Artists wear exploding fireworks suits, Don’t try this | Arts

Back in 2014, Tony Campbell and Matt Vis planned an audacious new stunt. They would attach long strands of firecrackers to a couple of cheap mail-order suits and set them off … while wearing the suits. It would be spectacular.

Vis said he should have worn nose plugs. But he didn’t anticipate that when the 2,000 firecrackers glued to his suit went off, some of the sparks would go right up his nose and sear his septum. Or that the fumes from the firecrackers would be so intense he couldn’t breathe.

Campbell said the rows of firecrackers on his suit went off so fast that he had to fight the instinct to flee. “You can’t turn off the lizard brain that makes you want to run,” Campbell said.

But what good would running have done? The firecrackers were attached to him, unfortunately. Campbell held his ground. His neck got burned.

To the artists’ surprise, the hot glue they’d used to attach the firecrackers melted in the heat of the explosions and stayed really hot afterward.

Who could have seen that coming?

Making art from ground nutria meat

Injuries and terror aside, it was just the sort of thing that has made Campbell and Vis New Orleans’ premier performance artists.

Campbell is from London; Vis is from Quantico, Virginia. They met almost 25 years ago and formed a professional partnership based on their shared love for unconventional art. Way unconventional.

These are the guys who welded two motorcycles together, face to face, so they could make lots of noise and smoke without going anyplace. These are the guys who sculpted their own heads from ground nutria meat.

These are the guys who coated themselves with bronze paint and stood motionless on Julia Street, apparently urinating into a fountain. Of course, it wasn’t real urine, it was beer pumped through rubber tubing. A passerby sampled some, just to be sure.

Forgiveness through firecrackers

Sometimes Campbell and Vis’s performances seem completely ridiculous, but actually, there’s always an underlying motive. Their flaccid, inflated replica of the Lee monument was a celebration of the removal of the symbols of the Confederacy. Their failed magic trick — unsuccessfully attempting to jerk a tablecloth from under a China place setting, which crashed into 1,000 shards on the floor — was a comment on the human hubris that led to the BP oil spill.

Their firecracker performance had something to do with seeking absolution for past sins, maybe as individuals, maybe as representatives of society.

Campbell and Vis were both raised Catholic. They set off their firecracker suits while kneeling at a do-it-yourself, candlelit altar, and called what they were doing “Pyrotechnic Flagellation.”

“We were thinking about contemporary and historic martyrdom,” Campbell said. “It’s a prayer of confession; pain can purify you.” Society, he said, seems to believe that “violence can purify things.”

Maybe experiencing 2,000 tiny explosions would absolve the artists of “toxic masculinity,” Campbell said.

Vis agrees. “Tony said, ‘We need to blow ourselves up,’ and I said, ‘Well, OK, let’s find out how to do this,’” Vis recalls.

Luckily, Vis was working in the special effects department of a futuristic, dystopian, kung fu-type movie that was filming in New Orleans. So, there were real stunt men to consult with, to be sure the artists knew how to do things safely.

Vis was told that the only way to safely do what he and Campbell had planned, was not to do it at all. Firecrackers are uncontrollable. The pure white polyester suits they planned to wear might catch fire. Et cetera.

Vis said he was told that he and Campbell risked “getting burned, losing your eyesight, and losing your hearing.”

“This is going to happen if you don’t take precautions,” he was told. To do it right would cost, like, $10,000.

Taking chances

Pish tosh. Campbell and Vis figured if they put on goggles and ear plugs, sprayed the suits with fire-retardant, and smeared their bodies with Hollywood fire-resistant jell, they’d be OK. They didn’t put the gel on their faces because it would look too shiny in the video they planned to make.

Though the video shows Campbell and Vis enveloped in explosions simultaneously, they actually performed the stunt individually and spliced the recordings together. Campbell went first. Vis admits that if Campbell had gotten badly hurt, he would have probably not gone through with his part of the performance. He’s not crazy, after all.

Campbell and Vis had glued the rows of firecrackers across their chests, bandoleer-style. In the video you can see them flinch and wince as the firecrackers explode on their shoulders, just inches from their faces.

“Afterward, we said, ‘Thank God,’” Vis recalls. The outcome could have been a lot worse. The point was purification, not going full Joan of Arc.

Never again

This all took place in 2014. The video turned out great. Very violent. The white polyester suits were tattered by all the explosions and charred here and there, as evidence of the daring performance. Campbell and Vis, who are now both 58 years old, soon healed. They would never do it again.

Except once, five years later, when they were invited to be part of an exhibit in Chicago, where they repeated the performance before a live audience. They both got burned again. The firecrackers they’d bought at someplace in Missouri on the way to Chicago were even more volatile and erratic than the first batch.

There would probably be another great video of the feat, except the person with the cellphone camera panicked when the firecrackers started cracking and fled.

This is not reality

“We’re not looking forward to any more opportunities” to perform firecracker absolution, Campbell said. Instead, they painted a huge circus-style banner depicting themselves in the midst of the fiery spectacle. It reads “Forgive me Father, I have sinned.” They displayed the banner at Good Children gallery on St. Claude Avenue earlier this year. If you looked closely, you could see the sparks going up Vis’s nose.

The point of banner, Campbell said, was in part to emphasize the irresponsibility of the stuff he and Vis sometimes do. “This is a freak show,” he said. “This is not reality.”

Of course, Campbell said, “don’t try this at home.”

“We know trained professionals, and they say absolutely do not do this,” he added.