Russell Martin
Writer | Artist
About Funny
Meet Peter.
Meet him as a babe, snug in his mother’s arms, until a neighbour warns she’ll turn him funny. Meet him at school, where sex education class tells him that the sex he’s already having is so funny, it might very well kill him. Meet him with the boy he had a crush on at school, and as he picks his way through the debris of culture wars past and present.
Meet him with the scent of sex fresh on his skin or as he comes out again and again and again, until the final, devastating, reckoning with his past.
An episodic journey through one queer man’s life, Funny is one of those books where the only thing that happens is everything.
Synopsis
Funny (165 pages, B Format) follows Peter, a queer man, as he grows up from infancy to middle age, tracking the effect of family shame on the development of his life and relationships. It takes the format of 13 independent short stories which, when read in this single volume, create a single novel.
The stories track how intergenerational shame affects lives long after silly things like laws are changed, and how deeply embedded expectations of normality continue to infect a person even when they’re convinced they’re happy just the way they are. Finally reconciling with his mother as she descends into dementia, the book is ambiguous about what is closure, and if it really ever comes in the end.
Get a copy:
- Books stocked at Camden Art Centre
Ebook available from Amazon
More about me
I have been an artist since 1998 when I graduated from Glasgow School of Art, with a diverse and non-object based practice, taking dialogue as a medium. Previous projects include work on radio, on artist residencies and workshops, publications, and numerous talks and events.
My art education in Glasgow led to an interest in how the art world works; how art is created and distributed, how it is manufactured, performed, sold and marketed. Artists, curators and critics are generally too caught up in an object-obsessed conception of art, thinking about what art is rather than what art actually does. Art, for me, is a lived activity separate and independent from any objects which may be produced during its processes - an art school truism emphasises process as important as product, and I'm interested in how far this can be emphasised to the exclusion of making no objects at all.
In response I started to make work with no material basis; making art through dialogue and conversation. I stopped making objects in 1999, while still studying, and, although I have no plans to make objects again, I wouldn’t rule it out either. Apart from the projects with others, all the work I made has no documentation: I have no 'proof' that any of the projects that happened in my practice ever took place, but nor do I have a collection of very boring videos that no-one will ever want to watch, so it’s not all bad. I like that, to experience one of my works, you either have to have been there, or talk about it with someone who has.
I need hardly say that my work isn’t exactly commercial viable, or brings in much money, hence the part-time jobs and social housing.
I am an active and experienced member of various housing co-operatives in London since 2006, and still live in and volunteer for a housing co-operative.
I have been a board member of arts charities, notably The Showroom (2008-16), Block 336 (2014-2020) and City & Guilds of London Art School (2018-2020). I am currently on the Advisory Board of Artists Futures Fund and on a trustee of newplatform.art.
I co-ran Rational Rec, a monthly arts social occasion (2005-2012) in venues such as Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, Barbican, Wilton’s Music Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank Centre, in partnership with Matthew Shlomowitz and Cecilia Wee.
I have worked at Artquest since 2001, and been the Director since 2010. Artquest is an arts development and research agency providing evidence-based advice and information to artists in England, based at UAL and funded by Arts Council England. I have mentored artists and written extensive content on all aspects of artists professional development, led in web development, and am currently engaged in an apprenticeship in data analysis.
I have been a visiting lecturer at London South Bank University (2023-24) in the MA Curating course, which has now closed.