Majestic Casual–Profumo Affair: Billy Morgan meets Sands Murray (Educational Anti-Entertainment)
Majestic Casual –– Profumo Affair: Billy Morgan meets Sands Murray (Educational Anti-Entertainment) is a collaboration between artists Billy Morgan and Sands Murray-Wassink and curator Titus Nouwens. It marks the first public outing of Prelude, a series of live events emphasising interconnections and influences between moving image and performance, and between visual artists of distinct generations.
Billy Morgan was born in London in 1994, when Sands Murray-Wassink was a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with artist Carolee Schneemann. Both artists eventually found their way to Amsterdam to continue their education in art. Sands’ former teacher, Carolee, became his role model, collaborator and friend, while Sands himself emerged as an important voice within Amsterdam’s artistic community. In recent years, his emphasis on the influences, friendships and other relationships that inform his work – and its use of his body, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behavior as art materials – inspires a young generation of artists and curators internationally. “Sharing information as if it were a brushstroke, which it is,” he writes. In the spirit of such intergenerational exchange, Titus Nouwens brings together the work of Sands and Billy in a sort of extended blind date.
Language connects their two bodies of work. Language and embodiment. “Language is somehow the basis of art, no matter how it is spoken, written, recorded, used. It is a form of communication surpassing the visual, it comes from the body, relates to it, and the success of artists has mainly to do with how they talk about and frame their works with language,” Sands writes to Billy. “What I love in the world is its associative nature – that things and feelings remind me of other things and feelings, that these can be captured by words,” writes Billy to Sands. The artists’ associative and analytical thinking expresses itself in precise yet uncomplicated language, full of humor and feeling. Sands through text-paintings characterised by honesty. Billy through texts that they activate with voice and movement; texts that play with fictionality and activate the audience‘s imagination.
During the evening at Perdu, Sands and Billy embody each other’s language and show each other “how it’s done.” The program brings together materials and texts produced and gathered over the past months through an email correspondence. These include fragments of works by older generations of female artists from the US and Poland – Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke and Małga Kubiak – that have been foundational to Sands and Billy respectively.
Using video projections, music, text recitation and interaction, Sands and Billy uncover a budding relationship and build bridges based on the idea that education is possible in all directions and at all stages of life. In this highly experimental program, Sands and Billy present something transformative for both themselves and the audience who complete the work.
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Sands Murray-Wassink was born 17 March, 1974 in Topeka, Kansas, USA and lives and works in Amsterdam since 1994. He is a painter, body artist, writer, perfume collector indebted to various forms and permutations of intersectional feminist and queer art. He is bipolar and his career has been marked by exclusion. Influences such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Adrian Piper serve as foundational coordinates for his practice. Lived experience is paramount, as “the personal is political” and urgent for all in our world. Recent solo presentations were realised with Auto Italia, London; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; diez gallery and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam. All pertinent information about his work and trajectory can be found here, and elsewhere on the internet.
Billy Morgan was born on the 23 February, 1994 and grew up in London, UK. Their turn towards art-making took place during the two years that they lived in Warsaw, from 2018 to 2020. This was a formative period of change, learning, resistance, and relations. From their beginnings in poetry-writing, and influenced by their friendships and collaborations, they have built a practice structured around language and embodiment. They continue to narrate a splitness inherent to their experience, with a light disregard for medium. Recent solo presentations were realised with ICA, London; ROZENSTRAAT, Amsterdam; marytwo, Luzern and Les Urbaines, Lausanne.
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Prelude is a series of live events emphasising the interrelations and influences between moving image and performance, and between visual artists of distinct generations. It is inspired by preludes, originally intended for musicians to tune their instruments before a concert and show off their virtuosity for incoming audience members. Prelude invites artists and audiences to ’attune to one another’ and consider the theatre as a site for time-based visual art. In contrast to the individual viewing experience of exhibitions, Prelude emphasises the audience’ collective presence and the theatre’s physical space as integral to the experience of the work.
The name Prelude suggests an opening to something new, something that is to come. Through collaboration and support, Prelude promotes new paths for the invited artists and fosters new perspectives on their work.
The first series draws on diverse narrations of past, present and future, through themes of language and the body, power and imagination, beauty and interconnectivity, starting with this Perdu event and, at de Brakke Grond in June, re-activations of works by Pedro Barateiro and Agnieszka Polska.
Prelude is an initiative by Titus Nouwens, with a visual identity by Edoardo Ferrari. The series is supported by Perdu, de Brakke Grond and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.
