n o t q u i t e s u c h a f a i l u r e

The last 2 weeks we’ve been working at Tempting Failure, a live art and noise art festival in London. The days were long but the performances were amazing. We saw someone water-board themselves, suspend themselves through piercings in their knees, consume paper with every mistake they’d ever written on it, pull their children’s baby teeth out of their vagina, perform the magic egg bag trick, dance with strangers, write Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’ in their own blood, move a tone of soil around a room, 24 hours of live vaginal lip syncing and a man playing snooker against himself. While there we also attended a talk on disability within the arts where Syliva Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ was brought up – suggesting that the disabled female body was a metaphor for language in the text. Another point of interest was during a magic-influenced performance involving an egg it was proposed that an egg was already a mysterious object, without the aid of any magic at all. One of our favourite performances was one involving the cooking of a soup, by Xavier de Sousa. While the soup was cooking, he began to elaborate on the cultural background of the soup and them himself and how the two things were intrinsically linked. Once the soup was finished cooking he invited members of the audience up to consume it with him – once sat at the table they had a fairly heavy conversation about belonging and the idea of home. Half way through this a curtain dropped down between the stage and the audience, creating a barrier between the two. It embodied the idea of isolation and exclusion felt by those who were involved in the discussion.

Even though we were fairly busy with Tempting Failure we did manage to take a look at the conceptual art show at Tate Britain. Even though the show had plenty of reading, it was short enough to allow for visitors to invest time in each work (if they chose to). Similarly to visiting Dia Beacon, it was very satisfying to see so many works by so many people we know and admire in the same space. Classics such as Michael Baldwin’s ‘mirror paintings’, Keith Arnett’s ‘Self-Burial’ and Michael Craig Martin’s ‘Oak Tree’. Margaret Harrison’s piece ‘Homeworkers’ featured handprints with palm reader-esque statements about equal rights, this brought about an idea to perhaps have a palm reader present in the gallery for one of our works. We thought that maybe we could write the prophecies and consequently are somewhat dictating the future.

Even though we’ve been living in Finsbury Park for nearly a year now we only just went to the gallery at the heart of it, Furtherfield. ‘Networking the Unseen’ was focused on the cross section of digital and indigenous cultures and how geography influences the two. The Phone Booth Project was something that stuck out to us; a multimedia installation that demonstrates the intricate relationship between community and technology and how this is uniquely affected by local circumstance and environmental factors. It positions itself in the idea that phone booths have all but died out in urban environments. Yet here, in the Western Desert region of rural Australia with the indigenous Martu communities, we see the vital role that they continue to play at the edges of the network - where cell phone reception is often non-existent, and landline phone connections in every house are an infrastructure expense that neither the locals nor the government is willing or able to carry.

We’ve also had a couple of exhibitions recently the first being ‘I Exist' held at The Old Red Bus Station in Leeds where we exhibited ‘The Key to Success’ (seen >here<). The other was titled 'So what is it that you do again?' which was at SLAM in Kings Cross, here we exhibited ‘Where Are They Now?’.

Finally watched Foxcatcher last night, which was of course brutal and intense. There’s a beautiful line where John du Pont is talking to Dave Schultz and he calls the lack of support for athletes ‘the canary in the coal mine,’ which causes him to jump to a discussion of his love of ornithology, then back to how he wants to help America ‘soar again.’ It was a lovely verbal daisy chain of metaphors.