MEET JOY (2020)

MEET JOY (2020) AND THE FLESH FAILS
Performed at Tottenham Grow for Riposte

Crispin Lord
Princelton Delacroix with The Obeah Foundation

In MEET JOY the artist is re-birthed into a room of flesh, re-education and reflective surfaces. The room is constructed; the artist has been abducted. A series of videos attempt to influence the artist through hypgnosis as it explores its expressive and sensory potentialities with the materials provided. Audience members are selected at random and invited into the room to watch as JOY learns how to walk, breathe, collect, transform, imitate, control and entertain.

Following Carole Schneeman’s seminal Meat Joy (1964) in which the naked body is exposed as a sensual, material flow of fleshy and painterly objects, we instead MEET JOY; a persona that emerges from the artist’s fluid identity as the possible twin, contextualising the cell-like space we find it in as as much of a construction as the codes we ascribe to the flesh itself.

All the meat used in the performance was comprised of off-cuts sourced from local butchers in the North London area, treated with disinfectant and disposed of responsibly.