11 October - 9 November 2008 Private view 10 October 2008, 6-8pm
Surfers Fantasy (2008) is the third in a trilogy of works by Mark and Stephen Beasley. In the radio play ADVENTURE: Showdown at the Pig Palace, (2007) two teenagers respond to the benign architecture of a local shopping mall; in the video work Beasley Street (2005) two elderly dance champions deconstruct the Waltz to the strains of John Cooper Clarke’s eulogy to the last of Socialist Britain in the coffee bar of Camden Arts Centre. In their new work, Surfers Fantasy (2008), the lost years of a middle-aged iconoclast get played out through the rough chapters of an unrealised film-script. All three works will be presented at MOT International.
Surfers Fantasy (2008)
“I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at selling anything. I am forty years old. Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.” – Surfers Fantasy, 2008
Bankrolled by Steven Spielberg, Malcolm McLaren spent the late eighties and early nineties endeavouring to make a movie in Hollywood. His first treatment, initially titled Heavy Metal Surf Nazis was tentatively re-titled by the studio heads as Surfers Fantasy.
Surfers Fantasy examines the failure of radical vision beset by market forces and the onset of the middle aged spread. Written by Mark and Stephen Beasley the film-script, conceived somewhere between New York and London, communicated and transcribed via cellular phones, from the luminous orange and purple setting of a Virgin Airlines Boeing 737 to the bright pink futon of an East End flat.
Beasley Street (2005)
‘In the cheap seats where murder breeds/Somebody is out of breath/Sleep is a luxury they don't need/- a sneak preview of death/Belladonna is your flower/Manslaughter your meat/Spend a year in a couple of hours/On the edge of Beasley Street’ - John Cooper Clarke
In Beasley Street (2005) two octogenarian dancers, Geoff and Elsie McGarry, skirt the periphery of Camden Arts Centre’s coffee bar. Choreographed by dancer Louise Klarnett with Mark and Stephen Beasley, underscored by the original punk voice of John Cooper Clarke, their exaggeratedly reversed movements attempt to turn back time.
ADVENTURE: Showdown at the Pig Palace (2007)
Taking the form of an experimental radio play ADVENTURE… weaves together a fictional dialogue between two teenagers and a measured description of the architectural specifications of a typical shopping mall, from the initial excavation of virgin soil. The play is accompanied by a soundtrack composed and performed by Nicholas Bullen (Napalm Death, Scorn).
Shopping, having become synonymous with entertainment, is received in distraction and the messages communicated by the seemingly benign architecture of the megalopolis work upon our protagonists in waves. “Girl” and “boy” struggle to orientate themselves, politically and culturally, or direct their desires, bouncing between resistance, through means of imagined violent revolution, and assimilation. Quotes and cultural references punctuate the dialogue, creating a labyrinthine structure of influences that the characters endeavour to absorb and utilize. Moving swiftly from enchantment to suspicion and back again, they are buffeted and cradled by forces beyond their control and understanding. Less a battlefield, or cathedral of commerce, the modern shopping centre, for them, is a theatre or film set that has to be torn down.
ADVENTURE: Showdown at the Pig Palace (2007) was produced with support from City Projects, London. Released by Junior Aspirin Records (2008).
