Rise Flap Lick

Rise Flap Lick is experimental writing, taking its’ title from words made in coloured masking tape, on an Art School Gallery wall during a performance made with artist Anat Ben-David (of Chicks on Speed) and students from Birmingham School of Art and The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. It also expresses bodily interventions of performance art and the messy curatorial and pedagogical happenstance of this event. These were incidental but not accidental. Ed McKeon (guest editing this edition of Riffs journal) and I curated this event after conversations and collaborations in our Cultural Activisms reading group. Art Schools can occupy a romantic and mythological mid 20thC place, in popular imagination, where it’s imagined that subcultures and subversions gestate and find form. The 21st Century reality is a little different, of course. Academic labour and Art History scaffold the circumstances of this event, some of which I relay here, reflexively drawing on my lived histories in curating and teaching.