Last night Steve Hollingsworth and I staged what we termed a performance/sculpture using neon, sound and our own bodies. We called it ‘RUINS’.
We moved very slowly on our hands and knees amongst a scattering of thin neon tubing, with devices strapped to our chests enabling us to ‘interfere’ with the neon directly and therefor producing a series of sounds as proximity with the tubing waxed and waned… I have no idea how it seemed to the audience because crawling slowly amongst the neon and fiddling with the controls on my chest took all my energy and attention.
The performance began in darkness until a timer switch turned on the neon and Ben our CCA sound engineer (he done a great job by the way) manipulated the volume etc. Steve and I had decided to crawl slowly for half an hour whilst interacting with the neon tubing, but really there was a practical consideration too, because if we had accidentally knelt on and broken it we would have received a very nasty electric shock… After the half hour was up the neon automatically went off and the sound slowly faded.
An audience member described the performance as ‘erotic’. I suppose watching to 40 something male artists humping some neon infinitely slowly could be . . .

Snail Mail

Here and there amongst the smoking ruins of that great and degenerate civilisation of Mu a few survivors eke out a desperate kind of survival. Things are looking bad for the humans, until one fateful day, a race of star-travellers arrive for a look-see. As the snail-like entities ooze from the bowels of their softly wobbling ship and raise their twitching palps in hungry anticipation a lone human snuck in the back way and stole their greatest treasure from right under their noses (for of course snails are deaf as posts). The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Compass, as it came to be known, was a kind of telephone whereby the natural telepathic communication of mating land molluscs is harnessed by means of a ring of interconnected snails glued within a box containing a copper sulphate solution. Pressing upon the snails evokes a reaction, through a process of sympathetic communication or ‘animal magnetism’, from their partner snail be it anywhere in The Known Universe. This technological breakthrough led the human race to rise once more to greatness.

Snail Sex

The analogy of an invisible trail of metaphorical snail slime was so powerful that it led the race to adopt many of the habits of the diminutive land mollusc, including developing similarly bizarre mating rituals wherein the human phallus came to be ‘fired’ or ejected from the groin towards a receptive female, who is then ‘reeled in’. This meant that the penis had become a ‘chitinous’ outgrowth, which began to develop its own consciousness often at odds with its ‘host’. After a rash of fatalities people took to wearing suits of armour in their daily lives in order to repel the constant bombardment of calcareous darts. This uneasy symbiosis was only brought to an end when the vagina in its turn took to wandering in search of fulfilment.

[work in progress]

A Tremendous Delirium featuring Scarlett Johansson

In our naiveté we imagined that our journey was a linear one, you know, with a beginning a middle and a tidy denouement. That was before we sampled the tasty-looking fungus lining the banks of the White Carte Water. Or did we? Perhaps our encounter with the river naiads was simply a hallucination brought on by overexposure to the peculiarly fetid air of Glescoo? For it seemed that the journey and its destination had become interchangeable… In part this was due to the writers deplorable habit of going off at half cock with one or other risible narrative gambit or other, his constant prevarication was frankly a pain in the tits and The Outcast and I took to casting withering glances at the sky, which is where we supposed he resided the bastard. Anyway either we did, or did not ingest the aforementioned fungus. And the riverine naiads quite possibly did not arise from the middle of the polluted stream, beckoning us to step inside their lavishly appointed boudoir. The one that looked very much like Scarlett Johansson I found particularly fetching, and she obviously felt the same as she divested herself of her barely there Kate Moss for Topshop Livin Cool Lace Angel Sleeve Dress. Her ‘boudoir’ looked suspiciously like a vile hostelry we had perforce visited in one of Glescoo’s less salubrious streets, one Easy & Peasy’s. The usual rutting was taking place but the crowd of revellers miraculously parted before my hostess and there was a leopard-skin lined booth awaiting us. Scarlett demurely avoided sitting on one of the handily placed dildo’s jutting from each be-cushioned resting place. I was not so fortunate however, yet impaled as I was I attempted to converse politely with my famous and naked companion. She, for her part, shook her head and placed an exquisitely manicured scarlet-tipped finger against my lips and indicated that I listen to the surroundsound grunting and squelching of our erstwhile companions. In one corner of the bar I watched The Outcast as he was forced to partake in a vigorous cunnilingual conversation atween the silk-clad thighs of his Jenny Agutter-a-like (circa Logan’s Run) succubus. The drugged and pixie-lated eyes of the DJ met mine as she placed a sapphire-tipped finger onto another waxen cylinder and a strange unearthly howling began to issue forth from the . . .

Actually, lets pause at this point and go back . . . way back.

to be continued . . .

I am currently sitting in the creative lab space drawing and writing and playing with i phone apps for sound (sampletoy and loopy 2 primarily). I think I’m here to try to expand what it is I do into the realms of the multimedia, at least that’s what I claimed on my application… So far I’ve staged one event, last Friday 11/11/11, where me and my sometime collaborators Jamie McNeil and Una Ravensdaughter made an unholy (and very loud) racket inside beautiful Aye Aye books. We are called WIDOWZZZ and I think we must have made the diners choke on their vegan chocolate cake! People claimed to have enjoyed the experience but I know they were lying.
Other than that I’ve been cribbing furiously for a presentation/talk/performance I am giving tomorrow at the Glasgow Film Theatre (starts at 11 if you fancy it). Basically its an opportunity to bellow filth into cavernous Cinema 1! Yes!
Also I’ve been writing a thing called ‘The inland Castaways or Lord Jim and The Outcast of the Islands enter the Heart of Darkness’ which is a travelogue of sorts describing a friend and I’s recent trip from Glasgow to Paisley by rubber dinghy. We are called ‘The Sunday Conceptualists’ and that is the sort of thing that we do.. I’m going to post a section for your edification, enjoy! Jim x

THE INLAND CASTAWAYS

or

Lord Jim

and

The Outcast of the Islands

enter the

Heart of Darkness

The Atlantic! A vast sheet of water, whose superficial area covers twenty five millions of square miles, the length of which is nine thousand miles, with a mean breadth of two thousand seven hundred, – an ocean whose parallel winding shores embrace an immense circumference, watered by the largest rivers of the world, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Plata, The Orinoco, the Niger, the Senegal, the Elbe, the Loire, the Clydde, the White Carte and the Rhine, which carry waters from the most civilised, as well as from the most savage countries! Magnificent field of water, incessantly ploughed by vessels of every nation, sheltered by the flags of every nation, and which terminates in those two terrible points so dreaded by mariners, The Port of Glescoo on the Clydde, and the Benighted Burgh of Paislay, on the effluvial White Carte Water!

A Terrible Place

On the sudden death of my beloved father – Lord Wharrie Colquhoun, Thrice Noble – I found myself tasked with the onerous and sysiphian undertaking of sorting through the ejecta of a lifetime, consisting of a myriad curios, memento’s, postcards, philately, etchings (pornographic and otherwise), anatomically-correct dolls, mechanical Whippoorwill and so on. After weeks of effort I finally made it up to the attic to begin to deal with what I knew would be the very worst of my late fathers well-documented deviations from what are considered to be the norms. And so it proved to be, on the morning of September the Fifteenth I had already wrestled a number of trunks containing the remains of several ‘friends’ (both human and animal) into a series of shallow graves secreted on a distant part of our estates, when I came across a tightly-wrapped oil-skin packet. I was about to consign it to oblivion when my eye caught sight of an attached ticket bearing a hastily scrawled (in his own inimitable hand) note to – myself – the inscription read: “My dear boy, may I first offer my profuse apologies for involving you in my affairs, re the unfortunate ‘Crotchless Steam Boy’ debacle, and may I say that you handled your holiday at Her Majesty’s Pleasure with commendable stoicism (I had been buggered silly by my ‘cellmates’ every hour on the hour for six months) and that your forbearance will be duly rewarded (indeed it had been: I now owned half of *******shire). Now to business (my father was forever getting ‘down to business’), you hold in your hand an account of a trip, undertaken by myself and a dear friend who shall forever remain nameless, for reasons that will immediately become apparent, into the veritable Heart of Darkness! For at a time of my life where I could truly be described as desperate, I found myself in the environs of the benighted City of Glescoo. A terrible place (as you shall hear), and to be shunned by all right-thinking people, which of course, is how I found myself there in the first place! There is a secret lying at the heart of that terrible place, a secret so awful that I have been unable to speak of my experiences, and even to write them down was an act fraught with dreadful consequences! No my son, I did not die in my bed and was only placed there latterly by those whose names I dare not utter! Read on then, and I leave it up to you to decide whether the world is ready for a tale such as this . . .

The Burning Effigy

“We always knew it was wrong, what we did to the cats. But its not as if we killed them! They liked it!” This – the screaming headline identifying Glescoo’s daily scandal sheet The Burning Effigy – came past us on the barely discernable current, the blurred and photogravured eyes of the pasty-looking protagonists meeting and following ours. Looking up from our leaking dinghy we spied a group of lemurs shitting communally in the remains of a rusting Chinook helicopter. They looked at us with those depthless black orbs, and, as we rowed past one of them muttered “Fannies” in a flat guttural rasp, squirting a stream of liquid manure in emphasis. Luckily The Outcast received the bulk of the stinking ordure, not that he minded a jot as shit in all of its many manifestations held a special fascination for him. The sluggish White Carte Water seemed able to make up its own mind as to which way it was going as earlier that day we had been heading up stream, but now we were most definitely on our way back to its scrofulous mouth. Of course whatever way one was carried on this bloated stream one was destined (cursed?) to end up in the scabbed and lesion-dappled arms of benighted Glescoo!

God’s Cock Ring

The City of Glescoo is surrounded by an impenetrable wall of mountains known locally as God’s Cock Ring, indeed the inhabitants of this awful place are buggered, both by circumstance and by each other. As the Outcast and I made our way carefully along the shit-bespattered pavements of a bustling thoroughfare we watched in horror as various complicated couplings took place all around us! We later learned that it was fashionable in these parts to replicate the polymorphous social niceties of the perverse Bonobo apes of darkest Afrique, which charming specimens greet each other with a rutting penetration or slobber incontinently over the unmentionables. As we watched, an upstanding citizen knelt on all fours to receive a thoroughgoing anal-rimming from a portly dowager, and this but a passing helloo! The Outcast and I were careful not to meet the eye of passers by just in case we were mistaken for a casual aquaintance! (Still though, we looked forward to tipping the barmaid and the potboy enthusiastically…) But first, a short preamble describing the workings of this unsavoury state:
There is a Ministry of War, a Ministry of National Aesthetics and a Palace of Pleasure for the weekly group love-making of all law-abiding citizens. Because their ideal was an egalitarian social state, they suppressed all opposition so that there would be only one opinion. In Glescoo individual welfare is subservient to the welfare of the city. The state decree’s what is agreeable or useful, and everyone must accept this ruling as law. Individuals considered a threat to the National Ideal are sterilised. The State religion is the Religion of Natural Harmony, and in its honour the Ministry of National Aesthetics organises a yearly parade of young and beautiful artists. There is no money, because the State provides everything; however, nothing can be bought, sold or given away anyways. Artists must refrain from expressing personal emotions and must produce works, which reflect the communal ideal. We had spied in passing a square filled with the queer outpourings of this artistic elite, which seemed to consist entirely of cursorily-painted hollow plaster gourds and shoddy theatrical mis en scéne of indeterminate provenance. A group of artisans stood around moodily sipping from fluted golden goblets and counting each other’s patrons. We moved on quickly as we had been warned that potential patrons were routinely tarred and feathered, a form of flattery in those parts.