Frog's Blog

The Mummer Returns

2009-03-24T15:20:00.005Z

On Saturday I will be taking part in a show called The Role of the Village Idiot, An afternoon of public art/street performance on Peckham Square Saturday 28th March 2 til 6pm. It's curated by Mark McGowan and he explains it like this :

"The theme of the afternoon is performance and the role of the village idiot. Obviously we have the holy fools, shakespears court jester, the dada art movement, but the village idiot is something else he/she is something other, something familiar, somebody we all know and recognise in our local communities. Here we will attempt to investigate, the role of the village idiot, the question of a necessary expulsion, the emotion of shame and how that relates to modern day life, street theatre and public art. Mainly using gesture and small props the artists will attempt to engage with the everyday happenings in peckham square. There will be a reception in the Bunhouse Pub opposite Peckham square in the evening."

I plan to stage a version of a traditional Mummers play, a traditional form of village pantomime often performed by Morris Dancers. Mummers groups would travel around their parish at holiday times performing short plays in pubs or manor houses in return for money and ale. The plays were spoken in rhyme, perfomers would often getting quicker as they became more familiar with the material but also more drunk and incoherent. As Mumming fell out of fashion and the old boys died off the remaining members of the group would often have to play multiple roles during the play. I will be performing as the last Mummer, attempting to play all the roles in the play myself.

ALTERMODERN

2009-02-18T21:17:00.003Z

A review of the Tate Triennial Exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud

It is widely accepted that post modernism has done it’s job of critiquing modernism. So where does that leave us? In the post-post-modern era? No academic has been brave enough to stand up and use such a silly turn of phrase.

French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has decided to try and answer the question about exactly where art is now in Britain. He decided not use the silly term post-post-modernism. Instead he has come up with his own silly term Altermodernism. Forgive the man, anyone who has read his books will know English is not his first language.

The critique of post modernism was all about disbanding the grand isms projects. It laid the way for a more pluralist go-your-own-way approach. Trying to create any thread through the whole thing is counter intuitive. The critics have been quick to point out this flaw in Bourriaud’s plan.

However don’t let them throw the baby out with the bath water. This is still a good show featuring the best artist in the country and it is trying to explain to the general public what is going on the artworld today.

Most people in Briatin still associates the contemporary art scene with the YBAs. It is 12 years since the Sensation exhibition that made their name but the satirical cartoons about them still run every fortnight in Private Eye magazine. Damien Hirst is an old hack now.

If you go into Goldsmiths College today you will not find YBAs there anymore, you will find students from across the world. Asians and American artist will far out number the British students. The art world is an international place with artists jes-setting across the globe from biennale to biennale. This is why Franz Ackerman’s abstract painting installations look like they are inspired by an airport coffee lounge.

Chinese Art is the big thing at the moment and most Chinese artists are too familiar with the idea of working in exile from their home country. This exhibition tries to make British artist look like trendy exiles from the home country. The rye cynicism in Bob and Roberta Smith’s billboards is perfectly pitched. His descriptions of his conversations with international art curator Bourriaud reads like the kind of postcards your Dad might send from a fashionable holiday resort that is a bit too hot for him. Marcus Coates’ video of his attempt to resolve the Middle East crisis with a badger on his head is also an equally astute. You can also study Charles Avery’s maps and drawings from lands he has travelled to in his imagination without the need for him to leave Scotland. Walhead Beshty’s ‘Fedex’ are series of glass boxes that are sent by Fedex delivery from show to show and exhibited as they arrive, full of cracks and damage. It is like is a work by Donald Judd that has been lost in the post for 40 years.

Other highlights of the show include the absurd self-mythologizing documentary by the wonderful Lindsay Seer, a girl who wanted to be a camera. Hey, welcome to the twenty-first century where you can be whatever you want to be.

Spartacus Chatwynn’s video wall is also typically self-depreciating. Her theme is carnival and festival which means sanctioned chaos and allowing things to go wrong for a little while. In other countries this means Mardi Gras and gratuitous sex with strangers, but in England it means playing old Sex Pistols records on the BBC Radio 2.

The finale of the show is an ‘GiantBum’ by Nathanial Mellors. The installation leads you through series of videos featuring three thespians performing a play about a clergyman stuck in a giant bum hole (what could be more British?). You are then lead through to a room containing the amazing animatronic heads that you have probably seen in the Guardian Newspaper colour supplements. Though the animatronic heads cannot fail to impress, but the real pay off for the clever people is the psychoanalysis and philosophical thought (and good old fashioned clever swearing) delivered by the thespians in the videos.

Though it is easy to paint Bouriaud as the curatorial equivalent of Inspector Clouseau, I would like to suggest that he is perhaps a more Jacque Tatti figure. This show is shot through with a sense of British wit, irony and self-deprecation. Our international jetsetting had made us aware we certainly ain’t super cool international freedom fighting artists. As Bob Smiths states ‘I wish I had voted for Barack Obama’.

New Website...

2009-02-03T11:55:00.002Z

Once again this blog has become woefully out of date. I don’t think I am ever really going to get around to filling in the missing entries.

However I have updated my website which now has loads of documentation from some of thing I have been up to in the intervening months, including the Montague and Campbell and Morris Projects :

www.frogmorris.net

Here are an extra videos that isn’t on the new site because it is on YouTube...

Heath Ledger Performance Art Comedy Suicide

2008-08-06T13:49:00.003+01:00

While I’m on a roll with blog writing I thought I might fill in some of the missing entries from earlier in the year. This is a video from January in the Montague Arms. It was a piece inspired by Heath Ledger, who is about the same age as me. His tragic death had been the big news that week.

It could have been a humorous routine if it were not for the terribly misjudged choice of subject matter.

The video also features an appearance by Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and Agent Calleigh Duquesne (Emily Procter) from CSI Miami.

SEX!

2008-07-28T09:50:00.004+01:00

Back before the wedding and Whistable Biennal we hosted a Chap themed Evening at the Montague Arm featuring the return of Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer. ‘Gentleman’s Night’ seemed a bit misogynistic so I was going to call it ‘Ladies and Chaps Night’. Martin at the pub had kindly offered prizes for the best dressed ladies and chaps. However, all the ladies I invited wanted to dress like chaps, not ladies.

I only curated half the live programme for Whitstable Biennale. Emma Leach curated the other half during the weekend I was busy getting married. Emma’s weekend presented a series of intimate and delicate and feminine performance artists. My weekend was more noisy and blokey (in Dave TV or Radio 6 sense of bloke entertainment, not the Nuts Magazine sense).

All this got me thinking about the old performance art stalwart of gender politics.

As Cherie Blair has shown over the last few months, the way to success as a female is not by becoming a respected member of the court, but instead by courting the gutter press. Cherie Blair is not a good role model for women.
The Spice Girls can now only be found in the bargain basket at Woolworths - girl power was too cheap and it didn’t work properly. Burning bras were replaced with wonder bras. However, all those sexy girls wondering the streets has led to a concerning increase in the number of reported rapes and the decrease in the number of successful prosecution. Wonder bras too easily confuse men. Forget Girl Power. We need some Lady Power. The lady is feminine and demands respect.

On the 10th of July in the Montague Arms I decided to host a Ladies Night, but there were no strippers. I wanted ladies whose performances are feminine and demand respect. Gentlemen were welcome.

The night featured Caroline De Lannoy, Holly Darton & Jenny Hunt, Lucy Panesar, Emma Leach and Jo Stephenson.

Whitstable Biennale

2008-07-21T17:53:00.008+01:00

This is a lovely photo of me getting married.

Whitstable Biennale was the week after my wedding. I had been told by Victoria (now Mrs Frog) that I should not arrange any stupid art antic that week. Then Sue Jones phoned and offered me the chance to program some events for the Biennale. I said no. I told Victoria. Victoria said I was an idiot as it was the best show I had ever been offered and I was to phone them back and say that I am going to do it.

I’m not going to write about the wedding on here in case anybody gets confused and thinks my marriage is a performance art piece. It wasn’t. It was a real wedding.

Whitstable went very well. Lee Campbell (who I programmed) got loads of press and even got on Midweek on Radio 4 with Libby Purvis. Lee did a recreation of the opening titles of THE RISE AND FALL OF REGINAL PERRIN.

Click here to hear Lee Campbell on Radio 4

LEE CAMPBELL on BBC News South East June 20 2008

Below is an interview I did for one of the Kent newspapers about Whitstable Biennale. It is probably in an editor’s waste paper basket somewhere in Canterbury. It is a nice summary of Whitstable Biennale.

Tell us about yourself:

My name is Frog Morris. I am an artist, poet, performer and curator of a weekend of live performances at Whitstable Biennale on 28th and 29th of June.

What were the highlights of the Biennale for you this year?

Last year I went to Venice Biennale, it was enormous, and I had to walk past so much boring art to find the good bits. At this year’s Whitstable Biennale everything I saw was a highlight in one way or another. Everything was good, from the big commissioned work by established artists, such as Ryan Gander’s animation, though to all the crazy satellite projects people organised themselves, such as Knitstable. I was really proud to be a part of it.

Kim Noble's performance was one of my favourite moments. Kim rode up Whitstable beach on a jet ski dressed in an amphibian costume and then waded up to an unsuspecting family and presented them with a brand new electric toaster.

I also enjoyed meeting The Man From Above. He set up a scaffolding tower on the beach and explained to passers by that they should embrace climate change and prepare platforms to live on above the rising sea levels. He also offered advice on buying wetsuits and eating more fish.

Other memorable moments included Das Schimmel attempting invade Whitstable Castle and also Charlotte Young’s Guided Tour which took in some usual points of interest around the town. And, of course, I couldn’t believe how many people turned up and joined in for Lee Campbell’s re-enactment of the opening titles from Reginald Perrin.

On Saturday Night we had a Cabaret in the Smack Inn with body beat boxing by Leigh Clarke, music by Victor Mount and spiritual healing with Princess Penang. We also had a drag act to compare, Brian Dawn Chalkley. She was a little nervous when she arrived because as she didn’t see many other people who looked like they might enjoy cross-dressing, but she was made to feel most welcome. It was very touching.

We rounded the weekend off with a special pub quiz night with no right or wrong answers on Sunday evening. We finished with a bit of an old fashioned sing-along with musician Daren Callow. We taught everyone a song about an Angry Badger.

Not many similarly sized towns have such a vibrant arts scene. What is special about Whitstable?

Whitstable is such a lovely town with a wonderful seafront and there is so much nice food and fine ale. It is not hard to convince artists to spend time there.

What do contemporary arts have to offer people?

Artist Kim Noble offered people electric toasters.

It seemed like such a useful gift but not everyone seemed to understand.

Sometimes people are a little confused when they first see a work of art. If the artwork is good it will stimulate people’s brains in one way or another, even if it is to articulate their dislikes. Many people who spoke to The Man From Above were initially bemused by his plan to flood Whitstable but he was also asking people important question about how they are going to deal with climate change.

How important do you think events like the Biennale are to Whitstable, and to society as a whole?

Nobody really gets rich from projects like Whitstable Biennale, there must be some other reason all these people want to do it and to get involved. I am glad that people are being supported in doing something they obviously want to do. I am glad that festivals can happen without charging £150 a ticket and getting sponsored by some awful tasting lager.

What are your plans for the future?

I run a regular night in a pub in London called the Montague Arms (it’s just by the turn off for the A2 in New Cross). We do a contemporary variety show on the second Thursday of every month with music, comedy and performance art. This week we are doing a Ladies Night, but not with naughty strippers. There will be performance by some respectable young lady artists. It includes a performance by Emma Leach who curate the other half of the live programme at Whitstable. Gentlemen are welcome.

Tell us something about you not many people know

I first started performing and organising art events because of a silly art student joke made during a lecture at KIAD in Canterbury in 2001. It’s funny how one thing leads to another.

Weblog Blacklog

2008-05-14T13:00:00.021+01:00

Here is some of the missing posts from February, March, April and May...

SECOND THURSDAYS – May 8th 2008
This month we had Sheer Zed who presented a mixture of songs, poems and sketches. He finished with a re-enactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho using fresh fruit which I greatly appreciated. We also had Wayne Myers who played the guitar. Wayne is a busker as well as running his own online comic you can read at www.conniptions.org

Another memorable moment was Duncan Ward’s strange performance art piece. Medieval songs and ceremonies influence Duncan’s work and this performance was inspired by the medieval artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. Duncan’s performances usually appear faithfully earnest and the whole pub fell respectfully silent as Duncan performed (see left). It was an unusual moment, but it is unusual moment like this that make these nights special.

There is a nice review of the night on Sheer Zed's blog

Next month we are taking it back to the Good Old Days with an Old Chap special featuring the return of Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer.

PLAY ON WORDS – April 16th 2008
This was another Lee Campbell show. It was in the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich so I used the opportunity to head back to my family home in Norfolk for a few days. I did a new series of landscape drawings while I was there (see left), but unfortunately the scheduling at the Sainsbury’s centre went a bit awry so I didn’t get to show them. Maybe next time I am invited to show in Norfolk…

SECOND THURSDAYS – April 10th 2008
This month we had some cow boy clowns who were excellent. We also had Paul from London Met and his band Dirty Minimal. Uncle Jeep also returned with his guitar and a selection of hats.

Mark Quinn couldn’t make it for this show as he got his shifts mixed up at work so he sent he friend Stewart in a mask (see right) as a replacement. Stewart then relayed Mark’s comedy routine via mobile phone from Mark’s work. All went well until Mark was called to security search a customer’s bag during a joke about a peanut.

As part of the Second Thursday’s agenda to mix artists in with musicians and comedians, we ran our own artists residency program this month. Sam Curtis had previously run self initiated residencies in IKEA and Harrod’s Fish counter. This month I asked Sam to be artist in residence in the pub. We met on several occasions in during the month in the bar and talked about art and Sam’s ideas.

Sam’s first idea was to work behind the bar making art by pulling pints and collecting empties, but the bar staff said they didn’t need any help (see Martin collecting Jeep's empties, left) and suggested some other places he could earn money. When Sam said he would work for free the bar staff became suspicious of intentions to get into the secure areas behind the bar.

As a result Sam and myself discussed at length the cross-over between art and life. Sam’s art practice and art performances had become almost indistinguishable from everyday activities and mundane day jobs. This was clearly intended as a conceptual statement questioning what art and the role of the artist actually is. Ever since Duchamp turned a urinal on it’s side and called it art 90 years ago people have been asking ‘is it art?’ Sam’s questioning is even more relevant now as artist are increasingly employed in community art projects where you aren’t sure if the artist is supposed to be making art or doing some kind of social work. I suggested to Sam that something was needed to distinguish an activity as art; the really easy way to do this is to frame it in art gallery. Outside of the art gallery some other gesture is required to denote the significance of some thing, other wises it will be passed by unnoticed and just disappear. It needed to be unusual. It needed to be remarkable. Sam organised a motorcycle stunt outside the pub.

Sam also gave me some thoughts on Second Thursdays. He said he felt the illustrated posters I made were quite essential to the whole thing. As a bit of a change, this month instead of performing I made a book of illustration and stories and gave it out to people on the door (see below).

30 DAYS OF 30 PERFORMANCES – Saturday 29th March
This run of shows in the Sun and Doves in Camberwell curated by Mark McGowan and Guy Hilton was quite fascinating. Mark McGowan’s taste in performance can be quite provactive. The opening night saw a performance by Paulo Pevreira who had previously performed as Princess Diana in Mark McGowan’s re-enactment conception of Prince William. Paulo proceeded to take his clothes off and stick his finger up his bum and then pour treacle and feather over himself. Mark and Guy had programmed different performance artists for each day for 30 day. The result of this is that not even the most devoted performance art lovers were realistically going to get to all 30 performances. By the end of the first week when Sally Bangs performed, she was dancing naked watched only by local pub regulars and office workers going for after work drinks. However attempts by performances artist to shock the audience into paying attention continued to escalate. On the final night I had to hide under the table as a group of drunken semi-naked art students smeared in Swafega were smashing up the pub and police had to be called to stop it.

I was scheduled half way through the run and had a Saturday afternoon slot and knew I would be entertaining Saturday afternoon football watchers and family lunches for six hours. We ran the Unwrong Quiz for the afternoon and I invited Daren Callow, Mark Quinn, Theo Morris and Thom Cutler down to help me fill the time. However I didn’t want to feel out done by the other more extreme performances so for my grand finale I brought blindfold, handcuff, lighter fluid, cigarettes, vodka and set of kitchen knives (see right).

There is a nice review on Daren Callow's blog.

ELEVATOR GALLERY – March 14th
This was a group show at Elevator Gallery I was asked to perform at following my appearance at Suburbia. On the down side, I got my iPod nicked. On the upside, one of the other artists brought a lifesize wooden Darlek and I got to achieve a lifetime ambition of being exterminated. I also tried to rig a David C West’s dogfight by feeding one of the dogs cans of Stella to make it fight more.

SECOND THURSDAYS – March 13th 2008
This night had the smallest audience but some of the best performances so far. Perhaps it was the intimacy that helped the performers. Das Schimmelhood of thy Worthy Das Schimmel Das Schimmel Das Schimmel Das Schimmelites had certainly become a more established and powerful group since their appearance at Frogstock last summer. They staged a full religious ceremony in honour of thy lord Das Schimmel and had the pub singing hymns to his Das Schimmelness.

Lee Campbell also did a retrospective of some of his performance work. I have only started working with Lee recently and he certainly seems to be on his way up the art world food chain. His performances pieces consist of misinterpreted catch phrases and half remembered hook lines from TV theme tunes and pop songs. He takes that popular vain of performance art inspired by Samuel Beckett and he confuses all that nihilistic philosophising about repeating acts again and again with a much more contemporary passion for hearing mobile phone ring tones again and again.

SUBURBIA – March 1st
This was group show organised by Lee Campbell in the foreign press association. Here is the video.

SECOND THURSDAYS – February 14th Valentines Day
This month we had an excellent performance on the Accordion by Martin White. Uncle Jeep also came down and was as unstoppable as always. We took some photos of Jeep and one is going to go on his next CD ‘Country Ways’ (see below). Daniel and Davina also came and wrote Valentines Cards to people in the pub (see left). This was a really great piece of work as it was the first time we had got performers working in the bar area rather the usual stage based stuff. I want to get more of this kind of thing happening.

Cold winter nights

2008-01-02T16:35:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

I had been resisting the urge to reflect too much on 2007 due to a terrible fear that I might realise that 2 years at Goldsmiths has merely brought me to a new level of wretchedness as an artist. My 28th birthday also looms this month and I realise that by 29 many artists had done their best work drowned in their own vomit. I have not worked much since September and now my overdraft is at it's limit and I fear that if things do not improve soon I will not be able to afford sufficient food to vomit up and choke on.

The nights in the Montague Arms have been going well and we will be continuing on the second Thursday of each month in 2008. We start next week with Mark McGowan. Mark recently staged a re-enactment of the appalling Abu Ghrahib human pyramid with six naked teenage girls in Stockholm. Click here to see Mark's video...

ANTI-FRIEZE
An audio work I made last year entitled "Anti-Frieze" has been shortlisted by London International Creative Competition in the Audio/Music category (maybe nobody else submitted anything in that category?):
http://licc.us/artists/Winners2008Index.html

"Anti-Frieze" is also features in an online exhibition of sound works on The Daily Constitutional website :
http://www.dailyconstitutional.org/soundcast.html

You can listen online or download on both these sites. Enjoy!

2007-12-24T14:49:00.000Z

The Blo' Boys and Opposite the Hotel have got together in the Blo' Norton village pub and recorded a few of their favorite Christmas songs for a special Christmas radio show.
The show features Frog Morris, Theo Morris, Tom Cutler and Jim Parker.

Click here to download an .mp3 for your iPod

Click here to listen online.

RUNNING ORDER :
Little Drummer Boy - Theo Morris
Christmas Bird - Frog Morris
Deer Attack - The Blo' Boys with Tom Cutler
Nationalist Song - Opposite the Hotel
Priest - Opposite the Hotel
Bird Flu Song - Theo Morris
Little Donkey - Frog Morris
Parker pokes Theo in the head with a carving fork.
Merry Badger - The Blo' Boys
.mp3 35mins

SECOND THURSDAYS

2007-11-22T10:48:00.000Z

Here is some video from the first of the new monthly night I am now running in the Montague Arms in New Cross.

This is a video featuring Daren Callow, Fred Lindberg, Victor Mount and myself.

This is a video of Fred

This is a video of me doing some new sketches.

The first night seemed to go very well even though I had a few last minute problems. Charlie Tweed canceled because he had got the dates mixed up for the next Alma Enterprises private view and we realized they were doing performances the same night, would I compete? Did I want to compete with Alma? I had also planned that The Fucks would headline but George Fuck decided he didn’t want to do it any more 2 days before the show and after I had already put about 400 flyers out with their name on. This also made me panic a little. However Daren Callow stepped forward and said he would play an extra twenty minutes and Fred Lindberg from Deviant Art turned up and charmed the audience with some song from The Peace. Victor Mount also put in an excellent performance and in blaze of rock n roll euphoria fell off his guitar amp at the end of the set.
I wasn’t sure how the event would be received as most of the acts usually perform in art galleries and I wasn’t sure how the pub would react to them. There were a couple of moment when I was up on stage reading poems and waving about some fruit and vegetables when I could see the venue managers at the bar at the back and I wasn’t sure what on they were thinking. But it turned out they loved it. They asked if I could do more nights and said to get even weirder acts. They said that New Cross was now full of music venues and the promoters all do the same thing (there was an article in Metro the same day about New Cross becoming New Camden), they want something that is a bit different.
It all worked out nicely in the end.
For the next show I have booked Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer to perform some hip hop in the Queens English and we also have Princess Penang who will be bringing inner contentment to the audience with some marshmallows, acoustic rock, trampolines,and a plastic penis. I also booked my brother Theo’s band Opposite the Hotel to do some of their prog / indy rock, however their bassist Johnny Steele had a bit of a funny turn at a gig last week and has done a runner. However Theo had promised to come on his own and do some songs on his own whatever, it might work out for the best, as I didn’t want to lug their kit down from Norfolk anyway. My advice to young musicians is don’t form a band.
After Christmas Mark McGowan has promised he will perform a piece called Sex with Ghosts which involves ectoplasm.

POST GOLDSMITHS POST

2007-11-13T11:30:00.000Z

This is my diary of the summer and what I have been up to since the Goldsmith final show.

Frieze Art Fair
This self-portrait was exhibted in the Resonance FM stall at Frieze Art Fair. The drawing was up for sale in a blind bidding auction to raise money for Resonance FM (so it's not like I am really selling out). You could also bid on a private performance in your front room. The auction is organized by Bob & Roberta Smith and also included work by Victor Mount, Leigh Clarke, Harry Pye, The Apathy Band, The Fucks and many others. Over £10,000 was raised for Resonance FM. I have no idea who brought my work. Is this in your living room?

The Blo’ Boys

Following their usual under rehearsed return to the stage at Frogstock the Blo’ Boys were invited to play at Studio 3 in Bury St. Edmunds by Bald Monkey Promotion. As usual we faced an unexpected change of line up 2 days before the gig but we didn’t let this stop us. The change of line-up resulted in a much darker and more disturbing sound. I think the Saturday night regulars who had dropped in for a few alcopops on the way to the Bruzilyuhs nightclub down the street were not expecting that amount of poetry and guitar distortion. Most of the audience left, but the few people who did stay will remember it for a long time. It was one of our better gigs.

Frogstock Festival

Once again hundreds of people descended on our family farm in Blo’ Norton for the Frogstock. The event was even bigger than ever and for the most part everything went very well, apart from a little trouble at the end of the evening. However it is probably the last Frogstock for the time being. Next summer I will be busy getting married. However I now have a set up a new Frogstock spin-off project in the Montague Arms in New Cross, London, where we will he having some of the stars of Frogstock perform on the SECOND THURSDAY of every month.
There are some more photos of Frogstock on facebook...

Vegetable Poetry

In September I was invited by Alex Lockett and Aspex Gallery to do a performance in an allotment in Portsmouth. For this show I wrote poems and drew pictures onto vegetables, I liked the idea of being throwing all the art on a compost heap at the end of the show.

The Quest for Wisdom

In July I was invited to back to the [deviant] Art Festival in Sweden (see July 2006 entry). We decided to travel via Venice Biennale so the [deviant] Arts Festival some of the other artist who had set up installation had been in Trollhatten for a couple of weeks by the time we arrived. The weather in Sweden was not as nice as Venice.
When I arrived I met my friend Charlie Tweed. In Sweden you get two types of beer. The supermarkets can only sell booze under 3.5% Alcohol know as ‘People’s Beer’. The other option is to make a trip to one of the special Off Licences and stock up on lots of extra strong larger and cider. When I arrived in Sweden, Charlie was drinking the strong stuff. He said his tent was full of cold rain water and the only way people were getting any sleep was to get drunk enough booze to pass out for a few hours. By the day of my show at the end of the two week festival most of the people had had enough and gone home if they could. However, I did manage to get the remaining few soggy tired hungover artists to write some poems about Norse Myths in my Poetry workshop and then read their works out at a Poetry Evening I hosted with Swedish poet Johan Lindeblom.

I did some research on Trollhatten using Wikipedia and discovered that the famous Trollhatten waterfall is claimed to be the mythical fountain of knowledge where Odin the Norse God drank and gained his great wisdom. I decided to give it a try myself. Afterward the Swedes said that they all pissed in it.

LISTEN AGAIN to the Goldsmiths MFA show 2007

2007-07-30T11:35:00.001+01:00

I have now recovered from the Goldsmiths final show. All the free booze has been drunk and the knives and the chainsaw have been packed away. I still can’t get the blood stains out of that suit.

I decided it was an appropriate time to move on.

I set out on a great journey in search of wisdom which took my across Europe. I have now returned and I will be typing up a journal of my adventures on this blog very soon.

In the meantime I have uploaded the radio show that went out as part of the Goldsmiths show for you to download and listen again. The program is compilation of audio works by graduating students on the Masters of Fine Art program at Goldsmiths College. The show opens with a radio drama called “A Play About” by Sarah Santos who helped me to produce the show. There is chance to hear my post-apocalyptic sci-fi audio drama “Anti-Frieze”. Ron Lapid contributed a recording of a telephone conversation in which he tries to make friends with a lady from a call centre in India. Alex Staiger contributed a recording of an art school tutorial which has been remixed by musician Darren Callow. Maryilyn Michele Kunkle contributed a story about herding cows. DiDi Lin has been asking people to tell her their most embarrassing stories and has re-recording them using actors so we can all hear them. The show also features a selections of live recording from an event I organised called Frogstock Festival in a Art Gallery with Victor Mount, Leigh Clarke, Martin White and The Man from The Woods. There is also plenty of other great stuff. The show was hosted by artist Robin Kirsten.

Click here to listen again to the Goldsmiths MFA Radio show…
Running time 1 hour
.MP3

Official Goldsmiths MFA 2007 Website :
http://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-arts/exhibitions/mfa2007/

The end is nigh

2007-07-05T21:55:00.000+01:00

The last few weeks have been a little intense. My art work for the Goldsmiths College Masters of Fine Art final examinations has to be ready for Monday.

There are a lot of students finishing this year. There are a lot of students with a lot of artwork to fit into the studio for the final show. Space is at a premium. I ended up with a lecture theatre rather than a studio space. Though it wasn’t what I had expected and I had to make a few last minute changes to my plan, I think it will work much better for me.

I have made the space into my own theatre. The only question is, what will I do in it?

It’s my final show so I decided to pull out all the stops and go for a big blow out grand finale spectacular that people won’t foget.

Yesterday I saw the health and safety inspector. The knives, the chainsaw and the booze are ok, but I am not allowed to block any fire exits.

I have been reading too much Harold Pinter

2007-05-31T12:41:00.000+01:00

I decided to change the publicity shot on my home page, the photo of me in my pants had caused a noted drop in visitors.

I am going to try and keep this blog more up to date in the run up to the final show. It started out as a diary of my live shows, but I haven’t actually performed very much over the last few months. I have mostly been studying.

Recently I have been trying to write an essay on ‘The Jokes of Harold Pinter’… they aren’t very funny.

I have been concerned by the ominous turn on my recent artistic output. This has included: An attempt to deal with apathy towards the post 9/11 nuclear threat with some jokes about doing the washing up; A song about depression, suicide and riding donkeys; and most recently a bleak post apocalyptic drama set in my local Tescos.

My work just isn’t that funny anymore. Does that mean the last two years at Goldsmiths has made me worse? Has it only made me a more miserable and wretched artist? Where does that leave me?

I decided last week to try and write some new jokes in an attempt to liven things up. But they weren’t very funny. I noted from watching television that even when jokes are not funny, you can make people think that they are If you dub on some sound effects of a laughing audience. I have been considering taking my own pre-recorded laughter to gig so I can play it even if the jokes are not that funny. Maybe this isn’t standard practice on the stand-up comedy circuit but I thought it might be worth a try.

The final countdown...

2007-05-30T10:38:00.000+01:00

It is getting near to the final Goldsmiths final shows. Pressure and anxiety is building here. In six weeks time old swimming baths on Laurie Grove Road, which are home to the Goldsmith College Post Graduate Fine Art Studios, will be turned into a grand exhibition. It will be the biggest show of my career so far, not only will it decided the final grade for my Postgraduate Studies, but it will also be visited by the important and influential people of the London Art world who will probably decided the rest of my career…

…And I don’t have any fucking idea what I am going to show them.

I needed to come up with something shocking and sensational to get peoples attention… so I have made this publicity shot...

The problem is that there is little left that can really shock art audiences. Only the other day I was watching a colleague from art college defecate into a glass jar. It was uncomfortable at the time, but it has all been seen and all been done before.

Nudity in art is expected. Not being naked was the most shocking thing I could do. This is a picture of me keeping my pants on in an art gallery.

Nobody really want to see my dangly bits, but that also admits to a conservatism and repression. Is conservatism and repression bad? That is a very difficult question.

I suppose a photo of a man in socks and pants should have been funnier, but it wasn’t. I’d accidentally had one too many in the Dog and Bell the night before and wasn’t feeling very cheerful the morning of the photo shoot. The piece is supposed to be about discomfort anyway.

I don’t know if not being funny is good thing.

FROGSTOCK IN THE CITY - THE MOVIE

2007-05-06T18:58:00.002+01:00

Here are some edited video highlights from Frogstock at Alma Enterprises Art Gallery. We have some great clips of The Man From the Woods, Victor Mount, Martin White, The Fucks, The Blo' Boys and Opposite The Hotel.
Unfortunately I had to change tapes during Leigh Clarke's body beat boxing set so there is no footage of this but I am hoping somebody else might have some I can edit in. The recording of Jeep's naked performance also had some problems due to being recorded on a dodgy cheap tape from Bethnal Green Market, but after some pain staking restoration work you can now see his magnificent piece of footage...

We have some more great recording we made at the event, including some audio tracks which might be available soon...

Bury St. Edmunds Fringe Festival 28/4/07

2007-04-24T00:12:00.000+01:00

Frogstock in the City was a big success. It was an honor to be part of the program of performances at Alma Enterprises - Brian Catling, Kim Noble and Haley Newman also did events.
Frogstock looked good. We built a stage in Gallery and hung lots of signs and banners we have made for the original event in Blo' Norton. The performer were also brilliant. Jeep stole the show a bit my taking his clothes off. Gonna fill in some more detail and pic and video later.
This Saturday 28th April I am back in East Anglia for my brother Theo's event for Bury St. Edmunds Fringe Festival. I have been busy writing some new material and there will also be a solo set from Theo withs some stuff from his album '29 Assorted Songs' plus some more of Jeep and other assorted music, comedy and performance art. There is an Open Mic for anyone who wants to do something (drop us a line if you want to book a slot). It is the same weekend as the Bury St Edmunds Beer Festival so we will be warming up with a few ales on Friday night.

I will also be back on Bob & Roberta Smith's show on Resonance on Tuesday 8th May with Martin White.

frogmorris.net not working? try FROGMORRIS.COM

2007-03-31T22:18:00.001+01:00

Due to some technical problems the domain name frogmorris.net will be out of order for a few days. I have moved my website to www.frogmorris.com until the problem can be fixed!

My e-mail address frogmorris@frogmorris.net also has problems. If you need to contact me please e-mail me at frogmorris@frogmorris.cominstead.

I am working to resolve the problems as soon as I can. If you have ever had to call the telephone support of a big telecommunications company, you will know these things can be can take painfully frustrating amount of time to get resolved

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Don't forget Frogstock at Alama Enterprises this Friday!

Apart from the fuck up of my website, plans for Frogstock in Alma Enterprises are going well. Alma is a little art gallery on the end of Vyner Street in the fashionable East End of London and we plan to ram as much of Frogstock into it as possible. It is not often you get offered a show in the fashionable East End of London so I thought I might as well make the most of it.

I have invited a few friends, Victor Mount, Leigh Clarke, Jeep, Shit TV, Martin White, Opposite the Hotel and The Man from The Woods. Some of these acts are artist, some them are comedians and some of them are musicians, some of them have been called all of these things and some of them don’t care what you call them. They just want to do their thing so come along and watch.

We have the Ditchlicker sound system and a cask of real ale so it is going to be good.

FROG MORRIS GOES INTO HIDING!

2007-01-15T15:32:00.000Z

No more live shows for a while.

I am going to be hiding in Gary Steven’s new exhibition :

Gary Stevens
Wake Up and Hide
24January–18 March 2007
Open Wednesday–Sunday 12–6pm during exhibitions
Matt’s Gallery 42–44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR
www.mattsgallery.org

See if you can find me...

New Years Revolution

2007-01-02T14:01:00.000Z

I had a crazy run up to Christmas.

Chelsea Arts Club is was a funny place. It was full of old men in suits with cigars and whiskey noses who did not want to be moved from the chair that had been sat in for the last 50 years and they didn’t think much of the art and all the noise. Fortunately a few collectors who did think something of the art turned up and spent a lot of money. It certainly wasn’t the audience of hippies and students I usually perform to and my poem about pig semen did not go down too well. But perhaps my favourite moment of the evening was watching the faces of the Collectors and Arts Clubs members during Victor Mount’s finally guitar solo.

The Art Auction raised a lot more money than I ever imagined it would. Though it was an unbelievable success, if you have read this blog before you will know my feelings about the commercial art scene and I was left feeling slightly awkward by the amount of money that changed hands at the event. There have already been arguments about it.

Because the Auction turned into such a big events it left me exhausted and ate up nearly all of time that I wanted to spend in the studio preparing from the run of shows I had before Christmas. Though I wasn’t on tip-top form, I did get to test some new material I had been working on in an attempt to broaden my range. Some of it worked and some of it really didn’t. Maybe the crap stuff will put people off booking me while I sort it out.

You can read the script for PEACECAMP : LAKENHEATH by clicking here. Bob Smith on Resonance FM said it wasn’t very ironic. I consider it a great achievement as I was once told by a painter friend of mine that I couldn’t do a non-ironic piece of artwork even if I wanted to.

Shameless Publicity

2006-12-10T21:17:00.001Z

I haven’t been so active on the blog recently. I have been busy in the studio. I had a my termly turn at presenting work at Goldsmiths and have been locked into supercritical art thinking which had made me question the worth of this blog. Is it little more than self indulgent diary of self promotion? Oh well, you’re still reading this stuff.

I have been busy helping to organise an Art Auction to raise money for our end of year show at Goldsmiths. It has all gone a bit crazy. When I came up with the idea a few months ago I expected to have a bit of a piss up and raise a few quid selling some works by mates and a few tutors in the college hall. However the event got moved to Chelsea Arts Club and some big names have donated some work worth 4 figure sums and it is all a bit daunting. This week we received donated artworks from Julian Opie, D J Simpson, Albert Irvine, Basil Beatty and Yinka Shonibare amongst others. Anthony Gormley and a few more are also interested in donating work. I really hope someone with money actually shows up or it could be a bit embarrassing. Check out www.goldsmithsauction.co.uk for more information. If you are rich come along to Chelsea Arts Club on Thurdsay 14th December

I took my script to the BBC Comedy Department last week. The BBC were lovely and want me to send a final draft in January which I will work on over Christmas.

I have also been busy trying to write the script for my Peace Camp performance 4 pm Saturday 16th December. I was asked to make a work for Peace as for an art exhibition called Peace Camp in Brick Lane Gallery. Peace is quite a big subject to tackle, particularly with the current state of international affair, and I had been a little unsure of where to start with it. What do I know about the meaning of peace? I am a middle class bloke who lived most of his life in a back waters of rural England far from the terrible wars other have seen. After a little research into peace I discovered there was once a Peace Camp in Lakenheath. I do have a lot to say about Lakenheath and the surrounding area as I used to live nearby and still visit often. I have even written stories and songs about the place. Lakenheath is in a remarkably peaceful area of the countryside if you should ever pass through it, except for the airbases full of American nuclear weapons. As I researched further I also discovered it is where Ian Huntley buried the Soham schoolgirls. I was originally going to send this script to the BBC Comedy Department but I had to rewrite it because the Huntley bit wasn’t very funny. I will perform the uncut version on Saturday at Brick Lane Gallery. It will be the story of my personal journey to Lakenheath. It will bit like Heart of Darkness except it is not down a river in the Congo but down the A11 to Barton Mills roundabout.

Badger Broadcasting Corporation

2006-11-01T16:44:00.000Z

The bad dreams have been continuing. This week I had a nightmare that I had to smuggle stolen nuclear warheads across the dessert and I wasn’t very good at it because an Art School education doesn’t really prepare you for that kind of work.

As you can see below I have been making some new video. The quality of this version is a bit poor but it is ok for the web. I reshot it for a new DVD I have provisional titled “Neil Young, where did it all go wrong?” and contains 2 other similar works. I am not quite sure if I am pleased with it as it but I am going to show it to a few people before I decide to throw it in the bin. I think maybe they are a little too dry and miserable, but I have to be sometimes so as people don't start thinking I am just a comdian.

However, to compensate for being miserable I have also made a much more fun flash animation which you can view on www.frogmorris.net.

In other news...
My mother who is an avid listener to BBC Radio 4 and Radio 7 had heard an appeal for people to send in their ideas for new comedy shows for Radio 7. I expected they wanted a script for a show which I didn’t really have, but I decided to have a quick look at the website one lunchtime and discovered that they just wanted a sound clip and I had loads of recording of my poems. I sent one in along with a brief proposal I wrote while I finished my sandwiches. I didn’t expect to get very far.

I have sent work to the BBC in the past and never had much luck. The BBC are an old public institution and they can be quite bureaucratic at times. If you had an idea for a new kind of show they haven’t done before they usually wouldn’t consider it because there wasn’t an established department to deal with it. There certainly wasn’t a department for performance art about badgers. Most of the people who did get new things done at the BBC had spent years working out how to get through the system. I had considered doing this at one point, then I decided I’d go to art school where I can do whatever I want without having to loose the best years of my life writing jokes for Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression.

...But I have nolonger need to be bitter about the rejection letters from BBC. This week I got a big A4 envelop from the BBC and I have had enough rejection letters to know that nobody wastes the big envelopes on rejection letters.

The BBC heard my poem and liked it and want to meet me in December to talk about my script. If they like it, they might possibly commission as a pilot. I better get writing…

NEW PERFORMANCE

2006-10-30T09:38:00.000Z

STEVE IRWIN IS NOT DEAD!

2006-10-16T12:31:00.000+01:00

Angst as Frog Morris goes back to college
I started back at Goldsmiths College last week. It was a little disorientating being back in the studio. I have not been settling back in very well. Though I have been in the studio over the summer it hasn’t really felt like it because I have mostly been using it as place to run my website design business and I have done very little artwork there. I have been making art at many other location : Sweden, Ipswich, Blo’ Norton, Three Colts Gallery, Shoreditch, etc. Trying to make art in a studio again has felt a little odd.

I have moved to a new white studio box for the new year and I had felt the strange urge to do a painting or sculpture to put in it. I had even found myself in shop in Deptford looking for art material, fortunately once I was out of my white box I soon came to my sense and went next door to the butcher for some scotch eggs instead. Once back in the studio I decided to try and quell my urge to ‘make something’ by making on some videos. I started by trying to sort through some of the video documentation of the shows I had done over the summer (note there are now some additional vids and pics on the previous blog entries).

Thursday was our start of term presentation when everyone on the Masters of Fine Art course takes turns to present a portfolio of past works so as all new students can get an idea of what everyone else does. Still wrapped up in reams of video from the summer, I decided I would try and present it as something. It had somehow slipped my mind that I had stopped caring for taking documentary footage as it was such a poor representation of my live shows [see July entries in this blog ‘Unprofessional Practice’]. I was reminded of this as the documentary footage played to the new students and lecturers and I was reminded that it was almost unwatchable. It probably made a very bad impression in front of my new colleagues.

As stupid as I felt, I didn’t have time to feel down about the whole thing as the next day I was doing a live performance back at my old undergraduate college in Canterbury and I had to rehearse. Rehearsal gave me something to do in the studio at least, though after the video presentation I decided to dump the poems that featured in the videos so as I didn’t have to dwell on them all afternoon and I set about writing some new material.

I slept badly that night worrying about that day’s presentation and worries that I hadn’t learnt the new material well enough. My sleep was disturbed by a reoccurring dream that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin is not really dead. He had faked his death because he didn’t really care about animals anymore and was hiding out in England. He was spending his afternoons drinking in local pubs where the pensioners who played cards and dominos didn’t know or care who he was. Everytime I went into a pub for a quiet ale Steve Irwin would always be at the bar, drunk and talking loudly in an Australian accent so as I could get no peace.

Jessica Voorsanger had invited me to Canterbury. Jessie is Mrs. Bob & Roberta Smith as well as being an artist with works in recent shows at The Hayward and The Serpentine. Actually her work wasn’t in the Serpentine, it was in a shed out the back. The little garden shed, better know as the Leytonstone Institute of Contemporary Art, had been put in the middle of the beautiful lawn of the Serpentine by Jessie and Bob and filled with art by their friends, including Victor Mount, John Hegley, Mel Broomfield and Sally O’Reilly. It was part of an art project involving the mentally ill.

After all the stress, my show actually went very well. There were only a few students at the performance and they were initially quite confused by but after a few poems they got into it. By the end people were crying with laughter. I’d never seen people do that at my shows before. I must be getting better at something. I did fuck the new piece up, but not as bad as I thought and speaking to people after I seemed to have got away with it. I think I have something I can work on further when get back to the studio.

The performance was in the morning, so after some lunch with some of my old lecturers, I had a free afternoon. I was tempted by heading to a few of my favourite Canterbury ale houses, but decided instead to head back up to London and try to catch a speech on performance art by Marina Abramovic at Frieze Art Fair that evening. There would be plenty more chances to visit Simple Simon’s Ale House I am sure.

When I got to Frieze the Marina Abramovic talk had sold out but I thought I would have a look around the fair anyway.

Frieze is a great chance to see an enormous quantity of contemporary art, but it is all there for sale and the likes of you and me certainly couldn’t afford it. It is amazing and revolting. I had started this blog by talking about my urge to make something as I felt this is what artists should to do. I now realise that this is not what artist should do. I’m not sure that art is about making things so they can be brought and sold by rich people. Rich people have enough things, they don’t really need my help to get any more. It’s mentally ill people that need that need help. But artists are not really supposed to be social workers either, but they can still do some good by addressing some people who aren’t terribly rich... students for example.

At least that’s how I will feel until next week when my credit card bill arrives and then I’ll be begging for Saatchi to stick his dirty money into my oil paint stained g-string.

Road kill

2006-09-23T11:35:00.000+01:00

The filming with Gary Steven rapped just in time to catch the train to the Ipswich for my gig. I found that I had been billed as an “Angry Poet”.

The first half of my set went stormingly well but the second half later in the evening after the bands was a struggle. It seems odd to want support or warm up slot earlier in the evening because they are not always the most glamorous but they seem to be where my work is most suited. I enjoy the struggle and potential failure of warming up an audience and revelling in the fact that I am in the position of being second best to the main act. It also helps with spoken word that the audience is quieter and more observant at the start of the evening before they have time to get drunk.

The Ipswich gig is my last booking for the time being which is relief as I get a break for a little while. Once I have cleared the backlog of jobs I had postponed due to my hectic schedule, I am looking forward to developing some new material over the autumn. I have already started planning a new music project with Sam Curtis, Charlotte from The Rust Bucket and The Man From Below.

I got a phone call this week from a chap called Fergus I met in Canterbury while I was doing Not For Human Consumption in 2005. Furgus worked at the venue we were performing and after hearing about the Blo Boys songs he told us that he had a badger pelt from a badger he had eaten. He had found the badger and many other dead animals by the side of the road on the way to work. Furgus cycled the route several times a day to and from his home in the woods to the whole-food restaurant where he worked and he therefore knew that all this meat was fresh and he had started eating it. He is now shooting a film for BBC3 about eating road kill and asked if he could suggest some of our music to the producers for the sound track. He said the producers seemed to miss his point that he didn’t set out to dine on cute little animals, he was just making the best of a sad situation. He wanted Angry Badger as it suggested a nice sentiment about woodland animals getting revenge on mankind. It will probably end up on the cutting room floor, but I would be perfect if Blo’ Boys got their first national broadcast on a show about eating animals that had been run over by cars. Furgus’s website is www.wildmanwildfood.co.uk

Oh those summer nights...

2006-09-12T22:47:00.000+01:00

Sorry this blog update is late. I was busy being a Best Man at a wedding last weekend which was quite a responsibility and I didn’t get time to type up my report from Ditchlicker. Last week was also been busy as I am trying to do as much money earning website design work as I can before autumn term starts back at Goldsmiths College. Last week was also the start of the new season in the art world so I have also been out schmoozing at some posh private views and I am sure there will be lots more schmoozing to come in the run up to Frieze Art Fun Fair.

This week I am working for Gary Stevens. I am a performer in a new interactive movie he is currently shooting. My role mostly involves hiding behind a chest of drawers. The movie will debut in Matt’s Gallery in January.

This weekend I will be appearing in The Swan in Ipswich again hosting another punk and funk night with Skrewworm. Apparently there had been a lot of talk about my previous show and they want me back again.

The Folkestone show has been postponed until later in the year so the Ipswich show will be my last booking for a while.

DITCHLICKER FESTIVAL

Dicthlicker was intended to be an alternative to Frogstock this year. We changed the name and organised a covert publicity campaign to the numbers down. The event was named after The Ditchlicker Sound System which had been built by our good friend Jonny Steel.

We had two stages rather than six this year and only about 100 friends visiting rather than 600. The day was much more relaxed and we got to sit back and enjoy a few ales, which is often hard to do with 600 people in your Mum’s back garden. We also invited back a few acts we have enjoyed performing with over the past few years.

Victor Mount was our star guest who did a great performance despite his hangover. We billed him for his legendary guitar playing. Nobody quite knew what we meant but by the time he reached his final astonishing solo everyone understood.

I missed the first gig of the recently reformed Opposite The Hotel but reports were surprisingly good so I might have to book them for some more shows. They’d obviously come a long way.

We managed to talk Sarah and Joel into getting up on stage and doing a few numbers for us. We had been big fans of their previous band the Fashion and it was good to see them perform again even if they had been reluctant about the idea. After the show I heard a demo of Joel’s new band, it was very impressive. If Joel or Sarah ever could stick at a project they could go a long way.

I did my poetry set in the afternoon. I wasn’t bothered about doing anything new so I did a selection of my favourites from the last few months of shows. It went even more smoothly than I had anticipated. My brother Tavy said I held on to the largest audience he’s seen me with at Frogstock.

Later in the evening I returned to the stage with The Blo Boys. The show was stolen slightly by our drummer Jeep. Jeep had told us that he got married in pagan wedding ceremony under the tree outside his house on Monday night and he spent most of the evening in his tent with his new bride sharing a horn filled with ale (not that type of horn). Before our set Jeep gave a rousing speech which can not be repeated and then fell of his drum stool. The set went well and we sounded good even with the absence of our guitarist Parker who was on a Nazi sight seeing tour of Germany. We ended with a short lecture by Theo on the philosophy of Foucault and a version of our song by the same name and a finally of our song about feminist theorist Judith Butler.

The Blo Boys were followed by Skrewworm. Skrewworm had added and second female vocalist to their line up which gave a fresh vigour to their set.

The final live act of the evening was a rare set by the mythical Ophopaedic Cheese Surgeons. The Cheese Surgeons are an experimental band and they experiment liberally with both music and narcotic substances. Sometimes these experiments work and sometimes they don’t. As usual it took them a long time to set up all their kit. Often their set up is too technical for a group of half-cut musicians and they don’t make it on stage, but tonight after blowing a few fuses and a lot of swearing they finally made it. They had so many speakers they filled the stage and had to build a second one next to it and proceeded to blast out across the countryside a ingenious concoction featuring the theme tune from Super Mario Bros and rapping in Suffolk accents. Their set included songs with such inspired titles at ‘Rob’s Bingo Bongo Finger’ , ‘Up Yer Face’ and their ode to Ketamine ‘Camilla, Where’s the Horse?’. It was one of the most fantastic shows I’d seen in ages but the Cheese Surgeons are far too wasted and disorganised to play anywhere other then the Frogstock field. I guess these special opportunities are what Frogstock is all about.

DITCHLICKER VIDEO
Sing along with The Blo Boys performing 'Judith'

SHOREDICTHLICKER

2006-08-24T10:59:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday I opened up for the Shoreditch festival. The festival features a series of public artworks by Bob and Roberta Smith under the title of SHOP LOCAL.

Bob’s public works were a series of signs advertising local businesses in Bob unique hand sign painting style, including the ‘Ron’s Eel and Shelfish’ posters that are all over the underground (see previous post). There is a nice write up about the show in yesterday’s Times Newspaper by Grayson Perry.

Last Saturday was the launch party with live performance from The Ken Ardley Playboys, Leigh Clarke, Jemma Freeman and myself. The Ken Ardley Playboy are the archetypal art band featuring Bob Smith and Victor Mount; Jemma Freeman is previously of art-punk-band The Fucks and Leigh Clarke is an artist who also does stand-up comedy and body beatboxing.

Opening up a show is always hard work and I had also been asked to do a 30 minute set which is more that I usually do in on one go. 30 minutes of poetry is quite heavy going but I accepted as it was Bob and my last show with him was great. I had decided to base the show around Bob’s SHOP LOCAL project and I had proposed a set of grocery and food themed songs. When I started rehearsing last Friday I realised all my food themed songs did not quite add up to 30 minutes of material so I decided to add in a few readings of Delia Smith recipes to fill it out.

Making Delia Smith recipes sound exciting was a little harder than I anticipated and I had to cram in some extra last minute rehearsals. The extra practicing and the extended set was not good for my voice and the show got a little ropey in places, but you learn by your mistakes. I managed to end on a version of Art School Band which unsettled a few of the other acts so it all ended well.

Next weekend is Ditchlicker which is going to be a scaled down version of Frogstock with only one stage rather than 6. The smaller event should be a little less work and more fun. The line up features a few great acts that have a unconventional style and are associated with art school bands and wrong music so it should be an interesting experiment to see who bemuses the audience the most. Victor Mount is coming which is an honour. You can learn more about the entertainment and get directions to the festival site on the Frogstock website

The BBC promises the weather will clear up in time for the weekend

Shop Local

2006-08-15T20:23:00.000+01:00

This week I have been earning some money as a freelance website designer working for some small businesses and added some updates to www.hobohouse.co.uk and www.rogergladwell.co.uk. After I finished the updates to Hobo House, Scott from Hobo Designs called me and he has some ideas about a new range of dolls and asked me to do some designs to help pitch the idea to some companies. Their current range is very funny but are aimed at a more mature audience but the new range of dolls have a much broader appeal and I could end up promoting children’s toys which might be an interesting experience…

I hadn’t heard much about my forthcoming gig with Bob & Roberta Smith this Saturday except that I was supporting the Ken Ardley Playboys and I had been advised that I should try not to practice too much. I decided to Google the event today and realised it has something to do with all those posters that are all over the tube. I think it might be more important than I thought so maybe I ought to prepare something special…

More info about Bob & Roberta Smith's SHOP LOCAL project can be found here...f
My gig is on this Saturday [19-08-2006] in the courtyard of Tannery Arts, Brunswick Wharf, 55 Laburnum Street, E2 with the Ken Ardley Playboys, Leigh Clarke and Jemma Freeman

Back to work

2006-08-06T19:16:00.000+01:00

The Rag and Bone show at Three Colts closed last Sunday with a evening of performance. Closing parties are never as much fun as opening parties, but we had a few people along for the final night at Three Colts. Unfortunately the other acts I had hoped to get had either declined the offer or pulled out a few days before so I was left on my own. I decided to be both support act and headline act for the evening.

I opened with a set of old material carefully chosen from some less successful projects. I began with a few extracts from Le Tour De Squirrel which was my 2005 touring show which only ever managed one date in Canterbury. The finally of the first set was a medley of Tony Benn songs from the first Blo Boys EP in 2001. I had been trying to write some new material for the show but hadn’t come up with any great inspiration but trying to rework the old stuff was good fun and added something a little different to the set.

Packed up the show this week and then put my tie on and went back to East Anglia to find some work so I could pay a few bills. I run website design business called Purple Network and most of my trade is from contact I built up while I was based back in Blo’ Norton.

While I was back I saw Theo and got to pick some vegetables from his garden he had been working on. Theo has also built a recording studio in the shed and had been practicing with a new line-up of his old band Opposite the Hotel. Though they were now much more musically competent, they were having a few problems with front man Tom Cutler writing too many epic prog rock guitar solos. I decided to use the opportunity with the studio and get the Blo Boys back together for a session. We recorded some rough demo versions of Focualt and Judith Butler. Our drummer Jeep also got a chance to record a demo of a song he has written about Syd Barret. Hopefully we can fit in some more practices before we return to the stage at Ditch Licker on 26th August.

Off the Road

2006-07-28T17:52:00.000+01:00

Sweden was wonderful, a fantastically beautiful country of little wooden house dotting tree covered landscapes formed by glaciers and also the most friendly and welcoming places I have ever visited, it was just a shame their beer was awful. They have strict laws about the sale of alcohol which mean that most shops are not allowed to sell drinks over 3.5% alc. except a few specialist off-licences. I could live with this if it weren’t that the beer was mostly imported Carlsberg and I hate Carlsberg which I suspect the Danes might have pissed in to let it down to the right alcohol content.

The Deviant Art Festival the The Pump House in Trollhatten was great. The art was very deviant, the gallery was full of outrageous statements, work made from old junk and depiction of death, nudity, and disgusting bodily fluids. Work in such bad taste is has been common in most major city for years, but the twist the curators gave was to set up camp with these artists in a quaint little Swedish town during tourist season.

The show also had a knowing awareness that you need to go to rural Sweden if you want to find people who can still be shocked by art. Much of the work makes jokes about the sensation art moments of the 1990s.

The show was perhaps best summed up by a performance by the Dribble Factory which was a guy from Newcastle who strapped himself to the ceiling and then dribbled on to the floor. The work was confrontational but maintained a playful knowing irony, punk rock spirit and a student sense of humour. As you can imagine it was just my bag and my performance went very down well.

I had intended to write some poetry in Swedish for the show. However my Swedish wasn’t very good and most Swedes were very happy to speak in English and much of the audience were artist over from London for the festival anyway. I did try to translate some lyrics but my pronunciation was a bit wrong and just scared and confused people. In the end I did a selection of favourites from recent show and a couple of new poems I’d written in English over the previous week, including Rose Tyler and Postcard the Campaign for Real Ale.

"Den Arga Gravligen!"

I was paired with Johan Lindeblom for the show who is a Swedish poet with some books and a CD to his name. Johan translated some of his poems into English for the show and also read in Swedish. Johan was a great guy and I would like to work with him again. His style was very different from mine, but we came from similar back ground as he had started writing lyrics with a band and we had similar tastes in music. Johan's poetry was subtle and gothic than my own and based on rhythm rather than silly rhymes.

Sweden was a great success and I was sad to leave, but there was talk about going back next year…

POETRY CAFÉ

Landed back in Stanstead on Monday afternoon and then raced across to Covent Garden for a show at The Poetry Café with John Hegley. It was the first performance at a proper poetry reading and John Hegley is quite well know. Nervous, exhausted from travelling and sweating like a pig in the current UK heat wave, my show was a little shaky but it seemed to go ok. Just did 5 minutes of favourites. One of the ladies in the audience described my show as an ‘onslaught ‘ which I was quite please with. My avoidance of such venues in the past had led me to develop a style that was perhaps different to what they were used to. I’m not sure what I did was entirely suitable for the venue but I was pleased I raised a few questions about what I should be doing.

FORTHCOMING

Rag and Bone closes this weekend and there will be some performances and the draw of Sam’s Art Lotto from 4pm. There will be a few drinks and a bit of a party. Was hoping that The Rust Buckets might perform but they are having some problem so it might just be Sam and me unless some else step up. There are now some picture from the show on the Rag and Bone Website www.ragaandbone.info

The word on the lanes of East Anglia is that there might be something called DITCHLICKER happening in Blo’ Norton on August 26th . Details are not confirmed, but rumour has it that Victor Mount, Skrewworm and The Blo Boys might be on the line up plus Alys in Wonderland and Opposite The Hotel are planning exclusive comeback shows.

WORLD TOUR!

2006-07-16T19:36:00.000+01:00

Still from my end-of-year performance art peice

I was very please with my interim show at Goldsmiths. Got heckled for more. I will would like to paste some video up as soon as I get time to edit it, but it was a bit rude and I don't know if the video will get through Google Video's adult content controls...

As soon as the show was done and I'd recovered from the Kareoke afterparty I had to start work on the Rag and Bone Show at Three Colts. Got is set up just in time. The show looks great and we had a great evening of performance last night at the Private View with myself, Theo, Victor Mount, Duncan Ward and The Alps. The show is up for two weeks, there is loads of good work in it so have a look. It looks more like a proper art show than I ever invisioned I could do.

This is a breif entry as I need to pack up my poems and fly to sweeden for the Deviant Art Festival. Should be fun!

I should hopefully land back in the UK in time to perform with John Hegley at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden!

Rock and Roll!

Unprofessional Practice

2006-07-09T20:06:00.000+01:00

I didn’t get the Rochford project. I was told it was close run thing but Haley Newman got it. Though I have not met Haley Newman, I have read about her performances in books and seen her work in some important places. It’s not so disappointing when you loose to someone who has books written about them when not so long ago I couldn’t get a parish newsletter written about me. I also like some of Haley Newman’s work and would have chosen her over me without even interviewing me, so I feel kind of pround I was a contender.

This week I have been working on my end of year show for Goldsmiths. Then last end of year show I did (back when I was an undergraduate) I had spent 6 months working on, this time I had to knock something together in week. I was left so short of time was because I had been out and about doing show and putting together proposals for art projects. Though this has distracted from some of my studies, I am studying so I can do show and submit proposals for art projects.

I considered doing an performance for the examiners but then remembered how unpleasant it is doing a performing to panel of stoney faced examiners making notes on clipboards the whole way through.

It was suggested that for my end of term show I could present some documentation of the various performances I had done. I didn’t really like this idea because I have become very weary of documentation of live art events. Performance is very fashionable at the moment and good cameras are affordable and easy to use and I have noted a compulsive urge amongst art students to document everything without thinking. I have succumbed to the urge myself. However I have become weary of it because I now have reams of video I’ll never have time edit and most of it is never quite satisfactory. No matter how many cameras you get you always miss something: a camera breaks down, the tape runs out before the grand finally, the camera man falls over half way though, somebody starts rustling in their bags next to the microphone, the camera is focused on the performer and misses the audience’s reactions. As a point response I had been refusing to document some of my shows at all.

My initial idea for the end of term show was to build a small theatre in one of the studios and just leave the stage empty except for a few discarded props and empty beer bottles. I wanted the examiner and the few other people who see the installation to feel disappointed because they had missed the show. However, I noted from the course handbook we had to present something that represented our practice over the year. The empty theatre was a bit of a one-off one-liner that wouldn’t represent all the other stuff I had done and had been writing about in this blog.

However, by the time I realised this, my proposal had already been accepted and I had been allocated a large black space that was perfect for converting into a theatre. I spent most of this week trying to work out what the fuck else I could do in this black room. I also need to work out how to present a lot of documentation which was inevitably going to look like second rate left-overs from shows I’d done elsewhere.

I came up with the idea to build a museum to myself. It would be full relic from performances. I liked the idea that reconstructions of historical events in museum would never be the same as experiencing something for real. This would also mean I could build an installation and wouldn’t have to perform in front of the examiners.

By Wednesday my museum looked was a pile of junk some shoddy leftover from much better shows I’d done elsewhere accompanied by some rather lame museum plaques. It didn’t look much like a museum. I’d forgotten how much work it was actually making objects. After a word with one of my tutors I abandoned the idea.

I had two and a half days left. The only thing I knew I could put together in that time was a performance. As much as I hated the idea I was going to have to perform for the examiners.

I rummaged through material from my recent shows in the hope I could adapt something I already had (You may note I have pasted up some more vids from previous shows I found while I was rummaging). I messed about trying to rewrite ‘Judith Butler’ or ‘Democracy of Mediocracy’ or ‘The Pig Semen Delivery Man’, as they had been my favourite recent works, but they were written for other situations and just didn’t work quite right. I was going to have to write something new for the space, but what? What the hell was I going to do with that black space anyway? Would I pull it off and pass the course?

Find out Wednesday, 7.30pm, Studio B, Goldsmiths College, New Cross.

Makes Me Just Wanna Go Out and Drink Cider

2006-07-09T19:50:00.000+01:00

Been trying to write poetry on a more site specific basis. This is a little poem I wrote this week as a site specific work for sitting in the sunshine.

I have also got around to editing and sorting a pile of video tapes and images and added some extra stuff to some of the previous posts on this blog, including some clips from Outcider Art and my performance of Democracy of Mediocracy in the VIP area at Glimpse Art, which Cherie Blair didn't turn up for.

Enjoy!

Art in Rochford Reservoir

2006-07-02T11:29:00.000+01:00

This week I was invited to Rochford in Essex. As part of a major program of regeneration of the Thames Gateway artists are being commissioned to produce new public artworks in a series of sites in the area. My name was put forward and I somehow got short listed to make a public artwork for Rochford Reservoir. I was asked to look at the site and present an initial response to an interview panel of artists, curators and members of the local community.

The reservoir has duck and a few fish and a miniture railway runs by the reservoir. It is in a sleepy little Essex town, maybe it is not the most exciting place but it is quite a pleasant place.

I think my name was suggested because Bob & Roberta Smith who is curating the project wanted me to do something like Frogstock on the site, except rather than involving local musicians, he wanted me to involve the local fishermen and miniature steam railway enthusiasts. He wanted Frogsteam

I don’t have any firm ideas about what I want to do. I don’t want to just impose some great monolith on the place anyway, I would rather work with the local community to create something they actually want that will improve the place for them.

The reservoir is not a bad place, there are some things that need a little sorting out such as the gated entrances and getting the miniature railway in more use, but the place already has some appeal that should not be spoilt.

The park is regularly used by dog walkers, fishermen and parents who take the kids down to see the ducks. I spoke to a few of them to see what they might want some one to do and the main suggestion I was asked to put forward on behalf of the fishermen was more fish! It was also suggested that I could involve the ducks in the art project somehow. I tried to charm some of the duck into talking to me by singing some duck themed songs from the bank, but they didn’t seem interested.

People I spoke to who do not have dogs, or children or a fishing rod are not so bothered about the place – it’s nice but they don’t use it. But some of those people didn’t really seem to like going out anywhere very much.

However, in conversation with the Tea Ladies from the Beehive Café I discovered Rochford had a serious social problem created by gangs who wreak fear in the local community. There a lot of bored children in Rochford aged 10 –13 hanging around the town. Their boredom is not only a problem for them but also for everyone else in the town because they have nothing to do apart from hanging around the town square making a nuisance of themselves.

As you can see from the video I didn’t deal with very well with the 12 year old self-proclaimed ganstas of Rochford. I also made the mistake of giving them my business card to prove I was an artist and not child molester. Since then I have since been receiving nuisance telephone messages of swearing.

The kids do have interests that could be cultivated using the reservoir, be that fishing, bicycles, miniature railways, gangster rap or swearing.

Rounding up all the kids in the reservoir (I mean the reservoir area I wasn’t suggesting we just drown them all) could also be a problem because hordes of kids in tracksuits could be quite threatening to all the fishermen and dog walkers.

I am quite threatened by kids in tracksuits as 2 of them put me in hospital a when I was mugged week and a half ago. Though the kids in tracksuit in Rochford are younger and I could much more easily beat them in a fight, if they are not put on the straight and narrow they could become a bigger problem later.

The kids do need to be dealt with sensitively, you can’t just go in there and tell them what to do, they won’t listen and they will think you are a teacher and want nothing to do with it. My total lack of authority over children could perhaps even be an advantage.

The kids could somehow be put in a position where they become a valued part of the local community rather than being alienated from it.

They need to feel responsible involvement in the project. If they feel responsible they will also perhaps be less likely to vandalise the whole thing later on.

At the interview I was asked to present my initial response to the site, here it is, incorporating the local interest in both Gangsta Rap and fishing :

Black Eye

2006-06-22T12:29:00.000+01:00

I am currently recovering from a violent assault and robbery. I was mugged by 2 boys who took phone and they wanted to steal my back-pack. A struggle ensued but they soon realised I wasn’t going to let go of my back-pack, no matter how many times they stamped on my head.

The Police found a young man matching the description myself and witnesses gave of the more violent of the 2 boys. I have given statements to the police but will have to wait and see if they can pin it on him. The took my DNA which they are going to try and match to his trainers.

I had to be treated for head injuries, I ache a lot and don’t look too pretty, but I am going to be Ok. However I am even more behind with work than I was before, for which I apologise.

Whitstable Beinnale

2006-06-22T12:19:00.000+01:00

These notes should have been pasted up a few days ago, but due to an unpleasant incident last week my schedule is somewhat behind.

Here some notes I made during my stay in Whitstable for the Biennale. It was great fun and I got to camp by the beach for a week and worked with artist Gary Stevens. Also got to hang out in pubs with a few of my heroes.

Gary was working with a group of students including myself on a performance called ‘Thought Bubble’. During the rehearsals for the performance we were improvising various everyday activities and we found some cleaning equipment in a cupboard that we thought might make useful props. Gary said this was a good idea but insisted that the women did not do the hovering because this might make the performance look like a statement on gender and he didn’t want this. On the way to the chip shop at lunchtime I tried to quiz him on his attitudes. I wanted to know how he avoided association with body politics which had become such an issue for myself. Pheobe, who also part of our performance group and was on the way to the chip shop concurred, saying that when she had done her own performances she had been accused of being a feminist when it was not her intention. Gary replied that he tended to work in mixed groups to avoided any specific body type coming to the fore.

Even when Gary performs on his own he is very sensitive of these things, as I said earlier it is very hard to describe his performances and this also means it is very hard to find specific statements in his work. During my our rehearsals Gary directed things so a performance happened but no real focus on any moment or individual could be found within it and therefore no firm conclusion could be drawn. There were no grand statements, things just going on.

I learnt a lot from Gary in how he creates his performances by evolving structures in which improvisations can take place using what is available to him.

The theme of the Biennale was Art and Comedy and I got a chance to a symposium on Art and Comedy. It was a strange affair, which highlighted the fact that theorising about comedy is not actually very funny. You can either not think too much about it, or think too much about things and not be very funny. Gary Stevens made a good point that art audiences think too much about things and don’t know how to take a joke. The reverse is also true, that comedy audiences only want to be entertained and don’t think too much about anything else.

The first speaker at the symposium was a stand-up comedian named Adam Bloom who was very funny even though it was clear he didn’t know what he was supposed to talking about. He said that “The object of stand-up comedy is to make an audience laugh”. Perhaps this is were art maybe has something to offer because though it can make people laugh, it doesn’t have to do just that, it can do many other things too.

Half way through the lecture Bob & Roberta Smith asked Adam Bloom if he had a mental health problems. The artist with the ginger beard elaborated on this and explained that most great comedians had suffered manic depression, such as Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Peter Cook and many others. Adam Bloom replied that he didn’t really have mental health problem and neither did many of he comedian friend, expect one who was in rehab for some drink problems.

At the end of the Art and Comedy Symposium Bob & Roberta Smith took everyone down to the harbour to float concrete boats on the sea. However the joke went terribly wrong because the tide was out and there was no sea, just some mud which nobody really had suitable footwear to wade through.

While I was in Whitstable also I ran into the poet John Hegley in a pub and I had a conversation with him about how great artists, musicians and poets die young. He was not comfortable with this idea because he was getting on a bit now and wasn’t dead which suggested he wasn’t held in such high regard where as I was only 26 and still had a chance of being great. I realised I was also not too keen on the idea of being dead soon. Am planning to do a show with John Hegley at the Poetry Café in July which is quite an exciting honour.

We’re fuckin’ with yer Power-Knowledge

2006-06-12T09:43:00.000+01:00

The OUTCIDER ART symposium was in interesting experience. My brother Theo had prepared a short presentation about Foucault’s ideas of radical politics and how they could be applied to art making. I don’t really have time to fully explain the concept here which involved the realisation that we are controlled by knowledge because we understand everything by referring to knowledge, but if I get some time I will transcribe some extracts or make some audio samples for the website. The lecture was mostly attended by Goldsmiths Fine art post graduates, however Theo the lecturer was still an undergraduate. This caused a mix of responses, those who found it funny and those who were not amused. We had been hoping that the whole thing would be light weight knock about with a few stupid songs. Goldsmith’s Fine Art department has a reputation for super criticality and Theo was quickly faltered by a series of difficult questions which he had trouble answering because he had not really done as much reading and the discussion soon turned into a more uncomfortably conventional debate on art philosophy. However the songs seemed to go down well despite the fact we never got around to rehearsing them and Sam Curtis rounded the event off with a game he had devised about Foucault’s love spud.

One of the theories Theo presented was that once the people are prepared to die then a government can not threaten people with death and no longer has any power. Theo applied this Theory to art and suggested that though the art institution can readily threaten artists with death, it can threaten to say that their artwork is not good enough; therefore Theo proposed that the institution would have no control over an artist if they were prepared to make crap work (I was held up as the main example for the justification of failure). This seems like a suitable justification for the performative failure of the event… however this theory of failure was also picked to pieces by the audience.

It was a nice little escapade into improvised performance and failure and we learned a lesson or two even if it wasn’t the one Theo was teaching.

Watch the video :

Just got back from Whitstable Biennale where I was working with a group of artist under the direction of Gary Stevens. Tired and sun burnt, but we all had a great time and I will type up my notes from the event over the next few days.

GLIMPSE and MEALS AND SUVS

2006-05-28T13:18:00.000+01:00

Had a busy week. I did a solo performance at Glimpse on Tuesday at 43 South Moulton Street and also appeared as part of The Union for a show at Meals and SUVs, Doleston, on Friday night. This entry will be brief as I have work to catch up on for College and for my business, before Outcider Art this Friday and a residency with Gary Stevens for Whitstable Biennial from next Sunday. It is all getting a little too much and I have been doing a lot of very long days, but Whitstable should be a chance to get away for a few day.

Glimpse on Tuesday was great fun. The exhibition was a charity do in support of Thames Broadway and was organise by DegreeArt.com who sell artwork by graduates. I was invited to perform for the VIPs. I was told when I took the gig that Cherie Blair had been invited and it sounded like a chance to have a bit of a word with her about what her family and neighbours had been up to, but she did not turn up. However I did get as much free beer as I could drink and I met some other interesting people.

I had a video screen in the bar which I missed because the beer made me loose track of the time, but my friend Fox who attended said that the other video in the screening were all priced in the thousands of pound and mine was priced at £15. This was not usual shabby crowd of art student I usually expect at my gigs. The event was attended by a lot of people in smart suits who would probably be described as ‘cadre’ in French. They were people who could afford to buy or deal in painting and sculptures prices in 4 figures or more. The audience seemed to enjoy my performance and surprisingly they were more readily accepting of it than some of the other crowds I had played to of late, however they were here to buy art and I had nothing to sell.

The Union is a group of 11 artists which includes myself. Exactly what that means is quite complex, we have developed some sort of horizontal power structure for making art shows. After our first show at Goldsmith a couple of weeks ago we were offered another show at Meal & SUVs in Dolestone, London. We immediately agreed, however it soon became clear that we only had a couple of weeks to put the show together and that a band called Black Autumn Gold would also be playing a gig in the venue later that night. We initially intened to just move our previous show to the venue because we had so little time to make new work, however we soon realise that our monitors, projectors artworks and gear was going to interfere with the band setting up their kit. We decided instead to literally support the band. We spent the evening playing at being roadies, selling promotional merchandise, guarding the doors and tending the bar. However we had to hastily knock together merchandise to sell, promotional items and make CREW t-shirts for ourselves so as we could be identified. It was hard work, but the evening was actually very good fun. You can check out the website I made for the band at www.blackautumngold.co.uk

The show was an interesting move for the Union because with 11 artists with 11 egos it was very hard work getting everyone to agree on anything for the previous show. Because this time we chose to be come subservient to Black Autumn Gold we could forego our precious egos and work together to help the band.

Theo is coming to Goldsmiths next week to do his lecture on art and radical politics, he has invited Mark Quinn [Fuxus] and John Topple to help. We have title the show OUTCIDER ART. It sounds like it might turn into some sort of revival of the Built Like a Truck Drives Like a Gallery symposiums for those who remember them. I think this will make a nice contrast to my recent work. Working with Theo and Quinn will be a much more developed and natural group dynamic compared to The Union and it will be a chance to demonstrate to my London audience that Frog Morris is not just a one man show.

Have decided that this is enough work for for me to be getting on with so I might skip the gorilla performance at Strawberry fair next saturday, but will see how I feel later in the week.

This Week...

2006-05-21T13:20:00.000+01:00

I am performing at GLIMPSE on Tuesday. The entry fee is £10 for a night of performance, video, music and art. Cherie Blair had been invited so it should be interesting...
GLIMPSE
43 South Moulton Street, London W15 KRS
Tuesday 23rd May 9.30pm

I also have some video in GLIMPSE BELOW
GLIMPSE BELOW
Tuesday 23rd May 8.30pm

It's been arranged by DEGREE ART

I have also become involved in an artists collective called The Union and we are supporting a great art band called BLACK AUTUMN GOLD at Meals & SUVs Art Gallery, 295-297 Haggerston Rd London E8
Friday 26th May 6pm
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=41452500

Video from the Swan Gig

2006-05-21T13:18:00.000+01:00

There is some shakey video from the Swan Gig on Google Video

THE SWAN, IPSWICH 13.5.2006

2006-05-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

Last night's show at The Swan presented a challenge because the work I had been doing in the studio had digressed away from the performance poetry that I had in mind when I proposed this shows many weeks ago.

The shows with Bob & Roberta Smith had given me a safe space in which to establish my performance poetry and gain acceptance though Bob's kind patronage. However, I had been criticised for placing my work within the safe bubble of white cube galleries. People expect to be challenged by contemporary art; therefore paradoxically challenging people in art galleries is sometimes not that challenging.

I am good friends with a punk band from Ipswich called Skreworm, they are Frogstock regulars and they had given The Blo Boys a few gigs when nobody else would dare. Following a discussion about John Copper Clarke, they had kindly give me a slot reading poetry in-between the band at last night's gig in a pub in Ipswich. It was a challenge to see if I could face down an audience outside of the art gallery. Punks appealed to me because they are usually culturally active people, but not so cynically art-savvy.

I had recorded a podcast for Motif radio a couple of weeks previously for which I had cobbled together some new material to temp listeners who had heard my previous set quite a lot of times by now. I was still uncertain about the new material, as it had not been presented live before and I had not yet received much comment from the podcast. I nervously had shuffled much of this new material to the side, but when I got to the venue last night I realised my time slot was longer than I expected and I need to include any extra material I had to hand. One piece in particular concerned me which was entitled Democracy of Mediocracy as it dealt with politics in a confrontational manner. I was very aware that political art can be a bad move and this risk of failure became all too tempting for me.

The response to the show was mixed. The favoritesites received a good response, as did a revised version of Tomorrow's World which I had finally got to work after several failed attempts. Following the first half of set I was approached by offers of more gigs. The second half of the set was to a drunker audience and contained the new material, which was sweetened by sofavoritesourites such as Angry Badger. There was a distinct sense of unease in places judging by some of the whispering between the more stony faced members of the audience. At my next gig I might put a video camera behind me and record the audiences response rather than my performance. What I do is not just light entertainment, I want it to provoke the audience. Whispering in the audience is good.

After the show I received several comments from people at the bar, I had a suspicion some them had presumed I'd done a runner when I went to the toilets to change out of my costume.

One young chap at said that I had balls to stand up there and say that stuff, he sounded impressed but added you can't dance to it.

Another girl approached who was from a commune who were involved with some of the other bands performing that evening and offered me a gig at a Green Fair. She was impressed I'd dared to get up there and say what I said and she no doubt wanted that kind of attitude for an politically motivated event. I responded that I was sorry if it freaked people out, but she replied :

maybe you're saying something the bands can't say.

TOUR DIARY STARTS HERE!

2006-05-14T14:52:00.000+01:00

I have decided to change how I am using this Blog. It had been pasting up half baked critical theories that desperately needed critique but this is only suitable for a very select audience. I have decided instead that this blog should become more of a diary. I have a list of shows coming up over the next few months, and this is might turn into some kind of tour diary, but this isn't really a proper tour. The shows are going to take various unusual forms, from art installations to video screenings to stand-up poetry readings to guerrilla happenings and I am going to attempt to tie up this series disparate events. Some of this is going to be funny anecdotes and sometimes it will wonder into theories, philosophies and proposition.

My recent art practice has spun off on differing trajectories. I am currently studying for an Masters of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. Late last year I developed a performance poetry project. The project initially grew from work I had been doing with rock band The Blo Boys and I had started by taking the lyrics and reading them to audiences as poetry without music. I also started writing some poetry specifically for this format of presentation. Being a stand up performer is quite a brave (or perhaps foolish) thing to do as in front of an audience you are very vulnerable. Rather than take the conventional approach of trying to become more secure I had instead tried to exploit this vulnerability.

Initially the poetry received an awkward critical response as people did not know where it stood. Was it art? Was it music? Was it theatre? Was it poetry? What the hell was I actually trying to do? Eventually I started to secure my unusual position through a series of shows and radio performances help by the patronage of the great Bob & Roberta Smith. I started to get offered more shows and was asked for proposals and applications.

As these proposals were being processes I returned to the studio to work on some new material and started making a series of video that aimed to resolve many of the criticism I had received. Building on the live performance poetry, these video were directed to focus on the performance rather than the poems. Some of the early videos have been proposed for public screening, but most of this work has not been shown publicly. However it has received a remarkably positive critical response from those who have seen it. It is more refined and also much drier than the live work, but has also lost a little of the fun of live shows and feels mediated by video.

Though the video work has received a good critical response and presents a new direction for my research, meanwhile proposals for show I put forward earlier in the year have been processed and I am out of the studio and doing live shows again with old material. My practice iperusingng different directions.

I have also become involved in a group called The Union and I am creating collaborative work as part of this as well.

Mean while I am still also trying to pay the bills by running my own business designing commercial websites.

It has all gone in different directions and I hope that this blog may navigate though all this confusion!