Pilgrim, saint, scholar?

Koestle-Cate, Jonathan

Every now and then an artist comes along who appears to express a genuine social concern through their practice. One such figure in recent years has been Marcus Coates, arguably one of the most intriguing individuals at work in the art world today. Part-healer, part-performance artist, Coates presents himself as a modern urban shaman, an intermediary who performs ritual journeys into the spirit worlds of birds and beasts in the presence and on behalf of communities or individuals. As he journeys he mimics the sounds of the creatures he visualises, summons and consults, taking on their characteristics the better to facilitate access to their world. He describes it as a form of imaginative visualisation and play, a trance-like state in which the artist becomes both a traveller and translator between alien worlds (human, animal, bird). Undertaking these quasi-shamanic rituals becomes a quest to find answers to serious questions put to him by his audience, questions that he insists must be of significant personal concern to the questioners. In the midst of an over-rationalised and disenchanted world artists, he believes, can be practical visionaries, their imagination attuned to a kind of vicarious agency. As such, Coates employs the pragmatism of the shaman coupled with the conviction that knowledge or insight may be achieved by non-logical, non-rational, non-conscious means. Whatever answers surface from his inner journeys are formed from experiential, intuitive and empathic knowledge, guided by the artist's responsiveness to the felt experience of the questioner.

An intentional result of such unconventional enquiry is to put into question our perceptions of being human through imagined non-human realities, seeking access to forms of under standing outside human frameworks of knowledge. He qualifies it as a way of inhabiting the animal, or put in Deleuzian terms, a process of becoming-animal. (1) It is a process both performative and informative. Coates actualises a virtual world inaccessible to his audience and different in kind to that with which they are familiar. To achieve this Coates typically follows the textbook requirements of shamanism as articulated in Mircea Eliade's classic treatise--an appeal to auxiliary spirits, usually animals or birds; preparatory drumming and dance, including the imitation of animal cries or bird song; a trance state in which the shaman embarks upon his mystic journey--but adds his own contemporary touches. These, if anything, threaten to undermine his already shaky assumption of shamanic authority, based as it is on techniques learned from a weekend course in Notting Hill. Coates makes no attempt to disguise his spurious credentials. Indeed, his outfits and props blue tracksuit and mirror shades, animal headwear and taxidermied totems--all signal a questionable authenticity, yet curiously this does little to undermine the seriousness of the enterprise.

In Journey to the Lower World, 2003, for example, a ritual performance for a representative cross-section of residents of Sheil Park in Liverpool, a tower block slated for demolition, the scenario borders on the risible: the living room is ritually cleansed with a vacuum cleaner, a drumming CD provides a trance-inducing rhythm, and jingling car keys stand in for bells. (2) The bemused residents seem unsure what to make of this atavistic situation: initially nervous giggles give way to an attentive, if visibly sceptical, reaction to the artist's increasingly erratic behaviour as he stumbles about the room, cloaked in a stag's pelt, head and antlers, emitting grunts, barks and birdcalls.

Similarly, in 2009 Coates embarked on a long-term residency in and around London's Elephant and Castle, documented in film as Vision Quest--A Ritual for Elephant and Castle, 2012. (3) Here, his interlocutors were, among other stakeholders, the soon-to-beevicted residents of the estates around this area of London, in preparation for its proposed redevelopment. In the film we see him talking with tenants, developers, and the planning and regeneration team, in order to then ritually respond to their thoughts and concerns. But he is also to be seen crowned with a horse's head scrabbling among the concrete detritus of the partially demolished area; or ritually interacting with the very material surfaces of the estate; or striding purposively, silver-suited, down one of Elephant and Castle's thoroughfares, holding aloft a mounted buzzard as a spirit guide. The residency culminates in a bizarre concert-cum-ritual-catharsis performed before the residents, supported by musical improvisation from experimental rock orchestra Chrome Hoof. As a counter-narrative to 'the scripted, corporate vision' (4) of regeneration and renewal it is extraordinarily visceral, a howl of rage vented against the gentrifying processes that threaten to disinvest the embattled community of their homes and future.

In the end, though, it is difficult to gauge how effective this all is. As Alastair Levy surmises, the disjunction between the artistic act and the gravity of the residents' situation (he is speaking of Sheil Park but it is as true for both projects) could be interpreted as unethical and irresponsible:

   Returning from this other world he recounts the details of his
   imaginary journey and explains what his encounters with animals
   along the way signify for the group. It is not clear whether the
   residents are convinced as he politely shakes their hands at the
   end. One cannot help feeling some discomfort at the contrast
   between the harsh reality facing the tenants and the art
   performance as a means of salvation. (5)

Although in interviews Coates openly expresses his own reservations about his appropriation of the shamanic tradition, conscious of appearing a charlatan exploiting the real situations of the groups with whom he works, and painfully aware of his inadequate training and competencies, he also expresses a heart-felt desire to serve those who invite him to ritually respond to their particular problem or question. Like other socially-collaborative artists his 'art' is tailored to real social concerns, and, if nothing else, expands the possibilities for thought around, or solutions to, those concerns.

In more recent works he has ventured into new territory, turning to dance and movement as a medium for pragmatic interventions into the lives of individuals. A Question of Movement, 2015, records a series of 'dialogues' between Coates and his questioners that rely solely on the artist's physical response to their question. This takes place in their kitchen, bedroom or office, adding a note of intimacy to the proceedings that could so easily be taken as intrusive, but for the fact that both parties treat the apparent absurdity of the situation with the utmost seriousness. In a particularly affecting moment with an office worker called Zoe, Coates's increasingly frenzied thrashing about her drab office floor brings her to the point of tears as she confesses to him and to us how accurately and viscerally his movements reflect her own inner turmoil.

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For his current exhibition at Workplace, You Might As Well Ask A Crow, 2016, Coates turned the gallery into a consultation room, working closely with a number of individuals to take them on an imaginative journey informed by their question towards an answer that couldn't be known in language or thought beforehand. The artworks we see are the outcome of that private process and as such are at times inscrutable, since they document a response to a journey made by the artist and his questioner to which the viewer of the exhibition can have only limited access. Though one can guess at the meaning of some, without the full backstory the relationship between the question and the performed answer often remains frustratingly cryptic. But perhaps our desire to understand and appreciate the works as art is a fundamental misreading of their purpose. Coates has said as much, confessing that he is not especially interested in art as such. The art is simply a by-product of the process. (6)

Another by-product is humour. If the shamanic performances of Joseph Beuys offer an inevitable point of comparison, they are also significantly distinct from Coates's more light-hearted approach, which relies upon a kind of 'knowing idiocy'. (7) There is something wilfully amateurish about his efforts, foregrounding his own sense of their comical implausibility. In interviews he stresses the importance of the novice, the amateur, the outsider, the one who admits he doesn't know yet, as a holy fool, is granted permission to play and freedom to explore. One critic disparagingly labelled Coates's performances 'smug and ineffectual', displaying 'lots of bombast but no profundity' (8) but I would contend that this is simply wrong. As anyone who has met the artist will testify, there is nothing smug about his attitude nor ineffectual in his practice. Coates himself admits that his performances are indebted to weekend shamanism and cultural misappropriation, a kind of watered down or westernised non-Western spirituality. Despite this, his collaborator in the Sheil Park project, Alec Finlay, thought it a genuine attempt to find answers through ritual means. How else, he says, could it be so 'generous to its audience'? (9) For their part, Finlay proposes it was the engagement of the audience that ultimately guaranteed the success of the piece. 'In the end it all looks quite normal,' he wryly observes.

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Some years ago these questions were played out in a sacred context when Coates was invited to bring his idiosyncratic form of ritual practice into the environment of the church as part of Wallspace's programme of church-based art events. (10) For Pastoral Spirit, 2008, he performed a series of rituals, each undertaken in search of an answer to a single question proposed by a member of the audience. Following each ritual phase, as if filling the shoes of the priest, Coates went up into the pulpit and delivered his response. Although he gave an answer of sorts to the question asked he tended to describe rather than decipher what he had seen, offering descriptions of journeys made and creatures encountered. For Coates this is always a risky business. His practice challenges the willing credulity of the viewer confronted with the peculiar logic of the strange and otherworldly. The potential for mistrust, ridicule, alienation or perplexity, compounded by the ever-present risk of failure, always threatens ultimately to undermine the performance through scepticism, where engagement is of the essence, hazards no doubt magnified when brought into the church. As in previous projects, Pastoral Spirit was highly reliant upon the audience's complicity in, and receptivity to, the premises of the event. Following the exit of a sizeable section of the audience after the first ritual performance, those who remained to see the piece through displayed an apparent willingness to accept its unorthodoxy through the serious attention they gave to it.

Although requiring, in a very real sense, an act of good faith it is not an audience's belief in the shaman's claims that matters but faith in his capacity to glean some kernel of truth from his wayfaring, as the art critic J. J. Charlesworth makes clear in the catalogue to Journey to the Lower World: Was Marcus having them all on?

   He does believe it all really happened. Or at least he says he
   believes. If it did happen then it can only have been through an
   act of faith. Whose faith? Not the conviction of the shaman who
   knows that he is communing with animals, but the faith of his
   audience, the people who must believe in him to make it real. (11)

The artist Mark Wallinger, an admirer of Coates's work, assumes that no-one seriously believes in these rituals, and yet their plausibility is somehow unquestioned. Faith in the project, he concedes, 'doesn't reside ... in the presence of actual shamanic powers, but rather in something credible and authentic that takes place between artist and audience.' By this commitment the answers given seem less indebted to the artist's imagination and more to the possibilities evinced by this encounter with a nonhuman world of animals and birds producing, as critic Dan Smith put it, 'a form of social engagement which manages to be both bizarrely ridiculous yet poignant,' a source of 'estrangement and disorientation,' but equally of fascination and delight. This is the potential promised by Coates's performances. They expose his audiences to a mediated experience of formerly unimagined realities, often resulting in an affirmation of hope for groups that have collectively expressed some genuine social need but whose options seem limited.

This summer Marcus Coates was invited to speak about his work at the ACE International Conference in Dublin, whose theme considered the role of the artist as pilgrim, saint and scholar. It was clear that his presentation provoked disquiet among some of the delegates, who voiced concerns, both spiritual and social, about his ritual practice. Of particular reproof was its perceived potential for exploitation or even psychological harm, with the thought that, wielded insensitively, it could have deleterious consequences. But what should not be forgotten is that Coates is neither a social worker nor a therapist. He is an artist seeking to create a trusted imaginative space that will allow others to invest in the possibilities opened up by his alternative vision of the world. As a keen ornithologist and naturalist Coates is genuinely interested in the lessons to be learned from the birds and beasts he ritually encounters. If they are effectively imaginary, his knowledge of their behaviour, habitats and inter relationships lends his rituals credibility, even legitimacy. As he says in an interview for Antennae, his knowledge of British wildlife becomes 'an artistic tool', allowing the notion of 'becoming animal' to operate as an 'investigative device' to probe the ecologies of human habitats. It is a means of escaping the limitations of anthropocentric perspectives, even if what must always ultimately be accepted is the ineffability of an animal's or bird's point of view.

Is it too much to say that he offers a kind of ministry? Perhaps. But in the broadest sense we might concede his artistic role as pilgrim, saint and scholar. Pilgrim, he follows the pathways of the natural world; saint, he seeks to bring succour and guidance to others; scholar, he turns his expertise into a resource to confront intractable scenarios. What more can we ask of our visionaries?

(1.) According to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal is not a matter of mimicry or simulation, or even an attempt to identify with animals; it is about finding 'an affective common ground', 'zone of proximity' or 'zone of exchange'. In other words, it emphasises the continuity between human and nonhuman animals, 'in which something of one passes into the other' (Laura Cull, Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 111, 117, 130).

(2.) Film available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAUWVKxiG2s

(3.) Film available at http://nomad.org.uk/project/visionquest/

(4.) Tom Lamont, 'Marcus Coates: Eventually Something Serious Comes Through', The Guardian online, 2012, available at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/apr/08/ marcus-coates-artist- elephant-castle [accessed 12 July 2016]

(5.) Alastair J. Levy, 'Marcus Coates, Whitechapel Gallery', Artvehicle 20, 2007, available at http:// www.artvehicle.com/events/94 [accessed 23 June 2016]

(6.) Mark Sheerin, 'Interview: Marcus Coates, Nature', ed. Jeffrey Kastner, London: The Whitechapel Gallery, 2010, p. 190.

(7.) Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 101.

(8.) Chase, G Alisia, 'Beuys's Hare is Everywhere', Afterimage 38 (3), 2010, p. 24.

(9.) Marcus Coates, Journey to the Lower World, ed. Alec Finlay, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Platform Projects and Morning Star, 2005 (unpaginated).

(10.) Wallspace was an art venue within a London church which aimed to promote close ties between the artistic and liturgical life of the church, and whose sad demise, yet another casualty of the funding shortfall in the arts, has left the London scene bereft of an exciting and often ground-breaking initiative.

(11.) Coates, Journey to the Lower World.

(12.) Coates, Journey to the Lower World.

(13.) Dan Smith, 'New Maps of Heaven,' Art Monthly 338, 2010, p. 14.

(14.) Giovanni Aloi, 'In Conversation with Marcus Coates, Antennae 4, 2007, p. 33; Max Andrews, 'Marcus Coates and Other Animals', Picture This, 2009, available at http://www.picture this.org.uk/library/essays1/2007/marcuscoates-and-other-animals [accessed 21 June 2016]

Jonathan Koestle-Cate is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and on the editorial board of A&C