Being Among Bluebells

Abstract

Based on participant observation during 2015 and 2016, this article analyses the Slaughterhouse Club, a drop-in arts project run by London-based queer performance collective Duckie for people living with homelessness, addiction and mental health challenges. It argues for the political potential of amateur artistic practice not because it helps people to articulate a personal narrative or become more proficient in a particular skill but because it enables escape, resistance, acceptance, subjective expression and collective world making. In so arguing, the article – following the club – renames participants ‘artists’ and reclaims the term ‘amateur’ to connote forms and processes that are intentionally distinct from professional, applied or therapeutic art practices and concerned with self-determined pleasure, relatively autonomous operation and indifference to a public audience.

The article locates the club within Duckie’s practice, which is broadly conceptualized as the production of ‘homemade mutant hope machines’. It describes the project’s development, material conditions, typical processes and outcomes across a range of forms, emphasizing its provision of a space distinct from either the institutionalized hostel or the transactional street. It notes potential alignments between amateurism, anarchism and queerness, expressed at the club through minimally conditional support for artistic practice on participants’ own terms and indeed for amicable non-productivity. There are analyses of solo and collective practices at the club.

The article therefore suggests how the figure of the amateur generatively engages the refusal of normative productivity, the embrace of fun and the distinctive expression of marginalized subjectivities, proving able even in acutely challenging conditions to catalyse empathy, relationality and hope on self-defined terms.

Notes

1 This argument is adapted from my doctoral thesis (Walters 2018). Unless otherwise stated, observations are from my field notes and Slaughterhouse Club producers’ online ‘diaries’, provided by producers, and quotations are from my field notes and recordings. Participants’ names have been changed to protect anonymity, except for Billy and John, whose names already appear on published materials.

2 The Slaughterhouse Club faces considerable uncertainty given the end of its current funding stream in October 2020 and the potential impact of the coronavirus pandemic on its often vulnerable participants.