Bite The Hand
Events by My Dads Strip Club
26th-28th November 2009
Various sites in Lincoln
My Dads Strip Club resided in Lincoln for three days to present work that was politically relevant and active. Their work focused around two main issues, Buy Nothing Day and the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, one questioned consumerism and the other issues of ecology.
Four events were presented to the audience over three days, the first of which, Bite The Hand, acted as an introduction to MDSC’s works and other artists who use activism in their practice through a stand up comedy style evening, hosted in the Dog and Bone pub. The evening explored every day consumerist actions, alongside personal insights into a brain washed world of capitalist dictatorship. Chris's no-frills attitude introduced bare faced facts of Coca-Cola's pillage of the globe through creating works that reversed the cycle. This functioned by subjecting Coca-Cola machines to unrequested sexual intercourse, an amusing anecdotal insight into an under reported issue.
Bite The Hand provided a platform for the subsequent day's activities, which saw a narrated live drawing event coinciding with the Mini Wave protest, a sibling event to the Wave protest in London, highlighting the Copenhagen conference. Chris's drawings illustrated issues surrounding energy consumption which were narrated over providing insights into historical events such as the fire on the Titanic.
The final day of residence on Buy Nothing Day encompassed two interventions. During the Christmas shopping rush in the Lincoln high street, Chris attempted to sell ‘deer shit’ to shoppers using the premise of buying ‘deer shit’ for Christmas rather than ‘cheap shit.' Lining the inside of Chris' coat were packets of glittery ‘deer shit’ retailing at £4000. The idea was to raise awareness of people's consumption during a time where there is a compulsion to buy for the sake of doing so.
Concluding the day MDSC lead an intervention in Tescos with fifteen participants who had come to all of the subsequent events. Independently the participants entered the store pushing an empty shopping trolley, they would then follow other customers around the store also pushing empty trolleys until the fifteen participants formed a chain of empty trolleys that snaked one and a half aisles. The intervention questioned the act of consumerism as the participants became silent martyrs of the supermarket using the act of browsing on mass as a subtle protest to other shoppers.
