Fish's Net
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- Fish's Net
- 1972
- b&w photograph
- 20,3 × 23,5 cm
During the Edinburgh Festival of 1972 (3–28 July), Paul Neagu performed "Fish’s Net" on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth. His distinctive performative vocabulary was nurtured by an interest in an open form of investigation based on associations and correspondences between natural gestures, simplified forms or symbols, and the elaboration of a subjective cosmology that aimed to create a dialogical relationship with the viewers. In a preparatory drawing for that performance, Neagu presented the diagram of a human figure with a metronome on its head and indications for actions and props (knives, transparent plastic tubing, bracelet, live fish). The metronome, which was to reappear in his later performances, functioned as a metaphor that expressed the rhythm of inner energies, while the fish alluded to his conceptual and profoundly metaphysical approach to reality. He was preoccupied with “the spiritual life of symbols,” and “their unmanifested symbolic energy.” The Fish later became one of the Nine Catalytic Stations (1987). A.Se.