An audience is closed behind a sliding door onto a mezzanine in a glue factory. Dirt on the floor, the muscles around his mouth are numbed by handfuls of cloves. Two proxy animals for our instability; playing with a dead ſısh, capturing a lobster. Unsubstantiated interpretation--potentially valid. A lobster inspirers an uninformed and emotional debate on the veracity of of its pain. In fact its nerves are not more complex than a mosquito's, only enigmatic. It's lack of central nervous system means the manner of death we decide, serves only to minimise our trauma not the lobsters. Playing with a dead ſısh, Hopper notices the life by Meade.
Hopper takes the bowl and recusitates his ſısh in his hands between rushes of water. When interupted he shouts "YOU KILLED MY FISH!" An arguement ensues and they run through the factory, dropping the fish on the exit.
In "Fish rots from the head." a basic disagreement with oneself is experienced as a non-indifference toward the other.
By negating the itch to pre-concieve artistic meaning, merit and self-expression Hopper and Meade work creating when idenity is not, deteritorialising and opening to expression through the non-identical. Here the result was a loosening of a tangle of interalised problems and projected perceptions via self and proxies, being candid but non-specific.
An art-process-as-artwork-as-emotion-live-exhibit where the continuum for catastrophe is for a moment actually interrupted and an escape afforded through non-sense.
