Fig-2 at Bicester Village – 29 October 2015

One cold October day a bunch of journalists and I and the whole of Gaggle were shipped off to the Baudrillardian Bicester Village where ’tis forever Christmas . . . 

Fig-2 is a great project taking place at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA). For fifty weeks in 2015 an artist is selected each week to create a new exhibition that is only in place for seven days. It’s a curatorial ultramarathon that has seen the ICA studio transformed into a dizzying range of different uses and appearances from a paint-splattered art studio to a gleaming white cube.

One of Fig-2’s sponsors is Bicester Village, and part of the deal was that four ‘Fig-2 artists’ would be asked to respond to Bicester Village in Oxfordshire and produce site-specific work there. From the forty-some Fig-2 artists so far the four commissions were a performance on October 29 by Deborah Coughlin and Gaggle (from Week 9 of Fig-2), a film by Annika Ström (Week 10), an immersive animation by Shezad Dawood (Week 13) and a sound and light installation by Vesna Petresin (forthcoming Week 46).

Bicester Village, Oxford

Bicester Village is a kind of open air shopping mall in the visual style of a village in a Christmas movie. When we arrived it was even snowing! (Courtesy of a snow machine). Regular villages have post-offices and pubs, or used to, but Bicester sells luxury goods, mainly designer clothes. Each of the major fashion brands has a house in the village but you can’t get a drink anywhere. It’s busy too. Aspirant Brits and affluent tourists flood in via the purposely built station, getting their Christmas shopping done early. They’re served by staff dressed like bellhops to mimic the American retail experience’s visual class distinctions. At 4pm the bellhops entertain the village in a dance performance.

Dancing and shopping have been paired before in art. In Gillian Wearing’s classic video “Dancing in Peckham” the Turner Prize winner dances uninhibitedly by herself without music in a London shopping precinct. It’s hilarious, but very few of the shoppers walking past even turn their head to look. Noone points and laughs.  Everyone is very British about it and ignores her. Presumably they think she is a crazy lady. There is a disparity between the unabashedness of the dancing and the refusal of the shoppers to step away from their purposive walking and shopping. The video is from 1994 so perhaps today everyone would be filming her with their smartphones, as they were the bellhops at Bicester.

Fashion and shopping have been a source of fascination for artists, as you can see at the current blockbuster show ‘The World Goes Pop’ at Tate Modern where pop artists like Andy Warhol both celebrate and satirize modern consumerism and its obsession with the latest thing. Art itself is subject to the vicissitudes of fashion and the reputations of artists often rise or fall in parallel with the prices their works command at the auction house.

Annika Ström’s work explores encounters between people. Just as Gillian Wearing’s video worked by dropping her into a public space, Annika Strom likes to set actors out into public spaces to interact with people. For Week 10 of Fig-2 she directed six actors to act in a lovely manner toward everyone they came into contact with. Her friendly film ‘Changing Rooms’ depicts two women who only meet at Bicester Village. Their friendship is in a sense based on the act of shopping, which you might see as a devaluation of their friendship or as an ennoblement of shopping!

Shezad Dawood created an animation that you view through eyeholes in a colourful shed-like circular structure in the centre of the Village. It depicts digitally generated characters from the animation he made during Week 13 of Fig-2 and in watching it the viewer enters a kind of virtual reality. Is shopping also a virtual reality?

We are looking forward to Vesna Petresin’s week at Fig-2 (from 16-22 November). Her sound and light installation at Bicester is playful and challenging. You enter a white phone box and are immersed in pink light with flashing lights running up and down like Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator, soundtracked by a female voice sexily whispering. It was too much for a couple I saw who emerged after barely seconds slightly perplexed. Art can take you to another (virtual) world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll like that world.

Deborah Coughlin’s work with her all-female choir GAGGLE is also challenging, with an explicit feminist purpose of female empowerment. In Week 9 of Fig-2 they performed in between readings of classic speeches by great women including Virginia Woolf. In Bicester each member of the choir carried a rock made out of paper and wire and sang ringing harmonies to her source of burden, “I wish my rock.. were you!” The choir carried their rocks through the crowds along the whole length of Bicester Village.

We fell about when we saw a dad successfully goading his children. “Those women must be so strong!” he said, provoking their incredulous reply “It’s fake rocks, Dad!”

Fig-2 continues until December at the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

AJ Dehany is blogging about every single week of Fig-2 at fig2loyaltycard.wordpress.com.

I was bad & I bought a suit..

Week 32 – Oreet Ashery (Anoxide + New Noveta) – August 10-16

Anoxide is this death metal band made up of four glamour models and the midget off game of thrones. DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA. DJENT DJENT DJENT. SHRED SHRED SHRED.

“Who likes babies?”

MUTHAFUCKKAAAAA

“So this one…’

OLD PEOPLE SHIT

“…goes something like this…’

OLD PEOPLE SHIT

“We are Anoxide. Let’s do this.”

Anoxide are heavy as fuck and bringing it in this weird garage down a ramp at the top of an art gallery. The drinks are free but it’s neat gin, fuck that. We’re all screaming and throwing each other about. It’s dark, it’s green light, it’s your elbow in my eye. Everyone’s screaming and whirling about, the guys are making a circle pit while the band tear it. It’s not loud enough, it’s bad, the singer is screaming and growling, hands in the air and everyone is jumping and headbanging and moshing out.

MUTHAFUCKKAAAAA

The guys are throwing each other around. They push into each other but never fall over. There’s the kid who was outside earlier playing this weird flute or something. He’d set out some kind of hamper and he was wearing Brighton-issue crusty crap. Here he’s the alpha dog of the pack, the one who starts and directs the trouble. He’s tossing rolls of blue cleaning paper across the space, up and across they go in bluegreen flames. Anoxide are heavy and crunchy as fuck. The low riffs turn into double time drums into screeching guitar solos into growling and chanting and djunt. Kill everyone and fuck every hole.

Then the lights go on, and it’s blinding. A door opens, and a couple of girls wearing red dresses are dragging poles through the crowd. Everyone’s still screaming and there is piercing electronic noise from the speakers. Performance duo New Noveta, the two girls in the sexy red, are panting and sweating and they look distressed as they fuck about with this bucket of fish and these long white poles that they’re trying to move in the bright white garage light. The crowd opens as they move through it and they take ages to move along. The fire doors open and they go up out of it. The faces in the queue outside gape in at us. Did this really happen? The fire doors shut.

Four snare hits and Anoxide are back. The lights drop to darkness again. Listening at home to this shit gives me a fucking headache and racing pulse, which is what it’s supposed to do. I’ve left it way too long to write this fucking thing. And I cannot read the fucking logos of metal bands. Are they deliberately unreadable? Look at this, their bandcamp says “lyrics written by anoxide” so it’s not just all growling but fuck me it has in fact literary qualities.

“Shout out to Stitches” he says, “Shout out to Stitches.” Stitches must be the one with the stupid flute who’s naked with a scarf round his neck. Everyone’s mates, we’re all having sex in the circle pit and sweating and dripping. We’re covered in sweat. Drenched. Wet. Wringing. Saturated. Fucking soaking. The band play an older one, it launches out then goes into a solo then a serious head banging riff and then the verse with the ride cymbal going over a chromatic descending riff. The guys are soaking, the roof is dripping, everyone is crazy, the garage is smashed up but sexy and beautiful. The riff opens up, we’re drunk and we’re dead.

This is exactly a year after I saw another death metal band do an art show. Unfathomable Ruination played a full set inside a soundproofed metal box containing no oxygen. I say ‘saw’, once the door shut you couldn’t hear or see anything. It was amazing. I really wanted them to die in that box. You’d be able to sense them all pass out as they used up all the oxygen and then the door would be opened and there would be a dead metal band.

Unfathomable Ruination played three days a week for a month in this box under the Gherkin in the shit City of London for ‘Box Sized Die’ as part of João Onofre’s “Sculpture in the City” project. On the last night of their residency they were allowed an extended set of 31 minutes and the bastards still didn’t fucking die. There are photos and there is a sound recording of this performance in the soundproofed metal box that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear. Naturally the gig is edited down to a length of 4’33”.

FURTHER READING 

Should I worry if my child is a goth?
Blackest material ever made created by scientists
Did dark matter kill the dinosaurs?
Crude Behavior: How Big Oil Tries to ‘Artwash’ Itself
The Little Death: Living and Loving as a Necrophiliac
The pleasures of METAL DRUMMING
There is a death metal band from Santa Cruz called PARASITIC EJACULATION

FURTHER FURTHER READING 

Anoxide and New Noveta performed on the opening night of Fig-2 Week 32/50 in which Oreet Ashery installed a beautiful white space and explored notions surrounding death and dying as part of her ongoing project Revisiting Genesis.

Fig-2 page for Week 32
Fig-2 interview with Oreet Ashery
FB event page for Anoxide at Fig-2
Video of New Noveta at Fig-2

The Parable of Yellow Black and White

I used to know an artist who only worked in yellow. Yellow paintings and yellow sculptures, all in grades of yellow and made in a yellow studio.

One yellow day a critic came along and said ‘This is not yellow work. This is really about black and white. It uses colour as a dialectic of shade. This work is not yellow. This work is black and white!’

Everyone heard this, especially the artist, who carried on making the yellow works.

Some years later I went back to the yellow studio, and was surprised to see no yellow works anywhere.

‘What happened to yellow?’ I asked. ‘All these works are black and white.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said the artist, ‘the works that I used to make were black and white. These ones are yellow!’

(Indirectly inspired by something in the discussion at Fatos Ustek’s seventh Fig-2 curatorial seminar)

Week 31 – 3-9 August – Broomberg & Chanarin

“It occurs to me to somehow reimagine the bouffon week as a punch and judy show involving Trump, Berlusconi and Boris. How would that work?”

Part one: Punch & Judy (I)

ENTER PUNCH

PUNCH    Mr Punch is one jolly good chap,
He left his baby in the back of a cab!
After a country supper he came back
But the foetus had turned into a pig!

PIG        Oink, oink, oink!

PUNCH    That’s the way to do it!

ENTER JUDY

JUDY    I’ve just seen the news on twitter!
Naughty Punch, you had better
Explain what it is you’ve had for dinner —
What have you done to my poor baby pig?

PUNCH    Calm down, dear! I’ve only done to this little victim
What I’ve been doing to the country since the election!

ENTER CROCODILE

CROC    Snap! Snap! Snap! goes the telephoto lens
Starving the poor to feed up our friends!
Let’s hope this party never ends!

THE CROCODILE EATS JUDY

CROC     Snap! Snap! Snap!
PUNCH    That’s the way to do it!

ENTER SCARAMOUCH

SCARAMOUCH    Bunga! Bunga! What, again!
I’m not a Saint, you can tell by the tan!
It’s better to like beautiful girls than be gay
Ciao Pretty Polly, come stai?

PUNCH    Scaramouch, do you do the fandango?

SCARAMOUCH    Solomente for the love of Italio!
I had to a-save it from myself
Tutto for the love of obscene wealth!
The right-a man for the right-a jail!

ENTER THE DEVIL

PUNCH    There’s the Devil, Dodgy Vlad!
All his friends are in a body bag!
See him riding on a horse’s back —
Noone’s told him the nag is dead!

DEVIL    Spasibo! Now I am the Tsar!

PUNCH    Not so fast, you King of Vodka!
I’ve already planned for my successor
We’ve had cloned Margaret Thatcher’s Vagina —
Our mates did it cheap, it’s made in China!

MARGARET THATCHER’S VAGINA EATS THE DEVIL

PUNCH    That’s the way to do it!

Part Two:  The Bouffon

The establishment has always permitted a circumscribed degree of satirical attack as a means of enabling the downtrodden to let off steam. Historically, satire has always been bounded by either time (a certain day of the year in which “natural orders” were overturned) or person (only a specified highly ritualised figure is permitted to cross certain lines). The Romans had Saturnalia and the whispering slave on the triumphal chariot, medieval power structures had their jesters, King For A Day and Lords of Misrule.

Local permutations of the medieval jester vary, and for Week 31 of Fig-2, Ollie Broomberg and Adam Chanarin brought one of them back to life. The ICA studio became a ‘green screen’ studio inhabited by a bouffon figure, a grotesque lumpy hunch-backed clown. The Bouffon or ‘Dark Clown’ originated in medieval France. The undesirables of society, riffraff de l’autres, would be exiled from the town and forced to fend for themselves outside the city walls and starve in their own filth and destitution, much as benefits claimants and refugees are forced to by the Department for Work and Pensions. The beautiful people would allow them back for one day of the annual hock-tide celebration, when the Bouffon was invited to the Royal Court with explicit permission to ridicule the authorities. And this is where the problem begins, with regard to Week 31 and the problem of satire as a whole. The bouffon in its first incarnation is officially sanctioned satire, which is an oxymoron. The bouffon would have to be careful not to upset them too much. The pleasure of a pinch, but no blood.

A camera filmed the bouffon and presented her on a TV screen with a background taken from the Imperial landscape that surrounds the ICA studio: the Mall, Downing Street, Horse Guards Parade, Buckingham Palace; an area characterised by daily military parades and other displays of state power. The bouffon mimed bumming the police and the Beefeaters, jumped in and out of traffic, and generally pratted about. A particular highlight was the bouffon pole-dancing around the Duke of York Column behind the ICA. You probably don’t need more than about twenty minutes of pelvic thrusting in any context comedic or otherwise but to its very great credit the performance went on for two hours. Was it funny? Yes, within the bounds of what we were there to enjoy, which was satire, and it has been long observed that satire doesn’t have to be funny to be effective. Not being five years old, we don’t actually find pratfalls funny, but we can contentedly agree to find them funny in the context of appreciating their implications in the company of a group of like-minded people who have come to appreciate the same thing.

Was it effective satire? This is where we run into difficulties. Given the history outlined above, it is surely no coincidence that the bouffon’s style of ‘satire’ is limited to physical comedy. The bouffon’s comedy is literally silent, or rather, mute. The bouffon comes from a tradition of not wanting to bite the hand that feeds it. For satire to be successful, for it to be satire at all, it can’t just be mocking. But the bouffon is limited to mocking, restricting to poking fun but unable to construct the ironies necessary for satire to occur. The word bouffon is appropriate; it comes from the Latin verb buffare, to puff, to fill the cheeks with air. It just gives us hot air. The bouffon is intended to be provocative, to poke fun at everyone in society and reveal uncomfortable truths, but I’m not convinced. Not incidentally, there was something very comfortable about being in the studio that day. The police officers and guardsmen representing the establishment were, of course, oblivious to the Bouffon’s presence; tucked up in the ICA’s cosy home on Pall Mall, we all pretended to be doing something a little daring in the very heart of the establishment, but the fact is none of what happened there was projected outside the walls. It was the other way round; the establishment was projected in.

Interestingly, Broomberg and Chanarin’s new film work Rudiments (currently on display at the Lisson Gallery) develops the themes raised in the Fig-2 show adding the missing element of direct interactivity. Instead of poking fun at soldiers digitally overlaid via green screen, the film documents a group of military cadets whose rigorous training of martial codes is interrupted by the Bouffon’s comic pratfalls and play. The conflicted reactions of the young soldiers-in-training gives a better illustration of the possibilities of the bouffon than the green screen perhaps could.

Part Three: The Buffoon

A few weeks after the Bouffon’s cavorting at the ICA, it emerged that the four-dimensional lizard-made-of-ham Prime Minister David Cameron“put a private part of his anatomy” in the mouth of a dead pig’s head while he was at Oxford during an initiation ceremony for a drinking club called the Piers Gaveston Society. It’s the kind of revelation that will rot your teeth and straight up give you Type 2 Diabetes. My favourite thing about this story in a crowded field is that Charlie Brooker felt obliged to issue a disclaimer that he’d known about it when he wrote Black Mirror in 2011 in which the Prime Minister is forced to fuck a pig live on television.

But even the pig is itself a blind, a sideshow, something George Osborne for one is quite happy for us to laugh at (witness his calculated snigger when asked about the revelations). Lawrence Richards (“What the British are really laughing about”) and Rob Fahey (“The PM, the Pig  and musings on Power” both quickly published impressive pieces that Joanna Walters (“Hazing, #piggate and other secret rites: the psychology of extreme group rituals”) also developed. They outline how Pig-Gate fitted into a tradition of “hazing” in networks of power. Throughout history exclusive and extravagant elites have bonded through rituals of humiliation. Revelations are held in check by a model of mutually assured destruction if anyone’s secret came out. The system is also upheld not so much by the threat of revelation as the curious fraternal bond of secret knowledge; possibly even a post-traumatic survivor’s mentality, particularly following instances of bestiality and homosexual rape in these rituals.

It has emerged recently that there was a rash of child abuse being committed by politicians in the 1980s, and that this was hushed up ‘in the interests of national security’. Richards examines how paedogeddon being committed by politicians was kept secret and how for the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher this was useful as a way of holding power over others by holding their dark little secrets over them. She was a real nice lady, the Baroness. As with the Pig Gate revelations, it’s remarkable how no-one has questioned the truthfulness of revelations of a cover-up about paedo rings in the upper echelons of the Tory political class in the eighties. It’s just accepted as a fact, with a bit of a tut, but it’s abstract. And it is all so, so much worse than any of us ever imagined. I mean, secret cabals of powerful men (and so far as I know we are mostly talking about men) colluding in concealing child abuse and murder? Really? The stuff of paranoia, surely. Well, no it seems not.

What is satire to do in the face of such dementedly awful realities? The prurience of the general public as presented in Black Mirror was dutifully reproduced by all us lot in our glee over PigGate, which is the main thrust of that show: Brooker wasn’t really satirizing politicians (who can do that themselves, after all), he was satirizing us. We’re left bitterly and humorlessly maundering on the street corner or screaming into the void of the internet, irony evaporated, stuck with raw sarcasm. It’s not just the bouffon. It’s the mode of the age, borne out of resignation and the impossibility of outdoing reality at its own self-satirizing absurdism.

Dan Brooks, writing about “Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art” sees sarcasm as the dominant aesthetic of our age: “a contempt so settled that it doesn’t bother constructing ironies”. He discusses a passage of ‘snark’ a ubiquitous form of internet writing that participates in sarcasm “typically by adopting the derisive tone of satire without the complex irony… There’s no insight here to raise this irony to the level of satire. There is only mockery.”

But poor old snark is all we’ve got left, isn’t it. Satire is once more the preserve of the establishment just as it was in the age of the Bouffon. Mark Fisher (“The strange death of British satire”) deals with satire’s history in the twentieth century (or part of it). He traces the emergence in recent decades of the sniggering, knowing-yet-adolescent non-humour which now defines political light entertainment like Have I Got News For You and This Week and roots it in the survival techniques of pupils at British boarding schools, “self-mockery… used to ward off the threat of an annihilating humiliation”.

The star exhibit here is Boris Johnson. His antics are carefully calculated to look anti-establishment but serve to entrench it by neutralising criticism, dissolving it in mild self-mocking buffoonery shorn of issues of importance, full of a distracting power. The pseudo-satire of Bojo neutralises real satire. As in medicine, a little dose of the real thing helps us develop immunity. Boris is like satirical small-pox. Actually, to think of it, it was actually cowpox that Jenner injected people with to immunise them against smallpox, so in fact Boris Johnson is political cowpox.

Had Fisher cast his net further back in time to capture the likes of the bouffon he would have seen that the establishment have always taken a harmlessly low dose of satirical poison to inoculate themselves against true revolution. If it is true, as he claims, that truly satirical voices thrived as never before in the middle decades of the twentieth century, well, what we’re seeing now is nothing more than hammy, lizardy hands massaging it firmly back into its traditional box. The buffoon triumphs over the bouffon.

Satire as a force had eaten itself by the time Henry Kissinger, who as National Security Adviser to Richard Nixon had Vietnam napalmed, won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Saudi Arabia, a country that practices sexual apartheid, religious oppression, summary beheadings, and is about to crucify a child, a country that doesn’t even drink, has won its bid to become head of the UN Human Rights Council. This is like putting Gary Glitter in charge of a children’s party (or David Cameron in charge of the pig-feed). This stuff is irony writ larger than it’s ever been writ. There’s a room full of comedy writers somewhere outside the universe trying to outdo each other, but they all work in politics.

Part Four: Punch & Judy (II)

Jeet Heer (“Donald Trump’s Comedic Genius”) describes how presidential hopeful Donald Trump isn’t just a joke, but is a serious comedic talent. He has mastered disruptive comedy and the stand-up takedown in the comedy of insult. He is a clown who acts perfeckly outrageous but who “suffers no punishment—indeed, goes from triumphant poll to triumphant poll”, a punishment evading Pulcinella (Punch) self-describing himself as a “non-politician” in order to inveigle himself into politics. Like our own Jeremy Clarkson, he deflects criticism of his bigotry and misogyny by maintaining that he’s not politically correct. It’s just a joke, like on top Gear! Broomberg and Chanarin’s Bouffon is described as a ‘dark clown’ but it’s really acts like Donald Trump who are the dark clowns, “using laughter for sinister ends” to voice bigotry rather than interrogate it. Satire eats itself and shits out establishment heterodoxies. Funny that.

Just as Trump’s ‘humor’ actually leaves establishment assumptions untouched, you know that BoJo wouldn’t take the piss out of the changing of the guard like the Bouffon did at the ICA. Whereas in Italy Berlusconi cocks more of a direct snook at establishment symbolism because bribery and bureaucracy are part of the everyday life experience of Italy, so people really do object to establishment symbolism. Whereas the UK as a nation will happily celebrate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge having unprotected sex.

Fisher describes the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi’s analysis of Sylvio Berlusconi: “Berlusconi’s popularity, Berardi argued, depended on his “ridiculing of political rhetoric and its stagnant rituals”. The voters were invited to identify “with the slightly crazy premier, the rascal prime minister who resembles them”. Like Johnson, Berlusconi was the fool who occupied the place of power, disdaining law and rules “in the name of a spontaneous energy that rules can no longer bridle”.”

In the not-quite-discredited-but-are-you-really-still-teaching-this Freudian structural model of the psyche based on the id, ego and superego the id is the pre-socialized instinctual impulsive driver of the libido and the dark slave of the pleasure principle that is held in check by the critical and rational agencies of the ego and superego.

Berlusconi and Trump are like Punch. Pure walking id, totally dissociated and always evading the consequences of their actions. I have to quickly tell you the synopsis of Harrison Birtwistle’s horse-scaring ‘60s opera Punch & Judy, because it is insane. Punch is rocking his baby, then throws it into a fire. Judy finds the charred baby and freaks out. He stabs her to death, then rides off on a horse to seek Pretty Polly who rejects him, and he murders the Doctor with a giant needle and the Lawyer with a massive quill. Polly rejects him again, and he murders the narrator by sawing him in half. He has nightmares about a satanic wedding with Pretty Polly. He goes to the gallows for his crimes but tricks the hangman into hanging himself. Pretty Polly reappears and they sing a love duet around the gallows, which is transformed into a maypole.

Like bozo BoJo, and the late Jeremy Clarkson, Donald Trump is an overindulged poster boy for the disruptive comedy of ‘plain speaking’ that prises apart but paradoxically reinforces the status quo. It does this by making politics look completely ludicrous and hopeless but without offering the possibility of better. In that sense it’s more related to Banksy’s sarcastic approach but coming from an establishment rather than anti-establishment perspective. How ridiculous it is, quoth-a, to aspire to change this leviathan. It is what it is. Let us laugh. Now vote, and we can promise you tax breaks for billionaires. The joy will surely trickle down!

Theirs is a comedy of disruption, not just that but Trump exactly fits the Borat model. Like Punch he is never punished for his outrages. Cameron too will make it through Pig-Gate largely intact and if he is remembered for being the Prime Minister That Fucked A Pig then history will have been kind to the PM that presided over the Bedroom Tax, taking away children’s school meals, privatising the NHS, tax breaks for billionaires.

Given that satire is now impossible because it’s been neutralized by buffoons and overtaken by events, we are going to need a sophisticated signalling system to tell us when satire is taking place. In Monty Python ‘SATIRE’ flashes up on the screen.  But if there is one thing we have learned from PigGate, and which Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle presaged in his satire of satire “What is satire?” it is that for any satire to be satirical it will require the involvement of an animal. “A toilet bowl full of goats? Satire. A limpet shell with a limpet in it? That’s doubly satirical to the point where it could almost be too serious. A crow inside a swift? Yes, that works: they’re two different animals. Sausages? Not on their own, no.”

Postscript: STATE BRITAIN

Broomberg & Chanarin’s depicition of the Whitehall government area of London reminds me that the Whitehall area is suprisingly unfamiliar in art. I can only think of one other major example, but it is a masterpiece. Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007) was a meticulous reconstruction a ‘peace camp’ that protester Brian Haw had built up in Parliament Square from 2001 until in 2006 the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibited unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square and Brian Haw’s protest was removed.

To my mind one of the greatest, most fist-pumpingly awesome Eureka moments in the history of art must be the moment Mark Wallinger noticed that the one kilometre exclusion zone exactly bisected Tate Britain. Marking this with a line on the floor of the galleries, he positioned State Britain half inside and half outside the border.

Thanks to Alix Mortimer

Week 27 – July 6-12 – Karen Mirza – The Ectoplazm of Neoliberalism

“This is yoga. Lots of smart people do it instead of going to church.” – Stewie Griffin

Each Wednesday they announce the following week’s Fig-2 artist. Today they’ve announced that next week the ICA studio space is going to be given over to physical activities. Like zumba and yoga, and dancing. Sounds dreadful, I know. When I was at school the PE teachers gave up on me and just let me sit in the corner of the gym reading Ulysses. I used to go orienteering, which is running around a forest with a map and compass racing against other fans of sci-fi and fantasy, but even this physical activity counts against any claim I might have on any kind of sporty jock cachet.

Apart from a ten-kilometre ‘fun run’ I did two years ago I don’t get any exercise. I no longer go running. Seriously, I don’t even run for the bus. I didn’t do a stroke of training for the fun run and I did the run partly to raise money for charity but mainly just to be ironic. Several people refused to sponsor me because they didn’t believe for a second I was going to do it. But I done it, not only that but I dressed up as a fairy with wings and a pink codpiece. I even live-vlogged it as I done it, and I raised £240.

Fun. I started being physically sick after two kilometres and continued to chunder repeatedly while sweating out my whole pituitary gland for the next three kilometres. After that it was sort of okay. I finished within twenty-four hours and noone had to call out Mountain Rescue (the run (okay, jog, bit of walking too) was through central London).

I wouldn’t blame you if you were not entirely amazed, therefore, to learn that I have never participated in the activity known as yoga. Or rather, this was the case until Week 27 of Fig-2 when as part of her week at Fig-2 Karen Mirza organised a session of Kundalini Yoga. Of course I had to go along. Valerie Solanis said that a man will swim through an ocean of snot if he thinks there is a friendly pussy on the other side, but a writer will drink the same ocean of snot if they think there might be a good story at the end of the draught.

Fig-2 Week 27 was Karen Mirza’s first solo exhibition in two decades. I don’t mean she’d been coaxed out of retirement for one last mission like in a cop movie. She usually collaborates. In her Fig-2 interview with Fatoş Üstek she says her relationship with her collaborator is strong enough now that they can do their own things. That’s okay. In the film Coffee and Cigarettes Iggy Pop tells Tom Waits that ever since he quit smoking it’s you know okay and you know now he can smoke! Bam! No, I’m sure they’re fine.

The week was called “The Ectoplazm of Neoliberalism” and involved private and public conversations via astrology, occultism, radical politics and yoga. In this it bears a similarity of content to Suzanne Treister’s Week 14 in which we explored HEXEN 2.0’s cybernetic history of everything according to conceptual tarot cards. Similarly Karen Mirza employed a range of approaches to explore her themes: silkscreen print collages, collaboration, borrowings from the archive of the College of Psychic Studies, her own desk and using the space as an office, and of course the yoga session, which I’ll get to.

It was an interesting week but sadly I missed the crucial event for the last day, the “Workshop of Ideas” that would have explained everything about what was going on and what the “Ectoplazm of Neoliberalism” is all about. Karen Mirza says it will take her two years to unpack what happened during the week. But I don’t know what happened because I missed this bloody key workshop.

Why did I miss it? I was volunteering at a soup kitchen after driving a school bus full of orphans to a children’s opera. In which I was singing. To raise money for charity. In drag. Okay, I went on my friend’s stag do and got trashed on a canal-boat resulting in Sunday being devoted to a £90 hangover, if you know what I mean. I’m definitely too old for this stuff. Who gets married in their mid-thirties anyway? You should get it out of the way in your early twenties for the sake of the physical health of your mates.

I did make it to the yoga session on the Thursday though, remarkably. Remarkable not only because it was in the morning at some horrendous hour like nine after a boozy band rehearsal the night before, but because this was during a tube strike. A sign on the door said noone would be admitted after 9.15am. It was.. oh dear.. or was it? The door opened. I was in. For however briefly, I was now a yoga bear.

“Siri Sadhana Kaur encourages others to experience themselves as joyful instruments of expression and transformation.”

Now, I am not naturally a joyful instrument of anything. When my batterie of phone alarms and clock radios prises open my eyes in the morning, I force them shut again for as long as I can take of Hell’s bells and overly entitled twats being twats on the Today programme. I get up with complete loathing of self and world to swallow the bitter dose of hemlock that is another day of the futile slow death that is existence. From that moment on it gets worse until I can take no more of it and go to work, where my brain is slowly petrified in ennui and incompetence until I can take no more of that either and go home, whereupon I drink a litre of whisky neat from a Doc Marten boot and take prescription drugs and crystal meth until I can’t feel my feelings any more and then I strangle myself with my own hands until I pass out, then next day when the Alarm Chorus goes off I do it all again. At weekends I do the same but in high heels.

“Come back to the breath, come back to your inner experience. Just listen to your breath. Kundalini yoga is not yoga without munthra (mind, cut across) – cutting across the frequency of our mind against those thoughts that block us. Munthra cuts through it and creates a different space.”

Yoga leader Siri Sadhana Kaur was leading a chant when I crept in to become the tenth yogist. I peeled off my skinny jeans, put on some baggy pants I’d borrowed from a competitive eater, and lay down on the floor. For the next three hours or days, Siri led us on a journey into our own mind-body, releasing mental and physical blocks with a combination of soft speaking, guitar, breathing exercises, lying down, and a massive gong.

“Through the repetition we don’t understand the world, it takes us out of the logical explanation of things, puts us into a different space. Training the mind to come into a different frequency rather than did I do the washing how was the traffic this morning. The invitation right now coming into a place, the frequency of another state of consciousness. Through munthra calling in that, we implode to explode. The frequency that we put out is the intention that we create and set within. To tune myself to the bigger aspect of who I am, that capacity, potential ultimately. That’s all kundalini energy is, our destiny, our gift, why are we here, are we an ant, or do we have something greater.”

Kundalini Yoga is a Raj/Royal Yoga that was brought out of secrecy in the sixties by Yogi Bhajan (the famous cartoon picnic basket whisperer from Jellystone Park). It’s one of the more far out forms of yoga. Bikram in its American bastardization is a kind of group boil-in-the-bag intended to make you look and feel like a kipper on steroids. Kundalini is philosophical. It’s holistic and uses cardiovascular exercises that seem gentle but are cumulatively tiring: stretching postures, and lots of lying down that relaxes you after all the cardio, and breathing and meditation to calm your special little insane mind. These together with the channeling of the kundalini energy through mantra give many people a sense of greater physical and mental clarity, energy and focus.

The word yoga means union, and the philosophical and mental elements of the practice are often overlooked and the whole thing reduced to a bit of rolling around on mats during your lunch break to make you feel a bit less worse about having ordered takeaway again the previous night while finishing off the last season of Dexter.

“In yogic and spiritual traditions we each have a unique and spiritual gift. Are we gonna direct and traject our lives and align with that greater aspect or are we gonna get caught up with our own agenda? Through the sound journey you allow that frequency of consciousness and bigger vibration of consciousness to come into play. So we’ll take a deep breath now. We come into sound, making noise, just vibrating. A sigh. Sighs. It’s just nature’s way of detoxing and releasing.”

Life. I sigh all the time. The deep wearied sighing of a boy-man who knows he is wasting his time. My sense of futility is so overwhelming that in order to distract myself from it I fill up my life with as much crap as I can possibly take. A gig or a show or an event every night, crazy projects like writing a haiku a day for two years or an essay for every single week of Fig-2, a couple of bottles of wine a night, a full-time job, learning Italian on Duolingo, books, films, music, being in two bands, constant commuting and never stopping for a minute, just to block out the abiding awfulness of it all — an ironically joyous and life-embracing response to an emotionally crippling inner nihilism.

There is a cult of busyness which a lot of clever modern people are members of. People who are seemingly too busy doing their job to do their job are just the tip of the human iceberg floating towards the shambling Titanic of collective mental health meltdown. We’re all so busy being busy. As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around for a while, you could miss it.” Only we’re far, far too busy to dream of taking the day off.

“With munthra you’re allowing space through the breath you create that capacity to release space and open up to the bigger you. A different ok this is who I am right now. Keep open to that invitation to yourself, through the munthra – truth is my reality – rather than all the other conversations, history, etc. Truth truth truth, I am truth, I identify with truth. That’s all you’re repeating, it’s called jaffa and through that we create a new reality. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Fill into those cavities, those spaces within. Soften, then exhale, let yourself go. Inner massage through the diaphragm, exhale, feeling that internal massage. You might start to already feel the tension in your body that’s ok. And exhale.”

I enjoy an internal massage myself, like any red-blooded male mammalian metrosexual. But the demands yoga makes of you in breathing and stretching are as strange as dancing when not completely plastered. Self-consciousness and the sense of ridiculousness have to be overcome, which is not just difficult in itself but because these things are crutches. Embarrassment is a way of avoiding having to do things at which you might be good. Noone wants to be good at anything because if you’re good at something you have to keep being good at it otherwise you fear everyone will be disappointed, though really it’s just you that’s disappointed. Noone else cares.

“Through the munthra, through the posture, the breath, align yourself to truth. To your inner wisdom. Throughout this session we’re gonna start to do some postures, transformative postures from a master, use the munthra and then go into relaxation and then have a gong. So you get to experience a greater sound that cuts through the mind and the mental habits. By the time we’ve done the physical postures they’re there to exhaust you to take you into a transformative space.”

I have no inner seriousness at all. This is why I’ll never win the Nobel Prize. That, and because I know nothing about Physics. My natural mode is ironic and tricksy, which is another defence mechanism that has experienced a resurgence among Millennials or Generation Y, or basically among all of us born into the howlingly absurd world of Reaganomics and reality television.

Millennials are often afraid to express a firm opinion on anything in case someone gainsays it and they feel embarrassed. Instead of saying you like the new Nob Jockey album you describe it a bit, and if someone says they hate it then you hate it too. Until then there is the Schrödinger’s Cat situation of ironically detached fence sitting. This is a natural mode of adolescence anyway, but it’s uniquely perpetuated by digital natives sitting on all of the information in the world and unable to comprehend it. Everything levels out, and as it is in Brecht and Weill’s dystopian protoprelapsarian sin city Mahagonny “everything is available.”

“The gong is a deeply powerful sound unlike any other sound. A guitar string is plucked, there’s a peak, there’s a sound maximum then decay of sound. Just as sound decays the gong has an overtone of harmonic that confuses the mind that gives the trans-spatial experience. Expansive self to come alive. Allowing the energy bodies. We’ve got ten energy bodies in philosophy and you’re allowing those energy bodies to really come alive. Whenever someone walks in the room you meet their aura. Nine seconds if you’re in an interview and it’s based on this meeting. This is what the gong means.”

The gong is genuinely sublime and transporting. I did kind of get into the mantras and the soothing spiritualism and idealism of Kundalini yoga, but not completely. This would be something to pursue in further sessions, to learn to basically get over yourself, which I suspect is what the whole activity is for. But the gong. For half an hour we lay on the ground in a group sensory deprivation experience, drifting away on the sustained ebb of the gong.

The sound gently laps over you, lapping the sides, oneiric and beyond time. It’s not like driving on the motorway on a long journey when you’re alone with your regret that you hadn’t done everything you’ve done differently, that you hadn’t fucked up everything that ever happened to you and pissed off everyone you’ve ever met. There’s no thought. The alpha and delta waves kick in, and there’s just you and the gong. There’s just me and the gong. For a moment it could seem as if I could even be happy.

“Inhale. Exhale. Close your eyes and look to the pituitary gland, the master gland of the endocrine system but also the third eye. Look to the pituitary and inhale, exhale – inhale forward, exhale back. Keep looking at the pituitary gland. Come into vibrating – come into the heart centre.”

[They start breathing in and out really fast and noisily…]

Week 15 – The White Review – 13-19 April

The quarterly White Review publishes photography and art (decide for yourself what and means in that sentence) alongside the usual shorter literary forms from essay to poetry. It is named after and partly inspired by La Revue Blanche, the French art and literary magazine run between 1889 and 1903, which was strongly associated with Marcel Proust in the days before he became an ultra-marathon runner.

For Week 15 of fig-2 the editors Jacques, Ben, and Harry, wanted to think about how to present what they do as editors and commissioners of printed work transferred to a spatial setting. This is arguably more challenging than print because there are fewer limitations. Instead of printing costs, page size, ink, and a final printed form read by an imaginary reader, you have to interface with 3D people moving around through time. It’s much easier to present ideas in a magazine than in a space, and this is one of the problems of gallery presentation. It’s almost impossible not to either over-explain and sound pretentious or to under-explain and leave your audience baffled.

Their initial idea was to have writing going on in the space, which would have recalled Will Self’s week during fig-1 in which he wrote about the people going in and out of the Fragile House in Soho (now demolished and presumably coffeeshopped or oligarchised into a non-residential safety deposit box). Then they decided to start with Eduard Levé’s book Ouevres (Works), which is extracted in the thirteenth edition of the White Review.

Levé’s Works is my new favourite book. It’s a collection of unrealized ideas (works), the first of which explains: “1. A BOOK DESCRIBES WORKS THAT THE AUTHOR HAS CONCEIVED BUT NOT BROUGHT INTO BEING.” This is playfully self-referential and enacts a kind of Cretan paradox in that it is part of just such a book, and has therefore successfully been realized, meaning that the book it describes contains at least one work that the author has conceived and brought into being. Believe me, I’m lying.

Works has been called a lampoon of conceptual art. It includes some incredible imaginary projects, many of which are impossible, but naggingly possible. I really especially really want to make “15. A leather jacket made from a mad cow” or the Grayson Perry-esque “24. A house designed by a three-year-old is built.”

The White Review first approached film-maker Patrick Goddard about executing some of Levé’s works, and he freaked out. To him, realizing them would be merely illustrative. Reporters report, but artists in the contemporary mould are supposed to be foremost makers of ideas. Your Hirsts don’t sully their hands cashing their own cheques, they’re project managers. The Great Masters were the same, which is why we’re never sure which bits of a Rembrandt were actually painted by Rembrandt or his massive team of assistants on below minimum wage.

Patrick Goddard didn’t actually end up making any work for the fig-2 show, apart from his film A Reverse Gun Shoot, which is hilarious and consists of video footage of his conversations with The White Review about his problems with what they’d asked him to do. It’s kind of like the fine art equivalent of Stewart Lee’s radical deconstructions of comedy as comedy. After an idea is raised of “digging up Margaret Thatcher” and making the aforementioned leather jacket from a mad cow, they discuss leather, one of them realizing that “I can’t tan! The exhibition is in ten days, we can’t do that!” with a detour via The Silence of the Lambs whereupon Goddard notes that it was in fact Buffalo Bill who did the tanning in that film (NB), before announcing that this is all “Not curatorially relevant.” I intend to use this phrase at every opportunity. Salt an vinegar on the chips? Thanks. That would not be curatorially relevant.

If I weren’t going to Warsaw on a jazz junket next month I’d be looking forward to Cally Spooner’s forthcoming Whitechapel event discussing “art that adopts the language of its own production as its content.” This probably means stuff like Singing in the rain, but it made me think of Patrick Goddard. The product of the film is its process. This sort of thing is why people hate contemporary art, but I thought it was a blast. Well, I’m a twat, innit, and every bit as white as the White Review. Around the ICA studio space, they’d already pre-empted us on this, fixing texts in unlikely locations, including “The sound of my own voice narrating aloud the sounds I can hear. (annoying)” which is presumably a comment on criticism (hai guys!), and then at length the final inevitable FML printed on the wall above the fire exit:

The sound of the middle classes applauding their own guilt distantly echoing from somewhere in the ICA.

Week 10 – Annika Ström – 9-15 March – Six Lovely People

SIX LOVELY PEOPLE

In the Silent Disco Diner, someone is murdering the six individuals from the Match.com adverts, one by one. Who has the means, motive, and opportunity? And can Labby, the amateur labrador detective, solve the mystery in time?

My God, it’s full of twats.

The Silent Disco Diner was heaving with bodies.  On the mezzanine hipsters bopped silently, while in the annexe the diners conversed uncomfortably. Annie, returning to her seat, hooked her bag under the table, and loud-whispered to her dinner date, “The toilets here, they’re not very clean.”

Lou smirked, and in a loudly ironic voice quipped, “You should try the food.” They lol’d together. “No it’s excellent. I love how they do the prices: 9.5, or 13.5. No pound signs, it’s so digi-modern.”

The 5-minute notification flashed up on their iPhones, and they put down their cutlery. Time to dance.

The silent disco is the worst fucking most unimaginably fucking dreadful and awful cuntnosed place in the entire cunting universe. Impossible to imagine a more solipsistic form of socializing. The cunts who come here pay a fucking fortune and look so smug in their mutual loathing they’re constantly coming in their pants. Twats, they’re twats. Someone should petrol-bomb their silent disco and block the fire exits then set off a silent fucking fire alarm.

As she stood up, Annie gasped, and steadied herself, “It’s so busy I can’t breathe!”

Lou smirked knowingly, “Yes, that’s how you know it’s good. The more unpleasant and packed it is, the better it is.”

The Silent Disco Diner is the hottest and best new joint in the hipsterhood. How it works is like chess-boxing. In chess-boxing, which is a great new sport that mixes the visceral combat of boxing with the intellectual sparring of chess, the combatants alternate a round of boxing with five minutes of chess. In the Silent Disco Diner the diners alternate five minutes of dining with five minutes of silent disco.

This has proven tremendously popular because it gives the diners plenty of time to think of something to say to each other. Conversational longeurs need no longer be attributed to angels passing or the terrible service (and the service is terrible). They are built into the dining experience. It is no wonder that the Silent Disco Diner is the go-to place for match dot com couples, as well as those who have married badly or have just been going out too long to be able to stand talking to each other for longer than 300 seconds. It’s more expensive than having a TV or children, but the food is excellent, and the disco music is bad enough to enhance the dining experience immeasurably either because after 300 seconds of the music you’re desperate to return to your kangaroo flatbread or because it gives both of you something to mutually loathe that isn’t each other.

Meeting people is a piece of piss. You go on the internet, swipe some cunt’s jpeg and tell them to meet you in a pig’s arse tuesday week to have a fucking smug off about who’s the bigger liver-faced cunt. There’s one now on the mezzanine, fucking dancing.

— You dance like a cunt, love!

— Sorry, what? I can’t hear you: silent disco!   

— I said: you dance like a cunt!

— Thanks!   

— You’re welcome!

She didn’t bite. That was a fucking waste of time. Probably a fucking shit-farmer. I’ll keep working the room.

It’s hard to meet people. Thirtysomethings, haunted by the time before the internet, find online dating impossibly contrived, and only approach it out of total desperation, having admitted defeat at life. Whereas to the yoof it’s completely normal. Their experience is noticeably healthier and more successful, unwracked by the thirtysomething’s sense that they might have regressed to a new period of arranged marriages and paying for sex.

The management team behind the Silent Disco Diner know this, and in the Silent Disco Diner, dating couples are encouraged to be completely frank and honest. All of the subtexts of ordinary straitened dating conversations rise to the surface. Sexual, behavioural, and mental problems that usually have to be inferred from a visual interpretation of body language, these are all strenuously in your face.

The encouragement of frankness and honesty is gamely facilitated by one of the more popular cocktails, the Autistic Spectrum. It’s especially popular because it is free, and it is a condition of entry that every diner and dancer has to drink enough of them to make them practically tourette’s. This is great for those diners who lack any imagination or charm and have nothing to say, because it gives them access to all the thoughts that would never arise in  banal smalltalk. In the silent disco diner everyone explains every detail of their mind with a pure sense of complete happiness and entitlement. It’s like being Kanye West.

I’m closing in. Those are the six cunts, in three pairs. You’ve seen them in the adverts for match dinner. Six arseholes in search of a fucking enema. I hate them more than it’s possible to hate anything in the universe, yet still they deserve more. Their little mooncups of cuntishness runneth over perpetually until the last albino fart of the cosmos is sodomized with the last spectral ballet shoe made of human cum.

— I love cooking!

— Oh fuck off.

While Annie and Lou were dancing silently on the mezzanine, over on the annexe, Tralee and Angharad had just run out of things to say. Angharad had all evening referred to match dot com as match doh com. She was from Barnet, which is a desirable French-speaking borough in Londres Nords.

Tralee asked “How did you get into match doh com?”

Angharad sipped her cocktail. “Looking for something to get my ex out of my head. I get so depressed. Dating is less depressing. When I think of her I get sad, and when I get sad I think of her.”

Tralee put her glass down. “Maybe what you need isn’t dating but counselling.”

“I’ve tried that. But I just couldn’t get laid. There was one counsellor who I thought I was definitely in with, but she said something about ‘professional standards’ and ‘duty of care’ – complete bullshit.”

Tralee nodded with diligent sympathy. ““Just not that into you” I guess. I hate that phrase. Everyone said that when I was telling them about this person I was dating. He’s just not that into you. I left him voicemails and sent text messages like all the time, and I know he was reading them cos it tells you. He was just too busy to reply, and a bastard. We had such an intense thing, really it was too intense for him.” She paused, then added, “Noone ever has a second pint of strawberry beer.”

Angharad, emboldened by Tralee’s frankness, continued “Sometimes, on week nights and some weekends, I sit outside my ex’s flat. I know they can see me. She’s watching TV but I know she’s glancing outside. They don’t close the curtains until it gets really dark, which is how I know she wants me to see her.”

“We’re buying a house together. Then everything will be fine. Everything will be brilliant.”

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” said Angharad.

“It’s not very clean.” said Tralee.

The first couple is fucking laughing, the cunts. It’s all so fucking hilarious, except while their faces are bent in half with shit-straining at amusement, their eyes are dead and cold, with nothing within their empty holes except sheer desperation. Life has destroyed these people. They have nothing to laugh about. They’re death, just sheer death.

Thelma and Girolamo were absorbed in their conversation, having found a good stretch of solipsism to mine. Thelma drained another cocktail, and exhaled lengthily. “I’m so depressed. I just don’t have the time or resources to run my own campaign. I need expert marketing help such as is offered by constantbumtact.com.”

Girolamo nodded. “Well, you’ve got marketing needs, and they’ve got marketing experts, after all.”

“Yes, they can connect me with a marketing expert in my area!”

“You sure seem like you’ve got the head screwed on. Oh, Thelma, you are a dream!” He narrowed his eyes. “There is some family history of diabetes, dementia, Huntingdon’s Chorea, or schizophrenia?”

“No, just folk dancing!”

They lol’d. Girolamo realized she wasn’t joking. Thelma sat up in her chair. “My parents were hippies before they became investment bankers. They were interested in free love and self-determination for all peoples, but then they had me because when they were having tantric sex during the Thatcher election they forgot to close the door and all the excitement about the creation of the nascent neo-liberal economic project made them pregnant, as well as extremely averse to taxation and human feeling. I plopped out and they decided to form a hedge fund.”

Girolamo felt the sharp slap of recognition. “Si! That happen a lot! My parents were given our Hampstead Mansion and Manors just for having a child during the early days of the Thatcher administration. They become hippies later, but by time I’m a teenager everyone else in the Prep College is enthralled with our “Mummies and Daddies”” — he laughed — “It fitted right into my, what you say, counter-cultural cachet: I make them my BFFs. They’re still very close but they live inside a volcano in an island off the coast of Croatia. They spend most of their time writing letters about what cunts the Serbians are, even though most of their friends are Serbian.”

Thelma felt rhapsodic. “That’s so amazing! They sound great. I love my parents so much but when because when I was born they started a hedge fund it means all I have to my name is six thousand miles of boundary-separating hedges in rural Hertfordshire while loads of my friends in squats have got their blonde dreadlocks to fall back on. They’re literally all on thirty K a year.”

“Oh,” Girolamo’s face fell. “So… you… you don’t have… money?”

“Just six hundred thousand miles of boundary-separating hedges in Hertfordshire.”

“Mamma mia.”

He pushed the last remnants of his Irn-Bru squash salad across his plate, so that, with the icing-sugar spinach, it seemed to form a sadface. His own face too had gone sadface. That was because he had turned his head sideways, in an attempt to address whether the bosoms of his dinner companion warranted the pursuance of this date in the light of the lack of family money. The realization dawned on him, like a winky smiley after a lacerating comment on a YouTube comments thread. Gazing into the dimness of the annexe, he noticed a leather bag. Squinting at it, he realized it had Brian Cox’s face.

Annie is a ginger twat and Lou is a nobhead douche. They’re somehow managing to out-cunt each other right now. Even the way they hold their forks is abysmal. They hold them the way Charlie Watts holds his drumsticks, and he’s a cunt too. Fuck, they’ve made the simple act of holding a fork pretentious. Twats.

— I fucking love food.   

— I fucking love food too.

— Oh my god we have so fucking much in common.

— What food do you like?

— Just all fucking food.   

— Me too!

— Fuck!   

— I like shit fucking food in a fucking brioche that smells of cuntjuice and dickcheese.    

— I like really fucking gross fucking shit food made of death and farts.

— Oh, I love that too.

— You should go to Cunt-hole, they do a fucking horrible fucking pulled chicken.

— I’ve heard of that. Is that where they pull the chicken at your table?

— Yeah they pull its head through its cunt and whack it against its arsehole until it tastes like acne and measles, and then they fucking slather it in applesauce and charge you twenty quid to lick it.

— I’m so glad they pull everything. If they didn’t I would literally die.

— This wine’s piss isn’t it?

— Yeah, it was seven quid a glass.

— We are so awesome.

— Imagine our kids.

Fifteen minutes passed, and Angharad had not returned from the Silent Disco Diner’s edgily not-very-clean lavatories. The 5-minute notifications had come and gone, and Tralee had waited. Had Angharad ducked out on the bill? She looked round at the dancers dancing silently in the Silent Disco Diner. She noticed that the leather bag at the next table looked like someone, but she couldn’t remember who.

— Didn’t you love the Olympics?

— To be honest, I spent the whole time masturbating quite heavily.

— Omygod I do that all the time!

— Me too! Do you think about Tony Soprano?

— No.

“Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” asked Lou.

Annie froze. “Three times since September. Four times.”

“What stopped you?”

“The thought I might fuck it up.”

“You’re still here.”

“Yes, I fucked it up.”

Lou looked pensive. “I never thought I’d get to this age. I never thought I’d pay off my student loan. I’ll never pay off my student loan, but you know what I mean. I thought that someone would smuggle a bottle of Evian through customs and then throw it in my eyes on the plane, and I’d literally die.”

Annie resumed, “First time I tried to kill myself by… I didn’t wash my hands after going to the toilet.”

“Fucking hell. And you lived?”

“I scraped through. I was in hospital for weeks. My heart stopped and when they found me passed out on the manky tiles they could only restart it by pouring a whole bottle of hand sanitiser down my throat. It was the toilet attendant that found me. I’d tried to duck out without buying any perfume or lollipops. I was crazy. It was a cry for help really.”

Lou chugged his cocktail, and spluttered, “And the second time?”

“I left facebook. Within hours I was clinically dead. I literally died. I only lived cos my twitter feed was still active, and the push notifications started coming asking me why I’d left facebook. There were hundreds of them. I’d just forgotten to switch them off, and I guess it saved my life.”

“Shit. What was the third time?”

“I ate some pork.”

“So what?”

“It hadn’t been pulled,” Annie gulped.

“Holy shit, if I had pork that hadn’t been pulled I would literally die.” Lou’s fork clattered onto his plate. “Wait. Oh my God. Don’t move.”

“Where are you going?”

“Stay right there.” Lou was on his feet. “Help! Someone, help! Porknotpulled! PorknotPULLED! Her pork – it hasn’t been pulled!”

Annie looked down at her plate. Lou was right. There was the pork, gleaming and unadulterated in slender discs in a mild jus. Unpulled, not pulled or shredded in any way, nor drenched in a fruits-of-the-forest frisson. Tender, and, crucially, partially eaten.

“Oh my God.” Panic rose in her. “Someone hasn’t pulled this pork. I’m -”

Her head slammed down onto the plate.

Lou raved. “Somebody do something! Does anyone have any pork boustrophons?”

The other diners carried on dancing.

“Someone must have some pork boustrophons! Please, help her!”

Then he noticed. His avocado sorrell hadn’t been smashed, as an avocado sorrell in all civilisation should be. He knew at that moment that this was not just some random culinary accident. This was deliberate. Both of their artisanal dinners had been proletarianised. This—

Lou was dead before his body even hit the floor. The beads of light from the mirror ball swept across his prostrate form. In the silent disco, silence fell, the silence of the dead, and of not speaking.

The thing about match.com is that if it actually worked, the business would be fucked. If you actually meet anyone suitable it’s game over for your fucking subscription, so they build into their business model algorithms that most of the ‘matches’ are unsuitable cunts so you have to go back – not so unsuitable that you stop in disgust, but just enough. It knows what you really want but if it gave you that magic person with the fucking unicorn horn and the gold-plated vagina it wouldn’t be able to take the money off you.

The silence was immaculate. Angharad had still not returned, and Tralee was pretty sure her date had done one. As she contemplated making a dash for it herself, an ear-splitting scream split through the immaculate ear of the silent disco, followed by the crash of cutlery being dropped onto the square plates of the diners. A moment of incomprehension, then the door to the not-very-clean unisex toilets cracked off its hinges under the pressure of the distressed Toilet Guy. SHE’S DEAD, he said. DEAD. IT WAS THE TOILET SEAT. THE TOILET SEAT HAD AIDS.

A wave of ‘there but for the grace of god’ wept through the silent disco. Everyone has chanced it at some point or other, but you take the risk sometimes. She, though. A filthy AIDS-ridden toilet seat. In a corner, a silent dancer wept, silently. Only hours before she had… but… At such points the unfairness and contingency of life crystallises into clarity, and you realize just how close you are to an imminent, immanent, and undesired demise. Poor Angharad.

Everything is in place now. I think I’ll have a drink, if they serve anything here that isn’t piss that’s been through a human centipede. This cunt in front of me has got his spectacles on the wrong way round. Twat. The fuck’s he saying.

— Do you not have any real ales or craft beers? I can’t believe this.

— Sir, we have Privilege.

— Thank fuck. Give me four pints of Privilege, wait, do you have any of that… what is it…

— Entitlement.

— Eight pints of that.

“WAIT”, boomed the labrador. Having heard the sounds of commotion with his enhanced canine sense of hearing and having smelled fear and trembling at some distance thanks to his superior canine sense of smell, Labby the amateur labrador detective had bounced into the Silent Disco Diner, and, having been briskly appraised of the situation, was about to take charge of the proceedings. “WAIT”, he reiterated.

Sufficient waiting having been waited, he continued.

“Very murder! So death. Yes. Profounds, is mystery! Yes. Wow!”

— Hey! So, I just sent you the link!

— Oh great! Is it shit?

— It’s fucking shit mate.

— Fucking THE shit mate.

— Fucking right mate.

— Nice one.

While Labby, the crime-solving labrador, had been ruminating on the case, noone had noticed that on the back table of annexe below the mezzanine of the silent disco, Giralomo had gone silent. One might say, deadly silent.

“Everyone! There’s been another murder! Look!”

The shock of mortality resonated through the room like a massive bell. At length, Labby drew himself up, and moved over to the distended form under the back table. It was Girolamo, dead. “He’s dead,” observed Labby.

A gasp swept through the otherwise silent disco.

“Yes. Many smothered. All the while we were concerned with the tragic death of a beautiful girl from dirty toilet seat, someone fulfilling deathly compulsion. Don’t look! Very horror! Many smothered, smothered by a leather bag made of Brian Cox’s face!”

The dancers stopped dancing and held still, aghast. A leather bag made of Brian Cox’s face!?!?! There was protestation. Brian Cox is a beautiful eyebrow made of spacetime. Brian Cox is a delicious talking forehead. Brian Cox is a sea-cow. Is what they said.

“Look, doge,” said noone, “Who on earth would want to murder the delightful match dot com couples?

“Very mysteries,” said Labby. “So unknow. Listen to me! Thinks! Who is make bag with Brian Cox’s face. Very answer! So mystery! Wow!”

The silent disco diner resounded with the ineffable and profound silence that can only be born of not speaking, a not speaking born of not knowing. As per. Some of the diners tried to resume their dancing. Labby the amateur labrador detective rose on his hind paws. “Nobody must leave! Bar the doors. Many mystery, much solution!”

— What is it you do?

— I’m an artist.

— Oh really what kind of art do you practice?

— Recently I made yogurt from the bacteria in my vagina.

— That sounds interesting.

— It’s not.

— Cool.

— Kinda wish I’d washed my minge this morning.

— I wouldn’t have licked you out anyway.

— I can tell. Your beard would probably have lice babies with my bush anyway.

Another fifteen minutes passed, while Labby the amateur labrador detective continued his investigation. The management had asked the dancers to keep on dancing, to ‘be normal’, and the dancers were quite tired now. Their skin-tight jeans resembled baggy chav sportswear. The boys’ man-buns were unravelling into bad bed hair, and the girls’ bright lippy had spilled down their chins giving them the look of Siberian cannibals mid-feast.

Labby, the crime-solving labrador, brushed with a dry paw his immaculate fringe, and cried out “I have been very fool! Many stupid. Now I see! Such look.” Labby became expansive, “I notice from outset, so profound connection between the victims. Is my business — wow! — is aware of details others overlook. Central fact of the case is this: in the mind of the murderer, the three dead couples were the six — much forgive — six “cunts” from the match dot com adverts.”

The crowd protested. Who on earth would want to murder the six delightful individuals from the match dot com adverts?

Labby waved at the protesting dancers to be silent. “You see, you are missing the central piquant detail of the match dot com dinner advertising posters. The match dot com “cunts” have got to be the worst cunts because it is this that disinhibits you from dating. If it was your Beyoncé or your Puffy on the poster nobody sign up. Perhaps you are a spotty disaster case with all the appeal of the back end of Tracey Emin, or the front end of Tracey Emin. Very cunts on the match dot com posters must be worst examples of humanity, is make you think very hope getting laid.”

There was a long pause.

A really long pause.

A bit too long really.

The gathered fathoms of the silent disco entourage looked toward the forceful amateur labrador detective for some sign. The inscrutable canine was nonchalant as ever.

“But are we safe?” they cried, as it were.

Labby, the inestimable crime-solving labrador, rose to his full height, and, stretching his ears to their full erectitude, intoned “You need not worry now, you are quite safe. Murderer making one crucial, fatal, mistake. In his sanctimonious vitriol against the match dot com couples, so poison himself with hatred. Wow! So hatred! Within the hour, he will be quite dead.”

Labby took up his pipe, and smiled enigmatically with a mixture of pleasure and satisfaction. At that moment the final surviving one of the six individuals from the match dot com advert, Thelma, emerged from the establishedly not very clean unisex toilets.

“Wow! Very survive!” said Labby with joy, “I thought you had been murdered!”

Thelma shivered, and pointed to her legs. “I escaped! I got toxic shock from wearing my knickers for a second day running. I was unconscious for the past hour, then the noise must have… I tore off the pants, and…” Noticing the chaos, she squeaked “What the hell happened?”

Labby chuckled knowingly. “Yes,” he said, “Many yes. Is Doge.”

Love is dead. And you can all fuck off as well.