Output details

Concerning the Difference Between the Delights of Pleasure and True Happiness

This performance was Judd’s contribution to a group exhibition Fourteen Interventions at Swedenborg House, London, 25th February to 5th March 2010, curated by Stephen McNeilly of the Swedenborg Society. Judd’s contribution was supported by ACE funding. McNeilly invited artists to explore the interrelated notions of belief, spirit and archive. The other exhibitors were Iain Sinclair, Jeremy Deller, Olivia Plender, Bridget Smith, Peter Fillingham, Edward Chell, Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan, Derek Sprawson, Rufus Moore, Paul Tecklenberg, Michael Chanarin, Colin Buttimer, Lucy Harrison, Tony Carter, Brian Catling.

Judd’s performance extended the ritualistic activities of groups and individuals into an action realised by actors and further explored how this action can be interpreted in a moving image work. It used performers embedded in the audience, as in a séance, reciting text from Swedenborg’s prose in an increasingly ecstatic cycle of spoken and sung phrases. Swedenborg, a scientist who became a mystic, conflated the empirical with the unknown or invisible, mediating his descriptions of his encounters with the spirit world through his earlier incarnation as a scientist. Such experiences, for example of a spirit existing in his foot, are therefore brought back down to the here and now, and were in turn physically relayed by the performers. Magic lantern projections acted as ‘scientific’ metaphors for his encounters with the spirit world (ppt:2-6).

The performance developed the conceptual framework of outputs 2 and 3 and the video was included in the exhibition The Edge of Reason (OP1). The performance, combined with Judd’s research on Swedenborg, led to the ACE-funded performance (Mysterium) at James Taylor Gallery, London, in 2011.

Articles / features / reviews: Art Monthly, Issue 335, April 2010, p27-28 (ppt:9); The Guardian, 1 March 2010 (ppt:10). Metamorphoses and Transgressions and Being in Two Minds in Ben Judd: Communion, Black Dog Publishing, (2013) (ppt:11)