Ian Andrews

Full performance video of And... Fractured Feral Tales (2014) by Ian Andrews, Ruark Lewis and Eric Bridgeman, in Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, Issue 1.

In this performance work the artists seek to engage in the complex history of the notions of the feral, wildness, and savagery, and elucidate upon a number of works, objects, and events that they have responded to, including: Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Wittgenstein’s book on colour, King George III’s loss of articulate speech, Krao “the missing link,” Marcel Broodthaers’ painted bones, and the destruction of artefacts in the PNG Parliament in December 2013. The work argues for a practice involving the setting of extremes into play; performing a reverse anthropology in order to utilise the notion of the feral as a tool to gain critical focus on our own culture. Rather than attempting to police the semantic boundaries of the term feral this work seeks to examine how the cultural notion of feral tends to be internally split in a number of directions. It seeks neither to celebrate or romanticise the notion of feral, nor simply denigrate it. Rather this work aims to unravel and collapse a number of oppositions that determine wildness: divine/natural, natural/artificial, domesticated/wild, and native/introduced.

This document and performance attempt to reflect the diverse areas of research and often cross-threaded lines of thought that coalesced through the collaboration between Ian Andrews, Ruark Lewis and Eric Bridgeman.

Animation excerpts from And... Fractured Feral Tales performance video (2014), piano Ruark Lewis