I've been working on project in collaboration with the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. It's called Drama Queens and will be shown in Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 next weekend. Performances are on 16th June at 17:00, 19:00 and 21:00 in the Münster City Theatre.

Michael and Ingar proposed to make a performance without actors, in which a group of famous Twentieth Century sculptures hang out on stage and chat (via performers on voiceover) - making some small talk, boasting about their respective places in art history and bickering about their possible worth at auction. They invited me to write the text which by now is finalised and recorded.

As we've worked on it the piece has developed into a preposterous object-drama in which (amongst other things) Jeff Koons' Rabbit falls out with Giacometti's Walking Man, Hans Arp's Cloud Shepherd falls in love with Barbara Hepworth's Elegy III, and the whole scene is observed with conceptualist wit from Sol Lewitt's Four Cubes and with outspoken rage from Ulrich Rukreim's Untitled (Granite). There's a great sense of fun in the piece but at heart it's pretty sad too. Maybe there's always something melancholic about objects that start to talk.

Initially E&D planned that stage-hands dressed in black would shunt the sculptures around the stage as they talked but in the final event the sculptures (slightly larger than life, and replicas of course) will be motorised and radio controlled from the wings.

A couple of weeks ago when we were in Berlin the kids and I went out to took a look at the guys amazing new studio (an old pumping station that's very much under-reconstruction) and at the sculptures for Drama Queens lying prone, or  bubble-wrapped and awaiting electrification.  I think the performance is going to be pretty interesting.

Rabbit: They said I was a nothing, an empty gesture, a superficial if kind of clever decoration. Others said that I embodied a devastating critique of the economy of the superficial. They said that from the tips of my ears to the ends of my feet I was a dazzling attack on a whole culture’s obsession with wealth, glitz and easy pleasures. Still others thought that I was genuinely charming, that I showed a real and honest sense of fun – a kind of joy without irony that has all but vanished from the world.

Elegy III: And, what’s your own opinion?

Rabbit: I am a silver rabbit, based on the form of a cheap but colorful plastic toy and I am approximately 104cm high. I just reflect reality on my beautiful skin. That’s all there is to it girl. What kind of opinion do you expect me to have about those big questions about symbols and meaning? 

My performance-for-sculptures collaboration with Elmgreen and Dragset, Drama Queens gets last word(s) in each of two round-ups about the Münster Sculpture Project this week; here from Ossian Ward in Time Out and here from Adrian Searle in The Guardian. If I remember correctly it is hillarious according to one and "not pompous" according to the other, which has to be good news. Münster runs until 30th September.  

Best overheard cell-phone conversation:

No, no you don't understand. Mum has sold the house.. But she doesn't own it.

*

Came across an interview with Michael Elmgreen whose project Drama Queens with Ingar Dragest at Munster Skulptur Project I wrote the text for. The interview here is in Danish so probably won't be much use to the general readership here although some words do seem vaguely recognisable. (Use the tags if you want to find other stuff I wrote about the project on this site).

I borrowed the picture above, which shows the operators in charge of moving the remote controlled sculptures - also found links to two small parts of the performance on youTube - here and here. These seem to be from the computer-animation mock-ups made before the live work was finalised. The audio doesn't seem like quite the final version either - I'm pretty sure the Jeff Koon's Rabbit got an additional layer of reverb! Worth a look though.

*

Alex Petridis is often best when he's criticising. But here he gives a positive but very amusing write up to Birmingham band Poppy and the Jezebels. There are four songs from the album on their myspace. The first of them is great.

I'm doing a show of my video work at Sketch in London from 15 September to 3 November 2007. For the show, titled One Hundred and Three People, I'm exhibiting three existing pieces (Kent Beeson is a Classic & an Absolutely New Thing, Erasure and So Small) alongside a new work called 100 People, which conjures the imaginary presence of one hundred people, each of whom exists only by virtue of brief descriptions on screen. This last one is currently under construction. Like my earlier video Starfucker, 100 People functions as a kind of minimalist anti- (or virtual) cinema in which simple presentation of unfolding text on a black background investigates the dynamic capacity of language itself to create images and to summon presence. 

Sketch is at 9 Conduit Street, London W1S 2XG Tube: Oxford Circus/Piccadilly Circus. The opening reception is on Saturday 15 September, 12.30-2.30pm.The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free admission.

Also, as mentioned here before Starfucker will be part of Ein zweites Leben (A Second Life), at the Stadtgalerie Pavilion / Loge in Bern, opening on the 8th of September and running until the 21st October. As part of the exhibition there will be a special screening event with a selection of my other video-pieces on 19th September at 20.00 with an introduction/Q&A by curator Barnaby Drabble. More details here.

Finally on art-related matters the Drama Queens project I made earlier this year with Elmgreen & Dragset has a very nice mention here in Kate Bush's roundup of Munster for ArtForum. I've written about the project a few times here in the notebook and have flagged other press stuff and youTube clips from it here too - use the tags below to locate this info if you're that way inclined.

Last year I wrote the text for Drama Queens, a project by the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Comprising a short (40 minute) play for 6 radio controlled sculptures (scale models of real ones by Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Giacometti, Warhol, Barbara Hepworth et al)  it was presented at Munster Skulpture Projekte and, more recently this year, at Art Basel. Here's what I wrote about it back then with links to some reviews etc here and here.

 Ingar was in touch with me a while back to say (slightly mysteriously) that "a London theatre" might be interested in staging the piece on a one-off basis with live actors providing the voices for the sculptures. The two presentations of the work so far featured recorded voices, as done by actors in Munster. Anyways. Things went quiet on all this and I thought any London plan was dead in the water. But now it's all happening.

The Old Vic, no less, will present the work as a one off on Sunday 12 October 7.30pm, with artistic director Kevin Spacey reading one part and various other actors great and small looking at the script in due course with a view to joining the cast. Drama Queens is £250 a ticket gala fundraising type event but there are regular priced tickets too. The performance comes just a month before Forced Entertainment's Spectacular at Riverside in London and alongside a new show by Elmgreen & Dragset at Victoria Miro. 

Currently hard at work on the text - one sculpture is getting cut (sightline and space issues - The Old Vic stage is 'in the round' this season, and a general spring-clean of the text is going on. I'm definitely going to make it to the performance in October. More details at The Old Vic website here.