another time, to nostalgia, and that mindless hyper-industrialism can still be convincingly user-friendly. Perhaps we have Steve Jobs to thank for that.