ON Sunday afternoon Patrick Tonks stripped off his blue singlet, smeared himself in paint and began yelling in Hebrew and Hindi.
He didn’t mind the confused faces of onlookers or even some aggressive shouts from those in cars doing Liebig Street laps.
To strangers the performance art might have appeared chaotic, perhaps even a little scary.
Shirtless and sitting across from a mirror in the civic green, Tonks cut his beard and chanted in a mix of languages and sang.
“Then I painted myself with red paint which was symbolic of religious self-flagellation,” Tonks said. During the act Tonks shaved erratically, sang the Muslim call to prayer and old colonial sheep station songs.
A day later and the paint cleaned off, Tonks put the chaos into some order.
“I turned the mirror on the audience — or the imaginary audience. What I’m doing isn’t necessarily beautiful, but sections are,” he said. “I was exploring my feelings; what’s happening in the current climate about people being human.”
The work is essentially about judgment and peeling off the layers of violence and fundamentalism.
Part of the idea came to him earlier in the year when a nine-year-old asked him why he had a beard.
“He said to me that ‘you like Muhammad (the prophet of Islam), don’t you?” For a while Tonks brooded on what the child had said, along with beards being the in-thing of inner Melbourne.
It all culminated with the culturally blending show at the civic green on Sunday.
The act titled DeTerrorise (We Are All But Human) was filmed and Tonks hopes to exhibit the clip in Warrnambool at some point. He concedes the meaning might be lost or even misunderstood, particularly in the medium of performance art.
“I don’t want to control what you take away from the performance,” Tonks said. “If they don’t understand the language, then they’ll certainly understand the symbolism.”
