Dorothy Feaver talks to Ann-Marie James about her recent work.

Dorothy: In Limited Means, you measured out the lifespan of a biro over a series of ten drawings. The drawings are painstaking. How long did they take?

Ann-Marie: From start to finish, the series took just over three months to complete.

And you have talked about the project addressing a general idea of lifespan, but of course the process of making the work took up that specific chunk of time. The process mirrors the subject. I suppose you could begin to look at any complete artwork as a measuring tool for the time it took to make. In this way once an artwork is complete it has come the end of its active life; the life is in the making process. This is a rather sad thought – macabre even…

I agree, though once complete the work can begin a life of it’s own. Most artists aim to make works that continue to function in their absence, and once the artwork is complete, it can become an element another creative practice – that of the curator. I am keen to curate exhibitions myself, but it’s perhaps more interesting to surrender my work to a third party – the work becomes an element of a broader conversation, and is open to interpretation and reinterpretation and sometimes misinterpretation, all of which are very interesting.

What about unfinished work? How do you feel about abandoned projects – because they, in a sense, are the ones that are still alive… what’s your policy on self-editing, or destroying old work? (I just threw something of my own into Michael Landy’s Art Bin, so this is on my mind).

It’s a fluid and often subconscious process, I don’t often destroy things, but I have notebooks full of abandoned ideas – some of them are terrible and should never see the light of day, and some of them have at their core something interesting to them but have yet to find their most appropriate form of expression. I never throw my notebooks away, and it’s interesting to see the core of a once discarded idea later resurface in a completely different form. Self editing is often more like a very slow process of digestion.

And did you keep the Limited Means biro? Do you go in for collecting/hoarding?

Yes and yes! I keep absolutely everything, much to my husband’s dismay. I recently cast the biro from Limited Means in plaster.

So the biro has a future with you?

Absolutely, the blue Bic Orange Crystal Fine is my weapon of choice.

The Bic biro is also the everyman pen, and that complements your source, that most universal of anatomical studies: Gray’s Anatomy. And yet, I think these drawings are very you. Were you trying to get away from the personal? Could this series be seen as a self-portrait?

I abhor the idea of making work with a first-person confessional narrative, and yet in spite of myself I am sure that this work is very much a self-portrait. I expect the less personal you try to be the more you inadvertently reveal, and that all works of art are, in some sense, a portrait of the artist.

Are some works more self-portraits than others? Are these the works you find yourself more attached to?

I have favourites, but they change constantly. Sometimes I am most satisfied by the compositions that turn out exactly as planned, other times works surprise you – happy accidents through which you end up with something that you wouldn’t have anticipated. I suppose the work I am most drawn to at any given point is at that point the most accurate self-portrait, like a kind of self imposed Rorschach test, if that makes any sense.

Definitely, although your drawings are too garnished to be mistaken for something scientific. The indigo ink and gothic patterns bring to my mind tattoos – the popular way of transforming the body on the outside. Was that on your mind at all? How do you rate tattoos?  Would you ever get one?

This is something that other people have mentioned to me a lot, I agree there is about the line work that would lend itself to tattoos. Tattoos are very interesting to me. I have yet to find a willing victim for a work called The Uncertainty Principle – a tattoo in 2 parts, one to be worn by the artist and the other by the owner of the work. Both tattoos illustrate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In this work I seek to explore the symbiotic relationship between ‘the artist’ and ‘the collector’, and the tattoo is an interesting medium with which to do that.

We used to draw tattoos on our arms with biros at school, in the lessons that really dragged. I used to like copying drawings of plants in science lessons, and eco-systems were fun to colour in, you could put in a lot of detail. Did you get gripped by science? How did Gray’s Anatomy come into your life?

My interest in anatomy came more from life drawing than from school – at school our biological drawings were far too removed from the body and from anatomy – we drew neat flow charts and reductive line drawings to indicate function rather than contemplating form, and our perception of our internal organs was as clean and as divorced as possible from their physical reality. I took life drawing classes at my local adult education centre when I was about sixteen, and there was a male model that brought along ropes, which he would loop around the pipe-work in the classroom so that he could flex and hold muscles for us to draw. Life drawing classes and books on anatomy were something that I sought out for myself again once I had left art school, as anatomy is not really taught any more.

Did you take anything away from all the staring at Gray’s textbook – are you more aware of which bone fits where? Would you know how to deal with a slipped disc or broken elbow?

Unfortunately not! In isolation – and particularly in photographs or in reproductions such as those in Gray’s text – bones and organs and muscle structures can be quite beautiful and make for fascinating elements of a composition. But faced with an actual sucking chest wound I’m sure I would be quite useless.

Well our insides are mysterious; your drawings are very precise though, while the arrangements are doing weird and wonderful things. They unite the illusion of control that measurement brings and the beautiful chaos that it is trying to counter.

Thank you! I’m really interested in the tension between control and expression, order and chaos – it’s something that I’m exploring at the moment in a series of works in biro and oil paint on board, and I’m very excited about pushing it further.

___

Ann-Marie James | Danse Macabre is on show at First Floor Projects.

Open Thursday to Saturday 12-6pm, or by appointment until 13th February 2010.

Somehow at some point we begin to create our own biographies from the things we own or possess.

Michael Landy, 2008 [1]

Since emerging from Goldsmiths at the beginning of the last major recession, Michael Landy has pursued particular themes across a sequence of big projects. Their coherence is compelling: ‘Worth and value are all wrapped up in what I do.’[2] A fragment from the early sculpture, Market (1990), comprising a market stall collapsed into its basic parts, had a niche setting in last year’s Frieze Art Fair, and still stands, twenty years on, as a pithy response to economic failure. Now in the South London Gallery, Camberwell, Landy is making an open call for artistic failures to be turned over to landfill. Art Bin confirms that his biography owes as much to what he has destroyed as to the items he has accumulated.

A 600m³ skip, bolted together from transparent perspex panels, fills the gallery, and over two months will serve as a shared depository for things that are deemed by Landy to be not worth saving. The system is efficient, with applications processed through a dedicated website, and beyond other explorers of waste in visual terms – from Baldessarri’s de-cluttering instinct to Christian Boltanski’s Personnes currently on show in the Grand Palais – it also brings to mind the dust-yards of 19th century London, a precedent in organised waste management. Accordingly, in his preoccupation with identity, Landy appears as something of a John Harman figure, to-wit the personal cataclysm of Break Down (2001) where he systematically destroyed all his belongings and generated 5.75 tonnes for landfill. Having since been very ill, Art Bin points to life-writing as an ongoing rather than retrospective activity. ‘When I had cancer, the thing that really annoyed me was not dying, really, it was more about thinking, “What about all the work I haven’t made yet?”’[3]

Darkly humorous, in Art Bin Landy has gone on to enliven that commonplace, ‘negative space’. On the opening night, the gallery filled with a smell unexpected from the conceptual – a workshop smell, of sawdust and paint. A couple of gallery hands went up and down a set of stairs, throwing artworks over the tipping point. Their costume of black T-shirts and white gloves conformed to museum etiquette but, given they were handling things about to disappear into oblivion, also gestured to mime artists in warm up.

Landy’s projects are difficult to commodify, and set him on an elliptical orbit from the yBa phenomenon, which is well represented in Art Bin. A tottering pile of sculptures that Gary Hume has been making from clusters of his old paint pots for years, and not showing, landed with a wallop, to cheers. They joined a drawing of the Scottish flag by Tracey Emin, a set of Ian Davenport stripes on metal sheets and a big pink painting by Michael Craig-Martin. Damien Hirst’s glittery screen-print of a skull on canvas has been biffed above the nose hole, and keeps company with a stuffed dog, a golden exercise ball, some wooden splints and other tat. The bin does away with hierarchy, showing celebrated and unknown artists alike, one on top of the other, in the way that newspaper layout collides one story with another. Indeed the life of this project is fanned by public outreach, and Landy draws on the history of rubbish in art to provide the bait for newspaper coverage.[4] A newspaper-style publication to accompany the event reproduces clippings that locate Art Bin within a history of news stories: ‘What a load of rubbish’ (The Daily Mail on Carl Andre, 16/2/76); ‘Modern art is rubbish – and confusing for Tate cleaner’ (The Independent on Gustav Metzger, 27/8/04); ‘Churchill portrait destroyed’ (The Times, 12/1/78).

One of Landy’s own drawings on the pile serves as an index to the whole conceit. A scrap from his last project, H2NY, lately shown in the exhibition Joyous Machines (Tate Liverpool, until 10th January) pays homage to Jean Tinguely, and specifically, his self-destructing artwork, Homage to New York. Tinguely’s machine was made from a haul of junk – a bathtub, drums, bottles and bicycle wheels – and designed to demolish itself in front of an audience on the 17th March, 1960. In the event, the machine ‘failed to fail’ and had to be extinguished by a fireman. Landy aims to complete Tinguely’s masterpiece, and has created over 160 black and white drawings of the machine, give or take the duds. In an imaginary interview, Landy summoned Tinguely in a New Jersey dump: ‘I read somewhere that you said “those whose jobs it is to destroy are often happier than those who have to build.”’[5] The drawing in Art Bin continues that conversation.

It’s unusual to hear whoops and laughter in a gallery or a tip, but Art Bin is a joyous spectacle. In Scrapheap Services (1995), Landy filled the Chisenhale Gallery with thousands of cut-out figures and mannequins posing as a corporate cleaning company. This was a raw political tableau, biting at the legacy of the Thatcherite government, whereas Art Bin brings a more positive inflection to waste-generated discussion, and invites a convergence between artistic and social practices. The artist’s private editing process is turned into public confession, not far from feeding time at the zoo. The experience unfolds in a dramatic arc: the climb to the top, the literal action of throwing an object away, the noise of the impact, the ‘oo’s and ‘ah’s at floor level. ‘One perverse, unforeseen result of the conceit’, Landy observes, ‘is that there are lots of people queuing up to be in the Bin, eager to be in the bin. If you’re not a “name” artist, this could be the first rung on the ladder, so that you embrace failure as a route to success.’ [6]

I had the gratification of getting my failed artwork approved for submission. Behind a desk at the back of the gallery, superintending proceedings, was Landy himself, as Ade Edmondson-cum-factory manager. He checked off the item against its logged number, attached a label to the back and filled out a receipt. I climbed the stairs, gazed into the abyss and hurled my paltry thing as far as I could. It smashed against the side – the perspex shuddered and so did I, realising that my mistake was now trapped in public. There will, I suspect, be an afterword. At the bottom of the receipt there’s a disclaimer for reproduction of the trashed artwork. Just as Landy created a unique taxonomical self-portrait when he catalogued those 7,227 possessions destroyed in Break Down, so too the Art Bin inventory will make for rich pickings.

Dud by D. Feaver is thrown into the Bin.

_____________________________________

[1] Michael Landy in conversation with James Lingwood, in Michael Landy: Everything Must Go! (Ridinghouse, London, 2008), p.107

[2] Michael Landy, cited in, ‘Michael Landy: Break Down’, Passports (London: The British Council, 2009), p.102

[3] Bryan Appleyard, ‘Art Bin: It’s official, modern art is rubbish’, The Times, 27/12/09

[4] Eg., Charlotte Higgings, ‘But is it Rubbish?’, The Guardian, 28/1/10; Louise Jury, ‘Rubbish! Modern art dumped as trash for exhibition Art Bin’, Evening Standard, 28/01/10

[5] Laurence Sillars, ed., Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely (Liverpool: Tate Publishing, 2009), p.134

[6] Michael Landy, ‘My Week’, The Observer, 24/01/10

_____________________________________

This article first appeared in Studio International in February 2010

All-round paragons of DIY virtue, Theo Peters and Ben Wright stage shows and circulate handmade records under the banner of Editions de Minuit. Moreover – and in keeping with a grand tradition of fannish self-expression – they’ve just launched a ‘zine. Hit editionsdeminuit@live.co.uk for where to get your hands on a copy. Murdofleur quizzed Theo and Ben about autonomy, identity formation and music fandom in the era of the blogosphere.

It seems that on corollary of music suddenly being everywhere is that you have less ability to decide for yourself when and how you hear it – I once had to leave the room when a mate’s little brother was playing Fifa Street because I was in danger of having a Dizzee Rascal track I really liked sutured to this image of a polygonal Ross Crouch doing bicycle kicks. It’s sort of creepy to realise that you recognise tracks you’ve never wittingly listened to, but which a record company marketting dept. has managed to sneak into your brain…

I sort of answered this lower down (last question, we did these out of sequence, sorry!) it sort of touches on a wobbler i threw in issue two of mine and theo’s ‘zine too. we got talking tonight about how pissed off we as fans get at the misrepresentation of our favourite artists in ads and other media we don’t agree with. I forget most of it, but lots was about Dylan, who I’ve never held in that high esteem anyway and Lennon, who I have, and McCartney, who I haven’t. And Bright Eyes. Halifax. wtf!?

As you said, you’ve started a ‘zine. Why something paper-based rather than online publication?

Because fuck the trees. Seriously, much as i appreciate the inernet as a platform for people to pebbledash with their creative juices (cheers to everyone who has ever tried and failed to make a video for their favourite song on Youtube, starring themselves or their bezzie that won’t make the viewer want to gouge their eyes out), i don’t really like what’s become of it. it seems much less anonymous and romantic, much more egotistical. Its also because I can’t work a computer and am a step away musically from an unwashed, denim-clad metallica roadie. My own influences are in the no-wave hardcore punk scene. I see the online blog/ ‘zine as creatively and artistically anaemic in comparison to its more organic predecessor. theo will no doubt have something much more ghandi to contribute.

It’s nice to have something real,  something that stands on its own without a computer. Why have paper money and not pay for everything by cards and wires, watch your money go up and down on a screen but never see it… It’s the same as having books, videos, cds, whatever. Imagine a world with no bookshops or record shops. That’d be weird.

Maybe im too distrusting of the internet but i like to think things that exist materially might be uncovered in the future when they’ll still be exactly the same but everything else has changed. I mean, no-one looks at old internet pages they made ten years ago laughs at how times have changed, or is reminded of the time they made it because things on the internet are either destroyed, disregarded or updated and re-edited as time moves on. Sometimes thats a benfit of the internet – that things exist in an ‘unfinished’ state, that they can always be changed and updated and remain in a state of flux, but for the sake of posterity paper and material things generally are essential.

Is there a good argument for wanting to own music in material form (for yourself as it were) rather than rent/stream it? Is it, like, ecologically sound?

I love music in material form. There’s a lot to be said for having the artwork and the box and having cds and records to flip through. Maybe theres an argument for only renting and streaming if you’re the sort of person who’s never into the same thing for more than a day at a time and if you had any kind of music collection it’d only be a list of things you were never going to listen to. People listen to radio 1 regiously and while they’d gush on about how much music means to them, Jo Whiley tells them which band to like each week and they consider downloading their album but by the time they get round to it they’ve heard it a thousand times and the bbc producers have something equally unoriginal but “totally new!” to splash about the airwaves and adverts and billboards.

I like to surround myself with the music I’m into, I think it shapes a person to an extent. or at least grounds a person, to have a collection of what you really like and have liked. Its partly posterity again, it’s nice to go back to bands that you used to be into and remember what they offered or what time in your life they represent. Things like Spotify are ideal for getting into new music or trying it out, but for me it’d never replace having actual cds and records. i guess depends on tastes and interests.

in terms of having the artwork of a release and the lyrics readily available, I am totally for owning music in a tangible form. However, I am opposed to third parties profiting form the creativity and experiences of others, so against streaming or renting music. collective ownership in libraries or similar is obviously the ideal scenario. There are some ways round the ecologically destructive aspects of the music industry, such as using vegetable inks and recycled cases, as used by Bakery Outlet and several other responsible labels. I realise that there isn’t really any way we can package hard copies of music without impacting negatively on our environment, but if we don’t, what are we going to do when the lights go out? You need oil for a keyboard and wood for a guitar…

Simon Reynolds has coined the (kinda ungainly) term ’scenius’. Whereas (his argument goes) rock-oriented music criticism likes to think in terms of singular masterpieces singlehandedly wrought by a genius (Dylan, Lennon, Conor Oberst or whoever) great records can also be products of scenes, movements, networks of people – of scenius. Mostly his examples come from recent UK dance music, but it’s arguably true of a lot of canonical rock - bands who are in the right place at the right time often end up representing/taking the credit for/being seen as the pinnacle of more diffuse movements. Do you think the tendency to want to think in terms of individuals and canonical works is unhealthy?

i think this one might be soaring over my head, but will try a tentative answer… I think music is a progressive and fluid expression of highly developed emotions. If you look hard enough, any barriers and genres within music can be transcended. From the Stooges and the MC5 on to Agent Orange (who can be linked to the Beach Boys!) on to Minor Threat, music constantly evolves and will continue to do so. It can be helpful to name-drop influences in a ’sounds like..’ way, but constraining and canonising along the lines of genre isn’t conducive to innovation and creativity, especially with different aspects of sub-culture. isolating them from one another as unassailable tablets brought from mount …ararat?.. will only cause stagnation in music.

Sometimes I think the ‘net’s helped me hear stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have and allowed bands to find larger audiences than they could have previously; sometimes I feel like it just means more hype and less being confronted by/stumbling upon things. What’s your opinion of how its changed fandom?

The internet has helped me find music, for sure. i used to be into those sites where you type in bands your into and gives you lists of bands it thinks are similar, and free tracks and things. Epitonic was one, i got into the whole Elephant Six Collective thing by typing into something I’m probably not into now. But it’s prompted me to go out and buy things, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Having said that, I’m sure it’s killed a bunch of music magazines and other mediums that we use to find bands and artists, but maybe thats sort of normal change. The defunct magazines might’ve set up internet blogs and set about interviewing people by email. Probably not though. I think the internet helps the lowly consumer, but fucks anyone trying to make money from an independent mag. So actually, it might be partly a bad thing. More hype? Probably. I dont know, I’m not sure I’m that affected by it. Extra hype’s probably mostly with famous-to-be up and coming bands that would kill eachother for hype and fame anyway, so they’d more or less find it with or without the internet. I think you have to go looking for hyped bands if you want to, don’t you? Read nme.com or something. or look at itunes’ recommended section. the internet makes it easier for people to be fans of more things. everyone likes fans.

The internet is the next generation of communication, so it has led to an easier exchange of ideas than was previously available. At the risk of continuing to sound like I am refusing point blank to get with the times or am old and jaded beyond my years, at least, I think this improved effieciency has come at a price. Back in the day (before my time, i can’t chat) people used to trade tapes and thus build up relationships, sustaining several diy communities. nowadays when i download music i don’t know who i’m getting it off unless the band has right-on diy ethics and i’m downloading straight from them, so i don’t know who to thank. Being a fan is easier now, for sure. its much more passive, you can leech (literally, torrent users) and not be active in contributing to the vast reservoirs of new music on the internet. As for hype, listen to hip hop by dead prez, allow hype

As far as i’m concerned, keeping it real is every bit as important today as ever it was. If not more so. Although it has been going on for  long time (elvis writing jingles for advertisers) nowadays commerce’s encroachment on the world of art is so hegemonic as to be mistaken for synergy in many cases. From my own perspective selling out is a real danger, as it means compromise. Others may not be of the same opinions as me, though. at the end of the day, it’s their music, they can do what they want.

As for Waits vs. Steve, fuck steve, he was hyped all along, yeah he jumped box cars etc. but then he SOLD OUT. Waits has kept it real, kept it undergroud since way back when. plus waits is a shite sight better than seasick steve. whereas steve sings form his own expreience, waits sings about others… more coherently than these others could manage. I believe that if you agree with the ideals and want to help an artist or label, then do what they ask of you, whether that is to spread the word about them, or buy their products (it shouldn’t be the latter). If not, steal!

I think it matters for sure. sometimes i hear about sell-out moves that bands i like have made and it makes me cringe a bit. The other day i read Rogue Wave described as part of ‘The O.C music crowd’ because they had a song on an episode. Sometimes its hard – a lot of bands i like i wouldnt have ever heard of if they hadnt made some kind of vaguely compromising career move at some point, but it’s acceptable in small doses. It’s when a band or artist allows it to be their main point of recognition, when it shapes their reputation and therefore the music they create.

If someone sets their sights on fame and gears their music towards a pop audience, forgetting their original ideas, they’ve lost it. I’ve got a half-problem with Stornoway at the moment because of their increasing radio time, press attention and critical acclaim. only because its seemed for some time that they’ve been actively seeking out much wider recognition (which they probably deserve). Trouble is, theres a line between working what you’ve got into a money-maker and “selling out” and its probably hard to know when that line comes. I’ve obviously got absolutely no standing for judging when a band has ‘gone too far’ with perusing media or pop attention so its probably not fair to say. BUT I am aware of when it happens. and I lose interest quite quickly. An artist’s intentions behind their art are often as important as the art itself.

Eugene: Hello hello, welcome to the maternity ward. Come in, come in. Now, you must be Samantha, eh? Yes, quite the little fox. ha ha! I bet you get that all the time, don’t you, a wee slip of a thing like you, eh? Well Samantha, pleased to meet you, I’m Dr Fergusen, but I expect that you already knew that didn’t you? If you didn’t, you bloody well should have; you’ve been waiting two hours to see me. Plenty of time to find out something simple like name. That’s the trouble with the youth today, no initiative. Well, you’re here now, may as well make yourself comfortable, put your foetus up! Ha ha! Don’t worry, just my little joke!

Now, what seems to be the problem? No no! Let me guess, I’m good at this. Right, let’s see… To start with, it hasn’t escaped my notice that you have a slight pot-belly, which immediately presents me with two possibilities: 1) that you are pregnant.

Samantha: Well, yeah…

Eugene: No, let me finish! Or 2) that, in an effort to look attractive, pointless as it may be, you have starved yourself to such an extent that you are turning into one of those ghastly little African things which, as far as I’m concerned, are neither comic nor a relief. However, given that on the whole you look comparatively healthy, if a little spotty, and given also that this is, after all, a maternity ward, I am inclined to discount the latter theory and have come to the conclusion that you are, as they say, with child. In a word, pregnant. Am I right?

Samantha: Yeah, genius, but…

Eugene: Oh, it was nothing, you needn’t look so amazed. Really, I’ve explained my reasoning, there was no other conclusion I could have reached. But now that we have got to the bottom of your predicament, we are faced with an either bigger question, namely: what are we going to do about it? Well, you have certainly come to right place.

Looking at you, and I am, I would say that you seem quite young, probably a bit stupid, definitely common, and – No! Don’t interrupt me. Remember that I am the Doctor whereas you are the silly little girl who got herself knocked up before she could even spell ‘condon’, let alone ‘prophylactic’. Where was I? Oh yes – and poor. In short, you’re in a bit of a coil, which is kind of ironic, I suppose. I therefore suspect that you want to have an abortion. Correct?

Samantha: No, I…

Eugene: Good! It’s for the best. Now, deciding to have an abortion is a big decision, and not one to be rushed into. So, if you can come to my home on Thursday, I’ll soon have the bastard out of you. I assume it is a bastard, or, rather, would be, were I not on the case. However…

Samantha: But…

Eugene: I said, However, if you can’t make Thursday, or perhaps think, as I do, that “if ‘twere to be done, then ‘twere well that ‘twere to done quickly”, then, for an extra tenner, cash, I’ll get to work now.

Samantha: No, you don’t understa…

Eugene: Of course, I was forgetting. You’re poor. Very well, I’ll waive the tenner. Now, on your back.

Samantha: No! I want to keep it.

Eugene: Just between ourselves? Of course, absolutely. Now, show us your snatch.

Samantha: No! I want to keep the baby!

Eugene: Keep it? What, in a jar? Actually, that’s quite a good idea. You could have it on a pendant or something, as a kind of contraceptive cum momento mori. Yes, I expect we could do that.

Samantha: I DON’T WANT AN ABORTION!

Eugene: Now don’t be silly, of course you do. You’re not old enough, clever enough, or rich enough to have a baby. Surely you don’t want to bring up a child to have the same kind of life that you’ve had, do you? Of course you don’t. After all, who could be so selfish? But perhaps you’re just scared. Well don’t be, it’s perfectly safe, even for triplets. It’s really very simple: first off, we take an itinery (you know: “two lips; indifferent red” et cetera), then we just part your beef curtains, so [part hands, Moses like], and insert a common kitchen whisk into your tuna canoe, do an Eskimo roll and mince the little blighter, or, as Jamie Oliver would say, ‘Blitz it!” Then we just suck it out through a straw; a Smoothie of the Innocent, as it were. See, nothing could be easier.

Any Questions? No? Good, that’s settled then. Now just lie back and think of England free from people like you.

by Jago

We’ll be talking about the slipperiness of ‘authenticity’, how much purchase the concept still seems to have in pop music and whether drama’s comparable – hence the cinematic griminess of the Ghostface track  and the combatively unvarnished P.J. Harvey song about wanting to X Robert De Niro. Harvey’s ping-pong Body Mass Index has fuelled speculation that she takes rock’s self-destructive credo a lil’ bit too seriously, but her film work (not to mention all those lyrics about live burial and manslaughter)  suggest she’s pretty good at pretending too. Tom Waits, meanwhile, has written a lot for the stage and is also a pretty decent actor – though it’s maybe kinder to sweep his role in Domino (wherein – seriously – he plays an itinerant preacher who appears out of a desert heat haze to parlay with Kiera Knightley’s mescaline-addled bounty hunter) under the carpet.

In terms of sheer screen presence neither Tom nor Polly can hold a candle, however, to Divine – whose life, work and (not insubstantial) body mass Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon have used to try and think through how ’selves’ come about. Certainly you may never be the same again once you’ve seen her/his rousing stab at You Think You’re a Man…

Spotify Playlist

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/cassettes/face-off/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/ripping-myself-out-of-a-mag http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/ripping-myself-out-of-a-mag#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:07:16 +0000 Alice http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=4438 ]]> made by Alice Feaver

Ink and gouache on paper,  205 x 260mm, January 2010

Dorothy Feaver

Tim Betjeman

Bottled. Hazardous. Handle with care.

Dorothy Feaver

Washed up: this dystopian landscape features great swathes of residue from ex art projects.

What happens next? . . .

Dorothy Feaver

Tim Betjeman

The future hangs in the balance: TALENT EVERYWHERE

Dorothy Feaver

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more post coming soon…