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Recent texts and projects

April 27, 2008

A list of completed projects, published and unpublished texts updated whenever something feels ready to show. This post will always remain at the top, with the blog - for discussion, ideas and unfinished things - updated below.

Projects
Slash Fiction
at Gasworks and offsite March 2007. Residencies, commissioning and exhibition project, co-curated with Nav Haq.
Resident at Gasworks November 2007. Residency and commissioning of public project with Renata Lucas, co-curated with Anna Colin.
Disclosures at Gasworks and offsite March 2008. Residencies, commissioning, seminar and library project, co-organised with Anna Colin.

Reviews
Panic Attack! at the Barbican published issue 110 frieze October 2007
Fusion Now! at Rokeby published issue 113 frieze March 2008
Take Care of Yourself - Sophie Calle’s French Pavilion at Venice Biennial 2007. Text submitted for frieze Writers’ Prize 2007.

Texts
Seduced at the Barbican published issue 44 Untitled March 2008
Interview with Breda Beban to be published issue 45 Untitled May 2008
Interview About Disclosures to be published April 2008 on undo.net. Responded to with Anna Colin.

Awards
frieze Writers’ Prize 2007 for new and emerging art critics.

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Seduced at the Barbican - review

April 26, 2008

The viewer of Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Today is led chronologically through the most infamous periods of sexual depiction across various times and cultures, staying largely with the preoccupations of Western Europe but also delving into Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian and ancient Roman collections of works. The ground floor takes up the ‘historical’ perspective and the upstairs galleries hold contemporary and early modern works. The exhibition is accompanied by a curated season of events ranging from film screenings, burlesque nights, to flirting classes, serving to link the exhibition’s historical trajectory to our present day sexual consumption and habits. I visited on the night when the London club night Torture Garden was the guest event, and any pretence of an atmosphere of sober, historical reflection were whisked away entirely by gaggles of fetish clubbers and innumerable couples on dates.

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Take Care of Yourself - review

April 26, 2008

‘Take care of yourself, yeah?’ is probably the last, and least sincere instruction made by those on the point of concluding a successful romantic disentanglement. Intended to instate a more platonically-based relation, in fact this throwaway line more realistically functions as the final signifier that your rapidly-becoming-ex lover has had the audacity to absolve himself of any responsibility for your welfare. Most of us, in our impotent fury, reach for whatever crutch it takes (gin, large bags of crisps, promiscuity) to get over it. For Sophie Calle, however, the resultant confusion is the basis for a project.

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The Open Source Boob Project versus the Twistylution

April 26, 2008

Deep within the internet lies Livejournal, the nearest thing Web 2.0 will ever have to a subculture. It’s Web 2.0 for people who hate Web 2.0. On there, millions of internet socialisers take advantage of its status somewhere between a blogging and a social/community networking facility. Achieving LJ fame and drama is no mean feat, a process so renowned that it has its own (highly homophobic, racist and misogynist - ie frat culture) encyclopedia.

Recently the LJ-famous user known as theferrett posted a story and a proposal about Open Sourcing women’s breasts. For some time I had been noticing the diametrically opposite attitudes to property in the discourses of female bodily integrity, and FLOSS ideology. theferrett, who appears to suffer from what internet feminists call ‘nice guy syndrome’, managed to initiate the inevitable by proposing that those who were open to requests to touch their breasts, could in certain circumstances wear a badge marked ‘yes.’

By contrast, the blogging-famous radical feminist Twisty Faster (self identified as a gentleman farmer and spinster aunt eating lunch in Austin, Texas)  at I Blame The Patriarchy had only a year earlier proposed the inverse system for defining rape. In her proposal, the legal system will presume ‘no’ as a default answer to sexual requests to women, even during intercourse. Women alone are capable of offering the ‘yes’ which can be offered - or, controversially, revoked - at any time, even after the event.

It seemed firstly, a good idea to write a text comparing these argumentations (and I hope to do that properly). However, a friend told me about CommentPress lately and, being a long time habituee of internet forums, I became interested in the possibilities of texts and writings answering each other as a process - criticism becoming the fabric of the text itself rather than as a necessarily secondary response. I want to write a CommentPress essay, within the fabric of another’s essay, soon. But first I wondered what would happen if you just mash the ferrett and Twisty Faster together. Sometimes the texts swim apart, in their relevance to each other, because matching lines up is an accidental process - but sometimes their thematics merge, as if simply putting them together produces - via irony or via the false impression of conversation - a mutual criticality.

As the formatting is fiddly, below the jump I’ve posted this as an image rather than text. You’ll need to click to enlarge. As a matter of practicality and aesthetics, I have used edited versions of both texts - taking only the material in which the authors outline their arguments. They should be read completely, though, and even beyond that, the original texts have been much commented upon, discussed, disseminated, edited and appended to since, so even the expanded texts are by no means the authors’ final word (there is no final word on the internet). The original texts can be found:
She said I know what it’s like to be dead - Twisty Faster
The Open Source Boob Project - theferrett

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