Ménage

It’s the ’90s and Dot, Saul and Owen are living together on the fringes of the Hoxton art scene – shoplifting, dole-scrounging, swapping drugs, clothes and beds. Fifteen years later they are drawn back into each other’s lives but can they happily relive the past or will they rekindle the passions that nearly destroyed them?

Ewan Morrison is the author of the novels Swung and Distance and a collection of stories, The Last Book You Read.

I just point my camera at people then they do things they wouldn’t normally do, I suppose. Even when I film myself, it stops being me. I don’t really think of myself as an artist anyway. I’m probably at least three people in one body. I mean, sometimes I’m a guy and other times two guys or three girls or . . . I don’t know, I just don’t buy into this big artistic genius thing. It’s sick. Who wants to be stuck on that pedestal? I’d die of loneliness.

Dorothy Shears, 1999

Ménage

Pronunciation: Ma’nazh

Function: Noun

Etymology: French, from Old French –
mesnage, dwelling; from Vulgar Latin –
mansionaticum

A domestic establishment; Household;
also Housekeeping

See Ménage à trois

Dorothy Shears

nine works

Video installations, 1992–2009

introduction

Trust. 1993. Video installation. 32 mins. Variable dimensions. Private collection.

THE NINE WORKS here form an intrinsic part of the iconography of what came to be known as the Young British Artist (YBA) scene, a period that started in 1992 and endured for almost fifteen years. Many of the artists from this ‘movement’ are now represented in major international art collections, with their works commanding impressive sums. As the movement has received institutional acceptance, however, it has inevitably fallen into decline.^fn1 Dorothy Shears is one of the few key artists to have survived the collapse of the YBA brand and to have consolidated her status.

The typical image of the YBA was that of grungy cockney post-punks living in squats, making thrown-together streetwise art in rebellion against Thatcherism and Consumerism.^fn2 Shears does not fit that prescriptive schema, being from a different class background, but her work shares many common features with her peers. Being made with ‘cheap throwaway materials’, in her case domestic home video, it crosses over into the realms of installation and performance art, and was originally made for exhibition in backstreet Dockland and East End warehouses.^fn3 Graduating from Goldsmiths College within a few years of Hirst at the time of what was to become Britpop,^fn4 the hype machine was quick to pull her into its orbit.

Some claim that Shears’s initial success was a product of ‘Van Gogh syndrome’,^fn5 with much tabloid hype being made out of the speculated history of her mental health. But unlike several of her peers, Shears has carefully protected her past from the public eye.^fn6 Against the ironic zeitgeist of her time, Shears created intimate, personal works that were in many ways a record of her own artistic ‘becoming’ in a secret coded visual language. As such, her work survives beyond explanation and plagiarist reproduction in the many forms that have attempted to exploit it across the years.^fn7

The following discussion of the nine works sets out not to analyse or explain, but to pay respect to the enigma of the works and the woman herself. As she has, throughout the years, invited viewers to lay aside judgement and trust her, so I too beg you to close your eyes, and enter the darkness with her.

Owen Morgan, 2009