David Roberts Art Foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary and also bid an exuberant farewell to its current Camden premises last night (7 September) with a performative extravaganza. This took place in and around X: a Fantasy (until 7 October), a high octane final exhibition focusing on the often vexed territory between public display and private intimacy.
There was poetry from Hannah Regel and some strikingly choreographed dance from Fernanda Muñoz Newsome, all set against a backdrop of often transgressive boundary-blurring works. These ranged from Pierre Molinier’s onanistic gender-bending self-portraits and Helen Chadwick’s sexily visceral photographs, to flickering lamps containing movie-prop frogs from Dora Budor, Celia Hempton’s luscious painting of a male nude and an entire wall covered with androgynous party people by the young Glaswegian artist France-Lise McGurn.
But it was in the upstairs studio where the action really kicked off, with London-based Zoe Williams’s Ceremony of the Void, an opulent, erotic banquet of rude food (suspended sausages, penis bread and fur-muffed flagons of urine-hued Suze liqueur, anyone?). This voluptuous feast was consumed with increasing flamboyance and gusto by the artist and her team of veiled, semi-naked latex-robed female celebrants.
Over an hour or so, what had begun as an elegantly ritualistic event disintegrated into an orgiastic, Dionysian food fight. It culminated in the arrival of some elaborately decorated cakes that were immediately crammed into mouths, smeared over bodies, hurled and sat upon.
Amongst the throng observing these hijinks with your correspondent were the neo-naturist duo Christine Binnie and Jill Westwood, no slouch in the performative nudity and rude food stakes themselves. But while applauding the unfolding mayhem and irreverent phallus-wielding bawdiness, they, along with your correspondent, couldn't help wishing that Williams had also interspersed some rather older and less perfect body types amongst her array of gorgeous young bacchantes.
Also, instead of being in the line of fire, perhaps the audience could have been invited to participate rather more actively in in the Ceremony, thus making the last hurrah of the foundation in Mornington Crescent a real free for all? Maybe when David Roberts opens his new sculpture garden in Somerset in a couple of years’ time there will be more inclusively multi-generational opportunities to go wild in the country…