Exploding Appendix Questionnaire: Victoria Margree
November 18, 2019Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group: February to June Schedule
December 11, 2019
The Exploding Appendix Questionnaire is an ongoing data collecting exercise that, drawing upon divergent public figures from different intellectual disciplines and artistic practices, seeks to create an ongoing and ever-expanding map of ideas. Through this ever-expanding map of divergent views, we seek a kind of dialogue that, in both its overlaps and contradictions, creates a kind of hive-mind, which, in turn, helps contribute to the intellectual unfoldings of Exploding Appendix’s overall mission.
For the Exploding Appendix Questionnaire, we have asked some of our favourite intellectuals, activists, artists, creatives and commentators to contribute to a series of 11 generic questions. The same generic questions have been sent to everyone, and what you read below is one response to this.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Nick Hudson. I’m an insomniac running on various parallel timelines. I make music, visual art (including film and video) and I write.
2. What are your biggest influences in art, literature, music and cinema?
Andrei Tarkovsky, William Burroughs, Donald Cammell, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Russian politics 20th century onwards, Meredith Monk, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Nico, Ennio Morricone, Kate Brown, Pierre Guyotat, Suehiro Maruo, Nina Simone, David Wojnarowicz, Jhonn Balance, Anselm Kiefer, Derek Jarman, Tanya Tagaq, Chris Marker, David Bowie, Antonin Artaud, Kenneth Anger, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maya Deren, Werner Herzog, Robert Wilson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Braque, Henry Darger, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sergio Leone, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vladislav Surkov.
3. What, for you, is the purpose of art and culture?
To present the possibility of alternate realities – and simultaneously: to reflect and amplify idiosyncrasies, to simulate religious ecstasies, to put theatre curtains around a person’s solipsism or anxieties, to flood the monochrome realism of dystopia with hitherto unseen hues that can propel one towards changing the present/future reality, to connect people through stories, to make the amorphous pink/white noise of consciousness more manageable through narrative framing, to externalise urgent dreams, to project oneself into a preferable timeline, to bind and fortify energies and make communal ecstatic awe, bypassing religion (In some cases); to compress time and space, to expand time and space, to provide catharsis in a way which doesn’t leave a trail of bodies.
4. What makes something subversive?
If it glitches you out of your established thought form, prompting further enquiry through peeling back the palm fronds, that might be deemed subversive.
5. How would you approach the task of winning friends and influencing people?
Turn up with a dog.
6. What does individual freedom mean to you?
Freedom to exist within a sphere of one’s own obsessions, dreams, desires, free of judgement insofar as said obsessions, dreams, desires, and acts associated with them cause zero harm towards others. (Except in a consensual S+M context of course.)
7. Is there, for you, a relationship between the personal and the political?
The political is the macrocosmic, the personal the microcosmic.
8. What is the root of society’s problems?
Assuming there is one root. Reductionism. Not listening.
9. Will technology liberate humankind?
It may liberate it from itself.
Only systemic reform from the ground up could even begin to approach the liberation of humanity. What are we liberating it from? Humanity is self-enslaving and will use whatever contemporary tools are available to continually reforge its manacles. I regard nuclear energy as the analogue terror, and the internet as its digital counterpoint. Both are ostensibly neutral and hyper-efficient resources, which when operated by humans render vast swathes of natural landscape radioactively scarred for centuries, or are availed to wield a scythe through Western democracy. My answer is, liberation comes from within a collective outlook, irrespective of the printing press, the wheel, Facebook, CERN, laser pens or elaborate pulley systems. And we’re nowhere near that yet.
10. Do you have a vision for utopia?
I’m working on it. But a harmonious and symbiotic alignment of entities in self-sufficient micro-agrarian self-governance is surely at its nucleus.
11. Finally, where can people find more of your work?
My solo work is also available via the Bandcamp link.
