Arty Toss: A Beginners' Course

Lesson 1: The Proposal

Why I'd like to take part in this project

I've been interested (despite having a resolutely apolitical family background) in Anarchism since I was a teenager. At the age of 14 I was reading Malatesta and Ricardo Flores Magon, and taking part in anarchist conferences organised through South London Press, sleeping on the floor of 121 Railton Road.

As a school leaver, feeling a little alienated from the dominant ideology of finding identity and personal fulfilment through work, I was very interested in that branch of Anarchism that aimed at the supersession of work. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was a revelatory, Damascene text to me, whose liberating refusal to knuckle down is resonant at all times since.

To be able to meld this interest with performance is an exciting prospect. The historical continuities of the absolute fear of Anarchism felt by the State, however small its active followers are in number, are something that lends itself to artistic re-presentation. I'm confident I would find it stimulating to be explore [sic] this in a practical live art context, as well as to connect with other artists interested in the general area of politicised live art.

I am retrospectively embarrassed about almost everything I write, including my application to go cavorting in a project run by the Live Art Development Agency. The reference to reading leftwing authors during my teenage years sounds like the ingratiating, winking gesture of the outsider wanting to be let in; the distancing introduction of the phrase "dominant ideology" works to give a retrospective intellectual shine to my adolescent reading; the way that the redundant "Damascene" is used as an intensifer--are only a few of the offences against style, and simple errors, that look so ugly now.

But it was successful, and with six others, I'm off on Thursday to Walsall. 82% of experts surveyed agreed that Walsall is a shithole; it was also the scene of a somewhat unruly demonstration by the far-right English Defence League last week. It needs the love.

Led by Sean Burn and Mike Layward, we are going to make a piece to be presented at the New Art Gallery, and in the town centre. It'll be based on an Anarchist bomb plot there in 1882, which involved agents provocateurs and the kind of paranoid confusion about who is and isn't a police agent that G K Chesterton extended to surreal, comic lengths in The Man Who Was Thursday.

I sent an email round to the other participants suggesting a drink before it gets going. Exploring their websites I find the photographs of young women laying on their backs in fields of grass which all funders of performance art insist upon before the money is released.

Trina's coming down on the Friday; on the same day, my Head of Pisstaking, my confidante, my little friend who steals with me through the doors of perception, Kim, will arrive in Birmingham with a girlfriend. I told Trina this, and suggested a night of one man-three girl drinky action, to which she merrily consented.

I want her to meet my friends, especially Kim, with her sexiness, low boredom threshold and bright wit. I'm proud of my girlfriends. Men look at me and Kitty walking down the street with a look that shoots envy, trying to scope her beautiful tits before looking away. Or was that me?