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2023
Billboards and posters, digital and paper
3 of
4 Tenets for Europe
Moving image: 192 x 288px, 704 x 960px mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:10; 1080 x 1920px mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:05 and 0:10; 1920 x 1080 mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:30
Static digital: 720 x 1056px, 864 x 432px, 1080 x 1920px, 1600 x 400px jpeg, RGB colour.
Paper: 1350 x 2980mm, 1375 x 2905mm CMYK colour.
15 September 2023
Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK
4 Tenets for Europe
was created in the year the artist turned 60. Each one of the tenets reflects on an aspect of the artist's experience, looking back over 3 decades of artmaking.
In the early 2000s, under the influence of 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.'
Firrell explored the moral value of disobedience. For the Guardian Newspaper, he designed a projection for the Houses of Parliament:
When the World's Run by Fools It's the Duty of Intelligence to Disobey.
These ideas were also developed in projections for Tate Britain:
If Obedience Invariably Leads to Cruelty, Disobedience Is Our Moral Duty
and
The Rule of Compassion Never Calls for Violence It Calls for Mass Conscientious Disobedience.
The third Tenet for Europe -
Disobey Any Cruel or Unjust Rule
- crystalises the idea that there may be a vital moral element to disobedience. Disobedience - especially mass disobedience - may provide important protections for a society subjected to inept or wicked government or laws.
In late 2022, the artist developed a prototype (later abandoned) inspired by the Marguerite Duras novel
Emily L
(France, 1987) in which the protagonist is terrified by the appearance of a group of Asiatics at a Northern French Port.
Fear of South-east Asians might speak to Duras's early life in the French colony of Indochina, now Vietnam. Equally, according to her biographer, Laure Adler, Duras and her lover Yann Andréa were drinking six or eight litres of wine a day at the time she was writing the novel. It's not unreasonable to assume, then, that the sudden fear described by Duras was more a symptom of her alcoholism than incipient racism.
