Chapter Two of Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? at Cooper Gallery DJCAD,

I was aware, from the work I had done in Chapter One of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? at Cooper Gallery DJCAD, of the profound underlying ethos with which, the curator, Sophia Hao, had shaped the show. It set me re-reading Hannah Arendt, re-connecting to the insights she had given me about meeting points of the inner and the outer life. Arendt wrote that ‘even the greatest forces of intimate life, the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence, unless and until they are transformed, deprivatised and de-individualised, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.’ As Arendt made apparent, the presence of others ‘who see what we see and hear what we hear’ allows us to feel that our reality of both the world and ourselves is viable and thereby gives courage and openness to push these thoughts to tough and complex edges, springing between ourselves individually and the group.

I was also aware of the underlying resonant armature of Dundee’s own past of courageous pioneering women. The city was nicknamed ‘she town’, due to the unprecedented economic and social independence of the female jute workers.

This dynamic balancing of history, memory and dialogue with new trajectories, the exploration of the space between archive and what I call ‘arc live,’ is something I recognise as an arena, where truly new ideas are moulded and nurtured, holding telling clues for ways forward.

With my archival documentation from the early 70’s of Moody and the Menstruators on display in the exhibition, I used these visuals plus old film footage of the group to make a video incorporating an initial ‘dialogue’ with Alexis Hunter about feminism. In front of the projection, I sang Lennon’s Gimme some Truth over our 1974 rendition of Troggs Wild Thing to inhabit the tensions and conflicting feelings around anger, repression, rebellion, the erotic, the exultant, joy and rage

I’m sick and tired of hearing things from
Uptight short sided narrow minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic psychotic pigheaded politicians
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
No short-haired, yellow-bellied
Son of tricky dicky’s
Gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocket full of hopes
Money for dope, money for rope
No short-haired, yellow-bellied,
Son of tricky dicky’s
Gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocket full of hopes
Money for dope, money for rope
I’m sick to death of seeing things from
Tight-lipped condescending mama’s little chauvinists
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
I’ve had enough of watching scenes from
Schizophrenic egocentric paranoiac primadonnas
All I want is the truth just give me some truth

The press release from Cooper Gallery read:

Glowering at the camera with an inscrutable and captivating presence, Anne Bean and her co-conspirators in Moody and the Menstruators evoke a politics that contests gender, androgyny and sexuality. Disregarding the norms and conventions of high and low culture, Moody and the Menstruators is an exquisite event that definitively situates the body as the only event on show.