PUGS IN SPACERecently discovered works on canvas

By Mavis Enron (1860 – 1949)

I’m delighted to introduce the first exhibitions in the Institute’s new headquarters.

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The new building has given us a lot more space to showcase art work including two dedicated areas, ‘The Gallery’ on A floor and ‘The Secret Corridor’ on D floor. The Gallery will showcase exhibitions by invitation or group shows which are chosen by panel selection. The Secret Corridor is a dedicated space for

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community groups and artists to curate and display work. It is tucked away at the top of the building but I encourage you to visit and look at the work, it’s worth the journey!

I am very pleased to show Simon Raven’s work in the inaugural exhibition in The Gallery. Simon works across a variety of media including performance, film and painting. His work is politically and socially engaged and full of dark humour. Simon is currently artist in residence at Camden Arts Centre in London. You can read more about Simon (and Mavis) in an interview I did with him in this catalogue. The Thursday group are a group of people with experience of mental health problems who meet up weekly to make and discuss art and to visit cultural

venues. The group visited the Institute to explore The Secret Corridor and have enthusiastically taken up the challenge of curating and showing their work in this new space.

Take some time to walk around our wonderful new building. As well as the exhibition spaces we have our permanent art work on display throughout the Institute. As I write we await with anticipation the arrival of our Institute sculpture, Ekkehard Alternburger’s “A House for a Gordian Knot,” a vast marble piece which will reside near the entrance to the building.

You can keep in touch with artistic activities at the Institute on our webpage www.institutemh.org.uk/-about-us-/art-at-the-institute

Dr Victoria TischlerArts co-ordinator, Institute of Mental Health

“The Gallery”The Gallery can be found on A-Floor immediately through the door next to reception.

“The Secret Corridor”The space is on the top floor of the building. On entering, take the stairs or lift up to D Floor and walk all the way through the open plan office area to the door at the other end, and through to The Secret Corridor.

Simon Raven (born Gotham, Notts, 1978) studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (BFA 2002) and the Royal College of Art (MA Sculpture 2004). Exhibitions include Sounding Off, Vitrine Gallery, London (2010); A Stranger’s Window, Nottingham Castle (guest curated by MOOT Gallery, 2010); Indoor Life, Walden Affairs, Den Haag, Holland (2009); Sex For The Disabled, AND Festival, Liverpool (2009)

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Directionsto exhibition spaces

Artist bio

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Victoria – So tell me more about your work Simon - You mean the Pugs in Space? I started making paintings of Pug dogs as gifts for my family, as I had no money, and I wanted to give them Christmas presents. I had a eureka moment watching TV or something, where I thought, ‘Pugs in Space!’ Then I realised it was close to ‘Pigs in Space’, you know the Muppets? Remember? Yes, so Pugs in Space. My mum and dad currently have two pugs, my granny has a pug, my sister has a pug who had a litter of pugs, so pugs have definitely informed my formative years, so that’s why pugs. I’m also interested in the specifics of the pug dog bulletin, which is a wonderful bi-monthly publication featuring poems and epitaphs and stories and things. Apparently there’s a myth, a legend that pugs originate in China, they were bred in monasteries to eat, they were eaten apparently and a monk travelled from deepest monastic China to the coast near Shanghai where the British area was, and he had some pugs with him. A lady who was convalescing, she wasn’t terribly well, its suggested she might have been depressed,

saw all these pugs and she said “what are these things?” and he said they were magical beings that had healing properties. He sold her a lie, and she bought pugs, and that’s how they originally, I think, came to Europe, through Holland. Then one of the British royal family bought pugs, rather than corgis. But anyway, there’s this kind of thing with pugs and healing in a sense. I enjoy painting them, partly because it’s fun painting things as gifts. There’s a sort of joy in knowing that the person I’m making this for will love this thing. Then they’ve also got the bizarre faces and features, and there’s a kind of thrill in trying not to make them look like me…. Or, you know, I’ve done ones before in the run up to Christmas when I’ve been really hung over or whatever, and the pugs have had bright red eyes, or they somehow embody something about the way I felt at the time of making. A boundary gets blurred. Occasionally I’ve managed to do some that just look like pugs and I’m really pleased with it, but then on the weirder end of the spectrum they kind of look a bit human too, and they all turn out quite ghostly as well, they’re kind of ghosts

of pugs, I think. I discovered an anagram of Simon Raven is Mavis Enron and I really like that name, so I decided that, because I felt a bit uncomfortable, as I daren’t define myself as a painter, but people like the paintings, so I started making them not as gifts, just as things. I thought, okay, maybe I could paint them under a pseudonym, so Mavis Enron, I thought, would be the perfect name. Now I imagine that perhaps she was a relative that I didn’t know, who was discovered in an ivy-clad mansion, tumbled down and surrounded by pug bones, this sort of Miss Haversham figure, with thousands of painting of pugs, some sort of turning into angels and butterflies and other things. And I dated her life exactly the same as Louis Wain, who was the obsessive painter of cats who was, you know, renowned, and Van Gogh, that was hopefully the kind of things that I draw upon, I like the idea of those artists – artists that have a sort of populism somehow, they’re popular work, they’re not just cerebral, although all artwork is, but it has an appeal that doesn’t have to come from that mind.

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The artist Simon RavenInterviewed by Victoria TischlerAt the Institute of Mental Health October 2012

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Victoria – So your pugs are anthropomorphic like Wain’s cats? Simon – I think, I can’t help but somehow... I started painting when I was a kid, I was obsessed with a cartoon called Garfield the cat, it was a bulbous cat and I thought it was hilarious, and I started copying that and they sort of morphed into gremlins, and I obsessed with drawing gremlins for a while and I think the ghoulishness of them, their whiteness links with that perhaps.

Victoria – So I know who Mavis is now, so do you always paint as Mavis or is it just the pug series? Simon – This is like the worst kept pseudonym ever because I tell everyone, but it’s the idea of a pseudonym that I enjoy, the idea of the name and all that. No, I do imagine, I like imagining I’m painting with a dead hand somehow, so it’s like a brush with time. I love standing in front of a painting in the Tate Britain in the medieval room - it is my favourite room of paintings, and the sense that you know hundreds of years ago someone actually stood with the same sense of touch and the sense of proximity, I don’t get that from anything else, I don’t get that from objects, but from paintings I do, and I love that idea, the idea of a hand reaching through time from another place to paint pictures now. I also think of sign paintings. I

love the painted signs on old pubs. I have an idea to open a pub called ‘The Pug in Space’. People could say, ‘Let’s go to the Pug!’ Part of the idea is that ‘The Pug in Space’ would be totally accessible, that would be part of its raison d’être, its great point. But obviously with character. You can go round London and there are lots of wonderful old, inaccessible pubs, but the new ones all seem to be, how can you take all the character away from an establishment where you go drinking? All Bar One is what I think of, there’s absolutely no character, but I guess that’s kind of the point of it, it’s like having character isn’t contemporary, places would rather be totally bland.

Victoria – So what’s happening at Camden Arts Centre? Simon – Oh right yeah, well the guy, I think the curators like to give the public a clear image of what’s happening, and so there’s a vinyl sign outside my room that says ‘it’s okay to be boring’, 2 until 4pm, and that I’m collecting boring stories. So people come and say “Oh you’re collecting boring stories?” and I generally say no. But I love the idea that suggesting what I might be doing gives licence to people to think about being boring in an art gallery. Early on in the residency a lady came in and said “I really want to tell you a boring story”, and she had as much charisma

as Dawn French or something, she wasn’t boring at all, she was absolutely magnetic, and extraordinary on camera. I also collected people shushing to cameras like that, ‘shhh’, which is something I wanted to do because Camden Art Centre (CAC) is sited in an old library… Early this year I started filming one word poems, inviting people who came to see my shows to say a specific word to camera. In Primary (artist studios, Nottingham) I made a short film where I invited people to say say Class to camera. Depending on their accent, the work became a portrait of the people who would come to see my show. That idea came about partly from reading something by a poet called Vahni Capildeo, and because the show was in an old classroom (Primary is sited in an old school) so the word Class had a particular, shared resonance in that context. Then I did a performance at a hairdressers in town, organised by a wonderful new outfit called ‘Gonzo Unit’. As part of the work I asked everyone to say “Cut”, so it was like each person was a director, cut, cut, cut, and then shh. So I was thinking I’ve got cut, class, shh, but unfortunately my camera broke, so I lost all my shh’s, so I might just have to, I don’t know, I can always shh to a camera myself, it doesn’t really matter. But when I ask a variety of people, slight changes in intonation animate the work. A series of different Shhh’s might become like white

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noise, a TV, or radio cutting between channels: shh, shh, just slight changes of pitch and emphasis. Some people do a very evocative shh, and some people do a very calming shh, and it’s interesting to me to see how people change the meaning of words.

Victoria – So you work across multimedia, so would you call that a performance that you were referring to, or is that film? Simon – I think, yes, performance is the thing that I’m most interested in, I think everything is performance at some point, you put pictures on the wall it’s a performance, you’re performing some kind of, I don’t know, social ritual or something like that. I got really tied up when I was younger, at University, constantly thinking what’s art, what’s this, what’s good, what’s bad, and eventually you just think, I’m going to do everything, I don’t do one thing over another particularly, I love looking at paintings, I love sculptures, I enjoy seeing a performance. I like music, and all those things. Everything you enjoy, I think you can also do.

Victoria – You were performing last night did you say? Simon - I did a performance at Nottingham Contemporary last night.

Victoria – But that wasn’t your band? Simon – No, but one of the organisers, an artist and friend called Jenna Finch, is also in the band I’m in - we’re a four-piece, called Flat Soufflee. Jenna organises a lot of performance and experimental music events, often at a really great bar, called ‘The Chameleon’, next to The Bell pub on Market Square. She also co-edits a publication, ‘Lump’, with a friend called David Eckersley. It was a Lump event at Nottingham Contemporary that I was performing in. I have invited Flat Soufflee to play at a

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party I’m holding for the end of my residency (on Halloween) at Camden. We’re sort of planning to do a tour, starting in Brighton, and going up through the country. But as it is we’re just in a never ending circuit, the same Nottingham clubs that will have us. But it’s growing, it’s nice, we did a festival this year, called Supernormal, which is a really tiny Festival in South Oxfordshire in Braziers Park, which is where Marianne Faithfull’s father set up a commune in the 50’s, and where Mick Jagger went when he was going out with her. It was there that he decided to become a sort of Lord. Supernormal was a great festival. I did all the applying for it, and I got a yes, which was exciting because it was the band’s first try at a festival. But then when I wrote to tell everyone we’d landed a festival, one of our members said “I’m not doing it, I don’t like festivals, I don’t like tents!”, so we came up with this thing called the The Cult of Flat Soufflee, where if one of us can’t or doesn’t want to play or whatever, it’s not a problem, if the others want to go on ,we just invite friends to come in as a guest, and we call that The Cult of Flat Soufflee. It’s made band life much more easy-going, takes the pressure off, and musically it’s nice having another person. We often work with a guy called Supersonic Ronnie, he might be autistic and he plays electric guitar, he just plays whatever, so we’re playing a song and

Ronnie just goes off on some extraordinary guitar solo and it somehow works because we allow it to. We don’t have any ego about music; we just enjoy doing it, being on stage.

Victoria – So could you define the genre? Simon – I think we’re DIY punk, post-punk maybe, that’s my favourite, I like the era of doing it yourself, making your own entertainment, that’s what we aim for, the touchstone, but god knows what we actually sound like!

Victoria – So going back to your residency then, so you’ve got this bursary, can you tell me something about that? Simon – Yes, the Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary is organised by Shape, a Camden based organisation, and it’s specifically for artists working with a disability, but you don’t have to define your work that way or anything like that. Shape is an organisation that helps artists who define themselves as disabled, and I knew the residency was going to be in Camden, so I applied thinking ‘What do I associate with Camden? The Freud Museum, Psychoanalysis, the market, Rock and Roll...’ At the time of thinking about my appIication I was reading a book by Slavoj Žižek, a psychoanalyist and pop-cultural theorist. One thing he said that I thought was really funny is that, now we live in a very permissive society,

where you can do what you want, with quite a hedonistic emphasis, the only reason to go to a psychoanalyst is to be boring. I was thinking, it’s quite a funny throw-away thing, but I’d just been to a really boring art show, with photos of cardboard, the artist couldn’t have been more boring if they tried, but then I started thinking, well maybe this is amazing, maybe it’s deliberately boring, maybe that’s its function! I think a lot of art from the last 10 years, or certainly the YBA art movement in the UK, can be described as prosaic. The underlying emphasis is that it’s expensive but throwaway, it doesn’t matter. Kind of meaningless, and I think a lot of art galleries, they have that, the kind of idea that everything’s fine, everything’s great, so long as the status quo is maintained it’s art, and that doesn’t really reflect my experience of life at all you know. Not that all art is like that, I think it’s just a populist thing. I’d be interested to make a direct comparison between the popular use of anti-depressants and the cultural shift that happened in the 90’s. I had anti-depressants when I was 19, I had a really bad patch at University, and it was like I had an extraordinary time when I was on them, but then coming off them was really bad. It’s not something I think about, I haven’t made that much work directly about it ,but that experience informs a lot of what I do, like everything really.

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Victoria – So you said extraordinary, what do you mean? Simon – It was like being on cocaine every day, but better, I felt like God.

Victoria – So, extraordinary in a positive way? Simon – Yeah yeah, well, positive but I was quite destructive, I was very promiscuous and you’re not supposed to drink when you’re on them but I did, and I was running in front of traffic and hanging off buildings, and I had no fear of death. I’ve never done that since. My friend tried to cut his fingers off on anti-depressants, and I’ve read since that’s not particularly uncommon. I had a lot of counselling whilst I was on them, but I felt high as a kite, so I don’t know how that works. Does counselling work when you’re really buzzing on drugs? Does it work when you’d generally consider yourself stable? I don’t know. Personally I don’t think it does, but then I think they saved my life, I was really really gone. But then I think, coming off them, I was definitely mad, I thought I was Van Gogh for a day once, I had a really really terrible time. I went to London to do a Masters, I managed to get a degree and I got straight into The Royal College of Art to do an MA, but the weird thing about that time was, people were saying they loved my work, at the time I was making casts of surgical

gloves, with wax and stones and things in them, and then cutting them back so they made these sort of strange shapes. Then I installed them on top of fragments of a tree that’d been blown down in a storm, and had been cut into sections. I took sections of the tree and had these hands appearing to emerge from them, like sleeves. It was successful work. Everyone that saw them, they triggered imaginative associations. So I got straight into the Royal College, but then when I got there I was coming off the anti-depressants and I was really bad, I couldn’t move, hair falling out, I was really confused. There was about a year of being really bad and then I went totally manic the next year, people thought I was on drugs and I wasn’t, I was just like, I inherited a bit of money and I spent it instantly. I became really promiscuous and drank a lot. I didn’t know what mania was, I had no idea what that symptom is, but then I’ve since discovered I have all the symptoms of hypomania. I have spells where I don’t really get out of bed, then I have spells when I’m running round like a fly, spending loads of money. I’m kind of in a bit of a manic phase at the minute, I’m spending all my money, but I keep living, I keep living by making art, I can make loads by just successfully doing that. It seems to keep me sane.

Victoria – You said hypomanic...Simon – I went to see a medical specialist a few years ago. I said I was at a party and I was out of character and aggressive, which I’d never been before. I felt really affronted by some people and I expressed it basically and then I got sent an email the next day saying, look we really think this is bad, and so I apologised and said I was kind of joking but, I know what you mean it wasn’t great, so I’m going to see a doctor about it, and I did. I didn’t find it particularly a good experience, he was smug, the guy I was speaking to, and there was a student in there sitting all relaxed and they asked if I minded this person listening in. It was quite a difficult thing for me to do at the time, I just knew I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to go back and I didn’t feel relieved. It was weird, I felt like I was trying to convince them of my experience, and I just felt like they thought I didn’t have any problems, or that I didn’t know what I thought. I had a massive panic attack when I left, but the doctor did say, oh you might have mild hypomania, we’ll give you some drugs, and I knew he hadn’t listened to a word I’d said, drugs are the problem. Prescription drugs.

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Victoria – So is that where you first came across the term hypomania? Simon – Yeah, I know when I was younger I did become depressed, definitely I was utterly depressed. Certainly, I don’t think it’s a disease, it’s something you learn out of habit I think, you can get into ways of thinking that are self-destructive and it gets worse and worse and worse, and I think it can get to the point where it becomes physiological such that you think you’re actually not capable of being happy because it starves that part of your mind. Nothing good comes from that place, you’ve just gone somehow. I’d be interested to know if I could have been talked out of that place.

Victoria – Do you think it’s a learned behaviour then? Simon – I think so yeah. I think in my case yes, but obviously you can only speak about your own experience. I feel quite angry and resentful that I was just put straight on this extraordinary drug, I hallucinated for two weeks when I first started taking it, I nearly crashed a car as well, I could have died on it.

Victoria – Is this the anti-depressant? Simon – Yeah, I had terrible dreams as well, extraordinarily terrible dreams, a lot of really bizarre things happened. Also, I could say though it was the best time of my entire life.

But you can say you’re only 21 once, and on anti-depressants.

Victoria – Yes, quite an extraordinary combination. Simon – It was kind of good, but I think having survived it and having survived its aftermath or continuing to survive its aftermath I have that as a reference point for hopefully exploring a new kind of experience, in such way that I am capable of at least recalling what it feels like to be absolutely centred, and to feel really really clear and confident. People were saying, oh we love your work, and I just didn’t know what they were talking about, I didn’t understand what it was that I was doing. I can talk about my work now and I can embody it, whereas then it wasn’t like that, it was just there out of nowhere. It’s really hard to describe, it’s like a blind spot, I have to assume that’s what the drug was.

Victoria – It sounds like a disconnection Simon – Yes, kind of like that. There’s an education workshop at Camden and a group of autistic children came in, and one guy in particular, who I think was really quiet, he had to wear a head protector to stop him banging his head, and he came into my room and he just went “AAAH” and he just started picking things up, like an electric guitar, and

performing on them, he’d totally got it and really got into it, it was really moving. His parents were there and I think what happened was rare, and they said, oh you know this room’s perfect for autistic people.

Victoria – Was that unintentional? Simon – Well people have said that I am, but I don’t know. I definitely have problems understanding emotion.

Victoria – You think you might be autistic? Simon – Yeah yeah yeah, I think so, in some way, definitely. If I was given that diagnosis it would be absolutely no surprise to me at all, it would actually be a relief, it would explain a lot. I don’t know how you go about doing that, or if it’s useful, I don’t know. I’m surviving OK.

Victoria – Do you see yourself as a disabled artist then? Simon – Yes, but I quite often make work that isn’t about that - just my scary imagination. I think I have been broken, totally and utterly. I’ve had experience of that, but I’ve survived. I like the idea of the social model of disability, where you might think of being disabled by barriers to access, rather than the medical model, by which you are defined by an impairment. That’s something useful to kick against.

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Victoria – So it’s structural more so? Simon – I started working. A friend and artist, Aaron Williamson, invited me after I finished my MA (Masters programme) to be in a film, with a group he founded called 15mm films. The idea was to form a group to make comedic films, where everyone involved would have experience of disability in some way, as an emphasis which was placed before any technical, or acting skill. The first 15mm film I made was in partnership with the Serpentine and icon gallery. Titled, ‘The Staircase Miracles’, the basic plot synopsis was that a golden staircase, of just three steps, had miraculously appeared in Hyde Park, and that a Jesus figure appeared on top of it, played by an artist called Katherine Araniello, with her Chihuahua as a sort of saint animal. And then a rabble of ‘disabled’ people came on a pilgrimage to see this miraculous staircase, in the hope of being healed by touching it. The work was a joke about access, and religious attitudes to impairment: firstly that there was a female in a wheelchair playing Jesus, who miraculously appeared at the top of a staircase, and secondly, sending up a traditional religious attitude toward disability, that if you have a form of physical impairment you necessarily need or want healing. The assumption is that you’re not godly and perfect, or complete, and therefore you must want to be healed by some miracle,

which is obviously totally insulting. I don’t think of my experience as negative, rather that ‘disability’ has informed and enriched my life. I really pity people who appeal to some idea of physical perfection. Before ‘The Staircase Miracles’, and my involvement, 15mm made a film called ‘The Electricians’, which was more to do with the medical model, the Frankenstein factor, and being electrocuted or re-animated by medicine somehow. Our most recent film was called ‘The Way Out’, made with Beaconsfield Gallery, which looked at the idea that there has been no explosive, radical disability art movement (in the way that there have been with relation to race and gender) For ‘The Way Out’, Aaron invited each performer to develop a character in an Angry Brigade type 70’s rabble, plotting to try and disable the world’s population with bombs. We were holed up under siege in a bunker on melt-down, which was fun. We also made a work for AND Festival in Liverpool, called ‘Sex for the Disabled’ where we made trailers for porno films, with each person coming up with an idea for their trailer.

Victoria – Was ‘Ship of Crips’ part of that? Simon – No, but I definitely wouldn’t have made ‘Ship of Crips’ if I hadn’t had the experience of working with 15mm, and Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello

star in ‘Ship of Crips’, so it’s like my small version of a 15mm project. I thought, okay I’m in Camden, and I’ve got this generous bursary, I want to make something that’s out of the gallery, what can I do? And then I thought, how did it come about? It was the title first of all. I was interested in the relationship between disability and folly/comedy, and wondering why a lot of people find disability, particularly mental illness, hilarious. It seems that if you say ‘retard’ in America, people will fall about themselves laughing, and that for many, disability is something to be mocked - when really what they’re probably trying to clumsily acknowledge is their own physicality. Then I was also thinking about the Renaissance practice of actually putting mentally ill people on boats, and setting them adrift, and how that practice isn’t too far off our current governments attitude, of just “oh, we’ll take away 40% of disability benefits and spend it on the Olympics, or whatever” which is just like being set adrift, there’s no difference. So I thought of the Royal flotilla, it must have cost a fortune you know, you just think, where are the priorities? I’ve just read that one of our local councils in Nottingham wants to spend a million pounds on a new scoring system for the cricket ground, at a time when there are closures of things that are really important and necessary, and you just think “yeah,

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lovely to have a new sign for Trent Bridge,” but you have to have priorities. If you’re taking people’s jobs and closing care homes and stuff, those things are more important, obviously, to anyone. So anyway, my work is partly politicised, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that. Going back to ‘Ship of Crips’, it was based on a book written by Sebastian Brant, with illustrations by Durer, which was a best-seller in 15th Century Europe, called ‘Ship of Fools’. I wanted to make a contemporary version. So I hastily arranged to hire an accessible barge, in 2 days, from a wonderful place called ‘The Pirate Castle’, in Camden Town. They offered us a beautiful, accessible barge, a skipper and crew for a very reasonable price. I bought loads of booze and food, Cava and canapés and things like that. Then the idea was that we’d sail down the canal in an indeterminate way, having a party. Our journey would be filmed, and that would be the work. The idea was partly informed by an exhibition of old photographs by Diane Arbus, of people on the fringes of society - poor and disabled people, whom she described in the massively outdated parlance of her day as ‘freaks’. I remembered being at meetings in the lead up to the exhibition, and hearing curators, who are paid with public money, guffawing about the idea of twins as ‘freaks’, and I was just thinking, you’re in a public institution and you’re that stupid,

you know? It’s happened since, very recently, when I’ve overheard another very established curator witlessly using the word ‘retard’ as a pejorative. I’d even told them the sort of work I make, what I’m interested in, and I just couldn’t believe it. If the same people openly joked in a racist or homophobic way they’d be sacked. But anyway, I read about Diane Arbus and how she equated disability with the aristocracy somehow, like if you’re that outside of society, you’re somehow as interesting. And that probably really reflected her own experience, in that Arbus was both those things: disabled and an aristocrat. So I thought, if it’s accepted among an artistic elite that there’s an historic link between disability and aristocracy, then maybe a film of a group of disabled artists just standing around having a drink on a barge is enough. People look at that sort of image all the time, in Hello magazine, and even in art magazines, there are pictures of rich, posh gallerists just having a lovely time. Or the royals or whatever. So I thought okay, as crips we don’t have to perform at all, we already are, regally wonderful, in the eyes of a lot of people. So we didn’t, we just dressed up in quite a half-arsed way in fancy dress medieval garb, alluding to ‘The Ship of Fools’, and went down the Regents Canal, eating, drinking and singing songs. Along the way we sang ‘God Save the Queen’, by the Sex Pistols, who were

filmed on a boat at the time of the Silver Jubilee, and other songs. I sang a Pogues song. I invited a friend, Rachel Dowle, to film and edit it all, who I gave no direction to at all, just the idea of being independently set adrift... In the end the work was edited like a series of videos on a music channel, such that there are six songs, titled, one after the other. This might have stemmed from the fact that one of the buildings I definitely wanted to go past as we rolled down the canal is the former TVAM building, now home to MTV Europe, which is an old, classic post-modern building on Regents Canal, designed by Terry Farrell. The one with the eggcups on the roof, similar to Salvador Dali’s museum in Figueres. It’s one of the things that when I applied, I said I’d done some research, and I know this building’s here and I really want to arrange this canal trip, and to make a version of the Ship of Fools. The work almost organised itself, it was weird, it was kind of meant somehow that it should happen, it was good. I find it excruciating the way that, because the work is just footage of people having a party, that it might seem very pretentious. If I’m doing a performance I’ll think about my relationship to the audience or camera and I’ll try to be objective with an idea and embody it, whereas in the ‘Ship of Crips’ it’s much more just a gang of friends having a laugh, with a context, but no direction.

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Victoria – So like you said it was just about having a laugh and drink? Simon – Yes, or rather, to question how it might be interesting (or not!) to watch other people doing that. I’ve thought about the work since, generally that’s the way I work: you’re given a title or maybe an image, and you work backwards, beginning with making the work, and then figuring out what it might have been about. That’s not always the case, but I like working like that. I tend to work backwards.

Victoria – So you don’t like the term disabled artist, but that’s clearly the focus of some of your work and you work with other people who might call themselves disabled? Simon – Yes, but strictly following the social model, so rather than being defined by a medical model of disability, where you’re defined by your impairment, in the social model you define the idea of disability as a social construct. Nobody is born disabled, but society makes some of us so.

Victoria – So is there a term you would use? Simon – Cripple, I think, I’m a cripple. I like cripple. There’s crip humour, which is used in disability studies, it’s like reclaiming the worst insult you could, as an empowered gesture, there’s no more empowered thing to do really than that. And I like the idea of really twisted

dark humour that’s not trying to pretty the world up or make it seem nice, it’s just an acknowledgement.

Victoria – It’s kind of comforting as well isn’t it? Simon – Yeah, cripple’s a biblical word too. As a kid, the only time I ever read about disability was in discussions about people being crippled, you know, in biblical stories. Miraculous healing was a really strong part of my imaginary world.

Victoria – My daughter asked me the other day what a leper was, what does it mean, they treat you like a leper? Simon – The idea of leper colonies used to terrify me, still does really. A lady came in when I was reading in my studio the other day, and she said, “so come on, tell me what your work’s all about” and I really just didn’t want to talk to her, I was annoyed that she’d disturbed me, and I just felt like she could have worked it out herself.

Victoria – Was this at Camden? Simon – Yes, I was annoyed because I could tell she was fishing for what my particular disability is, and I said I just don’t talk about it, I make art. Eventually I couldn’t help myself, I did end up talking about it, and it turns out she was recovering from depression.

I think I was getting closer to the more empowering thing which is where you just say, I don’t know.

Victoria – So the exhibition here primarily focuses in the Pugs in Space series? Simon – Yes, I might do a ‘Human Canape’ performance as well though, because I’m here anyway during the lunch break.

Victoria – Yes, the lunch break, because the delegate lunch will be served in that same space where the exhibition is. Simon – Is it like canapés and things like that?

Victoria – Yes, more like a finger buffet. Simon – Great. ‘Human Canape’ performances have gone down well when I’ve done then so far, and I think within this context it’ll be really unusual. But it fits with the work, in that for the performance I wrap my head in tin foil, so it looks sort of Lunar, like the moon, and then there’s punk looking cocktail sticks sticking out, with food on, that might suggest a sort of acupuncture for the head, or trepanning, and yeah, the idea of pain. This one seems to produce a lot of, it’s definitely humorous, I like the idea of doing something like that.

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Victoria – Is there anything you wanted to add? Simon – No, I think that’s a lot isn’t it. I don’t know if it’s useful to define yourself, to define, say, I’m a disabled artist?

Victoria – Well I thought with the bursary, and you were talking about disability I was wondering if that’s how you defined yourself ? Simon – Yeah, I think Shape have been really wonderful in allowing the residency artist to speak for himself. I think it depends on what I’m applying for. Often I’m applying for something that has an emphasis, and they have to ask if I have a disability.

Victoria – Well yes, on any type of form filling now, you have to declare it don’t you? Simon – Generally I always say yes and explain a little bit. I usually say I don’t really need any special treatment or anything like that, but I think for a lot of people that’s an immediate turn off. I know that from a friend who applies for things. You know it’s extraordinary for me that my friend who leads 15mm films, it’s so forward

thinking socially, it’s so advanced I think, and yet it’s so difficult to get funding, and so much crap gets funded. Yet this is really really pushing our social agenda very clearly and it’s bizarre that the work isn’t better known.

Victoria – Things don’t always work in a logical way Simon – No, they don’t do they. I think if you’re at the forefront of something then it is hard, that’s how it is.

Victoria – What are your thoughts about showing your work in the building? Simon – I love it, I think it’s great. My experience of depression and hypomania is not something that I’ve ever really talked about openly, as far as I know, and generally it’s just glossed over, it’s like, “oh are you alright? You’ve not had any problems have you?” and it’s like well, there was that time I was totally suicidal, five years of breakdown, you know. I think part of it is that people are repressed and incapable of expressing themselves. So for me, having a show in the Institute of

Mental Health is unavoidable, I’ve just done that for myself. I’m independent, I’ve learnt how to be independent, do what I want. It’s great, it’s lovely to be able to face people, when I’m asked what I’m doing it’s like, actually I’ve got a show in this lovely new Institute of Mental Health, and I’m really glad of it, to have something immediately to do.

Victoria – Well that’s good, because I must say I wasn’t quite sure when I asked you, I didn’t know how you’d respond really. Simon – I’m quite a political person really, I think a lot about politics, as does everyone I guess, on some level, and disability and poverty are the two things that are most maligned, and I like making work, and being involved in anything which is about that. But I’m not trying to make right-on work. I’m much more interested in the difficulties, the complexities. It wants to be humorous. It’s human work.

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The Thursday Art Group is a community arts group based in Nottingham who meet every Thursday to enjoy the process of making work and exhibiting. They visit exhibitions and other arts venues around the country and generate a vast amount of diverse and interesting work and have a great time.

Some members have developed the confidence to successfully complete college and university courses and

Ann Land

others have volunteered to pass on their skills to members on other arts projects. The group has grown to about fourteen members and became a constituted group in 2008. Since then they have applied for, and won, £13,700 in grant funding from different funders to develop programmes that broaden their knowledge of contemporary and historical art. They are all eager to be creative and attack art with a raw talent that is inspired by the things they see and experience in the art world.

The ThursdayGroup

18Ann Land

Lester Shipley

Jeff Beardsley

Lester Shipley

Wen

dy Allen

With thanks to the artists whose work we have shown in this publication