Whoresley - An exhibition of the Art of Sebastian Horsley I came across Sebastian a couple of times at various events – Current 93 gigs, the odd Chap party, etc, usw. I started reading up on who this bloke was (I was convinced that it was Marc Almond in a big hat when I first saw him!) and discovered a rather complex and interesting fellow. He was a fake in many ways (but so many people were) and the damaged selfish self-destructive abuser of people and chemicals was only partially true. He was an artist but despite having an affluent background and artistic friends, he couldn’t quite make it into the trendy art scene. He was a rude and crude and funny journalist. He was a self-created character, bordering on caricature, in his tailored and elaborate mad-hatter outfits and his role as ‘King of Soho’, lamenting the area’s slow and depressing slide from its dodgy reputation to its modern respectable mundanity. I kept thinking I was going to go and chat with him the next time I saw him. Then we bought tickets to see ‘Dandy in the Underworld’: a hilarious but darkly-tinged play about his life… and the next day he died of an over-dose. An unintentional publicity stunt to promote his biography: this was horrible and tragic and so unbelievable that it seemed a perfect (but premature) ending to a life lived in art, artifice, iconography and irony. A couple of days ago at Kim Newman’s party I was introduced to an old friend of Cecile’s called Nigel, who is an amazingly nice, modest, intelligent and level-headed bloke (it turned out that he was the director and owner of the Redemption Films and was therefore the only director to have had his films banned in the UK on the grounds of blasphemy!) who mentioned that there was going to be a Horsley exhibition… then a few days later Cecile was offered a couple of free tickets to the opening. This must be kismet! The exhibition itself was a little bit of a disappointment to me. I got to see some pictures I’d only ever seen in photos before and to appreciate the scale of his larger work but there were no real surprises: there was his shelf of human skulls, his sunflowers, one of his old suits and his film of his experiences in the Philippines where he was crucified. There were no familiar faces there either. I had half hoped to see David Tibet (Current 93) there or even Stephen Fry, but then those guys really knew the man and had no real need to get to understand him through his work. I chatted a little with Nigel about the time that he lived a few streets away from Sebastian and for a few years their two worlds met like that central bit of a Venn Diagram. This intersection was apparently filled with such things as illegal substances and immoral acts. I should have known there was a connection: a director unable to show his work because it is blasphemous (what century are with living in here!?) and an artist unable to travel to America due to ‘Moral Turpitude’. A slight and odd evening: good conversation (with Cecile, Patricia and Nigel), good wine, a bit of melancholic remembrance of a life in art and then home before it got dark.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 21:06:11 +0000
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