HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS PRESS ARCADIAMISSA.COM 14-16 BREWER STREET, FIRST FLOOR [email protected] LONDON , W1F 0SG 27/04/2020 TANK MAGAZINE TANK Magazine / Live [x] Back CONVERSATION | Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings « Shop » Current Issue Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach (ICA performance), 2019. Courtesy the artists In their ongoing performance project Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach, artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings create a cacophonous survey of contemporary queer culture’s radical edges and the reactionary white-male mainstream as they rub up against each other. Enlisting an expanded cast of performers – go-go dancer Ted Rodgers, singer Jesse Hultberg, musicians Owen Pratt and Milo McKinnon, drummer Severin Black – Quinlan and Hastings’ work presents an ecstatic and terrifying interpretation of the pride parade, complete with a rainbow-coloured float and big-screen video displays of lip- syncing soldiers and YouTube dance sensations. Guy Mackinnon-Little spoke to the artists about their work following a recent performance at the ICA as part of Image Behaviour, the ICA’s annual convening dedicated to experiments in artists’ moving image. https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2019/12/hannah-quinlan-rosie-hastings/ 1/4 27/04/2020 TANK MAGAZINE TANK Magazine / Live Could you introduce your recent performance of Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach and the broader project of which it is part? The performance was originally commissioned by ArtNight and exhibited in Walthamstow town centre in June 2019. When Helen Nisbet, the artistic director of ArtNight, approached us she really stressed that we should develop our most ambitious ideas and she would make it happen. We had a fantasy of reproducing a gay pride parade, something we could do on the streets that would engage a huge amount of people. Our aim was to work with the ultra-recognisable emblems of a pride parade: the float, a go-go dancer and certain types of music but re-contextualise these motifs and present them to the public in a way that makes them strange or alien. The project felt linked to our earlier live work @Gaybar (2014-16) an event series where we would build gay bar installations and host parties in them. @Gaybar was about creating a community-facing platform that sought to socialise ideas in queer theory, critique mainstream gay culture and privilege queer people, women, people of colour and trans people. The ArtNight Performance felt much darker. We were taking all these toxic and ultra-masculine elements of pride culture and exaggerating them to quite an extreme degree. Simultaneously, we tried to create something highly entertaining and emotionally engaging, a work that would appal and delight in equal measure. We used the film as a means to communicate all the disparate realities that co-exist within the LGBTQ spectrum, we were particularly interested in the tension between the gay mainstream represented by pride and a queer subculture that exists in the margins. We spent hours trawling through YouTube and other platforms, gathering footage of individuals or groups of friends who resist normative standards of gender, sexuality and beauty dancing in domestic spaces or gay clubs, and showed them alongside material taken from lavish, male-only circuit parties. The Carly Rae Jepsen sequence in the film shows a triptych of people lip-syncing to gay anthem “Call Me Maybe” – a drag queen, a group of sexy- topless gay guys and finally British and American Soldiers posing in the desert with their weapons and bulletproof vests. We were particularly interested in the drag performance of the soldiers: did they know they were performing a sort of drag or gayness, or did they think that they were just mocking women? In the video it felt like we were tracing lines of power that began in people's bedrooms and ended up in the military industrial complex. « Shop » Current Issue Censorship of the work by Walthamstow Council. It was a really disarming moment to experience in the audience. Perhaps because of the crowd the performance drew, the experience did at times gesture towards that quite utopian feeling that queer spaces, at their best, can enable, but then all of a sudden you are dancing along to “Call Me Maybe” and look up to see this really horrific imagery of soldiers dancing along with you. You’re complicit all of a sudden, and forced to sit with that complexity. We were unsure if it was appropriate to use the footage in public as it represents such a hugely traumatic conflict in the lives of so many people. In the end we decided to use it as this visual material is used and celebrated widely in mainstream UK culture and so embedded in our collective consciousness. It felt important to link the invasion and occupation of Iraq to dominant forms of white gay masculinity and pride culture – it’s about how white supremacy and masculinity exist on a spectrum of power, how individual behaviour can be traced to the level of the nation-state. What was particularly interesting was that the video got censored by Walthamstow Council, the council tried to entirely https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2019/12/hannah-quinlan-rosie-hastings/ 2/4 Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings Interview by Rosanna Mclaughlin the Conservative government’s rollout of fis- and patriarchy often collide, particularly in cal austerity had contributed to the closure of the shadow of Brexit. As their work shows, Modern Art nightlife venues across the country. UKGBD “G” is by a long stretch the best-represent- 50-58 Vyner Street is a record of public queer culture, legal in ed letter of the LGBTQ family. While gay London, United Kingdom the UK for a little more than fifty years, now bars and clubs provide a sense of commu- modernart.net at risk of extinction. nity for men across the UK, they appeal to a predominantly white clientele, and often Between 2015 and 2016, Rosie Hastings and Since completing the archive, the artist duo incorporate militaristic decor—aspects of a Hannah Quinlan traveled the UK while mak- has continued to explore the politics, histo- culture critically at odds with the metropol- ing UK Gay Bar Directory (UKGBD) (2015–16), ries, and aesthetics of queer space, shining itan, politically aware, university educated, a video archive of LGBTQ social spaces. In a light on a complex terrain in which ques- newly invigorated manifestation of queer the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, tions of class, nationalism, gentrification, identity. I met the artists in London to discuss their the logic of capitalism that dominates other RM: In June 2019 you’ll be show- recent video, (2018), areas of the entertainment industry, especial- Something for the Boys ing Something for the Boys at 148 commissioned by Two Queens gallery in ly in the context of London. It’s a reckless pur- Hayward Gallery alongside some of your Leicester, where it was shown earlier this suit, driven by a longing, desire, and fantasy drawings—a relatively new addition to your year, and their recent turn toward drawing. that feels synonymous with queerness itself. practice. What prompted the shift in medium? ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN: Something for Something for the Boys explores the con- the Boys was filmed in Blackpool, a seaside nection between musical theater and gay HQ & RH: Making UKGBD was exhausting. resort on the northwest coast of England. culture. In the 1940s and 1950s—musical We spent nine months traveling, inserting You’d recorded the city’s gay venues while theater’s golden era and a time when homo- ourselves into unfamiliar and often exclu- making UK Gay Bar Directory. What brought sexuality was criminalized in the UK—the sively male spaces. Drawing is a private, you back? industry was dominated by gay men. A cod- intimate process, and after we finished, it ed language was used to describe gay expe- became our salvation. Previously we hadn’t HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS: rience, such as “the diva,” a larger-than-life worked figuratively, as we were fearful Blackpool is a complicated place. It’s a woman who defies sexual and moral con- of replicating real-world power dynamics Victorian pleasure town in a state of decline, ventions. Musicals from this time parody the that deny certain bodies agency. Drawing abandoned by the state, where social prob- era’s rigid social codes. brought out a more playful and fantastical lems such as a homelessness and substance quality in our work, and became our bridge abuse flourish. A vibrant gay scene sur- RM: Do you think the parodic element is still to figuration: a medium with which to probe, vives in these hostile conditions, as part of active, or has it transformed into a purely analyze, and re-present these dynamics in a broader tourist industry selling a nostalgic nostalgic form of entertainment? an imaginary realm. Our drawings reveal idea of “traditional Britishness.” We first vis- worlds full of dreamlike uncertainty, pop- ited in the buildup to the Brexit referendum, HQ & RH: It’s interesting to answer this in the ulated by heroic characters on the cusp of when nostalgia was gaining political curren- context of Growlr and other sex clubs we’ve love or violence. It felt like we were digging cy, energizing white nationalism in the UK.