Martin O’Brien is perhaps the only genuine zombie you’ll ever meet. In this case, the term zombie is in reference to the London-based performance artist exceeding the life expectancy of a person with cystic fibrosis.¹ O’Brien’s relationship to his diagnosis has informed his extensive performance practice and serves as a thematic constant across his multifaceted body of work. He recently performed a new work, Fading Out of Dead Air, at the International Museum of Surgical Science in an exhibition put on by Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery’s director Joseph Ravens.

        O’Brien’s work is philosophical in the way he chooses to meditate on illness and death. It’s not about finding clear answers or solutions, but a personal process of sublimating the difficulty of their experience of cystic fibrosis into poetic gestures which celebrate vitality and life. In this regard, O’Brien’s performative inquiries exist in the legacy of Bob Flanagan, another performance artist who lived with the same disease. Flanagan’s most famous work, Nailed, involved nailing his penis to a table while singing If I Had a Hammer by Pete Seger.² O’Brien has in fact worked with Flanagan’s longtime collaborator Shree Rose several times throughout the past several years. If Flanagan was a punk artist, utilizing confrontation to shock an apathetic audience out of their stupor, then O’Brien is post-punk as he internalizes that same fury into something more contemplative and ambiguous. The self-inflicted violent gestures that marked Flanagan’s work are developed into more extended, durational explorations of physical endurance in O’Brien’s approach.

        Upon entering the second floor of the museum, there was an eerily tense atmosphere accented by emerald-green lighting and a brooding drone soundtrack. These theatrical effects created a unique, neo-gothic world in which the performance unfolded. O’Brien’s movements were slow and deliberate. It is hard to convey how truly slow-paced the piece was. A single sequence within the eccentric ritual took anywhere from ten to thirty minutes at a time. Across the three-hour length of the piece, a menagerie of symbolic references to death, sexuality, and fragility ebbed and flowed amidst a pointedly gaudy gothic tableau. The experience of watching the work was like staring at the waves at night—a pulsing and steady rhythm which lulled you into a trance.

        The performance unfolded in a cycle of repetitive actions. At first, an Elvis Presley song radiated out of a cassette tape. O’Brien placed a latex mask over his head and fought for every breath. The Elvis cassette was turned off and the song evaporated from the space. He began to crawl around. At first this crawling was meandering, but soon began to fixate on arranging green pieces of glass into the shape of caskets and graves. A large wooden coffin straight out of the Addams family was activated as O’Brien placed it on his back and drifted around like an ancient tortoise. He then awkwardly handled a glass between his wrists, pushing and prodding it across the floor. This was interrupted by several more rounds of organizing silhouettes of green glass caskets and a new kind of crawling, more frantic and agile than before.

        After two and a half hours, O’Brien suddenly broke free from the limits of the room in which he had been performing and wandered around the circuit of interconnected rooms on the second floor of the museum. He paused at the display of an iron lung. This outmoded device was used to help patients breathe in the early half of the twentieth century. The skin-like mask was placed back over his face, and he struggled to breathe next to the archaic medical apparatus.

        He continued to another room with murals displaying a history of surgery. At the end, O’Brien returned to the room where it had all begun. He took Polaroid photographs of the performance detritus and laid them down as memento mori of the piece itself. The photographs were haunting and spectral. You’d be forgiven for thinking they were documents of paranormal activity as the green glass shimmered a hazy aura of pale green refracted light.

        Despite O’Brien’s commitment and thoughtfulness, I found there to be disparities in the intentions of the artist and the actual effect of the performance. First, its duration. Such acts of physical and mental endurance primarily assert the struggle of the body. It’s visceral for the viewer because one cannot help but imagine themselves in the same strenuous position. This strategy naturally evokes feelings of empathy and opens you up as a viewer to the limits of human experience. Unfortunately, the structure of the piece as a series of cyclical actions interrupted the trance of watching the artist physically endure the strain of moving. You got into a rhythm of watching one action, but that tension was shattered by a new action. As a viewer, this feeling of constantly attempting to fall into the rhythm of O’Brien’s motions became frustrating. I noticed that the audience filtered in and out, only seeing glimpses of the overall performance. The frequent shifts of movement resulted in an audience who became easily distracted.

        This issue was augmented by the space itself. The International Museum of Surgical Science is a unique and compelling place for hosting live performances, but the staging of this work seemed to clash with the architecture. O’Brien used a wide swath of space–meaning that the audience was packed together at the very edges of the room and peering over one another at the two entrances. This further encouraged people to only view in bits and pieces instead of as a whole. I felt that this setting was not conducive to the effect attempting to be evoked. This was unfortunate as there were plenty of interesting elements and moments generated by O’Brien’s performance. Yet, the cumulative effect was ultimately undermined.

        Martin O’Brien is certainly an extremely interesting and highly relevant performance artist. His meditations on the fragility of the body are offset by the desire to exceed such limitations. As a zombie, O’Brien asserts the presence of life over the fear of the absence of death. There is power in creating alternative identities and refusing to be ignored by society. Such artworks ought to have more recognition especially in the United States where healthcare is treated as more of a luxury than a right. Even with its shortcomings, O’Brien’s performance maintains this political potential.

Footnotes

^1O’Brien, Martin. 2023. Interview by Alex Needham. The Guardian (London). July 18, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jul/18/martin-obrien-cystic-fibrosis-artist-zombie

² Smith, Roberta. “Bob Flanagan, 43, Performer Who Fashioned Art From His Pain,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/06/arts/bob-flanagan-43-performer-who-fashioned-art-from-his-pain.html

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.