All_the_Cunning

All the Cunning Stunts

17 December 2010 – 31 March 2011
Wellington City Council Light Box Exhibition, Courtenay Place Park, Wellington, NZ
Blog: http://lifeinlightboxes.blogspot.com/

All the Cunning Stunts, our debut collaborative outing, caught the attention and imagination of its passing public with a lively collective conversation about ‘contemporary homosexuality’ on one of the busiest streets in Wellington. Spanning eight light boxes and with cheek, sassiness and plenty of innuendo, the sixteen digital panels were an image and text extravaganza containing a mix of narrative, Photoshop pop and other digital delights. Addressing mass media assumptions about queer attraction, relationships and the representation of queer desire in popular culture, references oscillated from the very personal to the global.

Parallel to the onsite conversation, our working process was made public via our blog where (aligned with queer confessional online communities) all our ideas, experiments and research materials were shared with audiences over the internet. Our artists’ book SO GAY!!! (2011) re-presents All the Cunning Stunts in publication form, offering readers key insights into the intricacies of queer attraction and our representation of it within the project. The project, blog and publication involved contributions by curator Mary-Jane Duffy, NZ entertainers the Topp Twins, blog queen Krista Burton, poet Alan Felsenthal and designers the International Office.

Can I Help You?

Curated by Andy Bell. First published by Hue & Cry Journal, no. 5 (2011). Edited by Andy Bell and Chloe Lane.

Using power-full-point means, four individual voices condense holographic subject-object coordinates — namely emancipation and well-oiled gender slicks — via an exquisite corpse direct address. Uncovering alien life forms in the shape of a piece of pocket lint and a couple of stray capitals, Can I help you? rides the wake of a k8y perry ethic that can’t always be seen, accurately imagined, translated or put to trial, posing conditions for the perception, declaration and artful practice of everyday extraordinary communal, if not common, life. First using publishing as an action or a space for performance in Hue & Cry Journal, Can I help you? also has an alter-ego in the form of an animated four minute video loop.

Let’s just say it was a hot night in Double Innuendo (heavy on suggestion)

Slit Magazine, Simulacra Issue, no. 15 (2012), Sydney, AU
H ART Magazine, no. 112 (June 2013), Antwerp, BE

When Slit Magazine called for restagings of iconic feminist-queer images and stories of how we simulate and stimulate reality by writing ourselves into a history and a culture, we cast a little Stunt light on the wonder of the reflected doublet and the erotic potential of the suggested, simulated act in homage to Florence Henri’s (1893–1982) still life mirror stagings. Henri’s many ‘mirror compositions’ have a deeply suggestive eroticism (sexy) and use strong symbolic language (homotext), all of which have inspired the creation of previous AtCS photographic adventures. Henri’s (queerified) deployment of the mirror as a pictorial device lends itself to an elegant fracturing of her avant-garde imagery and an uncanny obscuring of the distinction between reality and illusion.

F+ Crop Top

In collaboration with Buenos Tiempos Int.
Launched at Filthy Sunset, June 2014, Buenos Tiempos Int. / Girls Like Us, Private Rooftop, Brussels, BE
http://buenostiemposinternational.com

A little F+ summer crop-top special with one of AtCS' re-occuring motifs. F+ made a rooftop cameo appearance via Stunt co-members Marnie Slater and Clare Noonan who quoted/referenced/co-opted/homaged it in fine fashion for Buenos Tiempos International's online exhibition space "xxx". Launched at Filthy Sunset and GIFing online during the 2014 European summer.

The Gayze Off!!! 2012
Three 300 x 240 cm inkjet billboard prints, installation view

The Gayze Off!!!

18 August 2012 – 10 February 2013
Te Tuhi billboards, Pakuranga, Auckland, NZ

The Gayze Off!!! is a triptych of high-impact billboards that brought critical focus to the language of advertising imagery on Auckland’s busy Pakuranga Road, finessing it with subcultural appropriation. Mobilising online image banks that sell niche-market LGBQTI imagery for public and commercial use, AtCS’ large-scale digital images publicly disrupted the monetisation of queer visual identity using multi-layered collage tactics. “The Gayze Off” watermark is a key compositional element; is it an imperative to stop gazing or perhaps a competition callout for the best gayze to step forward? Allusions to an exodus from the ‘pink dollar’ phenomenon appear elsewhere across The Gayze Off!!!. A fluorescent green lipstick takes on a performative role in its work as rogue-product and graffiti device. Fireworks, a hollowed hairpiece and hypnotic-swirls hint at actions and desires that slip between embodiment and fragmentation of self or selves.

Asking, ‘what are we not selling?’, the billboards take on further significance amid the media-scape of desire-driven imagery. The Gayze Off!!! invites the viewer to consider how individuals and collectives might achieve active political agency and search for celebratory visions of self and group when faced with the representational context of the commercialised image.

All that Glitter is Gold: A handshake in four dimensions 2013
Handshake and performance with slideshow and scripted presentation, 14 minutes

All that Glitter is Gold: A handshake in four dimensions 2013
Selected slides (6 of 39)

All that glitter is Gold: A handshake in four dimensions

15 June 2013
Curated by Ulrike Lindmayr, Sam Sterckx, Pieter Boons and Hans Wuyts.
In the context of the exhibition Glory Hole, LLS 387 Ruimte voor Actuele Kunst, Antwerp, BE

All that glitter is Gold is a performance tracing All the Cunning Stunts’ approach in the dispersing (queering) of images, pixels and glitter through influences and sources in popular culture and art. Beginning with a handshake welcome and continuing in Photoshop drag [ONE OF US PUTS ON LIPSTICK] and sunglasses, the audience/WE find glitter in her hair, on his shoes, wiped across your forehead, in Peter Berlin’s bed, and ask: What is our mandate? Who are these invented categories for our glitter existence? All that glitter is Gold warns us that glitter kisses willfully operate from the centre of the commercial handshake spectrum and offer F+ solutions, as a fabrication, a fake, as a positive fail.

Guest starring: Cosima von Bonin’s BIKINI I (GHOST VERSION), Dries Van Noten’s Coban spring collection drones, Lee Miller taking a bath, the triple reflections of David Bowie, google stats, Samson, Roydson, Zoe Leonard’s I love Pussy, [general subtext censorship rating] Rosemary Trockel’s Spiral Betty, Versace’s LLlegs, Linda Benglis’ 1974 Artforum “ad”, Martha Rosler, Florence Henri, Karl Largerfield’s spring-summer lesbian brides with boy 2013, k8y perry [ahem]… All that glitter is Gold presents points of visibility and invisibility, and connects the normative through to the radical demands and radical scope of queer life, with images, appropriating images, reading waaay [too much] into images, cutting, pasting, spray painting, glitter bombing...

On Collaboration 2014
Page work, digital image detail, 42 x 15 cm

On Collaboration

Curated by Mata Aho Collective for the catalogue Kaokao. Edited by Mata Aho Collective. Toi Poneke Arts Centre (2014) Wellington, NZ

If + Trust

Intervention at Magic Bar, Rotterdam, NL. 28 April 2012. Intervention components: Glitter Handshakes (performance at entrance), Do you Trust Me? (video installation in stairwell), Queer Contract (projected image in main bar), FFF+ currency (notes stamped by bar staff), F+ cufflinks (poster over bar), More Trust (posters in bathroom).

A glitter-encrusted handshake greeted every guest at the door to Magic Bar in Rotterdam. For one night only, All the Cunning Stunts performed a welcoming, smiling, glitter transfer, that, like our other interventions into the space, permeated the evening with alternative forms of circulation and economies of tRUst. “Do you trust me?”, we asked, via a seductive video portrait, shrouded in gold and continually calling out to the audience. The question mirrored concerns alluded to within a short text piece (installed in the bathrooms for ultimate intimacy): What other kinds of economies are present? Can we renegotiate the limits of our trust? Queer our contracts? Taking centre stage in the main bar, a digitally adjusted, colour-stained, image-bank image of a business handshake is celebrating its emancipated symbolism, projected on a screen, as if frozen, like a corrupted power point presentation. Perhaps we are witness to the illusive queer contract in action? Hard currency did not escape comment either, as we engaged the bar staff in an illicit performance: every euro note that passed through the till as visitors purchased drinks was stamped “FFF+”, bearing a reference to its historical precedent the early ‘70s ‘gay dollars’, the power of the positive ‘fail’, faggots, femmes, females, et al. These euro notes are now free to re-circulate, an artwork distributed through the channels of daily exchanges within the EU.

If + Trust: Glitter Handshakes 2012
Performance at entrance

If + Trust: More Trust 2012
Posters in bathroom, digital image detail.

If + Trust: Queer Contract 2012
Projected image in main bar

If + Trust: Do you Trust Me? 2012
Video installation in stairwell, video still detail.

You will find documentation and a small text on each of our selected projects

F+ Crop Top 2014
Hand-painted unisex singlet, unique. Collaboration with Buenos Tiempos Int.

Casting call? 2015
Digital print on paper mounted on wall, 380 x 600 cm, text printed on A4 coloured paper. Photo: Display Hooray

Casting call?

At Nieuwe Vide Artspace, Haarlem (NL) in ‘Girls & Ponies’, curated by Nathalie Hartjes

Casting call? was commissioned by Nieuwe Vide art space in Haarlem for the exhibition ‘Girls & Ponies’. Like the Flemish primitives, our work contains symbolism and iconography, in our case drawn from popular culture, queer contexts and developed through Stunt conversations in our digital studio.

Casting call? collages together past works with new images in a part tableau, part mood board, part studio set to prepare for the casting of a (fragmented, incoherent) character for our new, upcoming video work.

How can we to talk about and across collective practice? Invited by Mata Aho Collective led by a four-woman-strong helm to contribute a text to their exhibition catalogue entitled Kaokao, All the Cunning Stunts expand a text On Collaboration into a diagrammatic liberation-front.

Inverting sameness, here we speak from specific horizontal subject object coordinates and through something we made at some point called the gay shroud. Possibly we just discovered it, or felt it near the skin, or glimpsed it in the suburban gutter, the ditch on the farm, or in the trash–can. When the four of us work together under the mantle of the gay shroud we can be visible and invisible, we can underscore the difference and multiplicity at the heart of commonality and community, we can dance abstractly and make sense, or dance literally and be incoherent.

As All the Cunning Stunts we are tuned in to LGBQTIA liberations, representations and concerns, social justice, identity politics, pop culture and more [other stuff]. A working kind of liberation is in some ways like a working collaboration, it involves collective invention and communication and solidarity.

Casting call? 2015
Digital print on paper mounted on wall, 380 x 600 cm, text printed on A4 coloured paper.

On Collaboration 2014
Page work, digital image detail, 42 x 15 cm

All that Glitter is Gold: A handshake in four dimensions 2013
Handshake and performance with slideshow and scripted presentation, 14 minutes

Let’s just say it was a hot night in Double Innuendo (heavy on suggestion) 2012
Page work, 42 x 30 cm, digital image details

If + Trust 2012
Performance at entrance, banknotes stamped by bar staff, posters in bathroom, video installation in stairwell, projected image in main bar

The Gayze Off!!! 2012
Three 300 x 240 cm inkjet billboard prints, installation view

Can I Help You? 2011
Print, one of three double-page spreads, 17 x 24 cm

All the Cunning Stunts 2010
Sixteen digital inkjet prints for eight double-sided light boxes 97 x 265 cm

F+ Crop Top 2014
Hand-painted unisex singlet, unique. Collaboration with Buenos Tiempos Int.

Lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op) 2017
Digital print on adhesive vinyl, mixed media

lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op) 2010/2017
Digital print on adhesive vinyl, mix media. Photo: Aad-Jan Persoon

lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op)

Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking
TENT Rotterdam, NL
Curated by Jesse van Oosten

The work lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op) takes the representation of bodies and identities in stock imagery as its starting point. Stock photography companies have begun to develop LGBTQI+ image collections, with standardised images framed in seemingly benign terms – ‘Female mechanic teaching friend how to change oil’, ‘Lesbian couple kissing in garden’ or ‘Gay male couple enjoying camping with their son’. These kinds of stock images proliferate stereotypes that normalise and capitalise on LGBTQI+ experience in a drive to turn minority sexual identities into marketable demographics. In lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op), All the Cunning Stunts humorously appropriate such pictures in a layered Photoshop party full of queer-positive DIY symbols and characters, in an attempt to regenerate the representational frame with statistical outliers in a burst of collective laughter. Similar to the Stunts’ large-scale wall work Casting call? (2015), lacnroms, an unbecoming (photo op) smudges the notions of character and stage, figure and ground, cast and set.