I’ll Bathe Your Tears With Diamonds (1993)

Martin Burton

Photo by Martin Burton

Photo by Anne Bean

Anne Bean

I’ll Bathe Your Tears With Diamonds (1993)

Sterischer Herbst, Graz & Beaconsfield, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris

Since the early seventies I have made works that bring visually and aurally intense spaces to silence and darkness. This has often involved various ways of destroying tape recorders and light bulbs.

In Graz as part of Sterischer Herbst and at Beaconsfield as part of Nosepaint, I made an installation using suspended bright light bulbs and twenty tape recorders playing James Brown’s recording of The Bells.

Using a propane burner, I slowly reduced the space to one light bulb and one recording which I finally extinguished.

9 cassette players, each with a continuous loop tape repeating one word:
1) c'est 2) la 3) sub- 4) stance5 )dont 6) la 7) vie 8 )est 9) fait (this is the matter from which life is created)
They are all switched on at the beginning of the performance and one by one the sound is destroyed until there is silence.
1) A hammer 2) A water pistol 3) + 4) suspended from the ceiling and swung together 5) A funnel of meths is released onto cotton wool and a lit candle
6) A wire mesh cage and small explosion 7) A saw 8) wrapped in clothe until muffled. 9) A funnel of honey mixed with blue pigment is released
Text from drawing for Polyphonix 14, Centre George Pompidou 1995

I received an email in 2004 from the Dutch artist Toine Horvers who went on to do the performance he talks about here:

I would like to do a program with registrations of performances, and i wantto start with things that I saw and that stayed in my mind for some reason. One of those things is a performance that you did many years ago in Tilburg, ....IYou had 5 second hand cassette players that you 'killed' in a ritual way. On the cassettes you shouted 'help'. While killing them - in 5 different cruel ways - the machines shouted 'help' until they were not heard anymore.I know the whole story in details, and I told it often to other people.It was a beautiful, clear and shocking performance, and because of thisclearness it was not theatrical and open to many thoughts and explanations. Now i ask you if you have a clear registration of that performanceAnd if not I ask you to allow me to tell the story in front of a camera or maybe thats something that you yourself would like to do. In my own work I deal a lot with texts and oral describtions of situations related to time and space. So I would find this a nice solution, dealing with the fact that some ofthose things are from so long ago, that it could only be presented again in an oral way, like with so many stories

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