Street life
I can get pretty zoned out in a supermarket. The process has removed grocery shopping to an almost televisual experience. We glide between the silent aisles, led from one colourful box to the next enticing package, before being spat out onto the street. It’s an advert break with no TV programme.
Push into a street-market and there’s no way you’re a passive observer. The traders yelling in your ear, the smell of the fishmongers’, dodging other shoppers. Women wandering through the throng councelling us to ‘Lift up our hearts’. Truthfully, I’m not sure you’ll find the latter in all markets, but you will in Deptford Market.
I made a second trip down there on Saturday and the God botherers were once again competing for my attention with the artists. Across the road at the south end of the High Street there’s some paved open space. It’s about the size of a basketball pitch, open to the road on two sides with an abstract mural on the far wall and shops on the other. A trail of earth crossed the space, ending near the mural. At the end of the mole-trail sat a table topped with a music system and a row of flowers in pots.
The music was playing for a woman dancer dressed entirely in black. She darted around her performance space, weaving through the air; then stopping dead consulted an A4 pad in her hand. Above her two men in paint-spattered white boilersuits retouched the mural. On the otherside of the square a man in a worn black overcoat and greying beard told us to ignore those performance artists. “Look at my eye landing pad”, he roared. On two boards screwed together by hinges was his eye landing pad, a painting of a helicopter landing pad surrounded by the city. “Let your eyes land on my eye landing pad!”
Further into the market a Japanese woman encouraged to take things from her stall “all for free”…”all from the Thames.” She’d stretched out an old sheet and covered it with small red and dun coloured bits of old brick and dark green glass, all rounded by the tides. A huge pile of furry, green rope sat to one side, next to the skeleton of an ancient roller hoover. It had definitely all come from the river. A female customer was crouched down putting pieces in her old Tescos bag. “All for free”.
You definitely don’t find this stuff in Tescos. Later, when passing the dancers in the afternoon, there was a new act: two slender, black stockinged legs danced a riverdance type jig – each covered by a large black dustbin.
Tags: Deptford market, performance art