Photography by Richard Edkins

Friday’s highlights were Housewives, a London band usually seen in total darkness, lit only by shuddering strobe lighting and a collective realisation that they’re one of the most exciting live bands around at the moment. Here though, they played in daylight, but that didn’t hinder things; if anything, it showed that they’re more than the smoke and mirrors afforded by luminary trickery, and are a taut, brilliant and highly innovative take on post-punk angularity and barely verbal vocal delivery.

Cider is served from large kegs, demarcated by worryingly high ABVs. “That’s a conservative estimate,” says a chipper barmaid, pointing at the 7.4% Brain Biter variant. “With that one, you’ll end up in a hedge.” Reader, I confess. I vomited.

Prior to seeing the Brain Biter for the second time, however, more salubrious happenings unfolded. This is the sort of festival where no one bats an eyelid that a band called Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs is one of the best-known on the bill, and so they shouldn’t as we see them stomp through their peculiarly catchy brand of doom-led, Krautrock-inflected space rock. Later that night is the vaguely more accessible Girlsweat. Alluringly, the description offered by Supernormal name-checks karaoke-like cutie John Maus and Thee Oh See’s John Dwyer’s other band Coachwhips as influences, but naturally Girlsweat is nothing like either. But that’s beside the point really, as he’s magical in a way that it’s rather hard to pin down; despite vocals that mumble like Alan Vega and no shortage of full-bleed noise and reverb, it’s one of the most charmingly poppy performances of the festival, delivered by a man spotted around the site at various points living a life that can only be described as totally, unself-consciously bonkers.

Photography by Richard Edkins

For those looking for a festival experience a little less totally bonkers, Saturday morning brought a raft of genteel delights, including yoga, cream teas in Brazier’s House, life drawing and, er, death metal aerobics (face paint included). Nothing here is truly as it seems. When is a dart board not a dart board? Here, of course, where it’s an art installation mysteriously but perhaps unimaginatively called “Let’s…play…darts.”

In a day and age where we’re constantly bombarded with good tidings about “millennials” and their openness to alternative approaches to gender, community, modes of self-expression and identity politics — our only evinces being body positivity hashtags and “curated” Instagram feeds, Supernormal presents these alternatives and acceptances with no need for footnotes, hashtags, or indeed any 21st Century means of technologically driven communication. If that all sounds hippieish and Utopian, well I’m afraid it is. No one here seems to be doing the “I’m zany, me!” act, or indeed being a dick in any discernible way whatsoever. Everyone really just muddles along with each other, and when most people here seem to be making some sort of obtuse racket, that’s something rather powerful.

Photography by Richard Edkins

Take Isn’tses, for instance. This little duo spent the festival wandering about in sequins and wrestler masks shouting through a portable set-up of DIY circuit-bent synth boxes and distortion, but didn’t seem in the least bit out of place doing so in a quiet woodland enclave. Just over the hill from them, a kind primary school teacher-esque lady was leading a “noize choir” session in a barn. It’s very surreal, but in a way seems to tie in with the endless chatter of the modern world, and the need for “mindfulness” we see preached so often to counteract it. Once you start hearing the beauty in a noisy coffee machine or the revving of an engine, the world is suddenly not a mass irritant, but simply a very interesting sound collage.

Taking a more traditional route over on The Shed stage, The Early Years played a superb set of driven, determined and Damo Suzuki-endorsed psychedelia; followed over on the Red Kite stage by festival highlight Bas Jan. This all-girl outfit features Serafina Steer, battling on through with one arm in a sling, and sound a little like Electrelane, tackling otherworldly harmonies and narratives about Anglo Saxon burial grounds with deft dexterity and luscious arrangements. Take your eyes from the stage, though, and who do you see? But of course! It’s Bowie and Prince (a tall man in a ruff bearing a striking resemblance to the Thin White Duke, and a short smiling woman resplendent in military jacket and drawn-on moustache). They’re gearing up for Bowie vs Prince karaoke, which by all accounts, did their late namesakes proud.

Photography by Richard Edkins

Whereas at other festivals whispered rumours might concentrate on Terry Wogan’s death or Brexit, here it was about a secret act that few (us included) had previously heard of. By Sunday, everyone was very excited indeed about some cryptic symbols written near the Vortex stage hinting that Glasgow band The Cosmic Dead were to appear. When they did, in a flurry of hair and space rock, you could see why everyone was getting so animated. Both expertly tight and delightfully irreverent, they veered between impassioned praise for the festival and for experimental music itself, and hilarious quips about both. In a song about how much they loved jazz (“we’ve been reading Wire magazine, the sponsors, and it turns out it’s really fucking good,” they said). Lyrically, it was something like this: “Jazz is fucking brilliant…Lovely jubbly!”

Moments like this cement that fact that Supernormal is a glorious antidote to mediocrity, normalcy and modern life itself. Lovely jubbly indeed.

In Laia Abril’s latest project, a delicate phallus, gently accessorized with a ribbon, sits uneasily next to a rack of metal spikes and forceps. You’d assume something had gotten a bit Lorena Bobbitt. But it’s through these disarming juxtapositions that the Barcelona-based artist explores abortion access across the world, now and historically.

On Abortion, which opens next month in exhibition form and will be published as a book in 2017, presents Abril’s visual reconstructions of the tools and harrowing techniques that women have used to perform abortions when legal and safe access to reproductive care is denied. These sculptural works — from forceps to primitive vacuum devices, cervical needles, and cross sections of a woman’s abdomen — sit alongside photographic portraits of women who’ve died following back-alley abortions, and audio installation pieces created using the voices of women Abril has interviewed about their experiences. The show’s conceptual aspects are balanced by a thorough, research-led process. Abril’s journalistic background is reflected in the text-based pieces that provide context and narrative throughout the exhibition. Here, it’s about telling deeply personal stories over sensationalism.

According to Abril’s research, “47,000 women die due to botched abortions” each year. Though modern medicine has allowed the procedure to be as safe and simple as taking a pill, religious, societal, and governmental bans make unsafe alternatives the only option for some women. On Abortion confronts these unnecessary dangers and deaths, and forms part of Abril’s wider, ongoing project on the systems that limit women’s rights, A History of Misogyny.

Broadly caught up with the artist to talk through her hard-hitting approach to art.

BROADLY: How have you arranged the exhibition? What media and materials did you use, and how did you choose them?
Laia Abril: My methodology is based in conceptual, visual, and narrative research. As I’m unable to document every country in the world, I tried to cover as many possible consequences and scenarios that women face. I approached different societies, victims, and contexts as a collection of visual, audio, and textual evidences. In this way, I’m trying to weave a net of questions about ethics and morality and reveal a staggering series of social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have been invisible until now.

In the exhibition, you can find personal stories of survivors narrated in the form of photo novels and portraits; reconstructed scenarios of different kinds of repercussions [for having an abortion]; historical objects used to abort; historical and current DIY methods used by women; mugshots of doctors and criminalized women; mugshots of women who died through butchered abortions or the lack of access to it; and audio installations of pro-life terrorism or confessions.

Watch this: Who’s Afraid of Vagina Art?

In my projects, text has and strong presence. In this one in particular, I would say it is 50 percent of it. Although it is a visually-based project, there is a strong need of context and information to be able to read the pieces.

Marta, 29, Poland
On January 2, 2015, I traveled to Slovakia to have an abortion. [In Poland abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, serious fetal deformation, or threat to the mother’s life.] I was too scared to take DIY pills alone. What if something went wrong? So I decided to get a surgical abortion in a clinic abroad. I felt upset about borrowing money for the procedure, and lonely and frustrated because I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening. The hardest part was facing my boyfriend, who opposes abortion. All the same, I felt stronger and more mature afterwards.

Why did you decide to focus on abortion?
Forced motherhood has historically curtailed women’s freedom and their development in society. In general, anything related to a woman’s decisions about reproduction and sexuality has been always surrounded by strong stigmas and taboos. For instance, this year, for the first time in history, the Pope has allowed Catholic women who’ve aborted to be forgiven. While this may seem like a step forward, it perpetuates the stigma of guilt that surrounds women’s choices, since [the Catholic church] sees it as a sin. They see abortion as murder. In the meantime, politicians exploit abortion as campaign currency; they make reproductive issues a political matter, rather than a question of rights.

I decided to focus on the extreme situations where women’s lack of access forces them to make risky decisions, jeopardizing their health and freedom: women who procure DIY abortions or submit to illegal, butchered abortions; minors and rape victims; women who are forced to carry pregnancies; and women who are dying from being denied medical treatment.

I’m a white, educated, privileged woman, who happens to live in a country where abortion is legal. But it is a right that was not always there and which is constantly at risk. Recently in Spain, they tried to modify the law. You’re never 100 percent safe. When we’re in a privileged situation we have a tendency to think this is a problem far away from us, and it’s not. I approach the project from a historical point of view for the same reason: we tend to think these are problems from the past.

Lack of access [to abortion] isn’t just down to legalities. We forget about [physical] access and money. In Italy, abortion is legal for up to 90 days of pregnancy. But some hospitals [are completely staffed] with doctors who are conscientious objectors, forcing women to travel abroad for a termination. India has some of Asia’s most progressive abortion laws that permit pregnancy termination during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, but that does not guarantee access to safe abortion services, especially in rural areas. In 2013, a woman died every two hours in India due to unsafe, unsanitary, or DIY abortions. Also stigma [against abortion] can be so strong, even in countries where abortion is legal, that women jeopardize their health.

What was your research process like?
This has been so far the most difficult project I have done. My previous five-year, long-term project, On Eating Disorders, was hard to approach for many reasons. The stigma and taboo around mental diseases and especially eating disorders made it hard to access certain stories. In this case, the illegality made everything much more complicated. I’ve been calling doctors every day for more than seven months just to have some data. I approached hundreds of women, hundreds of NGOs, and I’ve never struggled so much to have even just anonymous testimonies. It makes sense as it’s dangerous for them [to speak out.] They face rejection from society and their families; they could lose their freedom or even their life. The story of Alicja in Poland comes to mind. She was denied an abortion years ago, even though she could lose her sight [from giving birth]. She won the international trial, but during the last decade she has struggled with daily society judgment. Even her children have a different last name, and sometimes they have to do homework about their mother’s case!

But women who I approached, whether they’re willing to participate or not, were always very receptive to the project, even though many of them had have very bad experience with sensationalistic media in the past. Women who I collaborated with or portrayed are happy that I don’t victimize or judge them. They are survivors of obstetric and systemic violence but they are not ashamed to have aborted, they are proud of having the maturity to exercise their rights.

What do you hope people will get from seeing your work, in the exhibition and in the book?
By constructing this kind of installation you face a great amount of challenges. You need to balance the information, emotion, and visual creativity for such an uncomfortable and controversial topic so people can question their own beliefs.

Abortion is often hidden: in the past, in shadows, in illegality. Many women don’t want to be visible, and doctors can’t share too much information. Nobody wants to talk because it’s surrounded by shame and stigma. It’s a sin. For me, trying to visualize the invisible is a great challenge. My only hope is to make people face an issue they don’t know about or never thought about, and help them to empathize with personal stories.

The installation and the book have different narratives and displays though the content is mostly shared. Now that I’m working on the book, I’ll be able to create storylines that exhibitions do not allow me. Installation art creates an experience for the visitor, which can connect with their beliefs on a different level.

Originally published at broadly.vice.com.

A strike at one East London cinema hopes to save a community asset that’s currently under threat — the Rio Cinema in Dalston.

The Rio’s near closure back in 2013 reflected a wider trend in the decline of independent, single-screen cinemas, despite audience figures growing across the board. According to figures published by the UK Cinema Association, nationwide cinema admissions grew from 157.5 million in 2014 to 171.5 million in 2015. “The advent of the multiplex, and record levels of investment in improving the theatrical experience (still ongoing), have seen admissions recover such that since 2000, they have remained (sometimes significantly so) above 150 million,” says the organisation.

Cuts to the Rio cinema staff team, however, are reflective of widespread cuts to cinema and film: in March this year it was announced that Creative England was being made to “streamline its film department due to budget constraints,” and late last year the BFI announced that its funding was to be cut by £1.3 million over the next four years.

Around 400 people took to the picket line outside the cinema on Kingsland Road on Wednesday, railing against mass compulsory redundancies, restructuring, and the Rio’s refusal to pay the London Living Wage (LLW), which is currently £9.40 an hour.

With most of the cinema’s 30 full time, part time and casual contract employees and many more friends and advocates sporting yellow SOS Rio T-shirts, holding placards and handing out flyers, the crowd was a peaceful yet determined force against what’s going on. “A staff restructure is set to cut jobs, cut hours, cut salaries and marginalise investment in the community,” reads the SOS Rio campaign flyer. “The staff want change but not change that rips the heart out of The Rio!”

Filmmaker Julia Sukan del Rio, who helped coordinate the London Turkish Film Festival at the cinema, was among those on the picket line. “They’ve called it a restructure so they can have a smaller team”, she said, “but the job descriptions have been altered, or qualifications are suddenly needed, so effectively people have been dismissed.”

“It’s probably going to be the end of that community spirit and soul, that dedication and film geekiness from the staff. It’s so disappointing to see such a lack of support from higher management.”

Around half of the Rio employees are members of cinema worker, media and entertainment trade union BECTU, which has spearheaded the SOS Rio campaign and strike action. “What started out as a simple pay dispute has turned into a passionate ideological battle over the soul of one of the last community cinemas in London,” said Sofie Mason, a national official of BECTU to local paper the Hackney Citizen.

The strike comes three years after 2013’s announcement from the cinema’s board that the Rio was going under. To save it, staff agreed to a seven month-long 10 per cent pay cut; they asked for this to be repaid and for a pay rise in October 2015. The board offered a pay increase that worked out to £8.10 per hour for the lowest paid — £1.30 an hour shy of LLW — and this fed into the company-wide restructure that was being protested this week.

A statement on the Rio’s website concerning the industrial action reads: “We were saddened to receive an email from BECTU stating its intention ‘to induce members of the Union’ to take part in industrial action against the Rio, which is a registered charity, has no shareholders and returns all surpluses to the organisation and its staff in support of the Rio’s charitable activities.”

The fight for independent cinemas continues.

SCREENGRAB VIA YOUTUBE

Artist Grear Patterson’s new exhibition captures the film’s nostalgia through romanticized sunsets.

In the 1993 film True Romance, Patricia Arquette as a hooker named Alabama made enviable a look that no women before or since has been able to pull off: a turquoise puff-sleeved crop top, a cow-print skirt, and cowboy boots. But aside from the film’s sartorial significance, True Romance has enjoyed lasting legacy in art and culture, as well as in the hearts of 90s teen girls and boys.

Directed by Tony Scott, the film was Quentin Tarantino’s first major motion picture screenplay. In it, Tarantino’s fondness for violence is apparent, but True Romance is, of course, about love. While the film’s theatrical release bombed, the cult classic has since been spawned countless romanticized Tumblr posts (“If I’m with you, then I’m with you. And I don’t want anybody else.”), and it was also the namesake for Charlie XCX’s 2013 debut album, of which fraught intimacy was a major theme.

Read more: ‘Come See Our Beautiful Ladies!’ Collecting Women’s Bodies on Postcards

Together the film’s star-crossed lovers, Clarence Worley — an Elvis fanboy played by a then-dreamy Christian Slater — and Alabama — who also serves the film’s narrator — made trashy cool, and it’s sort of stayed that way ever since. Now artist Grear Patterson has created an entire body of work inspired by the film for his new show,True Romance, which opens June 24 at Marlborough Contemporary in London.

The young, New York-based artist tends to ruminate on childhood; he has described the way he uses materials for his work as being “like toys.” True Romance is just another touchstone from his youth. He was so enamored with the narcotics-driven narrative of the film that his mixed-media works sometimes evoke it in a literal sense; he created vast sunsets out of color-blocked paper as a meditation on True Romance’s closing scene, where the couple has their happy ending in the sun. At other times he pays homage to the film in more abstract ways, through sound installations.

But Patterson’s work isn’t always what it seems. He has also formed dreamy sunsets out of found objects — including parachutes, boat sails, wedding tablecloths, and vinyl — mirroring the film’s obsession with adventure, trash, and ephemerality. The overwhelming sense is one of nostalgia. We caught up with the artist to ask him a few questions about True Romance — the exhibition, the film, and the idea.

“Silver Beach” (2016). All images courtesy of Grear Patterson and Marlborough Contemporary, London

BROADLY: Why make an art show around True Romance?
Grear Patterson: It’s a masterpiece on all levels: casting, sound, cutting, cinematography, you name it. [The film] acted as a foundation for knowing what I wanted to do, like a cue: making you believe something was possible. One of the first movies I watched was Good Will Hunting. I was nine, and it made me cry. I couldn’t believe you could make a movie that shifts a person’s emotional scale completely. It inspired me and made me want to construct a similar emotional escape. True Romance portrayed a really hard reality, but also an amazing escape. The characters are so in love, riding around carefree, only concerned about each other. It’s almost a modern-day fairytale. I look back at the movie and its script, and it acts as a benchmark for my own work. [My goal is to] try to make something as good and effective as that. Maybe one day I can make a movie like that.

What elements of the film do you love so much?
When making a movie you’re demanding people’s time. I liked the directness of True Romance — from the first five minutes the audience is already involved. At the beginning, Tarantino resists giving away too much information. The audience just sees these two characters, Alabama and Clarence, finally meeting, and hears Alabama talking about a love she “didn’t even think was possible.” The audience is totally invested, wondering when and how this love is ever going to emerge.

“Alabama Worley” (2016)

Does your work always take such literal starting points?
[My work] is often triggered by memories. Making work is a way of archiving these moments and ensuring I don’t forget them. It’s not that the ideas are based on something literal; rather they spring from something which derives from my consciousness.

Tell me about your choice of found objects in the show.
Most of the found objects are replacing items which were thrown out or lost during my childhood. Or something a friend would have in their room when we were kids. Everyone has owned an object they particularly cared about while growing up. It’s a universal experience. They might be objects that provided solace during the turbulent transition into adulthood. Such items can contain countless associations with different people, places, times; incorporating these objects and materials in my work allows people to recall them. For instance, movie directors often use objects as a stimulus to evoke the viewer’s memories or associations with a particular place or time.

Read more: Meet the Artist Making GIFs to Ridicule All the Shit Women Have to Deal With

Do you worry people will only view these works through the lens of the film?
People can look at the work through whatever lens feels best for them. I just want to provide a momentary visual escape. I am happy for people to view the works in terms of the film. However, many people may not have seen it, which is great, too. In that case, people may think about the show in terms of the idea of “true romance,” as a goal, a magical thing, or something which brings people together. I think there is scope for multiple interpretations.

[The narrow starting point] isn’t always a bad thing to me. Sometimes it’s necessary and it has a purpose to serve. For instance, when you cut metal, you need a narrow, high-pressure stream of water. There is always a time and a place. Narrowness can also enable you to stay focused. In fact, I liked having some boundaries in school. I always responded well to structure.

“Moonrise” (2016)

Tell me more about your interest in childhood nostalgia and memory.
I just like to hold onto the good parts, regardless of the ratio of bad to good. That’s true for me with almost everything. People often ask me what I’ll do when I run out of old material from my childhood — I’m not so worried about these physical elements. I work with ideas in my head.

Do you fetishize youth and beauty? Does everyone? Should art?
No. I am grateful to be growing up. Childhood is a battlefield.

In the past you’ve said you “juxtapose ingenuous form with complex discourse.” What does that mean?
I often think about energy, efficiency, and clarity. If I can make something using one shape, one color, one movement, that still retains the feeling I want to create, then I will. It feels more pure this way.

So let’s end just as Alabama Whitman did. “Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: You’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool.”

Elizabeth Price takes a magpie approach to both her curation and her own work. When Price won the Turner Prize in 2012 — only the fifth woman to be awarded the UK’s most prestigious art honor since the institution launched in 1984 — it was with her powerful 18-minute short film The Woolworths Choir of 1979. The film placed architectural imagery alongside the 60s girl group theShangri-Las — and news footage of a fire that claimed the lives of ten people in a Woolworth store in Manchester. The piece makes for chilling viewing, united by rhythmic percussive finger clicks and a barrage of images that leave the viewer at once confused and overwhelmed by an intangible sense of pathos and loss. It is also emblematic of her collage-like approach to video art: Ideas, surrounding spirituality and ritual, weaved into a music-led tableaux of pop culture references, are common motifs in her work.

She brings this same fondness for mash-ups to her latest exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. In Elizabeth Price Curates: IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, Price unites worlds: a former porn star turned artist; the first filmmakers in history, the Lumière brothers; Andy Warhol; and, of course, Jenny Holzer. She uses their images, along with those of other artists, to explore ideas around sex, death, dreams and sleep.

Watch this: Artist Marilyn Minter on Depicting Female Sexuality

As the London-based Price was busy preparing for a solo show in Ireland at the Model gallery, we spoke to her about her show at Whitworth, her influential video work, being a woman in the art world, and why no one should give a shit about what’s in her handbag.

All photos by Michael Pollard. Courtesy of the Whitworth

BROADLY: Why did you choose In a Dream you saw a way to survive and that you were full of joy for the title of your Whitworth exhibition?
Elizabeth Price: It’s taken from a work by Jenny Holzer. It’s a reference to another artist, but I was also interested in using it to establish the narrative arc of the show. One of the things I’m doing is using and juxtaposing artworks to imagine certain types of fulfillment from them. It’s a way of dramatizing or narrating or unpacking what that might be.

What are the themes in the show?
The show is in four sections: sleeping, working, mourning, and dancing. I wanted to create the idea of a cycle, which might be of a day in a life, or a life itself — or it might be the course of a dream. At the same time, I started looking at certain kinds of art and found myself particularly interested in images of people sleeping. I want to think about how art is used to think about the horizontal, or things that are prone, or recumbent human bodies. There’s the idea of horizons or depictions of landscapes, but also 20th Century art and performance art, where the body stretches out. I was really interested in the idea of narrative potential when you see an image of someone sleeping. It’s kind of someone doing nothing — it’s a hiatus — but you also imagine the moment of waking up and of the ensuing day or experience. Horizontal has a sense of potential. You see that a lot in art to do with mourning; it’s a terminal state, but it also expresses the proposition of something ghostly, or spectral, or the afterlife.

Why do you work in video? What is it about the medium that allows you to express what you want to say in your work?
I started making videos because it means I can use many different things that I’d been struggling to bring together: narratives that are either fictional or social-historical, rhythm and music, existing images, and archival photographs. I found that through video I could bring these things together in really interesting and dynamic ways. There’s so much stuff in my films; [there’s a] sense of being completely immersed in the density of material. It’s a space of experimental assembly..

It feels like that reflects how we all interact with the proliferation of images online.
Yes. I often move from one body of material to another, which is maybe surprising. As an experience, that’s something that’s familiar to anyone that’s used digital technology.

How did winning the Turner Prize impact on you?
It gives me a platform that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. My career changed really quickly. I got nominated for the prize from the first museum show I’d done, and I’d only started making videos five or six years before that. People were suddenly a lot more interested in my videos than things I’d done before. To be honest I was giving up on the idea of success [before that]. I thought I was just making these eccentric things for me.

It was kind of weird and a bit disorientating to go from something that felt very private — and, in a way, that I didn’t think anyone was going to like — [to people saying that] they like my stuff. It’s one of those experiences you can never regret, but it takes a while to get used to. Things got very busy all of a sudden. I’m really quite shy and private, so it was weird when I was suddenly being asked to do [interviews] like, “What ten things are in your handbag?” Who really gives a shit about what’s in my handbag? There’s stuff like that that’s quite shocking. But I also started to get nice letters from people I’d never met, so it’s incredibly varied. I remember seeing a bit of my film dropped into the news, and I felt alienated, frankly, seeing it seamlessly dropping into the Channel 4 news. I felt I’d completely lost contact with my work.

I’ve always felt relatively indifferent to what people thought about my work. People saying they don’t like it is of course a bit upsetting, but I’d always felt very robust about it. It’s one thing to prepare yourself for people not liking your work, but it’s quite weird when you haven’t prepared for people liking it.

I doubt that male artists would get asked what’s in their handbags. Do you think there’s still a difference in how male and female artists are taken seriously?
I’m sure [male artists] do get silly and trivial requests, but I also think what’s true of society more generally is true of the art world, even though it’s very self-conscious about identity politics. I think it’s really improving, but the proportion of solo shows in commercial galleries is still significantly dominated by men.

Art is a very precarious career, so it’s quite difficult for both men and women. There’s no maternity leave and no pensions, but women are affected in a different way. I know [women] artists who’ve had kids and chosen to take a step back for a few years. That impacts their profile. I think there are many, many reasons, in spite of all the apparent self-consciousness in art, that male artists may tend to be taken more seriously.

In a strange but unsurprising way class feeds into it as well. I’ve often felt as a woman artist that I have to assume a certain type of authoritative composure in certain situations, otherwise it feels like people think you’re a bit of an idiot. There’s always a narrower space women have to work their way through and it impacts them in many, many ways. Their presence and how they speak are maybe viewed more critically than men, or assessed in ways people don’t realize they’re doing.

With cuts to arts education and art school fees getting so high [in the UK], it seems like the class divisions are only getting more prominent.
Moves to narrow the curriculum in schools in favor of rational subjects, and making art not obligatory, means that of course in state schools all of the resources will go to those areas in which [kids are] primarily assessed. But I’m sure that young people who are fortunate or privileged enough to attend public schools will still have access to art education.

For so many people, being good at art and having that acknowledged is the only positive experience that they have at school. Without that, people can become demotivated entirely, as its not recognizing them. State schools aren’t providing the sort of art education I was lucky enough to have.

Read more: The History of Bodily Fluids in Feminist Art

I’ve read that your working process is really intense. Do you find it hard to know when something is finished?
When things get to the end, I tend to get monomania, though I try not to. I got ill at Christmas, and the doctor said I had to work fewer hours in the day so I wouldn’t get into that exhausted state of watching everything I make again and again. It actually meant I worked better, I made decisions quicker, and was more clear.

I change things numerous times and edit them in this crazy way. Sometimes I’m editing for 12 hours a day. But I know that’s part of what makes the films like they are, so I’m reluctant to be more sensible about it. Generally, I stop [working on a piece] not because I think it’s perfect, but because I have to start working on something new.

The female stars that were to become the irresistible faces ofgiallo — Edwige Fenech, Mimsy Farmer, Dagmar Lassander and Florinda Bolkan, to name a few — carried a dichotomy with their new starlet stature: they were at once powerful femmes fatales (aligning with similar scenarios in film noir) and typified by a specifically womanly form of madness and victimisation.

Particularly in the case of Fenech, roles for woman in giallo were often accessorised with psychoanalytical or Freudian tangents: her performances frequently feature histrionics, taking things into Freudian territory as she deals with psychological trauma in frighteningly visceral ways. In Mario Caiano’s Eye in the Labyrinth, from 1972, the lead female role is searching for her missing psychiatrist lover; and many other titles feature women currently or formerly in therapy.

However, analogue film specialists Cigarette Burns have challenged notions of giallo females as solely objectified hysterics. Co-founder Josh Saco says: “The women in giallo, without sounding like I’m downplaying them, are the original scream queens. You watch these films because you want to see people like Florinda Bolkan [the star of A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling]. These women are stunning and interesting; they play these crazy roles and you’re really drawn to them. So many people find their way through giallobecause of the actresses: they’re really important people in the genre.”

But for all the women’s importance, so many giallo plots centre around the murder of a series of attractive women, which seems at odds with feminine power. “When you really start to examine the films, the ideas about misogyny drift away,” says Saco. “Often the women are killing as many people as the men: they’re the killers as often as they are the killed.

“There’s a film called New York Ripper which is considered instantly misogynist — it’s a pretty horrible film — the killer is a guy who goes around killing women but he’s doing it because he feels like he’s failed as a man. He hates women: there’s no question that he’s a monster, he’s so obviously flawed that it stops it being misogynistic.”

So can we really view giallo as pro-women, if their madness is condemned to histrionics, they’re so frequently victims, they’re always always beautiful? In Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 film The Frightened Woman, we see a rich, S&M-obsessed man who delights in his power over women. He abducts a female journalist — Maria, played by Dagmar Lassander — who ultimately usurps her captor and proves herself to be ultimately more powerful. While her route to power was through male abuse and oppression, the conflict is resolved in favour of female prowess.

Viewing the genre through a camp lens serves to dissipate its ‘sexploitation’. If, as Susan Sontag says in her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’, camp is, “a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not,” then that fits giallo perfectly. By being the most perfectly stylised, glamorous and bombshell-esque of everything about giallo, women are placed at the heart of the big, powerful, overblown and ridiculous drama of their scenes. These siren-like women find themselves to be the root of the film’s power; a feminist force to be reckoned with, as director John Carpenter concludes in the documentary Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror: “In his films the heroes are women. But he couples violent death with sexual beauty, and that’s extremely disturbing to me.”

Argento himself naturally takes things even further, offering up a lesbian reading of Suspiria in an interview for Xavier Mendik’s book ‘Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress’. “In Suspiria I wasn’t primarily interested in the theme of motherhood but, rather, in women’s lives. In fact, if you want to give a deeper reading of the film, it can be seen as a vaguely lesbian story; where lesbianism has a certain importance, or, more precisely, where the relationships between women are sometimes of a lesbian nature and are characterised by power struggles. There aren’t any male characters to speak of in the film; among those that do appear, one is blind, another is mute and the other is gay… All there is are power relations between women.”

“We’re at an interesting time for woman embracing their sexuality,” says artist Liberty Sadler. “But the capitalist structures in place mean that it’s a certain type of sexuality that is a commodity. There’s an aesthetic privilege and hierarchy of bodies that means that a normal sized woman in an advert is suddenly plus-sized. We’re in an era of fat shaming and also thin shaming — it’s the dichotomy of our times.”

This problematic inference that “one body is better than another” is at the heart of Liberty’s work, which uses film, performance and photographic documentation to show that food, fat and the female body are as much feminist issues as ever.

Even though she’s still in the midst of completing her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, Liberty already has a regular gig illustrating for the likes of Metro and Grazia magazine, and is now one of the Selected 6 artists, a group of young creatives nominated by previous winners of the prestigious experimental film prize The Jarman Awards.

The work she’s showing in the UK-wide Selected 6 screenings is the tampon-crowned short Private Theatre, a four minute film of three personae: The Feminazi, The Tampon Tiara Princess and The Little Girl Dom. It’s a playful yet visceral melange of modern-day nminisht concerns, fairytale narratives and biblical references.

“When I make characters I do feel like they move into an atmosphere of drag,” says Liberty. “When I think about the feminine character in the film, it’s an over-the-top caricature of a man-hating feminist. You move into the realm of fantasy, and take a negative stereotype and make it humorous.”

The film was very much a DIY affair, with Liberty hand-drawing all the animated elements and making all the costumes, working with a very small team to realise it.

Ideas around drag, and sexual and gender identity, loom large in Liberty’s work. In a video piece from 2015, This Is The Way We Like It, two of the artist’s friends are shown enacting their interest in BDSM, but in such a playful way as to almost render the sexuality innocuous. “It started as an experimental piece inspired by the change in the pornography laws in December 2014, where rules were set out out for certain things like face-sitting and spanking” Liberty explains. “I saw a lot of connections between submission and feminism, and I wanted to show [the couple] being silly and dancing around, as well as the BDSM stuff.”

Elsewhere, her pieces explore uncomfortable and personal topics, veering from binge eating disorder to self-hatred and body-shaming. Surely there’s a vulnerability in that? “When I’m making work on certain topics that are very personal I like to transfer that to another character rather than being autobiographic,” says Liberty. “It’s about taking those experiences and turning them into something much more far-reaching.”

A forthcoming project will see Liberty adopt a selection of male personae, though ideas around the body and the media’s problematisation of it still reign. “We don’t realist how much the images we’re presented with online infiltrate our feelings about ourselves until it’s highlighted on the street,” says Liberty. “Once people experience fat shaming or slut shaming on the street, we see how are private internet lives are really starting to have such a detrimental effect.”

Liberty’s film is being screened at the Whitechapel Gallery on 7 July for Selected 6.

Anarchic, nude and vitally, vibrantly fun, 1980s performance group the Neo Naturists were a glorious tits-out reprise to Thatcherite Britain, to stiff upper lips and to art world po-faces. The group’s main members were Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson, and its raison d’être was deliberately bold and hippyish — a daring move at a time when to be a hippy was deeply unfashionable. Over the course of a five-year period in the early 1980s, the Neo Naturists took their naked, painted bodies out onto the street and into nightclubs, creating their own unique brand of performance art.

It all came about fairly organically, the trio explains. Christine was a life model, and when Wilma set about drawing her, “it only took half a day for her to be painting my body, and not just a picture of me,” Christine explains. “Then I painted her.” Both Jennifer and Wilma had studied fine art, at Portsmouth University and Central Saint Martin’s respectively, while Christine turned to craft, focusing on pottery. Together, they broached political ideas around society, austerity and the female body in the most joyous way imaginable. What’s more, the Neo Naturists lived as alternative a lifestyle as their artwork would suggest, living in squats and parading around in clubs like Heaven, Taboo and The Blitz. Among their associates were leading lights in the club kid gay scene, from filmmaker Derek Jarman and dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, to performance artist Leigh Bowery, as well as art world characters like Grayson Perry, Jennifer’s boyfriend at the time.

The Neo Naturists

View Gallery 18 images

Since the 1980s the Neo Naturists have been mostly making paintings, but at first their work was characterised by these nude body performance pieces. Their flesh would become a canvas for wild and colourful designs: boobs frequently formed the eyes for a cheerfully made-up face, bellies were the fulcrum for tribal-like swirling patterns, or in the case of Grayson Perry, the body’s inner muscular structure was rendered external in bright primary colours, accessorised with a little penis decoration.

Ahead of the Neo Naturists’ new retrospective exhibition — completing the group’s progression from public performance to gallery setting — we met the three founding members at London’s Studio Voltaire as they wiped away the residual flecks of body-paint after a day of daubing the walls with their flesh.

Neo Naturists, Christine Binnie body-painted at Central St Martins, London, 1 April 1980, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

On how it all began…
Wilma Johnson: “Part of the thing of doing the Neo Naturists was using women as women, rather than their being a sort of object. Historically in art the woman is the model and the muse, and not the person who’s actually making the work about their naked bodies. So we were turning that around.”

Christine Binnie: “In Yves Klein’s work he had models painted, but they were just models, and it was his art. But with us, we’d all paint each other: it’s not just about being a painted body, but the process of how we get ready and what we do with it afterwards.

One of the inspirations behind starting Neo Naturists, for me, was transvestites. I remember going to the Black Cap [a north London pub famed for its drag acts] and seeing these men on stage with their bosoms Sellotaped together to give them cleavages, and coming on stage, having a lovely time, and just showing off. I remember thinking ‘that’s really not fair, how come those men are allowed to go on stage and just have fun showing off, and I’m not allowed to?’ That was one of the things that led me to performance art.”

Jennifer Binnie: “I think also, there wasn’t any other way for us at the time. When you left art college you didn’t really know what to do. There wasn’t much talk about careers or how to get recognised.”

WJ: “We’d been through the punk thing, which became a bit negative to say the least, then the New Romantics thing, and we were dressing more and more extremely. For a year I dressed as Marie Antoinette. Then we thought ‘let’s get even more extreme and just not dress’. It was part of a whole thing about seeing how far we could go.”

Neo Naturists, Swimming and Walking Experiment, Centre Point Fountains, Tottenham Court Road, London, August 1984, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

On what it was really like being a Neo Naturist…
JB: “At the time there was a big crossover between what we did as artists, and what we did in life. For me there wasn’t a clear definition. I was definitely having a good time. I loved those days. We did it all on instinct.”

CB: “I don’t want to be part of the illusion that it was all wonderful, but I went along with it and at times I think I was really unhappy. I’m worried about this sort of heyday thing and romanticising the past and all that, but I’m a lot happier now than I was then, just generally in myself and how I find ways to express myself.”

JB: “Everything is ups and downs though, isn’t it? I thought it was an amazing time. I only lived in the squat for three years and that period was really intense in terms of exhibiting our work as artists, and doing the cabaret and making films. Everything we did and the way we lived in the squat was all about creativity. There wasn’t really anything else.”

WJ: “We just used to turn up at a nightclub naked and everyone would go ‘great, the Neo Naturists are here!’ Doing that now, we’d probably be arrested.”

Neo Naturists, Trindy, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

Neo Naturists, Sexist Crabs and The Cosmic Egg, Portland Bill Quarry and Sculpture park, Portland, Yorkshire, 1 August 1983, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

On being naked body-painted in your 50s…
JB: “Now we’re in our 50s and 60s, we’ve realised it’s really important. From the moment we got into the gallery last week, there wasn’t really an issue about whether we’d be naked or not.”

WJ: “I think we did it to counteract that myth about being an invisible woman in your 50s — that idea that you’re no longer young and no one’s going to look at you.”

CB: “I’ve always known I want to be body-painted when I’m 80, but this is the awkward in-between stage — you’re not young and you’re not old. But it’s probably the most important stage to be body-painted at. When you do it, it’s really easy but somehow it makes you very outside of the world; most people don’t go and hang out in a gallery and take their clothes off and do body-painting. When you go back into the normal world you sort of can’t remember what you’re supposed to do.”

Neo Naturists, Cabaret Fridge, Fridge Brixton, 31 December 1982, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

On men and women’s naked bodies…
JB: “I think the performances were quite hard for the men, I think they became more vulnerable than us. When we did performances in nightclubs sometimes it was just us three as women, and that was all right. Then doing it with a man, people were outraged and did really horrible things like throwing lighted cigarettes at the boys. It brought out something quite horrible in people, but women’s bodies were much more ‘acceptable’. I suppose people are more used to seeing women’s bodies. There’s an element of titillation to having women’s bodies on stage, but when it’s mens’ it takes that away from the men in the audience a bit.”

CB: “Also, it’s illegal [for men to be naked]. We did an experiment at Centrepoint and we were nude, so when the policemen approached us we talked to them about the difference between indecent exposure, which is what nude men are charged with, and insulting behaviour, which is the charge for women. It’s something to do with Queen Victoria, I think. So we stopped and talked to them, because if we’d run away we’d have been arrested like streakers used to be. There’s a sliding scale of what’s deemed ‘insulting’ behaviour. It’s different for men and women in that way.”

Neo Naturists, Paper Dress at the Embassy Club with George O’Dowd as Brittania, The Coffee Spoon Embassy Club, London, 5 Setpember 1980, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

On their complex relationship with feminism…
CB: “There was something about being having big bosoms that made it different to be nude. There were performance artists who did feminist performance art, but they all seemed to be these young women with small bosoms and bobs, they were very neat and boyish. In a way, one of the things we were doing was testing the edges of feminist performance art, but I don’t know if we would have said that at the time. We were sort of rebelling against what feminist performance art might be like, and we’d get told off by a lot of feminists for our performances. They objected to blatant showing off of big bosoms. I used to say ‘I don’t call myself a feminist, but I’m glad the feminists came before me,’ so I kind of felt we were the next generation. I identified feminists as people in dungarees who told you off for being nude.”

WJ: “Feminism now is just about believing women should be equal, so I don’t see why anyone would think they weren’t a feminist. What we did fed into our going against the whole fashion industry thing of androgynous women and those body extremes, which is obviously still a problem. Our performances were always quite funny, and we were just having too much fun [for the feminist artists]. We say now that of course we were feminists, but it was very much linked with denial of femininity and feminine things. For us, our work was a celebration of the female body and what we are. We were taking these rituals around women’s place in society, like cooking and doing housework and those sorts of things, and completely turning them on their heads to make them into empowering goddess rituals, but at the time we wouldn’t have said ‘this is a feminist performance’.”

On the messages in their work…
CB: “Our work is about other things than naked bodies. We’re looking at things like nature and anthropology and society, in a way, it’s about a group of people. It’s radical because it’s not just about one thing, and there are spiritual angles coming through. We were semi-aware of what we were doing, but also we just wanted to make beautiful art and have a laugh at the same time.”

Neo Naturists, Mermaids with Marilyn, Henley Regatta, 1984, Courtesy of the Neo Naturists Archive

Aforementioned Daniel hangs proudly in the Lisson Gallery thanks to Cory Arcangel, one of today’s most prominent post-digital artists. His entire practice is concerned with the digital world, manipulating and appropriating it into often hilarious, yet thought-provoking and tradition-crushing art. Arcangel’s work simultaneously lampoons and celebrates internet culture, taking its hashtags, “promoted content”, clickbait and elevating into fine art photography, video and installation pieces.

Arcangel is one of many contemporary artists taking the mass culture he finds both IRL and online and using it as the building blocks, or pixels, from which he makes his work. Jon Rafman takes a similarly magpie-like approach. In his incredible 2015 exhibition at London’s Zabludowicz gallery, physical relics from children’s playtime — ball ponds, gloop, a maze — act as foils to occasionally disturbing adult themes. From a ball pond, we see videos formed from merging strange internet fetish footage and other found imagery. Vomit, cigarette butts and debris strewn around a computer keyboard, and a bedroom reduced to grimy detritus, are a site for ominous voices that suggest the omnipresence and omnipotence of screens. It’s a frightening unreality that turns domestic spaces into nightmares.

Crush fetishes, furries and role play abound — while grotesque imagery is never far from the screen. Rather than simply conflating his findings in video games and memes and weird corners of the digital landscape, Jon weaves them into pieces that feel like fables or entirely new works, which make us question ourselves and the very nature of art.

These trampling over barriers of ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture is, of course, nothing new. It is the axis on which postmodernism turns. Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences lecture of 1966 highlights French theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term bricolage, showing that the postmodern author or artist “uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary.”

In this way, artists are today perhaps more than ever availed of multiple ‘instruments’ from which to make work. Their collages can be created from infinite digital images, sounds, themes, traits and characteristics. And while artists do this in the most visible way, I’d argue that today, our very sense of being and personality is similarly a bricolage of influences and tropes.

People have always been an amalgam of nature and nurture, and in our 21st Century digital age it’s easier than ever to appropriate ideas and imagery from other people and culture to form new identities. “Fake it till you make” takes on a new dynamism in a time where, at least online, you can at the click of a button, be whoever you want to be.

Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation explored the idea that everyday reality and media were blurred, and in an age where we’re bombarded with advertising and messages through television, radio stations, newspapers and street billboards, we lose the ability to separate what is real and what is ‘simulacra’. Artists are now taking all of these things — real, simulated, simulations of simulations — and making their work from them. And as art imitates life, individuals are now also a mixture of all of these confusing things. How can we find a stable sense of identity when our ‘real’ selves are for better or for worse (I’d argue, both) obfuscated by a tsunami of digital images?

Of course, the availability of all this appropriation is a wonderful thing. We can find out almost anything; we can learn from people across the world, from art movements from centuries ago, finding new styles, languages, friends, materials, colours, texts, doctrines, lovers, talismans, ideas, facts and fictions. And from these, we mould and evolve new selves. But could this be the root of our collective unease, our mass sense of instability of the self?

Consciously or unconsciously, like post-digital art, are we becoming a strange passive conglomerate of Kim Kardashian, belfies, Deliciously Ella, Throwback Thursdays, ladettes, gender-neutral fashion, ‘disruption’, vloggers, bloggers, YouGov poll results, Friends quizzes, listicles, X-Pro II, SXSW, Bardot-shoulders, MIC, 5:2, lilac hair transformations, Newt from Hollyoaks, Bronies, legal highs, My Mad Fat Diary?

There’s a lot to be said for Umberto Eco’s definition of postmodernism in this sense, from his Reflections on The Name of the Rose, which says that in postmodernism’s deconstruction of the past, innocence is lost. He says: “I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’.

“At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.”

So in an age of art and life that appropriates and re-appropriates again and again, can we learn to be sincere? What is real? Can we truly “love madly”?