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Celebrate Difference
is a digital animation of simple b&w images of the artist, two drag queens named 'Suzette' and 'Desire' embracing, and a glitter ball. Text panels, derived from the artist’s journals, punctuate the images calling for acceptance of, and engagement with, what is 'other'.
The content of
Celebrate Difference
is influenced by the artist's encounters with flamboyant art dealer Jibby Beane.
NOTE
Jibby Beane (birth year unknown) was a fifty-something Surrey housewife until she met fashion designer Vivienne Westwood in the ladies' toilet at the Design & Direction building. Impressed by Beane's energy and style, Westwood invited her to model and, at the age of 51, Jibby joined Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell walking for Westwood on the Paris catwalk. Beane was one of the first gallerists to show work in a domestic space. Her inaurgural exhibition opened in her Bayswater flat in London on 14 July 1993, showing the work of then boyfriend Jonathan Golsan. Beane also hosted an arts club. She described
Jibby's Arts Club
as 'a platform for people to do as they like, whether techno-poetry or an impromptu performance. I don't want it to be predictable'. Of her divorce and transformation from suburban wife and mother to artworld doyen she said, 'I don't want to make it sound easy. It was tough. But life is a gift. We owe it to ourselves to live it to the full.'
Beane is a larger-than-life theatrical character and she appealed to Firrell's sense of the utter. She was also a jolt-to-the-system for someone from the Norfolk countryside.
As she turned 60, she posed nude for a magazine centrefold. This struck the artist as courageous, non-conforming to societal expectations and fiercely individual. All qualities he admires.
Then Jibby picked me up in her car, and gave me a copy of her centrefold signed, and I was wildly excited, the same infatuated feeling I caught from Jaime/Suzi at L’Équipe Anglaise on Saturday - a sort of larger feeling that you can get from these fabulously exotic creatures, or from writing, from art...The thunderbolt of meeting Jibby and Suzi and Desire... Jibby went to buy a packet of More menthol cigarettes but didn’t really have enough money and the guy in the shop just said, 'That’s fine Jibby...'
