Barney Ashton
BARNEY ASHTON, Schema/Stasis, live performance
11 August, 2007 at Open Eye Gallery
Photo by Martin Effert ©
Towards A Biography: Born in Dorset in 1970, among my current labels are verse dramatist, documentary producer and visual artist. All of these disciplines fused in my first film-poem performance Schema/Stasis which is exhibited as part of this Bound exhibition. I graduated from Goldsmith’s College in 1993 and went on to represent England twice as a young playwright through the Royal Court Young People’s Theatre, in Interplay Europe in Berlin and as part of the internationally co-written ‘Storming The Net’ drama. I have enjoyed Prince’s Trust Fund, European Union and local council funding for theatre works and have had 12 fringe theatre plays performed to date. In theatrical reviews of these works I have been variously referred to as ‘post-Berkoff’ ‘fuckfuhrer’, ‘shagmeister’, as ‘providing a refreshing jab of social realism’ and as being the ‘future of European theatre’ by Jason Boko in Croatia. That was when I thought I should try to fuck my way through the map of Europe that I was supposed to be the theatrical future of and, so, I am currently working on a psycho-geographical film-poem about Europe called ‘The Excursions Of A Lonely Poof’ using the film I shot on those self-same excursions. Might I recommend Romania? Recent achievements have included curating the Imperial War Museum’s Official DVD Collection, curating an archive weekend on Discovery Wings, curating an evening ‘Into The Jet Age’ at the National Film Theatre. I DJ in a central London fetish club and have recently completed a sensory deprivation experiment for BBC’s ‘Horizon’ programme for September 2007 transmission.
Peformed Works Textography:
2007 : Schema / Stasis
2003 : Torsten The Bareback Saint
2000 : Queer Dorset Bastard
1999 : The Pump Room
1998 : Threnody
1997 : Born Angry (New Version)
1996 : The Bacchae
1993 : Born Angry
1990 : Rupert Drinks Vodka
1989 : Volte-Face
1988 : Culture And Anarchy
1987 : Boy Changes
1986 : Church At Llanbadrig
Schema / Stasis – An Insight
When Predrag Pajdic started to talk in some detail about his plans for this exhibition BOUND, I started to think in some lurid detail about how our reality is bound in ever so many ways; how, in fact, our identity is highly constructed at any one moment in time by several variables. Enslavement, for me, exists in the conditioning we are all subject to; it is implicit in the labels we apply to ourselves and have applied by others that constrict and blinker the index of possible means of self-awareness. We can be hindered through the inculcation of doubts both imposed on us or self-generated: the embarkation on the destruction of these constraints that short-circuit our thoughts and cauterise our potential seems to me to be the most admirable mission of any life. The nurturing of positive self-esteem is a veritable survival skill that should ideally be a birthright. In many ways, it seems to me patently obvious that a number of social conventions and social mores, not at all disassociated from the vested interest of power and the Establishment, can conspire to define who we are. Furthermore, the explicit Victorian assertion that “one should know one’s place” is alive and well although its guise mutates in line with the new control possibilities presented by successive developments in the new ecumenical omnipotence of our time, information technology: Information technology that is and its bastard children of profiled targeted advertising, untargeted spam, identity theft and surveillance. We drown in the incessant babble of our age and celebrate it as democracy, when it is quite possible that it also provides the glue that arraigns us in a subject position of thwartedness in that our participation in the babbling blinds us to the power relationships that control the distribution and use of those technologies. It also dovetails neatly with the requirements of capitalism to keep us all suitably consumptive, that we should all feel we are lacking something that the transformation implicitly promised in the purchase of a desired item or membership could cure.
Our relationship with control cultures whether interpersonal or imposed by laws are often tempered and mediated by our familial bonds, in our domestic sphere and in networks of friends. These all contain us and position us in terms of our awareness of ourselves and often function as a mutually supportive enclaves in a heartless world. If to be bound is to be human, to resist it seems is equally so.
My artwork Schema/Stasis visually represents the chaos of the existence of both people and cities, both of which have a life cycle to which different stages are ascribed with different graded valuations of worth. In Schema/Stasis, decadence and decay are mirrored betwixt and between people and the urban environments that they create. We shape cities and they shape us. Against this psycho-geographical montage, the words of a sequence of performance poems dealing with different aspects of intrapersonal imprisonment are read. The topics dealt with are as diverse as Memory, Loss, Paedophilia, Ageing, Fear Of The ‘Other’ and Sexual Fetish.
Bound : Memory (Autumn Again)
Petals fall parched in variegated sienna hues
As just so many burnt pieces of me
Now punch-drunk by the ‘truth’
And punctured by the proof
That you’ve ‘moved on’.
Unlike my coiled, circuitous thoughts of you
That you were, somehow, the only one.
You’ve eschewed every vestige and year of my hurt
And all the bloody altercations
Spewed of a real red raw frustration
That I never loved anyone ever
As much as I did you.
Late spring and early summer of, when was it?
1982?
And somewhere the thinnest of smiles rises and falls
At one corner of a dinner party table
As a former friend, by chance in your earshot
Mentions, in passing, my name.
© 2007 – Barney Ashton