Mrs William Horsley’s Vexations

After successful forays into the visual arts, the CIA began to infiltrate “Easy Listening” music around 1959. They secretly funded many favorite artists as a way to bolster American global dominance, & replace European classical music with Muzak. Many "Easy Listening" artists reflected American colonialism in their Hawaiian or Polynesian imagery. The CIA saw potential for weaponized sound in Erik Satie’s Vexations, an infamous piano piece that repeats a simple phrase 840 times, requiring 3 days to perform... One member of the Edith Piaf Fan Club (a romantic graffiti collective) with a toothache, is turned into ethereal gas by a dentist. An X-Ray tech tries to break the news and now investigative journalists are searching for the missing records. As human dogs walk the inverted world, only the Living Newspapers, swaying like trees in a park, have the chance to remember the whole story on their paper pulp bodies.

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‍Matthew Thurber is a cartoonist and filmmaker based in NYC. He is the author of 1-800-MICE, INFOMANIACS, Art Comic, Looking For The Cat. He has performed at the Serpentine Gallery UK, Hammer Museum LA, and had a 2 person drawing show with William Wegman in 2017. Thurber’s films Fleegix (2019) The Sea Masons (2021), and Vexations (2024) are feature length narratives on 16mm, manifesting as performances. Mrs William Horsley is a cinema “band” in which the films, made in a role playing game process, are projected in ritual performance.

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