BIG show, small works! 6-27 August Willesden

P.Murry artworks in this show
BIG show, small works! PRIVATE VIEW  Tuesday 6 August 6-9PM 

BAR Gallery, Unit 5, Queens Parade, London, NW2 5HT (near Willesden Green tube)

Pierre Petitpied and the Big Foot

Pierre Petitpied (P.Pp) developed an obsession as he entered his sixth decade; and, luckily for him, this obsession was facilitated and enabled by the fact that he lived in an industrialised nation in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Inspite of the surname that he had inherited from his Gallic ancestors, P.Pp’s pedal appendages had recently swollen. Why, only ten years ago, P.Pp had worn size 9 shoes, but now he was onto or into 13/14 footwear and xxxx wide at that. His footwear was now hard to find and ugly. Also his swollen feet were either a cause and/or side effect of the several maladies that he now endured. Often, nowadays, he was as good as immobile. He stared at his computer, farted and pursued his obsession across the Internet.

The object of his obsession had many different names in many different places, but, one American one was, appropriately enough, Bigfoot. Pierre was fascinated by this, then cryptid, which like some other latecomers to the ‘reality’ of scientific recognition hovered on the edge of fossil, myth and folktale; as Bonobos, Mountain Gorillas and Coelacanths had done. Pierre expected Bigfoot to be confirmed as an officially extant being soon.

P.Pp had spent too much sleepless time recently viewing on-line video clips of or about this possible hairy thing. He neglected other obligations and commitments to do this. The minutes of obscure left-wing political sect meetings went unwritten and their tortuous agendas were circulated late. When Pierre’s washing machine meeped, because it had just completed a wash cycle,  and eradicated shit and sweat stains from his tatty old clothes; Pierre became immensely irritated by this interruption, he would have smashed the expensive domestic device with a sledgehammer, had he been able to do so. The machine always meeped when a video operator was zooming in on something, and commentator, (usually the same male person), was saying, of some chunk of American forestry: “…I’ve got it, I’ve seen motion, just in here,… something’s moving in the bushes! It must be watching me!”. Often the tensions of such possible sightings were increased by audible panting and the crunching of leaves underfoot as the Bigfoot hunter moved in on his pseudo-prey. The commentator might often then add that he was experiencing a “weird” or “creepy” feeling or state the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. The commentaries would sometimes be interspersed with frequent obscenity and blasphemy.

This, “The Encounter”, (or “Near Encounter” or “Alleged Encounter”), video seemed to have common features across Anglo-saxon/Celtic cultures. Video clips showing hunts for the Australian Bigfoot, the Yowie, were basically very similar to American ones, except that the Australian commentators used the word “bloody” more.

“The Encounter” was probably Bigfoot video in its wildest state: there were other sub-genres. Lectures and presentations from crypto-zoological conferences, radio interviews and discussion panels, documentaries involving expensive looking technological and human geegaws.

P.Pp liked all of these types of Bigfoot video, for him they all provided access to many co-existing, contradictory and compelling parts of the human condition and in doing so they far surpassed the narcissists and poseurs who held mainstream TV in a nausea-inducing pseudo strangleholds. Pierre preferred even mythical monsters to the monstrous egos of televised “personalities” and ham actors.

Pierre could not recall how he formed a connection to Bigfoot video. He had always liked crypto-zoological topics and in his boyhood had conducted public library researches about the Loch Ness monster, gigantic squids, sea serpents, salt water crocodiles and other such exotic entities. He sometimes claimed that he had seen an “Alien Black Cat”, whilst cycling near the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire.

But now the Sasquatch had got its smelly claws deeply but metaphorically embedded in Pierre’s fat flesh. He loved to watch videos from all the Bigfoot video sub-genres. He liked debates between talking heads, and he liked the expositions of lone experts and academies about ‘internal’ Bigfoot controversies such that over whether Bigfoot had human DNA, and whether or not it could therefore be classified as an ape. Another hot topic was whether it would be ethical to shoot a Sasquatch, to prove its existence, which echoed the Vietnam War notion of Bombing Huė in order to save it. The latter also sparked sub-controversies as to the veracity of a couple of alleged terminations and the non-production of a frozen cryptid stiff.

P.Pp was an aficionado of those vids which seemed just to display foliage. Often the makers of such conceptual pieces would repeat a shot or sequence slowed down or zoomed in or out and assert that the change in a single pixel denoted the presence of an eight foot tall giant bipedal apeman. Sometimes Sasquatch cineastes would actually draw the outlines of creatures onto the film to show that they had actually filmed a Bigfoot.

Then there the stick structures and the language. No one seemed to have ever videoed a Bigfoot making a stick structure, (or what the cognoscenti sometimes called a ‘formation’). In essence stick structures were piles of sticks, sometimes leaning against tree trunks and sometimes near broken trees. At first glance, these things could be the result of storm damage and, no doubt, this is what some stick structures were: but some structures seemed as though they could only have been placed as they were by actions driven by some sort of intention, or at least that was the verbal picture that the commentators made. The stick structures were often found, on close inspection, to consist of branches, logs, or even small trees that all been broken off, (not sawn or cut), to the same length. Sometimes different types of tree from different places had been collected together to make the structure. Some structures were as basic as two or three sticks crossed, or a sapling bent over to make an arch or sticks leant against a tree or together making a sort of skeletal wigwam, so that the sides could be filled out and made more solid if more branches and foliage were piled on. A few solidly constructed shelters were filmed, but mostly the builders, (whoever they were), seemed interested in the skeletal shelters as a symbol  to denote the presence of a being capable of building such a thing.  They were displays of strength and intention, which most clearly shown in the biggest “stick” structures, which had entailed uprooting and rearranging entire trees. Usually the latter featured a tree wrenched out of the soil, picked and jammed up off the ground in fork of other trees. P.Pp had seen a photo of one instance of a large tree that been reversed and rammed into the ground so that it roots were sticking up into the air; maybe it was the angle of the image taken, but that had looked like the boundary marker for a Bigfoot Emperor to Pierre, wordlessly stating; “Look on my works, mortals, and despair for I AM strong enough to rip this out of the ground and put it back the wrong way up; so don’t piss with me, or I WILL  do the same to you!”

But the smaller stick structures, made from twigs, perhaps by juvenile Sasquatch were more impressive to Pierre than great displays of strength and power. They seemed like sketches by someone trying out an artform, where the medium was wood and the canvas was woodlands.  Making art might or might not be a defining human characteristic, but calling a pile of sticks art was a major industry where Pierre came from.

P.Pp thought that language, in terms of the systematic organisation of sound into meaning-associated phonemes was a basic human characteristic, but he also recognised that it could be mimicked as it was by mynahs, starlings and some sorts of parrots. Some, who had recorded and analysed the utterances of Sasquatch said that parts of them sounded like Spanish, others detected Japanese and Native American like tones.

So, on a couple of counts, art and language, Sasquatch hovered on the brink of humanity, whilst official recognition of its existence, (whatever that might be, (was debatable). In 2011 the US Army Corps of Engineers published an illustrated description of Sasquatch in its “Washington Environmental Atlas", (see http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/fbi.htm), as  one of the species of wild animal that lived in the American North West. 

In 2013, one of several ongoing Sasquatch controversies was over whether Bigfoot had human DNA and whether or not this meant that it was a decendant of the giant prehistoric ape, Gigantopithecus.

Looking at the video clips of beautiful American forests, P.Pp was able to join in several of the controversies, and do a bit of tourism, vicariously. Art, DNA and language were not the half of it as video aficionados and strange crypto-zoological pundits (some of whom could have been quasi-mythical, themselves), engaged in heated dispute about what one or the other had or had not posted on the web. They interviewed themselves sitting in their cars denouncing each other with venomous diatribes, eg: “…SasquatchWizardX and TexasBigfootPete are totally dumbass hoaxers who film their boyfriends running about in monkey suits in the woods at night hooting when they are all drunk. Muthafuckas like the bring the noble discipline of crypto-zoology into total, but total disrepute. Etc etc…”

P.Pp would have joined in himself, as he liked the occasional on line ruck, but as he had got himself into the position of moderating the slightly less polite disputes of English eco-socialists, who felt moved to send each other pictures of Stalin from time to time: Pierre sat on his hands and sucked his Bigfoot toes and looked a pretty pictures of pine trees as the debates of Sasquatchery unfolded around him; even the blurred image of what  might be another human being, far, far away, made him feel less lonely.