Micro-residency at Theatre Deli, London, WORK IN PROGRESS: LET RIP: DYMAXION HOMOFILE (TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK)

  

Please join me for a work-in-progress showing as work produced as part of a micro-residency 08-10 Sept at Theatre Deli, London. Details below of the residency project. 

If you would like to attend please RSVP email lee.campbell@arts.ac.uk

My schoolteacher said I should keep a scrapbook 

Images catching my attention

What happens now if I go back thirty years and look 

When me being me I dare not mention? 

To my teacher’s surprise was my scrapbook 

I kept scrapping for five or so years

Homophobic eyes fuelling my shame 

Heteronormative culture provoking my fears 

Too often too lonely with my scrapbook and tears 

Every tear, every tear in my scrapbook 

Each image with its own special meaning 

Images of men for girls everywhere to look 

Being gay in a straight world dreaming 

The irony being, in the men I was seeing

The more I reveal, the more I conceal 

Cutting out bits from that week’s Smash Hits for my scrapbook 

My bedroom wall, my private public space 

Then from the wall into my scrapbook, hundreds of images and lyrics

But all I wanted to look at was his face 

But the handsome man’s face was carefully placed in between 

Images from National Geographic Magazine 

I became a master of collaging those I desired 

in amongst images of others and places I had been 

Always liminal 

Clever at seeing without being seen 

The artists she taught me all turned out to be queer 

Did she know something I didn’t, my teacher Miss Cavalier? 

Now so obviously glaring, my rip-outs of Keith Haring

And Robert Mapplethorpe’s men, erotic and daring 

Yet, this was the time gay men were perceived

We all have AIDS many straight folks believed

Maybe that’s why I didn’t fully enquire 

in the artists Miss taught me for fear of the fire 

Look in my scrapbook, I remember his songs 

But my eyes were on his chest and what’s under those thongs

Jesus to a Child - such a sad song that he sung

I’ll never forget George Michael all wet 

In the video for Fast Love, all my Christmases come

His album called Older helped me through tough times

Me finding comfort in the beauty of what he wrote in its lines

Whilst I loved George and his chest back in late ‘87

This album taught me gays don’t just live and die Heaven 

We are often perceived as fake, camp, G-A-Y

Yet Older was heartfelt and helped me get by

A source of frustration was high school sex education 

My elderly teacher although terribly kind 

was not well prepared for a teenagers’ mind

‘After several dates, buy a packet of Mates

Machines in most gents. Three for 99 pence 

Andrew, this condom, roll it down this banana

I can hear giggles from someone. Is that you Pollyanna?’

Andrew struggled at first to get the sheath on

‘Miss!’, Jason shouted, ‘Andrew’s ‘nana is two inches long!’

‘It’s the angle of the dangle’, Miss quickly replied

Pointing to an OHP of where to stick it inside 

The default is hetero but what about gay? 

I had a burning question for Miss but never dare say 

‘Miss’, said Paul ‘I went in the gents but lack confidence,

got wobbly knees, in case someone sees’

‘Well’ said Miss

‘If it’s other eyes popping or nerve you are lacking

In your weekly shopping, put a pack in your packing  

Awkward, yes, buying a pack of Durex in front of your ex

If you really must mask it, don’t just put in a basket 

Put in your trolley, with your carrots and cauli’ 

Then all of a sudden it was quite unexpected but for me not so weird 

When Miss in her 60s said she liked men with a beard 

Wish I could go back now and tell Miss so do I 

Nothing quite as sexy as a beard on a guy 

The art of the squint during a McDonalds stint 

Escaping the gloom in the male changing room

Late ’94, the first time I saw 

this guy from the grammar school strip to his jock

I thought it rude not to glance what’s under his pants

My eyes couldn’t stop, my eyes were on lock

He had that grammar school voice my co-workers despise 

So given worst job in the kitchen, he was stationed on fries 

Every chance I’d be skipping me on burger flipping

Yet allowed me some spying at Grammar Guy frying 

Getting sweaty whilst cooking, I couldn’t stop looking 

at Grammar School Guy through the flames of my griddle

Just imagine a burger with his meat in the middle 

I wonder what happened to my friend called Gavin

Did he realise his dreams? What kind of life is he having? 

Me and Gavin were rebels, both on a mission

To escape where we worked 

with its workers’ lack of ambition

Grunge indie look. All those drugs that he took 

Britpop was alive, 94/95

Oasis v Blur. Who did you prefer? 

Was turned on seeing Gavin put black eyeliner on 

I wanted badly to kiss him but knew I was wrong 

Tried hard to unsee him having sex in his Ford

Gav in mascara – something his girlfriend adored 

Looking back, it seems clear now, I acted deliberately coy 

Could never show my true feelings for black eyeliner boy 

With his intellect, creativity, and eyes deep blue 

My student crush at art school was another George too 

That scrapbook photo of me and George on a beach 

Feelings for George that I had nobody could teach 

In Paris, my heart broke. It wasn’t me he was kissing 

That photo of me dancing alone 

to Everything but the Girl’s Missing

In my sixth form was Mike 

who all the girls liked

Mike not just the punk taught me acid jazz funk

Bands like Jamiroquai (when they were cool) 

He taught me so much they don’t teach you at school 

Never told Mike I’m gay – sure he knew anyway 

Worried the reaction and what he might say

For fear of rejection, us getting hurt 

I fancied him rotten in his Nirvana t-shirt

At that REM concert, whilst me fancying Stipe

I peeked at the hair on Mike’s chest, I realised my type

A pint in my local, Christmas Day ‘99

Me looking over at Danny thinking ‘Damn, he is fine’ 

Playing pool with the lads, Danny-boy on my mind 

Bent over the table, that peachy behind

His wife on the phone saying turkey is served 

I brushed up against him

Phwoar, his peaches were curved 

Go home to your wife, to your not-so-fun life 

I’ll sit here with my beer and imagine your rear 

You bloody enjoyed it though you said it was nothing

Imagine me not your wife and the turkey you’re stuffing  

Feeling forlorn now Danny had gone, Natalie Imbruglia's Torn 

Me listening back in my bedroom with Christmas pudding and porn 

There came a day when I thew away 

my too heavy to carry too bulky to manage scrapbook

If I could go back then, what would I say?

Lee, you will be fine. In time, you will be okay 

CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY VIDEO POEM 

SECTION OF POEM PERFORMED via ZOOM

FULL LENGTH VERSION via ZOOM

AUDIENCE COMMENTS

‘My art teacher suggested I go to the Southampton Film Society, where they were playing A Bigger Splash, with David Hockney and his bathing beauties. There was so much tanned male flesh on show. I was 14, had Miss Chuter sussed me out? I identify with this poem Lee, wonderful.'

'How it really brought me back to the 90s - even we had these posters in Carlow in my Gaelic speaking school!'

‘Loved the visuals Lee. As a late 90s/early 00s teenager I had many the scrapbook :p Also brilliant depiction of the awful awkward sex education of so many secondary schools’ 

I remember video recording Pray by Take That on ITV The Chart Show onto VHS in 1993 and playing the few second clip of Jason Orange in his underwear over and over again until the tape snapped. My burgeoning homoerotic imagination was on fire but what was fuelling this were images of men intended for a straight female audience. 

 

LET RIP: DYMAXION HOMOFILE is a performance poem about what it was like for me to realise I am gay when I was surrounded by mainstream heteronormative pop culture in 1990s homophobic Britain. The words of the poem will directly reference images within a scrapbook that I kept when I was a teenager in the 1990s for 5+ years – my personal private archive of images that in many ways helped to shape my understanding of (gay) male desire. These scrapbook images will form the basis for the moving imagery that I use as part of my Zoom performance work and also for then the poem is presented in video poem form.

 

The title Dymaxion Homofile is a play on words of Dymaxion Chronofile, architect Buckminster Fuller's very large scrapbook  which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983 (below). 

In 1993 when I was 15/16 whilst at high school, my art teacher suggested that I keep a scrapbook of images. Inspired also by my mum's love of collecting postcards and sticking them and collected bits and pieces (train tickets/tourist brochures etc. from holidays into  scrapbooks, between 1993-1999, this turned into a 6-year self-guided project! Between 1993-1999, as a teenager, I kept a scrapbook of found imagery, of newspaper and magazine cuttings mainly from magazines for teenagers like Look In and Smash Hits but also of images from National Geographic Magazine and Germany’s Stern, of pieces of printed ephemera from around the world

 FRONT COVER 1997

BACK COVER 1997

Hundreds of images collaged together over many many pages that now exist digitally, as the original physical scrapbook has been destroyed. In my mid-late teens, I realised that I was gay. Before the breakthrough moment of me reading Gay Times in my late teens (stealing copies of Gay Times and smuggling them into my bedroom without my parents seeing), the way that I accessed images of guys that I fancied would be through imagery in mainstream (straight) pop culture, often through music magazines like Smash Hits where I fancied pin-ups designed for a teenage girl audience. And not just in teen magazines but through images of (straight) men on TV and in all kinds of other printed media. When I was able to catch a glimpse of a gay man on TV, I did not often identify with him. Normally presented as overtly camp, I fancied a more ‘straight-acting’ guy and therefore was drawn to straight men.Inspired by Crawford Barton’s home movies which documented his life as a child and then into adulthood with his male partner, LET RIP: DYMAXION HOMOFILE revisits my teenage scrapbook through the lens of my (now adult) queer eye. In Reel in the Closet (2015), the narrator talks about Barton’s home movies that he made over many decades and says ‘they’re (Barton and his male partner) interested in the same things as everybody else but at the same time there’s a definite queer eye behind the camera’. What can I learn about myself by revisiting the scrapbook? How did these scrapbook images (unbeknownst to me at the time) speak of me exploring my (homo)sexuality as a teenager? 

 

MY BEDROOM CIRCA 1996 WITH CORKBOARD (TOP LEFT) 

In 2019, I re-excavated my personal archive of drawings, paintings and photographs made over the span of 25 years by making a series of collages (see example above) which not only had the same textural quality of my teenage scrapbook but also the corkboards of images in my bedroom where I lived as a teenager (images were first ripped out of magazines and then placed onto corkboards in my bedroom and then after a month or so of living with the images, I would select which ones would go into my scrapbook). None of these images would be too edgy (provocative/pornographic) as the scrapbook would form part of my college studies and edgier images (i.e., images of men in their underwear or who I particularly fancied would be stored under my bed so I could look at them late at night once my parents were asleep). In 2021, one of these early collages was featured in Oriel Mostyn gallery’s exhibition MY ONLINE BEDROOM (top) and was featured in an issue of HOMOSURREALISM magazine (bottom. 

For virtual exhibition tour see: https://www.mostyn.org/myonlinebedroom

 

My previous LET RIP films; A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SEEING AND NOT SEEING (2019), THE BEAUTIFUL GAME (2020) and BODIES (LEAN AND RIPPED) built up a sophisticated linguistic system of collaging images from my personal archive of artworks mixed in with  found ephemera and moving image footage (for example football matches in 1990s on YouTube) to build up an arresting body of work that recycles my archive into the present. Their success is demonstrated by the many international film festivals that they have been shown in for example Wicked Queer 2021 in Boston USA and Visions 2020, at the Nunnery in London.

WATCH HERE: https://filmfreeway.com/LETRIP

WATCH HERE:

https://filmfreeway.com/LETRIPTHEBEAUTIFULGAME 

WATCH HERE:

https://filmfreeway.com/FITslashFATLEANANDRIPPED20

These films then provided the green screen Zoom backgrounds for my later performance poetry works made in 2021 including CLEVER AT SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN and BODIES OF DESIRE: STICK YOUR STEREOTYPES  with arresting effect and similar public and critical acclaim where these works have been invited to be performed at a number of events online from a range of hosts internationally.

This self-tape includes shortened versions of these two works.*CLICK to PLAY*

Exploring the power of re-quoting myself by having motifs that are recontextualised, the green-screen imagery accompanying the Zoom performance will employ the action and sonic motif of ripping as in Let Rip: A Personal History of Seeing.. (2019). Each word or each phrase within the poem incorporates different parts of the scrapbook imagery and the content of the poem will reflect upon how I understand the significance of that imagery now as an out gay man in my forties. Like layers of a painting, each page of the scrapbook  imagery will form one layer juxtaposed with other pages/ layers. The rips and tears and the turned-up edges of the scrapbook printed material now as digitised images appear flat on the computer screen. I will employ green-screen processes to achieve seductive surfaces to beckon the viewer to want to see them in real life thus making the reality of viewing the now-destroyed physical scrapbook in the flesh even more desirable. 

What would it be for me to take that advice from my teacher today – take a book and collage some images into it? Would I repeat the process that I did? Would the process stop after two weeks? Or ten minutes? Would the imagery be different – I didn’t know  fully what I was doing then (in terms of selecting and ‘curating’ the imagery from magazine to corkboard to scrapbook) but it seems so obvious now. In some ways, I feel no different as a person looking at the scrapbook today than when I made it all those years ago but in other ways, it’s almost like looking at another person and zone of feeling (hiding/closeting my homosexuality) that I am never going to revisit, that my teenage self is completely ‘other’ to me now. I feel that I am looking at these images as an outsider now. This just proves that even though we feel we know ourselves at a particular point in time, we are always reassessing everything. That’s a very human quality in the work – it exposes our vulnerabilities but there also a lot of humour in the work as a means to communicate with the viewer. 

Extending Mike Mashon’s idea that ‘there’s something very real and very visceral about a person shooting a very personal film’ (in Reel in the Closet by Stu Maddox, 2015), I have begun experimenting with how I can animate the pages to give the impression of them ripping with subsequent pages coming through. But not so much ripping but more smudging out (see tests below).Using the images digitally, you know that the images are not being destroyed (by ripping  the materials (the paper) physically). The viewer knows that the image is being smudged/wiped out but the image is still there because of technology (the image still exists digitally). But when it’s the paper being ripped, the image is gone. There is an irrevocable harm. But as the image is digital I know that I can bring it back. 

As Covid-19 restrictions lift, I would like to use photocopies versions of the pages I have as forming a background in the real space for me to perform the poem in with the new imagery  experiments projected onto my body in physical space extending how I currently do so with Zoom. By wallpapering the space, the space then becomes the book.

Below is a small selection of the many digitalised scrapbook pages