Celebrate Difference
is a digital animation of simple b&w images of the artist, two drag queens named 'Suzette' and 'Desire' embracing, and a glitter ball. Text panels, derived from the artist’s journals, punctuate the images calling for acceptance of, and engagement with, what is 'other'.
The complete text reads:
You want your courage to be apparent. It’ll be obvious you’re afraid, the shadows under your eyes, the strange ridges that appear just above your cheekbones when you haven’t slept.
Now you can’t be ordinary. You can’t be ordinary like other people. Easily. Unconsciously. Ordinary is something you have to concentrate to be. You have no sense of the ordinary. You do not remember what it is to be ordinary.
The strange, unhinged, cantilever effect you have on the world. You embarrass yourself. You cannot regulate your behaviour sanely. The world rolls on behind the glass, rain falls, cars pass.
Allow me my weakness. With no recrimination, no meaning, no future, no hope. Take me. Make me mad. Blind me to reason. Allow me to wound myself in this way. Anything not to have lived a small life. And I’ll love you for your evasiveness when we meet again and we’re both full of casual disinterest in one another, maybe feigned, maybe not.
You can wish for life to be different in a hundred different ways. You can want it to be shone up with a restlessness, a kind of uneven, brilliant madness. But you do not consider what it might otherwise have been, how very hard in a practical way it might have been.
The indescribable beauty of that known territory of home, your face.
You meet and nothing’s lost. Nothing of what was between you is past or lessened. You say it. You were made never to surrender. Never to give in.
The content of
Celebrate Difference
is influenced by the artist's encounters with flamboyant art dealer Jibby Beane.
NOTE
Jibby Beane (birth year unknown) was a fifty-something Surrey housewife until she met fashion designer Vivienne Westwood in the ladies' toilet at the Design & Direction building. Impressed by Beane's energy and style, Westwood invited her to model and, at the age of 51, Jibby joined Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell walking for Westwood on the Paris catwalk. Beane was one of the first gallerists to show work in a domestic space. Her inaurgural exhibition opened in her Bayswater flat in London on 14 July 1993, showing the work of then boyfriend Jonathan Golsan. Beane also hosted an arts club. She described
Jibby's Arts Club
as 'a platform for people to do as they like, whether techno-poetry or an impromptu performance. I don't want it to be predictable'. Of her divorce and transformation from suburban wife and mother to artworld doyen she said, 'I don't want to make it sound easy. It was tough. But life is a gift. We owe it to ourselves to live it to the full.'
Beane is a larger-than-life theatrical character and she appealed to Firrell's sense of the utter. She was also a jolt-to-the-system for someone from the Norfolk countryside.
As she turned 60, she posed nude for a magazine centrefold. This struck the artist as courageous, non-conforming to societal expectations and fiercely individual. All qualities to be admired.
Then Jibby picked me up in her car, and gave me a copy of her centrefold signed, and I was wildly excited, the same infatuated feeling I caught from Jaime/Suzi at L’Équipe Anglaise on Saturday - a sort of larger feeling that you can get from these fabulously exotic creatures, or from writing, from art...The thunderbolt of meeting Jibby and Suzi and Desire... Jibby went to buy a packet of More menthol cigarettes but didn’t really have enough money and the guy in the shop just said, 'That’s fine Jibby...'
