Joshua Di Mattina-Beven
Selected Work
Tussle
Wrestleclub
Listing, Wishing
Handkerchief
Up Your Ass
Ditty4Duo
About
CV
“So beautiful, in the face of it all.”
Up Your Ass, or, From the Cradle to the Boat, or, The Big Suck, or, Up from the Slime (1965) is a play by cultural theorist and man-hater Valerie Solanas. Part exhibition, noise act, drag show and theatrical re-enactment, ‘Up Your Ass’ materially and performatively reconstructs the original text in its unholy glory.
Written before the publishing of SCUM Manifesto (1967), Up Your Ass carries the writhing politic of ‘Cutting Up Men’ – here theatricalised, but no less serious in its commitment to male destruction. We have interpreted ‘Cutting Up’ also as a reordering, rearranging, of the contingent parts which make up the gender binary and its oppression. In this spirit, we have also edited, cut and reinterpreted the original text for both brevity and contemporary relevance.
Upon the rediscovery of Up Your Ass in 1999, and its musical adaptation in 2000, critics heralded the text as ‘adolescent’, ‘more a provocation than a work of dramatic literature’ and ‘fundamentally flawed’. We are here to embrace the text’s amateurish energy, drawing from clown and drag practices to generate a show brimming vitality and destruction.
Presented by Kudos Gallery through the Emerging Curator Award 2023