Pure Taste Indicator - Artist Page

Andrew Stooke is a performance artist who questions classifications, working across diverse media and subjects. In fact, the mechanisms of categorization, adopted in order to demarcate and exclude, are central to his practice. Judith Butler highlighted performativity as, ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’. Stooke’s work weaves together normative, rational, and complicit discourse, following Jean Francois Lyotard s stance, that meanings are defined in terms of, ‘position in the discursive network’. The assumed erosion of hegemony ensuing post-internet has not produced consensual praxis and archipelago organization, but sustained a dialectics of the ‘outsider’, of, inclusion and exclusion, authenticity and reproduction, and the encompassing, and the concealed. The ‘outsider’, is a persona explored in multiple iterations throughout Stooke’s work, from the travels of cosplayers, the romantic dreams of pigeons, and the legacy of Judith Scott, to ‘nerds’, and florists. This ‘Other’ is found in a relative place, enacted through movements and in gradients of materiality and opacity. ‘Other’ is permanently misplaced or abject, and the only explicit exclusion below the arc of power and influence of art s objects and organizational structures.