THE WILD BOY
Performance, installation and video: The Showroom Gallery, London. April – May 2005.
Duration: 5 hours per day over six weeks.

As a deaf person, I’m intrigued by the figure of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron who was found living in the forests of southern France at the end of the 18th Century. Jean Itard, a teacher at the School for the Deaf in Paris, adopted Victor in order to study him and to teach him language using ‘oralist’ methods (devised to maximise, or force, deaf people’s use of speech). Initially believed to be deaf, in fact Victor’s years in the forest’s silence appear to have made him lose interest in sound. In any case, Victor would not take up speech and led Itard to perceive oralism’s failings. As such, I was interested in exploring what legacy Victor might have for deaf people.

Victor’s story is largely familiar through the film L’Enfant Sauvage by Francois Truffaut. I was curious as to why Truffaut chose to make his film about Victor in black and white, as did other directors making films about a disabled subject (eg David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Start Small). The disability theorist David Hevey in The Creatures Time Forgot (Routledge, 1992), shows how the use of black and white imagery in charity advertising is used to signify the disabled subject’s tragic ‘dispossession’ from the world of health, colour and luxury (ie: in order to evoke sympathy or pity in order to increase donations).

In contrast to Truffaut (who, as well as directing, played Itard in the film), I wanted to indicate that I was considering Victor’s story from his position. For the video installation then, I employed a 1970’s analogue vision-mixer to re-make Truffaut’s film as a wildly colourful, psychedelicised version. This piece was titled F. Truffaut’s ‘The Wild Child’ As If Passing Through the Mind of a Young, Noble Savage (the ‘as if’ indicating the playful uncertainty of this act of reverse-empiricism).

The use of bright colour as a riposte to the convention of depicting disabled people in black and white extended to the installation room that I inhabited. A ‘fluorescent forest’ was constructed, the day-glo painted leaves shimmering beneath ultra-violet lighting as a path ran past a babbling pond up to the video room. A raised platform stood in the corner of this day-glo forest, the effect being to suggest the residence of some unidentifiable zoo-exhibit. Covered in straw, the platform was my residence for the duration of the exhibition.

Just as Victor was visited and gawped at by the fashionable elite in the late 18th Century, the work increasingly came to focus on the Gallery visitor’s looking at me on the platform, often at length. I resisted ‘doing’ anything much beyond simply lolling around the platform scratching myself atop the itchy straw, effaced under a ‘Victor’ wig and wearing a filthy, torn shift.

In this passive state ‘Victor’ attracted an amazing range of responses from individual Gallery visitors who brought him fruit, sang and played music for him, attempted to join him on the platform, tried to engage him in play or conversation, and on more than one occasion, wrote letters of affection and love to him.

Towards the end of the show some visitors returned regularly as if somehow (like Itard) having adopted Victor for themselves.

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