Words are the sex I’m willing to opt back into
I was in a group of people who wanted to re-educate themselves and other people about sex. It was called Bedfellows. We used to do a research group where we’d find stuff on the internet about sex – articles, zines, blog posts, videos, podcasts – and talk about it.
I’d opted out of having sex with other people in my early twenties and I found this process of getting together to talk about sex provided me with some of the things I’d wanted from sex – intimacy, learning and excitement.
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WOW (It’s A Thrill Without Resonance)
Exhibited at If This Ain’t Art… Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds and SpiderS, Smaragd, Berlin
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Minster Craft
Bad copies of gargoyles from the Southwell Minster south face made at clay club. Thanks to Beryl Foster for hosting and Robin Cooper for stage management / choreography.
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Party Politics
Performed and published on the occasion of THIS IS NOT A SCHOOL, Five Years, London by DARTER (Chloe Cooper, Phoebe Davies and Louisa Martin)
A piñata of the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education is presented to participants alongside a choice of sweets. Through an active, participative discussion based upon the concept of the Free School, participants will decide what the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP is full of.
Text below produced in response to the aforementioned Party Politics by DARTER and published in THIS IS NOT A SCHOOL. BOOK. by Five Years / Edward Dorrian available to download here
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You Don’t Have to Be Posh to Be Privileged
Exhibited at BAT Pack, Mile End Art Pavilion, London
A video of Mile End Art Pavilion, London, shot and edited to correspond with Joanna Lumley’s audio tour of this section of Mile End Park. The addition of a visual element to Lumley’s description of the area in her dulcet tones identifies a slippage between reality and rhetoric in the subjective process of representing a place.
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From Here to There… And Back Again
Audio walk for Art from Elsewhere, Arnolfini and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol
Audio walk to listen to while walking between the two exhibition sites of Art from Elsewhere – Arnolfini and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. The walk begins at Arnolfini and has two parts, see track listing below:
Track 1:
From Here to There
(18 minutes 57 seconds) – it’s uphill Direction: Arnolfini to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
The artists Carl Andre and Robert Smithson take a journey through the streets of Bristol, reflecting on their experience of Art from Elsewhere. Carl Andre ‘is best known as a minimalist sculptor’ but in the exhibition, he is represented by some of his concrete poetry: ‘a form in which the visual order of the words or letters on the page is as important as the words themselves’. Robert Smithson ‘is best known for his monumental ‘earth works” but in Art from Elsewhere is represented by some of his ‘phantasmagorical drawings of cosmological worlds…’. Hear a fictional conversation between the artists as they find themselves ‘elsewhere’.
If you want to walk the same way as Carl and Robert did, go across Pero’s Bridge, along the restaurants by the waterfront and up Park Street via Ganesha Handicrafts and the Wetherspoons opposite Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.
Track 2:
…And Back Again (12 minutes 59 seconds) – it’s downhill Direction: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery to Arnolfini
It’s a mash up track that you don’t want to dance to, with sounds of hope and despair, and a general feeling of it going down the wrong way. It’s stinky burps. It’s acid reflux. It’s delicious. It’s chewy. It’s bloating, abdominal pain and constipation.
Listen to a visceral response to the experience of Art from Elsewhere. Begin with Ana Mendieta’s smoking body, be persuaded into failed collective activism and end with an affective rant on the politics of collecting and lending.
Commissioned by Arnolfini and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.
This commission is part of the Art from Elsewhere Programme.
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Non-digital digits in the post – Messy Threats
Shown at Rupert’s An Artist And A Rover, Art Vilnius ’14, Vilnius, Lithuania
For its participation in Art Vilnius ’14 Special Projects Program, Rupert collected mailings from past and present Resident artists and Educational Program participants. Responding liberally to the traditions of mail art, with its lineage of Ray Johnson and the New York Correspondance School, Fluxus Eternal Network and the art form’s subsequent cyber interpretations, participants have sent Rupert clippings, posters, postcards, letters, prints, found objects, publications, texts and emails that are exhibited. In accordance to mail art exhibition rules, the works are not for sale.
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Prop for Reflection
Commissioned by Artsadmin/LIFT during DARTER’s project responding to Plunge, a public artwork concerning climate change by Michael Pinsky
A viewing device to allow you to look up at yourself looking down at yourself from 1000 years in the future used and documented by workshop participants. Thanks to Billy, Tom and Phoebe Davies
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Assholes with Harriet Parry
Exhibited at Xymphora 2, Kevin Linfoot Gallery, Leeds
“Legend has it that this all began as a dare 27 years ago in the Mugs Away Saloon on Camino Capistrano. Patron K.T. Smith vowed to buy a drink for anyone who’d join him mooning the train across the street. A handful did. A tradition was born. On Saturday, that handful had grown to an estimated 5,000 people. “Mooning is not condoned in public, yet not really harmful”, many said, making it just rebellious enough to unite them. A backward nation maybe, but a nation nonetheless” – Xeno