Beg, Borrrow, Steal
Posted by Tom Estes on Saturday, May 4, 2013
Man With A Camera- Tom Estes in performance/ talk at the event Beg, Borrow, Steal at Dilston Grove Saturday, April 27, 2013.
" A programme of live art at CGP London Dilston Grove featuring a host of artists from dark corners, glittery stages, white-walled galleries and gravelly gutters. For centuries, it has been widely recognised that many who create that anomaly known as "art" may well be looked upon as outsiders, deviants, depraved or mad ...and vice versa. BEG, BORROW, STEAL will call upon the spirits of famous artistic, professional (and only sometimes deceased) degenerates such as Genet, Bataille, Orridge, Artaud, Kahlo, Wilde, Emin, Camus, Darger, DeLarverie, Bacon and Duchamp (to name a few).
There will be a reconsecration of this one-time church in a new guise, as a haven for those outside of the norm, for some impossibly 'queer' artists and their 'odd-fellow' associates." Beginning gradually from the early afternoon, Dilston Grove will be occupied by a handful of works to be surveyed and interfered with by visitors, who are encouraged to look upon this wholly unholy environment from their entirely unique perspectives. Later into the day and evening will be a smorgasbord of shorter performance works building to a crescendo of celebration for the outside, the inside, the upside and the flipside."
Also featuring Natalie Adams, Giles Bunch, James Cawson, Lucy Doherty, Sarah Gavin, Ruby Glaskin, Richard Kightley, Kate Mahony, Adam Robertson, Nigel & Louise, Katy Baird, Tom Estes, Peter Georgallou, Robin Klassnik, Jordan Mckenzie, Niall O'Riain, Adam Papaphilippopoulos, Annabelle Stapleton-Crittenden
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As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
