There’s a low hung dirty sky in London town and the Sisters have all gone to ground for a while.
Time to take a rest, check out the wider horizons and repair the edges of all things made ragged.
Miss Bird and me have been in the attic for months labouring over a hot computer trying to raise some roubles to finance the next Art of Nuisance season in Doyce Street. We’ve hustled and bribed and sold a few makings but so far stopped short of pitiless begging. If anyone knows a patron with anarchist bones please send them our way… bird@misspokeno.com.
In a London art climate that is deathly dull and the Sunday papers full of how young artists don’t experiment anymore and ‘whatever happened to the happening?’ comments from the ICA boys you’d think they would be rushing to help us develop our scene. But they make the applications and criteria for funding so pedantic and prescriptive it’s no wonder that all the wild ones give up before they have even begun. How the hell do you say what the outcome will be before you have done the work? For me the discovery is in the making and the thrill is because anything could happen. That is what makes exciting work. That is what creates new art movements.
So while we wait to see who will throw pennies our way to fund the Art of Nuisance 2016 I am leaving Miss Bird and Bingo Brown to run HQ and setting off on an expedition to the farthest reaches of the empire. I am going down down to the southern most part of New Zealand where the skies are huge and littered with stars and the sea rolls in from the Antarctic.
I will find a wide open space there and string up my washing line and peg up the 28 red rags and remind myself about the vast beauty and the wonder of this world. I cannot tell you why this must be done or what the outcome will be or what number audience will benefit from it or how many boxes will be ticked doing it. All I know is that I am drawn by the undertow of my own longing to be on that land again and as is the custom of that country I will not go empty handed. 28 red rags on a long washing line will be my offering. The colour of rage against a landscape that cannot be owned. Fuel for the fires. A constant resistance.
I cannot calculate the value or cost of such an act because I do not see the world that way. I do not know nor want to know how you quantify the magic innate in bringing people and objects and places together to create something new.
I hope as always .. in constructing something beautiful …to find the poetry and be overwhelmed and possibly even struck dumb… if only for a nano second. So who knows if I will report back. AnythIng could happen.
