For 16 nights, for six hours each night, in October 2005, visitors to Matt’s Gallery in east London found Brian Catling stalking a stage set of dark ecclesiastical wood. The artist’s behaviour was erratic and volatile: he paced up and down at speed; he messed around with an animal’s jawbone; he would urinate from a constructed pulpit, or don a wooden dunce’s cap. Each night he grabbed a member of the audience, hooded them in a gold lamé sheet and forced them down a trapdoor, not to be seen again that night.
Catling, who has died aged 74, was a performance artist and fantasy novelist whose work mined a gothic imagination at odds with his otherwise genial manner. Antix at Matt’s Gallery was “thick with a sense of implicit violence”, one critic wrote, and Catling acknowledged: “I like perversity, I am attracted to the wrongness of actions, and the wrongness of doing things. I’m not making art for your comfort, I’m not an entertainer, I’m not making things to make you happy.”
