The installation

This installation, Meddle with the Devil, combines and synchronizes materials that attempt to simulate memory loss and fake memory syndrome employing a series of graphics, The New York Times newspaper logo, a large-scale mirror, black-out curtains and performance materials, as both live re-enactments and on video, which also explore and stage exaggerated public behaviours, personal relationships to the press and exchanges based on wealth and desire. These works make reference to and synchronize an array of materials, including Mike Kelley’s works Memory Ware and Day is Done, the video work of Catherine Sullivan, House/Lights by The Wooster Group, The Idiots by Lars von Trier, The Tenant by Roman Polanski, email scams, hazing rituals, newspapers quotations, marbled paper, explosions and biker gangs. It also references the town motto: Better Meddle with the Devil than the Bairns o’ Falkirk and an ongoing body of research into memory stimulated by working at the House and the High Rises, principally archives, recollections, mementos, etc.

For this installation I have produced a new film: Falkirk Voodoo King Kenny, with email scam and dog jokes (2008). The basis of this film is personal and public transactions, primarily the exchange of money, the exchange of ideas, news, power etc. It uses a scenario from a re-enactment of House/Lights, an experimental theatre work by The Wooster Group, the texts for this work commingles Gertrude Stein’s libretto Dr Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph Mawra’s film Olga’s House of Shame. In Stein’s text Dr Faustus sells his soul for the power to create electric light while in Olga’s House of Shame, a drug and narcotics ring kidnap a jewel thief, Elaine, to bring her into alliance with the gang’s leader Olga. The second part of the film sees the text from two email scams, suggesting the accumulation of massive wealth from bank accounts from deceased millionaires, which are in fact attempts to steal the identity of anyone who falls for the con, as well as the contents of their bank accounts. The two fictional authors of the emails, Ken Morgan and Emma Bambara appear as absurd characters in a performance to camera filmed at The Park Gallery, 18 April 2008, with the photographer Jennifer Beaton. (Further forms of transactions appear as FOR SALE or FOR RENT signs). The characters also allude to King Kenny and George Washington, two identities from Falkirk’s past. These two men displayed extreme forms of public behaviour based primarily on religious zealousness, mental health issues and financial hardship, they appear in momentary recreations on screen based on a system of absurd interpretations. The work also includes the personality of Jayson Blair, a New York Times journalist who was forced to resign from the paper when it was discovered his news stories were either plagiarized or fabricated, his scandal is used in the film to develop a relationship to his imagination, his false memory syndrome, here re-enacted as a display of the psychosis but not the (traumatic) false event, since the ‘original’ events never took place or were radically different from their ‘public’ presentation. Meanwhile this form also extends my interest in interpretation of events and their siphoning, deterioration and corruption through memory and its imperfections.

The “Bairn o Falkirk” is seen in an image of a female child taken from a Mike Kelley work, she mimics my performance material (make-up etc) as well as displaying a premonition of aging. She also alludes to a character in House/Lights and Dr Faustus Lights the Lights, Marguerita Ida and Helena Annabel, a female split identity who is created by the Devil to deceive Dr Faustus and to the Devil’s promise in the text to reverse time, allowing the old to become young.

An artist edition has been made for the show, which appears in the form of a playing card: one side is the Queen of Spades, the other the Ace of Spades. The card shows some of the absurd characters in the film and the other is a specially-commissioned knitted felt drawing by Lorna Shields which shows the word Heroin in display cases, another form in the show referencing the psychotic, hallucinations, desires, addictions, downfalls. (The felt is my Joseph Beuys moment in the work, we all have them.)

Lars von Trier’s work The Idiots appears as a connection to the email scam as well as the presentation of faked behaviours, the film sees a commune of individuals pretending to be mentally disabled in order to challenge social acceptance and tolerance of the spectrum of modes of public behaviour.

The installation is accompanied by references to gold, a colour and material which appears frequently in Callendar House. This explores further notions of wealth, transactions and value. The work is supplemented by a number of old jokes about dogs, the kind of thing you’ve heard before, a set-up-joke-set-up-punch-line scenario again looking at constructing fictional mental narratives and their surreal outcomes. It also relates to the character of a dog in House/Lights whose only line is “thank you” (a receptive, accepted/acceptable transaction) and the policy of barring dogs in the high rises (a prohibited, unaccepted transaction).

The final character in the film is Roman Polanski (no stranger to scandal himself and still wanted as a fugitive from justice by the US authorities) from the motion picture The Tenant, here his male identity assumes a female one (the previous tenant who died in the apartment) as his mental status deteriorates, mirroring her decline (and the fugitive status of criminals Olga and Elaine). This connects the work again to my live performance of House/Lights which sees, through the use of computer and sound technology, my voice delivered in a feminized pitch. This completes a cycle of traumas and scandals whether real or imagined that commingle through this project.

Of course I also think there is something interesting about gender in all of this.