Beggars Teeth: Painting, performance art project Glasgow

Research output: Performances, compositions and other non-textual formsPerformance

Contributors

  • Steven Anderson (Performer)
  • Fiona Robertson (Performer)
  • Carrie Skinner (Performer)

About

‘Beggars Teeth’ is a project at The Glasgow Project Room during the week 29th April – 6th May 2017. The event culminated in two performances, a panel discussion and an exhibition of paintings during the week. Three Artists collaborated together – Steven Anderson, Carrie Skinner, and Fiona Robertson, in the lead up to the Exhibition, Performance and Discussion. Fiona Robertson initiated the project.

Expressionistic, neo-expressionist and surrealist themes and figures have been consistently influential in Glasgow art over the past 40 years; this influence has, however, been overshadowed by the emergence of a post-modern critique of Expressionism and related movements. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a significant, international trend away from expressive and romantic art and towards neo conceptualism, relational aesthetics, abstraction, decoration and process based painting. In recent years, with metaphysical questions about originality, subjectivity and spiritual transcendence reemerging in an increasingly digital culture, a number of artists have begun to re-engage with the expressionistic and neo-expressionistic lexicon. It is within this revivified debate and engagement with expressionism and related movements, in Glasgow and internationally, that ‘Beggar’s Teeth’ aims to situate itself.

The writings and work of Antonin Artaud are heavily influential within this discourse, and constitute the most significant theoretical source for the project. The title ‘Beggars Teeth’ is a quotation of his, referring to the limits of spoken word. Looming large in Artaud’s life was the distinction between art as what he terms “the esthetic simulation of reality” and art as “…the scrapings of the soul” These distinctions and relations between artifice and art, the representation and the expression of reality – the nature of and limits of expression – are themes key to the project.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished or Performed - 4 May 2017

Author keywords

Keywords
  • performance, painting, exhibition, Artaud