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Props to the fairy people: Jon Davies on the autarkic art practice of FASTWURMS.

Article Excerpt
Active since the early 80s, the Creemore, Ontario-based couple FASTWORMS (Dai Skuse and Kim Kozzi) have evolved an art/life cosmology that unites every creature, scrap of cultural detritus and social scene into one harmonious and hedonistic union. The arena for their aesthetic alchemy is subcultural style--working class, youth, stoner, witch, goth, queer, cat-fancier, pirate, country, anarchist, all filtered through pop mediation, camp adoration/irony and an amateur's loving hand--and their methods are collaboration, craft, collecting, movies and manifestos. They have carved out their own burrow in the Toronto art ecology: home-spun and tactile unlike meta-media barons General Idea, cryptic and mystical unlike fellow maximalist Allyson Mitchell, and raffish and cute unlike the Dionysian John Scott. Art is not merely their life but their religion--and their apostles are everywhere. The WURMS' breed of casual socializing-cum-performance has been a vital part of their practice from the beginning, making them not only pioneers of what is now typically called 'relational aesthetics,' but also catalysts in the dynamic Toronto art community as well. (As different as their styles may be, it's hard to imagine artists like "service-oriented" collective Instant Coffee or even the prodigious Luis Jacob without the WORMS.) They have arguably served as a model for Dave Hickey's view of art as a "mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities" in a scene that has changed dramatically during their three decades of production. Delighting in culture surfing and social scenic crossover, the duo mash up all manner of subcultural signifiers into a creolized, impure utopia.

The WURMS' ethical system--which brings together the most radical and compelling elements of witch and queer cultures, or essentially, "do what you will, harm unto none"--is an animistic rejoinder to the restrictions of civilization with our humans-only burdens of guilt, shame and self-doubt. As media theorist Sean Cubitt states in his essay "Drawing Animals" (2005), "human desire is founded on loss and lack, while animal instinct is presumably ordered by presence and fullness, since it is never mediated by those prohibitions that shape humanity" Into id more than super-ego, their copious videotaping, photographing, mark-making, crafting and scavenging of objects--not to mention the excess of their display strategies--adds up to a radical art practice based on desire and pleasure. They have...

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