Interviewed by Jay Younger
JAY YOUNGER How did you become interested in performance within the visual arts sphere?
VIRGINIA BARRATT Well I came in the stage door really via my disillusionment with theatre. Theatre is narrative bound, stage bound, usually written by a man who's dead whose words don't mean anything to you.
JAY YOUNGER So restrictions of theatre forced you to move towards your own notion of performance?
VIRGINIA BARRATT Yes, my own narrative. I've also discovered you can't be emancipated from your own history, you have to own your own truths. I want to write my own history and perform under my own direction.
JAY YOUNGER John Mills National has been operating as a performance space to encourage all kinds of ephemeral activity especially those that exist outside commodification. What do you believe the space has achieved in these terms?
VIRGINIA BARRATT Firstly, when you decide that notions of ephemeral and marginalised work are the areas you're going to encourage and support you land yourself in fairly much unexplored and ignored territory, here in Brisbane that is, so far as exhibition practice is concerned.
JAY YOUNGER Would you agree that as sole director of the space a certain 'personality' or atmosphere has been created.
VIRGINIA BARRATT Somebody was saying the other day that they found it worrying that J.M.N. was developing a 'persona' of its own, because I'm beginning to sign things "Virginia Barratt and John Mills National” as if it had human traits or something. And while that is little more than an amusing observation there is a grain of truth in it because we co-exist. J.M.N. necessarily becomes an extension of my own personality.
JAY YOUNGER As a half-breed space... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Virginia Barratt, The Lethal Stage (Triptych), John Mills National, September 1987. Photograph: Jay Younger.
