Battersea Arts Centre, London
Katy Baird’s strange, intimate work of performance art leaves little unexposed – but its lack of depth leaves us wanting more
Last time I saw Katy Baird, she hiked up her skirt and urinated on stage. It wasn’t even her show. Tonight, with the audience all hers, she steps it up a number. On the big projection screen, we get a closeup of her defecating, shot from behind in excruciating detail. Just in case you start to forget, she shows it from another angle later on.
Get Off wedges itself somewhere between desire and disgust, a needy search for beauty overridden by the sweat and grime of reality. Baird is preoccupied by the mess of bodies, of wiped noses, scratched pubes and wiggling lumps of flesh, the ordinary mundanities of our bodies that we usually clean up before we show anyone else. But this intimate, deeply odd piece of performance art isn’t designed to shock. Instead, it seems to reach for brazen honesty, a perhaps over-literal openness. “I want you to want all of me,” she says – to the audience, to an unseen lover, to herself maybe.
