Peter Crawleyrounds up the usual arty suspects

It isn’t often that I need to check up on the details of a performance with the Garda Síochána, but, to give them credit, the gardaí really know their stuff.

When they called a halt to an apparently unscheduled show last week – by fishing out a performer who had been lazily drifting along the River Liffey in a floating bed – the gardaí became viewers, participants, critics and, in a strange way, publicists for another example of that loveliest of public nuisances: performance art.

Or maybe it was an installation. Or a happening. The Garda press office didn’t want to get hung up on terminology. No charges were brought. The “artist” in question was merely asked to confirm his name and address. The incident report described it as a routine interrogation of the liminal space between dreaming and wakefulness, using postmodern geography to cast the Liffey as the Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness.

Well, no, it didn’t. But I was mildly disappointed to discover that there was not a special division devoted to this kind of thing. CSI: Live Art.

Instead, I had to go to my usual source for fast-breaking arts coverage and rapid semantic decoding: the message boards of Politics.ie. Posters incisively recognised the shock value and social criticism of the piece (“Quite bizarre sight”) before advancing trenchant criticism about concept and execution (“Don’t think it was thought through”).

The debate becomes still more animated – “Is it a river bed?” asks one. “A water bed, surely,” replies another – and leads to deeper readings à la the banking crisis (“Is he looking for a bailout?” “He’s too buoyant and has too much liquidity”). The final analysis dispels all reverie for a more sinking metaphor: “Like yer man in the sack, the country is rudderless.”

Such is the way with the abstraction of performance art. Like a dream, you see your own concerns in its imagery. But, paradoxically, the fewer people who see such a thing, the more who will hear about it.

Like Chris Burden’s Shoot, in which the performer was shot in the arm by a friend, or Marina Abramoviæ’s Rhythm 0, which ended shortly after one audience member held a loaded gun to her head, performance artists who put themselves in harm’s way are notorious. That makes police surveillance a prerequisite. The more extreme the spectacle, the more attention it generates. It’s how a lot of performance art works.

It’s also how a lot of terrorism works. When Michael Stone tried to combine both disciplines, claiming that his heavily armed raid on Stormont in 2006 was “an act of performance art”, performance artists found themselves in the absurd position of having to invalidate his artistic credentials. The judge was even less indulgent (Stone was jailed for 16 years) but, again, nobody could spot a performance art forgery quicker than the security guards who bravely pinned a red-faced Stone between revolving doors. They are the real experts.

The true test of a performance artist, in fact, may reside in that old euphemism: They’re known to the gardaí.