The Antisocial Poodle (2023)
film and installation.
shown at Kunstbrücke Am Wildenbruch, Berlin
in the group show, Von Urinalen und Ornamenten
31st March – 16th July 2023.
The Anti Social Poodle film centres around a protagonist who is training dogs and also her self through exercise and singing. Different characters with different voiceovers of appropriated texts explore how people are socialised through games and playing as well as sublimating antisocial impulses through marketable subcultural groups and activity, (skaters, heavy metal, fitness, pubs, drinking, pool, darts, basketball, etc). The theme of self improvement collides with self destructive tendencies as famously written about in Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse.
The film is deliberately shot in a nofi fashion, with rough cut edits, focusing on the POV of the trance state with voiceovers of texts from different sources. Trance states occur usually as a result of trauma, PTSD, but also in alcoholism and in the case of Dennis Nielsen, he stated in an interview before he would attack his subjects he would often be in a trance, still to the world.
I was interested in the varied use of the trance state, acting as a screensaver for our lives.
The installation resembles a toilet cubicle with the viewer sat down. The video is projected cut in where the door is. Eschewing the obvious cruising analogy, I thought about the toilet cubicle being one last space for public transgression of shittalking and defacement, in a way the original social media doom scroll sanctuary.
On the walls I appropriated many logos, band names, and bad toilet jokes.
In the film, the beginning and end is informed by an experience I once had in rural Norway in 2003. I sat on a bench and saw a metalhead in full corpsepaint walk past me around midday. He returned past me 20 minutes later (also the length of the film) with a baguette, same facial expression, walking back home.
