Tom of Finland/House/Lights – The Wooster Group (USA)/ Rafael Gordon Aristegui X de Wardhouse, Conde de Mirasol (Based on Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights by Gertrude Stein and the S&M film Olga’s House of Shame)

HOUSE/LIGHTS  (a revival)

Faust standing at the door of his room with his arms up at the door lintel looking out behind him a blaze of electric light just then Mephisto approaches and appears at the door Faust growls out the devil what the devil what do I care if the devil is there

I work with a range of materials including video, film, performance, drawing and collage that engages with the devising, construction and deconstruction of the meaning of images and visual vocabularies and the construction of work that connects specific art projects with real sites, political, psychological or cultural realities and personal biographies. I intersect through complex projects and research notions of displacement, imitation and synchronization and allowing selected artworks to comment on each other or on specific contexts, which in the past have included linking the performance work of the American artist Chris Burden to the institutional purposes of a Scottish town hall and the Wooster Group's work HOUSE/LIGHTS with the biography of Carlos Gordon, a Scot who briefly ruled Spain in the 1930s. Recently I have worked with group scenarios, discussions and debates that make images with limited appeal accept more appeal, the subjects of which have included the drawings of Tom of Finland. Whilst maintaining core structures in the work, projects have been predetermined by concepts around reputation, meaning, imitation, artifice, copying and simulacra, they are offered up in diverse and radically different forms that have included animated films for television, short story writing, video installations, performance and video installations with drama students, lectures that transform into opportunities for the audience to perform, film screenings, online digital media projects, sound works delivered via the telephone, and self-publishing, for example an online Wooster Group fanzine. Current work includes a new installation based on rehearsed readings in performance and formats within cinematic remakes, this work will use a remake of Fassbinder's Querelle interlinked with a rehearsed reading of Kate Valk's performance of Elaine/Faustus from House/Lights to explore impulses in reading gender representation and a performance of House/Lights using a debate scenario stolen from The Wooster Group's theatre piece LSD... Just the High Points.

Writing has appeared in a number of publications including Map, where I sit on the editorial advisory board,  Independents Liverpool Biennial and Stretcher, San Francisco.
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I have recently begun to look at the behavior intrinsic within making performance, and specifically the modes of construction within the methodology of The Wooster Group. I am looking in detail at the fabrication of The Wooster Group’s HOUSE/LIGHTS, and a notion of radical theater and frameworks of referenciality and how this methodology of ‘radicalization’, of “reference” is disseminated. HOUSE/LIGHTS merges the texts from Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights with the voice-over from Joseph Mawra’s lesbian S&M flick Olga’s House of Shame.

-------------------------------- -------------------------------- Recent research concerns from this work devises the connections between Aberdeenshire and Madrid, its aristocracy, laws and politics and the Spanish royal family, and specifically the biography of Rafael Carlos Gordon and the Wardhouse estate, near Insch. Gordon, a Scot by ancestry, became the Mayor of Madrid and during the Franco era briefly ruled Spain. The Gordon family originally transported themselves to Spain to continue to practice as Catholics.

I have begun to systematically connect the biography of Rafael Carlos Gordon to Dr Faustus Lights the Lights and its interpretation within HOUSE/LIGHTS. And the Wardhouse estate in Aberdeenshire (the estate of the Gordon family) and its history and connection to the royal family in Spain and the aristocracy of Madrid to Olga’s House of Shame and its interpretation within HOUSE/LIGHTS. I am interested in processes of dissemination and of movement, notions of radicalization, themes of shame, themes of technology and the above working framework is the basis for future approaches to issues of knowledge, constructing meaning and the complexity of political realities and narratives.

-------------------------------- -------------------------------- Stein’s text in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights entails Faustus selling his soul for electric light. In House of Shame Olga, the ultimate sadist, moves her headquarters from Chinatown to upstate New York, where she controls a crime syndicate involving narcotics, prostitution and jewel smuggling.

In HOUSE/LIGHTS a number of characters inhabit territory shared with characters from Mawra’s Olga’s House of Shame. This idea of shared existence and simultaneous presence/acting and pretence is at the root of work in progress. -------------------------------- --------------------------------

Elements of the project were  developed with the artist Susan Cassie, who is based in Aberdeenshire.