read1 of 1
discover
Marcia Farquhar
People

She reminds one of the black-haired girl from the café in Lindsay Anderson’s film “If…”, holding a machine gun and shooting from the cathedral’s roof of the university at the fleeing professors below.

Marcia Farquhar burns endlessly. A star on rocks brought by the mothership emerging from Earth’s incendiary core. Artist and performer by trade and vocation, she never stops: life, imagination, impromptu and stage blur in one stream of time. She is always right on, whatever the situation she provokes or stumbles into. Her performances are open, perhaps even open-ended, shape-shifters, meteopathic, and engaging like a feast or a funeral.

It has been suggested that her acts have the candid, coruscating quality of punkishness, consciously approximating a level of training, be that flamenco dance, fashion catwalk, psychoanalysis or tour guiding, in a “self-assured amateurism”. This is why the beauty she gives out is never cold. Raw and infectious, her work reaches interstitial places that sizzle. And immediately everything is throbbing, humorous, uncomfortable and disinhibiting; crevasses of truth are opening, flashing at everyone, for an instant. Her metaphors are pulling at the realities she knows so well: high bohemia and bourgeoisie, domestic and institutional lures and horrors, different generations forced in the same piece of clothing, stardom, loneliness, loveliness, ridicule and fame.

Her work, if not in real time, can be also viewed in Marcia Farquhar’s 12 Shooters, where 14 artists shot her performances in 12 critical acts and contributions to the book.

People
Marcia Farquhar