Alexis Milne performance at CHARLIE SMITH london

ALEXIS MILNE

WITCH FINDER GENERAL

Performance / First Thursday
Thursday March 4th 7.30pm – 8.30pm

This performance is part of the exhibition DEMONOLOGY featuring:

Jonathan Baldock, Sebastian Gögel, James Jessop, Jasper Joffe, Alex Gene Morrison, Claire Pestaille, Prue Piper, Moritz Schleime, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark, Erik Tidemann, Danny Treacy

Exhibition Dates
Friday February 5th – Saturday March 13th 2010
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

Performance artist Alexis Milne will be conducting a modern day witch hunt at CHARLIE SMITH london. The age old tradition of demonization and hunting out of convenient scapegoats induced by mass hysteria and intolerance of alternative views will be resurrected in the contemporary arena of the art gallery.

Modern day peddlers in the occult and the forces of neo-paganism (such as Harry Potter, the bastard offspring of single mother J K Rowling and the necromancer novelist Phillip Pullman in his ‘Dark Materials’) will be targeted by the Witch Finder General, a transgendered alter ego of Alexis Milne based on a characterization of Valerie Solanas. Solanas was the founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), a figure from the 1960’s New York art scene who embodied a seemingly contradictory nature, advocating a radical feminist doctrine of hate towards the regime of male hegemony whilst earning money as a street prostitute and courting the famed and male dominated circle of artworld star Andy Warhol. Her own mental health deteriorated to such a state that she famously shot Warhol after being repeatedly rejected from his factory.

The volatile and contradictory nature of Solanas as the Witch Finder General will be evoked to highlight the irrational hysteria inherent in demonization that has occurred throughout history from medieval witch hunts to the McCarthy communist trials of the 1960’s to the current War on Terror.