We are very excited to start this year’s Reading Room with an evening with Mark Shorter.
Mark has recently finished his Cotangent Residency at Tangent Projects studios and will demonstrate his newly fashioned trumpets alongside a text about the famous flatuist cabaret performer El Petomane.
Mark Shorter is an Australian artist. Working across performance, video, photography and sculpture, he examines our preconceptions around landscape, gender and the body.
The male figure and its conditioning is a recurring element in his work, found in both his own performances and the characters he devises, which include the vaudevillian cowboy, Renny Kodgers; the quixotic journeyman Tino La Bamba; and the temporally adrift, guttural art critic Schleimgurgeln. Often absurdly humorous and visceral, these characters are performance investigations. Conceived to test the construction of self, they stretch and twist the ideologies that sit deep within the form, pressing to a point of distortion and collapse.