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Click here to watch the video The video The Last Breath is the culmination of four performances under the title The Last Breath. The subject is derived from memories of two experiences of approaching death. The first was at Speakers Corner in 1967, when a speaker spoke of his immanent death. The other is derived from being the sole witness to a man burning to death in an East London park in 1998. In December 2006 a video was filmed at the performance in the Schlacthaus Bern, under the Bone
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Click here to watch the video Please go to the text sections for Notes to Thomas Röske on About Barbara Suckfull I came across Barbara Suckfull`s word drawings in a catalogue… And was impressed by the visual qualities of the drawing made visible through the elegant script. When I read the translation of one or two of the texts I was intrigued by the seemingly mild difficulties she recorded. However the discourtesies she mentioned I
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Next Door (the missing subject)
Next Door (the missing text) First Day 12. 5. 2010 Next door is an abandoned retail outfit. It seems to contain the detritus of at least three businesses, a sign making company, electrical retailer and a bookshop. There are also some records of applications made by children to a charity of some kind. It exhibits all the evidence of abandonment. It is owned by the local council and has been shuttered down for some considerable period. There are signs of flooding which came from the toilet and
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Landscapes This project began after considering William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, which together with music by Hubert Parry has become the second if informal national anthem in England. It is sung at football matches where there appears to be an unfortunate lack of suitable songs other than the dull slow moving national anthem. Jerusalem stands as a hopeful expression of a bright future. And did those feet in ancient time. Walk upon England's mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God,
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Pit
Pit is a dark image the bottom half revealing the edge of a pit with roots hanging over the edge, looking up into a tangle of trees through which a summery light can be seen. The attempt is to enclose the viewer in a dark enclosing atmosphere with just traces of light seen through thick foliage in the upper right hand part of the image.
Stuart Brisley
March 2012 -
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Sink
Sink is a reversal of Pit where the viewer looks down into the muddy water of a stagnant pool in a wood. The viewer is enclosed by the shrubbery of small marshy trees. The gaze is directed into opaque muddy water.
Stuart Brisley
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Next Door (the missing subject)
Click here to view the trailer: http://vimeo.com/44627473 Click here to view the entire film: https://vimeo.com/103703996 The shop space next door to PEER, owned by Hackney Council, was previously leased to a bookseller, an electrical supplies business and a signmaker's business. It was then disused for four years or so before being rented to PEER.The lease negotiations were completed just two days before the performance Next Door (the missing subject) was scheduled to
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Shadow
Shadow is an open scene of a huge field leading up to a stretch of dense wood at the apex of a hill. Above is a part cloudy sky with intimations of sunlight between rain clouds. A shadow covers the bottom half of the field. The shadow leaches out the colour of the field leading to intimations of death along with the summery aspect of the field in sunlight.
Stuart Brisley
March 2012 -
The Missing Text, Interregnum 1 (6 May–12 May 2010)
THE MISSING SUBJECT I took up temporary residence as the Curator of Ordure RY Sirb for 10 days amongst the detritus of failed businesses in a former shop. Entitled The Missing Subject, the series of actions covering a 10 day period was the base from which 4 further parts were constructed. 1.The diary 2.The film 3.The photographs 4.The paintings The 3 paintings are variants based
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The Missing Text, Interregnum 2 (6 May–12 May 2010)
The Missing Text, 2012 Interregnum 2 (6 May-12 May 2010) The second painting paraphrases two similar photographs in a reduced light mirroring one phase in the changing conditions of the shop space. What drama there may be is derived from the qualities of light at the moment the photographs were taken. Neither of the photographs is faithfully reproduced, but altered as the painting evolved and began to determine its own future and
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The Missing Text, Interregnum 3 (6 May-12 May 2010)
The Missing Text, Interregnum 3 (6 May-12 May 2010) The third painting is based on a single photograph selected as an antithesis to the characteristics of paintings 1&2. This photograph reveals reflections on the right side of the image which break the internal confinement of the heap and fractures the unified surface of the image. The street breaks through the surface and confirms the liquidity of the moment and the transitional nature of the 10 day action. Note: Elephant
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A new ten–day performance, Before the Mast. The dates of this performance correspond to the month of Frimaire in the Republican Calendar that was introduced in France after the French Revolution. This calendar established a new chronology and was an effort to sweep away history and a centuries–old religion–centred organisation of time. The seven–day week was replaced by a new ten–day decimal week called a 'décade', with ten–hour days and 100 minute
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The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome (Jerusalem)
A reference for this work is the novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1888 based on the condition of split personality now termed disassociative identity disorder. The title of Stevenson’s novella has become part of everyday language. The image is of a young man convicted of paedophilia published in a report of his trial in the Guardian newspaper in 2013. His employment as a carer in a nursery school enabled the defendant to
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A performance and film by Stuart BrisleyThe performance took place in Barcelona in 1992 but has only been made into a video on the occasion of the forthcoming solo show at Modern Art Oxford. Performance takes its title from an earlier visit by Brisley to Barcelona in March 1974 when the last 2 executions of the Franco regime took place while he was there. The Catalan activist Salvador Puig Antich and a common criminal Heinz Chez were executed by the use of the garrote.Duration 27:24 min Click
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"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" Hamlet (1.4), Marcellus to Horatio, William Shakespeare
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Please go to the Text section to download the PDF of Manifesto of Equals printed as an edition of 60 and given to audience members at the end of the performance.
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A new sound installation at 3rd Mardin Biennial
Please go to the News page for the artist's statement on this work
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Meanings of drawn or it comes to the same thing follows a path similar to what a live action drawn out during 6 hours a day might be like: Evenness, equality (of time), monotony, level, stretching on the bed of Procrustes. Who was Procrustes? From Wikipedia: In Greek mythology, Procrustes (Προκρούστης) or "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]", also known
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In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramschi's analysis represents a condition of tensed-time, a live proposal. It is about the current time, the present time. Time of performance, time of the present situation and of the participants themselves. ... There is an idiomatic expression in English language, elephant
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The work refers to a much earlier performance, The Minder's Line (Procrustean Bed), 1973, Walker Gallery Liverpool. This earlier engagement is re-examined in 2016 with the performance DRAWN. Following the 2 performances where the body is the primary element, this sculpture solidifies and cuts through the concept of the procrustean bed which is about a framework of system enforcing
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"And I couldn't forget, at the outset of the job, to prepare myself to err. Not forgetting that the error had often become my path. Every time something I was thinking or feeling didn't work out - was because finally there was a breach, and, if I'd had courage before, I'd have already gone through it. But I'd always been afraid of delirium and error. My error, however, must be the path of truth: since only when I err do I step out of what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were whatever I
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from the freezer... thaw A collaboration by Maya Balcioglu and Stuart Brisley with the Museum of Ordure "what's past is prologue: what to come" Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1, 245-254 "Making present the voices of what is past, not to entomb either the past or the present, but to give them life together in a place common to both in memory." Mary Carruthers, Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990) p.260 Genesis
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17.2.2018 Turf Projects Croydon Interregnum 11:30 - 16:30 (with two breaks) This work is titled under the term Interregnum. As an example it describes the gap in the continuity of monarchy, occupied by the English Revolution between 1642 -1688. There are contemporary examples. This is where we are. The following text does not presume to be an analysis of Interregnum. I am not in a position to see myself as a performer. I aim to provide some observations
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Action for Body and Voice (Evening Tide) at David Roberts Art Foundation, London
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Breath II (Against the Dying of the Night), Galeria Studio, Warsaw
Breath II (Against the Dying of the Night) Sound performance Duration: 30minutes Galeria Studio, Warsaw Performance takes its reference and the title from a poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The title is the first line "Do not go gentle into that good night", it was written in 1947. Being in my mid eighties I am both conscious of having lived a full life, and being at the same time full of life. The poem is used as a reference to the performance which is not
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Mirror (Lustro), Muzeum Sztuki w Łódzi, Łódź
Working Proposal from Stuart Brisley: The title is The Octogenarian Specular… bit parts, moments, inevitable mistakes, errors. Specular refers to the properties of the mirror. Please add a mirror to the list of materials. List of antics: Everything to do with the images of sitting, lying, on two legs, speech and un-speech, wearing others’ (other people’s) clothes from time to time. Please supply clothing of both