Snooze Captains

Last year my friend Victoria Stanton, whose righteous Bank of Victoria site is an absolute classic of the genre, paid a visit to our house in Fitzroy, all the way from Montreal.

I met Victoria in NYC as part of the Short Fuse book launch. She’s a great performer, writer and spoken word historian. Anyway, enough preliminaries.

While she was here, Victoria dared me and my housemates to engage in a bit of spontaneous art. So we went on down to the Captain Snooze warehouse to buy a bed for five people.

The result is catalogued on Victoria’s website:

What happens when five people go shopping for one bed? A direct lead-up to the performance series (Being) One Thing at a Time, this site-specific intervention bluntly attempted to disrupt quotidian behaviours and expectations within a place of business.

‘Untitled (Captain Snooze) April 2003’ is a searing comment on Western commercial aspirations, as well as a sly revisionist parable aka Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Or should that be dwarves?

Anyway, you can check out more of Victoria’s interventions on the website. My favourite: Drug – “Six couples (of varying sexual orientations) stood on the sidewalk, kissing, in front of the Export A tobacco factory for one hour.” Go Victoria!