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Valie Export was an extremely important influence on me when I was younger. In fact when I first applied to Goldsmiths it was for the BA Fine Art, and with a portfolio full of shameless rip offs of her work. Within about two weeks of being accepted I switched to Art History because I realised that I was most interested in commenting on and thinking with the work of other artists and could do that better in words (although many artists do it brilliantly in all media). She remains incredibly precious to me as someone who gave me a route into art full of humour and rage, and thinking gender as action.

A reading list for the undiagnosed criminally insane

Like Gayle Rubin’s The Traffic In Women but with gowns by Nolan Miller - watching Joan Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty (1986) with the always brilliant @johanna_gosse and @atimeofonesown at the @goldsmithscca Paper Tiger show. Now dreaming of making a show on the strange troubled cultural symbol that is Joan Collins - there are more works about her than you’d think

Amazing to present @tateliverpool and @liveveryplay for the Working Class As Method Conference organised by @fuscowriting and @workingclassbritish Like everyone else who gave talks, although the presentations were excellent, I was very touched by hearing about the micro aggressions experienced in an overwhelmingly middle class art world. Hearing others talk about also being scolded for being too loud, for interrupting, having their accents parodied and all the other ways you are told you don’t belong, don’t have the right manners, made me realise the weight of trauma that I had simply accepted and carried around. Condescensions that are tolerated because they are ‘just how things should be’ but according to whom? Also hearing others agree that the legacy of cultural studies is being eroded as elitist despite coming from the working class.

Policing and criminalising working class and inner city youth instead of providing alternatives and outlets for their boredom, frustration, dispossession.

We’re pleased to share that MFA Curating Lecturer, Paul Clinton, recently introduced a screening of Day of the Idiots (1981), directed by Werner Schroeter, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts @icalondon as part of Anguish & Ecstasy: The Cinema of Werner Schroeter, curated by Elizabeth Dexter

Recuperating in Saint Tropez from the stress induced by the production of Salomé, Schroeter met actress Carole Bouquet, 23 years-old and the star of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. Inspired by her stardom, his reading into anti-psychiatry and witch-hunting, he set to work making Day of the Idiots, a raw study of confinement and disintegration set largely within the confines of a psychiatric hospital in Prague.

The season Anguish & Ecstasy: The Cinema of Werner Schroeter is ongoing, with further screenings available to book via the ICA.

Image: Day of the Idiots, dir. Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1981, 110 min.

We’re excited to share that MFA Curating Lecturer, Paul Clinton @fpclinton, is taking part in Who Does Not Envy with Us Is Against Us: A Conference on Working-Classness as Method in Creative Practice, organised by the Working Class British Art Network.

On Friday 10 April 2026, 11:00–17:00 GMT at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool

“Working-classness as method is an approach that addresses working-class experience, values and modes of knowledge as generative forms of understanding that resist institutional authority and challenge dominant hierarchies. We invite you to bring your voice, mind and heart, to think through what the characteristics, uses and criticality of working-classness as method might be. We are not looking for answers, we are looking for refinements, for questions, for space.”

The conference is co-convened by Beth Hughes and Maria Fusco @fuscowriting .

Free attendance. Lunch will be provided.
Find out more:https://britishartnetwork.org.uk/uncategorised/cfp-who-does-not-envy-with-us/

Image: Sean Edwards, Tea at my Father’s House (part iii), archival inkjet print, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.

Tanger

I will be participating in the conference ‘Who Does Not Envy with Us Is Against Us: A Conference on Working-Classness as Method in Creative Practice‘ giving another one of my proletarian poofter papers (using alliteration because it is gauche).

I’m excited to announce that I will be introducing a screening of Day of the Idiots by Werner Schroeter, a director I have loved for a long time. This is perhaps his bleakest film and contrasts with, but paradoxically continues, the flamboyance for which he is known. Book tickets at the ICA @icalondon for the showing on 19th March! Madness, feminism, queerness - what’s not to love?!

Genocidal fascist and colonial regimes attacking other fascist regimes. What a time to be alive