Leah Walker

Kevin and Perry, ‘Boring’ (2015) video

4 September 2015

“The piece is called Boring”, opens an email from Menna Cominetti and Leah Walker, introducing a nearly twenty-minute film of one of them scrawling the word “BORING” across a catalogue of work by an undisclosed artist. The video is long and it’s almost mundane, except that there’s something that’s hypnotic about watching Cominetti obnoxiously scribble her frustration on the pages of another, older, generation of artist with miscellaneous markers. The camera lens wobbles but it’s angle doesn’t change as a crayoned head with hair appears over a landscape, a “SHUSH BORING” on top of some text. The movement is rushed and reckless but it’s also lyrical. The drawing is colourful and aesthetically quite beautiful. It’s imagery builds on top of another person’s art (or the documentation thereof); modifying and building on what already exists, even as it aims to destroy it.   

Collaborating under the tongue-in-cheek title of Kevin and Perry, a reference to the teen-film and an equally obnoxious institution among a certain generation of twenty-somethings who were still kids on its year 2000 release, the project attests to admiring said comedy’s approach as “simultaneously clever and stupid”.

You can watch the video and read the “pretend interview” initiated by the artists (spelling mistakes included) below.

JK: Why are you called Kevin and Perry?

KP: i dont know much about kevin and perry but i like that they are symultaneously clever and stupid. Their jokes are clever and make us laugh but they are ‘dumb’ almost like they’re hiding in a big dumb cloak. Our boring video is dumb as a gesture but is about quite complex feelings. Kevin and Perry aren’t teenagers they’re adults, adults acted sludgey dumb but winking all the while at everyone who is watching. 

it’s so hard to know how to be online, I don’t want it to be clean, I just want the content to be there. I think both of us feel similar in knowing we’re are ambitious and that we are makers but to write an art logic into what we do, stunts it’s growth. And that’s what the video is about, it’s noone else’s logic but our own, and even though it is shouty and audacious, it is shouty and audacious, the logic of it isn’t knowable so therefore it is something new, and surprising. 

JK: What led to this video ?

KP: a story like this works quite well, it’s from Bjork.

This is the story of a girl grows up in a forest. She realised as she grew up that the pebbles on the forest floor were actually baby sky scrapers, and as she became a woman she found herself in a big city and she clashed with the city people’s civilised thoughts. So she began to isolate herself, withdrawing back into the forest and into a little hut, calling herself Isabelle. There she would collect moths and train them to send out her message, which basically is the message to act with instinct. She would send the moths out of her window and they would fly all over the world. They would fly in front of people’s faces who were walking around thinking with too much logic, they would buzz ‘nah, nah, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah’ until all the clever people clicked out of this state of being so sensible and so serious.” ** 

Kevin and Perry are a London-based collaborative art duo, including Menna Cominetti and Leah Walker.

Header image: Kevin and Perry, ‘Boring’ (2015). Video still.

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