LET RIP: TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK (POETRY FILM)

**Honorable Mention for 'Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook' at REELPOETRY INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2023, Houston, Texas, USA ***

‘I love the rhythmic nature of the ripping sounds that accompanies your voice. I can tell this is personal and those passion projects of the heart are the ones that move us’

My art teacher suggested I go to the Southampton Film Society, where they were playing A Bigger Splash, with David Hockney and his bathing beauties. There was so much tanned male flesh on show. I was 14, had Miss Chuter sussed me out? I identify with this poem Lee, wonderful.'

'How it really brought me back to the 90s - even we had these posters in Carlow in my Gaelic speaking school!'

‘The internalised homophobia in this piece is so important’

‘I was devastated that you threw the scrapbook away and you took bad jpegs on a shitty phone… …the emotional investment in these five years of the scrapbook now with just photos must be devastating’

‘Feels like you laid out on a page, every single layer! Such a privilege for an audience to be immersed in something mental like that’

SUMMARY:
In 1993, when I was aged 15 whilst at secondary school, I discovered Dymaxion Chronofile, architect Buckminster Fuller's very large scrapbook which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. Around the same time, my art teacher suggested that I keep a scrapbook of images. This film contains imagery of pages from a very large scrapbook that I kept when I was a teenager in the 1990s for just over five years – my personal private archived of images that in many ways helped to shape my understanding of (gay) male desire at a time when I felt too uncomfortable to come out as gay.

In 1993, at a time when I was exploring my sexuality as a teenager, my schoolteacher suggested that I keep a scrapbook of images as a resource bank The scrapbook far outlived my teacher’s initial suggestion and the finding, scrapping and juxtaposing of images together from a wide range of sources continued until 1998 by which time the scrapbook was 300 pages and extremely heavy. It wasn’t just one scrapbook; my scrapbook was several scrapbooks welded together to create a monument of my life at that time. In the same manner of Scottish poet Edwin Morgan’s love of scrapbooks, my scrapbooks were ‘a mixture of autobiography, documentary, and art’ (DigitisingMorgan, 2022).

The idea of building a queer identity was so different pre-Internet. The world wide web introduces new possibilities for the construction of queer identity. In the manner of bricolage – building and constructing from what is at hand, piecing together images and visuals available in physical images from magazines etc (pre-Internet days), as a teenager in the early 1990s, I could be said to be the queer bricoleur making my collage constructions in my teenage scrapbook. A lot of the imagery in my scrapbook referred to pop music – pictures of pop music stars and their lyrics. Music that you listen to does inform you (particularly so when you are a teenager). For me it was really difficult growing up at that time in the Nineties listening to music about teenage heterosexuals. As a gay guy, I could identify more with Madonna than a heterosexual man yet she’s taking about heterosexual men. By the time I finished adding further images to my scrapbook in 1998 my scrapbook became too heavy to carry and too bulky to manage; hundreds of images of men (whom I fancied) carefully collaged together with images of others and places I’d been over many pages now exist digitally - the original physical scrapbook was destroyed in 2006 and its pages up until 2020 existing as jpeg files in a folder buried somewhere in another folder on my laptop.

Beginning a perpetual process of making and remaking, constantly recycling myself, constantly requoting myself to create a density, in late 2019, I began making a series of Let Rip films which reused/recycled bodies of my past artwork.These films used the rip as both metaphor, symbol and structure to build upon existing work and employed the action and sonic motif of ripping to create new forms out of ‘old’ practice and indeed show new versions of ‘old’ me. The ‘rip’ in terms of this work could be defined as creating visual textures on screen, which both concealed as much as they revealed, and that ripping something apart did reveal certain things about my homosexuality. Inspired by Crawford Barton’s home movies which documented his life as a child and then into adulthood with his male partner, Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook (2021) revisits my teenage scrapbook through the lens of my (now adult) queer eye. In Reel in the Closet (2015), the narrator talks about Barton’s home movies that he made over many decades and says ‘they’re (Barton and his male partner) interested in the same things as everybody else but at the same time there’s a definite queer eye behind the camera’. What could I learn about myself by revisiting the scrapbook?

Presenting an intimate history of sight (mine), of not seeing yourself (represented in mainstream pop culture) and discovering a part of yourself through seeing, Let Rip: Teenage Scrapbook (2021) tapped into a lot of personal and political issues but mostly internalised homophobia. The voiceover is my voice reciting lines of poetry that I have written that look back in retrospect and reflect upon my life at the time of me producing the scrapbook. Each word or each phrase within the poem connects to different parts of the scrapbook imagery reflect upon how I understand the significance of that imagery now as an out gay man in my forties. Like layers of a painting, each page of the scrapbook imagery forms one layer juxtaposed with other pages/ layers of memory that collectively salvage and monumentalise what could otherwise be the detritus of my life. The rips and tears and the turned-up edges of the scrapbook printed material now as digitised images appear flat on the computer screen. Green-screen processes are again employed to achieve seductive surfaces to beckon the viewer to want to see them in real life thus making the reality of viewing the now-destroyed physical scrapbook in the flesh even more desirable.
Extending Mike Mashon’s idea that ‘there’s something very real and very visceral about a person shooting a very personal film’ (in Reel in the Closet by Stu Maddox, 2015), the pages of my scrapbook in the film appear animated to give the impression of them ripping with subsequent pages coming through. But not so much ripping but more smudging out, on the one hand I am building the image and on the other hand ripping out the image – this is being seen from the image being built up whereas all the other times (in other films like Let Rip: A Personal History…). I am destroying the image.

As part of my solo exhibition Bona Polari! at The Margate School in February 2022, a magical moment was when I performed my scrapbook poem with moving imagery behind me (Figure 28). The teacher who told me to keep the scrapbook, Sharon Cavalier, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years since I left school in 1996, was in the audience. She hadn’t changed a bit and she commented that neither had I after all these years. We shared a very poignant and emotional moment together after the performance had finished agreed not to leave it another 30 years before we met up again. The experience made me question what would it be for me to take that advice from Sharon today – take a book and collage some images into it? Would I repeat the process that I did? Would the process stop after two weeks? Or ten minutes? Would the imagery be different – I didn’t know fully what I was doing then (in terms of selecting and ‘curating’ the imagery from magazine to corkboard to my original 1990 scrapbook) but it seems so obvious now. In some ways, I feel no different as a person looking at that 1990s scrapbook today than when I made it all those years ago but in other ways, it’s almost like looking at another person and zone of feeling (hiding/closeting my homosexuality) that I am never going to revisit, that my teenage self is completely ‘other’ to me now. I feel that I am looking at these images as an outsider now. This just proves that even though we feel we know ourselves at a particular point in time, we are always reassessing everything. That’s a very human quality in the work – it exposes our vulnerabilities but there also a lot of humour in the work as a means to communicate with the viewer.