Writing Encounters: ‘Institute of Beasts’ (2008)

In 1998 Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells formed the artist collaboration Dutton and Swindells. In 2008 they completed a three-month artist residency programme at Ssamzie Space, Seoul, South Korea. During the residency the artists founded the Institute of Beasts by introducing live animals into the studio as members of a faculty; to suggest new readings of the work but also as a strategy to potentially generate art as a form of encounter in which different compulsions or pathologies pull in various ways but equally live together in a frame or scenario in much the same way as practice can exist as performance, text and as object. An interesting aspect of having an animal(s) in the studio is the unpredictable nature of what happens to the work when it becomes a perch, a hutch or a burrow and what happens to the artist's practice when they share a space with other animal(s). This article and accompanying images form a written/visual extension to a presentation they delivered at Writing Encounters, York St John University, 1113 September 2008.