Disc One : DVD-Video 640 x 480 — Psychedelic Version LPCM Mono / 65 mins
Disc Two : CD-Audio — Reversed Audio-Strip Stereo / 65 mins

SCREENINGS:
LONDON | FRANZ WEST, Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1. 20 Feb – 2 June 2019.
LONDON | OTHER CRITERIA, 14 Hinde Street, W1.  7 May – 30 June 2015.
LONDON | SARAH LUCAS, SITUATION: ABSOLUTE BEACH MAN RUBBLE, Whitechapel Gallery, E1.  2 Oct – 15 Dec 2013.
AUSTRIA | FRANZ WEST ‘WHERE IS MY EIGHT?’, MUMOK, Vienna.  23 Feb – 26 May 2013.
LONDON | SITUATION FRANZ WEST, Situation / Sarah Lucas, First Floor, 4 New Burlington Place, W1.  10 Oct – 28 Nov 2012.
LONDON | ICA, commemorating the life and work of Franz West who passed away in July.  Screening details, 23 Aug 2012.
NEW ZEALAND | Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 30 The Octagon, Dunedin. 18 Sep, 1 Oct 2011.
AUSTRIA | LUCAS BOSCH GELATIN, Kunsthalle Krems.  July – Nov 2011.

Video stills

LUCAS BOSCH GELATIN  [Bosch as in Hieronymus Bosch] : Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, 2011

SITUATION FRANZ WEST : 4 New Burlington Place, London, 2012

ENERGY DAIRIES + other Franz West videos : ‘WHERE IS MY EIGHT?’, MUMOK, Vienna, 2013 [photo Design Art News]

FRANZ WEST : Tate Modern, London, 20 February – 2 June 2019

Full review of the talk from SLASHSTROKE magazine,

‘When we arrived at the elegant Royal Institution and entered the lecture theatre with its hot pink tiered seating, artists Sarah Lucas, Andreas Reiter Raabe and Franz West’s discussion was already in mid-flow. Similarly the advertised “musical interventions” by Phillip Quehenberger had begun. Drinking beer, grinning, and murmuring into their microphones, the artists were often eclipsed by Quehenberger’s keyboard sounds and growling electronic bass. Quehenberger, for the most part silent and serious in his black vest and chain, carefully produced music that has previously been called “electro-pop music for test tube babies, a giant ‘f*** you’ to the Hoxtonites proclaiming the hipster draw of ‘electro-house’, it’s mean, dirty and sometimes horrible, but it was always meant to be that way, wasn’t it?”(Boomkat). In some ways this description is apt for the way in which many received tonight’s “talk” which took the anticipated format and threw it back into the crowd. Much to the delight of many (beautiful young art folk resembling the cast of Glee dragged via art school into brogues, gingham and messy hair) who proclaimed the evening “marvellous” and “mental!”, but much to the disgust of others – two of whom were women in scarves and pearls who told me in the Ladies’ afterwards that they considered the evening an “insult to their intellect”.

Through the flow of Quehenberger’s music (at one point we seemed to slip into an Orb song with Sarah Lucas’ words “penetrating”, “realer and realer” and “sense of what they might be” floating through the beats) the three artists covered varied territory, and though individually their points were not particularly insightful, the parts did eventually result in an interesting whole. Looking not unlike a Madhatter’s Tea Party, the trio covered the abstract in music as similar to the visual (Delacroix-style music as the most abstract form), the subconscious, the role of music and colour, the artist’s hand (Lucas: “ I make the eggs the best”), a love of pink and its ability to improve in the countryside where it contrasts well with green (a rural rather than urban pink), dentists as sculptors and the use of furniture within Lucas and West’s work. The latter provoked West’s initial interest in Lucas who began using furniture as a substitute for the human body in the 1990s. Lucas has continued to appropriate everyday materials to make works that use humour, visual puns and sexual metaphor to discuss wider issues such as death, Englishness and gender. The evening’s talk was filled with just such humour and discussion. West spent the majority of the time requesting the music was louder, more melancholy, sweeter. Maintaining a whimsical smile for much of the time, his bright red socks popped like one of his colourful sculptures or worn abstract objects. Reiter Raabe’s questions vaguely held the conversation together – to take this “talk = art” metaphor to its end, he compiled their words into a loose linear narrative, posing conceptual questions in the same way as he explores wider meaning in his photography.

The evening reached a climax of mixed pleasure, frustration and confusion when Lucas walked out saying “I’m going for a wee” which resulted in many people leaving. West shrugged and said to the audience “money back again”. I suddenly felt I was part of a morphing Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. When Lucas returned questions were invited from the floor – to which a young man asked what was going on. He had come for a talk, he had come to an institution, he expected information, and he expected a structure. The artists asked him what he wanted to know and they would tell him. The starry crowd tangibly divided between those sneering at his lack of comprehension and those nodding vehemently at his right to ask the question they were too afraid to ask. Perhaps he exposed an Emperor’s New Clothes element to the proceeding, but also in questioning the activity he created a Brechtian sense of performance, a commentator exposing the process of the event, clarifying the deterioration of the 4th (in this case even 3rd, 2nd and 1st?) wall. The frustration of many seemed contradictory for a crowd so willing to accept anything within the boundaries of the artists’ decision and yet they rejected this member of the audience for demanding to become a part of an apparently boundless event/experience through his question. However, ultimately this need for formal structure resulted in his missing out on the pleasure of the ‘in progress/in process’ flowing nature of the event.

Despite the mixed responses, one thing was certain – the audience positively buzzed as it left, whether in humour, joy, or anger. Before the night closed, West had offered a definition of the aim of the evening: a “loading of energy”. This description was certainly true for me.’  REBECCA BELL.