Charles Avery - Drawing Room Confessions # 1

Made of words and exchanges, with no images, Drawing Room Confessions is open to diverse practices and voices. It is named after a game played at the end of the nineteenth century in England and France, which consisted of a fixed questionnaire answered by players to reveal their tastes, aspirations and personalities. For every issue of the journal, we invite one artist to play the serious and playful game of conversation. Each section follows a set of rules, only the players change, as interviewers from a wide range of fields contribute to a portrait of the artist at a certain time.

THE RULES OF THE GAME
Each  issue opens with a conversation conducted by an individual selected by the player. The Egoist borrows its title from an experimental literary magazine published in London between 1914 and 1919 that claimed to ‘recognize no taboos’. In homage to the ephemeral publication from New York that invited contributors to publish whatever they wanted, The Blind Man consists of a series of questions posed by an interviewer whose identity is concealed from the player. From the idiomatic expression suggesting that certain activities cannot be achieved on one’s own, Two to Tango is a warts-and-all conversation between the player and someone selected by the editors, which aims at questioning the core process of creation, directly and honestly. The player is challenged to create ‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’, inspired by the Greek literary form known as Ekphrasis. For the Timeline, the player selects the defining moments, including the art and culture experiences and historical events, that have marked how he or she thinks and lives. Each issue ends with the player’s answers to a fixed questionnaire, La Madeleine, based on the original game of Drawing Room Confessions as played by Marcel Proust and others.

Edited by Manuela Ribadeneira and Vincent Honoré

Editorial board: Åbäke & Michèle Smith

Publisher: Drawing Room Confessions and Mousse Publishing
ISBN: 9788896501276
Pages: 82
Binding: softback
Dimensions: 170 x 110 mm

Price: £9.00

• Tell a Friend