Screwball

Abstract

As an artist and curator whose practice mines film culture and genre – Hollywood, pornography, amateur videos – I promote screwball logics but also draw a line back to the work of Charles Baudelaire, that connoisseur, to which Aaron Poochigan refers as the ‘tender freak of freaks’, whose unabashed intimate style always generates a strange ambiguity, not least because of the way Romanticism and realism cross paths in his work. It is in the decadent tradition of Baudelaire that I re-enact scenes, appropriate scripts and mess with genres in my own creative practice. This essay articulates the decadent methodology of the screwball via reference to the video and installation works I curated in the show of the same name at Verge Gallery in Sydney, Australia, June-July 2022. A mix of commissioned and existing pieces, Screwball featured work by California-based artists Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn, P. Staff, and Aimee Goguen, alongside work by Australia-based artists Sione Monū, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Jimmy Nuttall, Brian Fuata, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran, and Garden Reflexxx.