Fascinating Fandoms: Owen G. Parry & Beth Emily Richards

Escape is on my mind.

This week the UK government are trying to push through a disgusting Brexit deal, while the British music industry simultaneously wheels out The Spice Girls for a bit of Christmas ‘girl-power’ nostalgia. The perfect distraction.

I’m thinking instead about affirmative modes of escape; escape from reality, work and leisure as it is factored through late capitalism as opposed to escape as nostalgic distraction. In fact, I’m not just thinking about escape in this moment, my body is craving it: escape from the raising of borders which will inevitably keep us all in like an overused bowel full of baked fucking beans.

and so i’m thinking about the potentials of:

Daydreaming, joining a cult, wasting time, engaging in collective craft, surfing the web, reading romance novels in public, writing fanfiction, imagining how things might be different in a far away AU (Alternate Universe).

And I’m asking: How might we conjure ‘something different’ to the present? What tools, forms and languages might we need to survive?

Someone said:
“we need radically new counter-fictions to the artistic and political impasses of the present, but with non-straight people”

While escape has a bad-reputation (it too often reads as an “escape from the political”), I am interested in the necessity and need for modes and practices of escape in order to not only cope with the present (a respite!), but to also imagine something different to the current social and political mood. Of huge importance in this moment is the need for abandoning old methods and tricks of 21st century artists and avant-gardes, which have now been fully tested and incorporated into capitalism’s oppressive regime (Angela Nagle). Anti-Tory conceptualism or symbolic theatre is not enough! What we need now are new tactics, “new fictions” which privilege care and singularity and expansion and non-ironic humour. It’s time to abandon the gatekeepers of knowledge, of individualism, of top-down tactics and Escape en mass!

I see this happening, like in any good novel, on the streets in spring and to great suspicion by authorities: women, mothers and queer people leave their homes and jobs armed with a book or reading devise: a deep romance novela; a scifi trilogy, a One Direction fanfic; they leave in order to occupy their town squares and community run cafes across the UK: they leave in order to read in silence, to read in silence in public, to disappear, to escape, but in great visibility and for all to see. Escape en vis!

Some of the ways i’ve been addressing escapism in my own life is through the study of and living with alternative communities and fandoms (online and offline) and the future affirmations that performance, fantasy and fiction provide.

I came to fandom by “wasting time” on tumblr as I was finishing writing my PhD thesis. I always say that in 2013 tumblr was the equivalent to New York city in the 1960s in that it was the ‘hey day’ of bohemian escapism and participatory cultural productions that were really fucking new and exciting. Instead of concentrating on writing my thesis, the erotic and domestic fanfictions of boybands written by fangirls in their bedrooms became a very generative escape and distraction. In fanfictions fans create their own version of the world. Major narratives get remolded like ‘silly putty’ (Henry Jenkins): men get pregnant, characters bodyswap or transform into objects and animals, people travel through time or across borders, and as its fanfiction — a lot of sex happens! Fanfiction becomes for me an important feminist, queer and de-colonising tactic, and one that is necessary for the rebuilding of the social or public imaginary. Especially in times like Brexit!

Fans and artists have for so long been pathologised for being “escapists” – daydreamers instead of doing “real work”. The backlash to this is evidenced through art’s “Social Turn” (Claire Bishop) and the engagement activities of artists with vulnerable communities. A top down approach, than needed re-evaluating a long time ago and yet still informs and shapes the practices of the UKs most successful ‘Arts Council artists’, making them individual successes.

As an alternative, and as a space of unproductivity (but not leisure) and escape (but not nostalgic vacation) I’m interested in how ‘fandom’ as opposed to ‘community’ opens up a counter time and counter narrative to work and leisure under neoliberal capitalism, and how the reading and writing fanfiction (or performances like this) might call into the present some of its most radical challenges to fascism and cultural hegemony.

Brexscapism is not only a respite from the dreary dreary watching of our government run the country into the ground; Brexscapism is the turning away from the horrid spectacle of cruel Tory intentions in order to choose our own escape roots, to occupy a different mode or mood, and to imagine alternate narratives and image worlds.

It’s been said before and i’ll say it again (but with a difference): “In order to find a way out (there is no way out?); first we need to imagine a way out.”

On Thursday 1 November we opened ‘PooR Life by dog people’ at Transition Two Gallery in London. The show is developed through our mutual interests in fandom, poor copies and amateur-expertise: “Their interest in the confluence between avant-garde and mainstream culture finds curious expression through both solo and collaborative works”.

On Friday I returned to the gallery to drop off a lead and was pleased to see a group of MA students from Chelsea visiting the show. One of the visitors remarked on the title of the show ‘dog people’ and asked me if it was in any way related to ‘skiladiko’ in Greek; a derogatory term which refers to ‘the dog people’ – or those who enjoy skyladika music (dog music) a variation of laika songs associated with mass entertainment of low quality and “the music of alienated migrants who came to the big cities to work from the rural areas”.

Skyladika has roots in 60s and 70s Greek music which jams with elements from Arabic and Middle Eastern music and is considered as an expression of degradation and social decadence.There are many (questionable) reasons for the term Skyladika or dog music. Some say the name relates to the concentration of street dogs that would congregate outside nightclubs where these songs are performed to eat the scraps of boiled veal “which was impossible to eat, and was usually fed to … dogs”; others say it refers to the quality of singing which is said to resemble “a dog’s lament and cry”. Despite its negative association, skyladika music is widely popular in working class areas of Greek cities and villages. This inight into our work is absolutely relevant and fascinating!

Perhaps their is a singularity in the concept of ‘dog people’ in our show, which absolutely relates to the skyladika particularly in terms of our interest in the amateur, fan art and poor copies. In particular I am interested in how the skyladika cannot be considered a subculture in the way that for instance punk was, or a form of high culture the way that contemporary art is, precisely because this form of music embraces and inhabits the most mainstream of all music in Greece. On occupying fandom through our show, I’m interested in the subversive and world-building potentials of occupying the mainstream – particularly as subcultures like punk always get recuperated into mainstream capital anyway.

Beth and I also liked the idea that there are two kinds of people in this world: dog people and cat people. We both 100% identify as dog people, and this became a way of us thinking about the kind of publics we belong to or who might form around our productions. (In my previous post, it was a dog who interrupted our phonecall too). We are also both really interested in thinking of Fandom as an embodied experience (rather than just an imitation) and one of the ways this manifests for us is when people look like their own pets. We want to believe that it is absolutely true that dog owners look like their dogs. ??

‘PooR Life by dog people’, opens next week at Transition Two Gallery, London. (Opens 1st November 2018) show runs 2nd – 25th Nov: https://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/Transitiontwo/Poor_Life_by_Dog_People.html

‘8 Poor Copies’ was written in response to Beth Emily Richards’ show ‘Poor Copy‘ at Northern Charter in April 2018.

8 Excerpts from ‘8 Poor Copies’:

1. Poor Archives

The exhibition is an archive of found documents, evidencing a set of peculiar yet-interrelated narratives.

Poor Copies point to the notion of a deprived repetition. This is instanced in the show through the various low-fi and amateur archival components

The materials have been assembled as fragments that re-produce an archive of evidence.

2. Poor Stories

Poor stories are good stories.

Terrorists have attacked New York City. So Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando pile into a car and get the heck out of there, stopping at fast food joints as they trek across the country…

(The New Yorker)

3. Poor-becomings

An illusive figure, a monster of late capitalism, particularly in his deteriorated state (both in terms of his health and reputation) towards the end of his life in 2009, Michael Jackson was in a state of poor-becoming.

4. Poor Evidence

poor evidence, like poor stories, have real consequences

5. Poor images ii

A poor copy is an image constructed in your head while you’re on the phone.

Poor Copy consequently bares relation to the title of Hito Steyerl’s essay In Defense of The Poor image (2009), which explores the valence of the low-fi digital image and its circulation in the age of the Internet. For Steyerl the poor image is “a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image… compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”

with a poor copy there is no original. “This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the transience of the copy” (Steyerl) and the possibilities this opens up around questions of truth, fiction and the archive…

6. Poor communication

In an essay titled Derrida on the Line, Sarah Jackson writes about the multiple references to the telephone that echo in and around Jacques Derrida’s work and specifically his communication with proclaimed “lover of the telephone” Hélène Cixous. Jackson’s essay, structured as a phone call to Jacques Derrida, affectively inhabits the phone call as a “poetico-technical invention”, signaling that the phone be a conduit for “thought itself” (Derrida). Jackson also reminds us that Freud said the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and that the telephone is a medium for analysis, while also paying attention to the uncanny mechanisms of the telephone in terms of the ways it can cause “interference in thinking and writing”.

7. Dogs

It makes absolute sense that in our conversations about Poor Copy, that it would be a dog rather than a cat stalking our line. If the cat is a copy – “They communicate telepathically” (Cixous) – then the dog is a poor copy.

8. Michael Jacques-son as poor concept

Unlike the copy, which renders a subordinate imitation or impersonation, the poor copy is an expansive archive, is a repetition with a difference (Gilles Deleuze). It’s the becoming Jacques-son of Jacques Derrida, Michael Jackson and Sarah Jackson – albeit a silly or confused idea – where history and theory maybe “just miss the point” or don’t always match up…. The line cuts out, a dog barks, or a child falls over, life, truth and the future seep out “on the diagonal”. The poor copy subverts an archive (or subjectivity in the case of Jackson) from within. It’s the becoming-Jacques-son of the poor copy; it’s the stalking of something (an idea) or someone (Michael) ungraspable, in process and only partially constituted; it’s the affirmative expansion of an idea, as Cixous remarks in regards to the telephone, “Both distant and inside one’s head”.

I met Beth Emily Richards at a Theatre Fandom conference in Bristol last Summer. We had already been in contact with each other over our mutual fascination with fandom as a nerdy participatory network, amateur expertise and subversive world-making practice. There are many crossover elements in our own art practices that we are exploring with the aid of the A-N Artist Bursary 2018, including several ‘studio’ meetups, dialogues around our individual projects, including me writing a critical essay as part of Beth’s exhibition ‘Poor Copy’ at Northern Charter, Newcastle in April and Jerwood Staging Series 11 September 2018, a presentation of ideas at The Fan Studies Network Conference in Cardiff in June, visits to The Michael Jackson Exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery in August, and working towards a joint exhibition at Transition Two in London, opening on 1 November 2018, curated by Cathy Lomax.

I initiated the Fan Riot project in 2015, which explores the intersection of art and fandom since the internet and includes a fan club series with contributing artist and fan practitioners, publications and a series of artworks and performances including ‘Larry!Monument‘ – a fictional monument to the Larry Stylinson fandom (a fandom dedicated to the speculative romance between One Direction boy band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson) at Jerwood Visual Arts 2016.

Beth’s work investigates contemporary mythmaking, often exploring popular culture and its associated idiosyncratic subcultures. Past works have engaged with personae such as Harry Houdini, Robert Falcon Scott, Francis Drake, Arnold Schwarzenegger and William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody; as well as with social trends such as ‘tombstoning’ (teenagers jumping off cliffs into the sea), Mexican telenovelas, ‘80s-‘90s action films, roller derby, Western movies, scouting, and motivational speaking.

This Blog will document certain aspects of our dialogue that we feel will benefit from sharing with a wider community of artists, or what we might call or imagine to be an ‘art fandom’.