Frieze London 2019 | Booth C01 Flipper Stripper

Frieze London 2019 | Booth C01 Flipper Stripper In 1974 pornographer and showman Paul Raymond presented two bottle-nosed dolphins, Pixie and Pennie, in Royalty Follies the revue at the Royalty Theatre, London, performing alongside ‘mermaid’ Ms Linda Salmon. At the climax of the show, dubbed ‘flipper-stripper’, a 65 tonne glass dolphin tank rose through the stage as the dolphins stripped Ms Salmon of her bikini. The show was not a success, however, and both dolphins died within the year, having contracted a viral skin disease during a subsequent tour in Asia. All that remained of this spectacle was the glass-walled tank that held Pixie and Pennie, which survived for a time in the building’s basement, before it was eventually destroyed. It is said that the Royalty, nowadays known as the Peacock Theatre, is haunted by the voices of the dolphins, with ‘spectral squeaking’ and ‘desolate wailing’ periodically audible. Dolphinaria were popular throughout Britain in the 60s and 70s. One of them, the London Dolphinarium, opened in 1971 on 65 Oxford Street – not far from where the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery stands today. These ‘Dolphins of Oxford Street’ (as they were known) were kept in a basement pool that was 3 metres deep, 14 metres long and 6 metres wide, with a holding pool of 2 by 5 by 4. Run by a company called Pleasurama Ltd, the dolphinarium’s star attractions, Brandy, Sparky, and Bonny performed for families in pantomimes like ‘Robinson Crusoe on Dolphin Island’, and various other revues. They worked alongside ‘aquamaids’, who swam with the marine mammals and enticed them with fishy titbits (it is said that the males also had to be treated with anti-androgens to prevent them making advances on their female co-stars). Yet the London Dolphinarium too was marked by fatality: one of its other performers, Sonny Boy, died of unknown causes mid-way through the attraction’s short existence. As representatives from Pleasurama Ltd admitted, ‘dolphins do suffer from heartache or psychological problems sometimes – almost like humans’. The London Dolphinarium closed in 1973 and its site on Oxford Street was demolished in 2012, though it is claimed that remnants of its blue-painted tank can be seen in a cellar off Soho Square. Beasts These incidents surely inspired one of the strangest episodes of Nigel Kneale’s 1976 TV show, , which comprised six stories written for television on the topic of animal hauntings. The originality of Kneale (most Quatermass naturalise famous for his stories of the 1950s) was always his ability to horror, whereby he would strive to remove all supernatural elements from his otherwise fantastical stories. For example, in his The Stone Tape earlier show (1972) he explained ghosts as artefacts of architectural memory. As the late Mark Fisher described it: ‘particularly intense phenomena…are literally recorded by matter, by the stone of Beasts the room.’ The house as analogue recording device. In Kneale’s , that material naturalism becomes even more architectural. In the second episode, ‘Buddy Boy’, a pornographer wants to convert an abandoned theatre into a porn cinema. The problem is that the old theatre was once a dolphinarium and is seemingly haunted by the spirit of one deceased dolphin, the Buddy Boy of the title (whose unnatural death is placed at the door of the theatre’s previous owner – now driven out of his mind by this haunting). Kneale must have heard of the events at the Royalty Theatre and 65 Oxford St a few years earlier – the tragedy of Sonny Boy inspiring Buddy Boy’s revenge of nature. And yet, we never see Buddy Boy in the episode: it is the absence of the dolphin throughout that is striking. We only hear very un-dolphin-like sounds twice in the show (‘squeaking’ and ‘wailing’ perhaps) but no moving images of animals at all, except over the opening and closing credits. This is true of all the episodes of Beasts in fact, but particularly ‘Buddy Boy’. Indeed, in terms of a haunting, were we to follow the naturalism The Stone Tape of Kneale’s , then it is the dolphinarium – or things like it (such as a bath, as we later learn in is the story) that houses – or – the animal ‘spirit’ of Buddy Boy. This is no immaterial spook but a kind of wetting ‘wet aesthetics’, the of perception. The point, rather, is that such absent presences – hauntings if you differently materially either will – must be thought of and . In this way, we get beyond the dialectics of or here absence presence: not one material presence or absence (or not), but multiple presences (and multiple ‘impresences’) in multiple times and places – in pieces of glass too, or in a blue-painted tank. In Kneale’s Follies here fictional echo of Raymond’s and Pleasurama Ltd’s Dolphinarium, an absence or impresence becomes a presence elsewhere (to be precise, in the dolphinarium understood as an alternative, material presence). This isn’t an absent centre or void, but a different level of material continuity. It is a recording, though not one that is understood anthropomorphically as a fantastical projection of the human (spectres in bed sheets) but immanently, as an actual continuity, another kind of nonhuman presence (a resonation of the non-dualisms of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and the ‘materialisation’ of animist and is animal spirits). It is not that the building houses a malign immaterial spirit, it the building and all it becomes own next elsewheres throughout in its – not only in the basement, but (and this ‘throughout’ includes all the The Stone Tape other bodies involved – our bodies, our brains too, inside-out). As Fisher wrote of , ‘what the haunting phenomenon offers is the possibility not only of a new recording medium, but of a new player: the human nervous system itself […] what Kneale implies in the end is the breakdown of the distinction between the player and what is being played.’ It is the outside that ‘haunts’ the inside (which is actually another outside). play Locations (sites) haunt, or , other locations: ‘long players’ over many space-times. A coincidence (literally): today, the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery is located on Brewer Street, London, not only close to the site of the London Dolphinarium as mentioned, but also right beside the old Soho strip club, the Raymond Revuebar. The ghosts of animals and artists, humans and nonhumans, continue to haunt-play even this gallery. Whether they are presented for titillation or seen in horror, whether present in one or many locations (art museums, Barcelona Zoo), they haunt us, and we play them, through materials like fabric, skin, sex (both within a species and between different species), disease, even gallery walls. Fish, viruses, sex-dolls, spectral white gorillas, and, of course, dolphins (used by entertainers, religious shamans, and laboratory experimenters) inhabit multiple times and locations, even within the seemingly immaterial acts of artistic abstraction: each naturalises (non)human ‘spirit’ in their own, different forms of matter. John Ó Maoilearca, 2019 Sources: London Made Us: A Memoir of a Shape-Shifting City Robert Elms, , Canongate, 2019. The Weird and the Eerie Mark Fisher, , Repeater, 2016. http://ukdolphinaria.blogspot.com/2015/07/london-dolphinarium-1971.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/return-of-the-whale-hunters-6793901.html Thanks to Charlotte de Mille for introducing me to the Ghost Dolphins of the Peacock Theatre .

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