Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Admittedly, I spent a lot of time in cheap motels when I was 16 and in my second year of high school.
Invariably, as the night wore on, we'd endure increasingly angry encounters with motel managers, hookers, truckers, junkies and hapless out-of-towners actually looking for a good night's rest. Frequently fights broke out and cops were called but they were fun-filled nights none the less, full of freedom and energy and the possibility of something strange and wonderful or awful and unforgettable happening.
Ever since then, I've had a soft spot for flea-bag motels, roadhouses, crumbling deco flop-houses and the like. Neither completely private nor really public, these places exist in a Burroughsian interzone where nothing is true and everything is permitted. The anonymity they offer throws our very sense of self into question. Don't we all act differently in motels? You can be anybody in a cheap motel: a businessman fleeing an embezzlement rap, a famous country singer looking for some peace, a hit-man waiting for the call.
Or, like Janet Austin in room at the Coral Sands, you can be 'Sweet Hostage' dressed in Valentine red, offering unconditional love, in person or on the phone George W. Marie Antoinette was there as well, serving chocolate cake it was Bastille Day, after all , as was rapper Dead Lee, who'd installed a cramped cell in his room and, dressed in a bright orange LA County Jail jumpsuit, was happily taking prisoners.
The emphasis was firmly on goods and services. Wandering from room to room, you could have or be had in any number of imaginative scenarios. From bondage demonstrations courtesy of Mistress Strix to Bruce La Bruce's fake-blood-spattered room, where you could have a Polaroid of yourself taken as a murder victim, the body reigned supine.
