Tag: Trickster

Quite simply, my favourite British artist, and, for me, one working very recognisably within the role of Trickster-artist as Hyde describes. His Angel work perhaps shows this best: him as a blind man, the whole piece filmed and then reversed, for which he had to learn to speak the opening words of John’s gospel backwards,…

Looking back thus far, many of my Tricksters have had an interesting relationship with travelling: Merton’s constant tension between staying and going, Gandhi’s galvanising experiences on the rail network, Kesey’s original Magic Mystery Tour… And now Iain Sinclair, who did many of his walks with Bill Drummond. This should come as no surprise, for Hyde…

From the sublime in Gandhi, to the ridiculous in Kesey, TricksterWorld® has it all… Kesey pretty much fell into Tricksterdom by accident. Taking a job as a hospital cleaner to support his fledgling writing career, he was asked if he’d participate in some drug trials. After one particularly powerful session, he noted the name of…

Few people can claim to have played Trickster to a whole Empire… and won. In true Trickster style, he turned the most ordinary activities – making salt, spinning yarn – into highly subversive acts. In 1922 he was charged with sedition for two articles he wrote in his paper Young India. He not only pleaded…

Member of The KLF, author of, among other classics, The Manual, purported burner of a million quid, decimator of art works, potty-mouth and all round cultural subversive… Drummond is a proper Trickster in Lewis Hyde’s mould, offensive, challenging our perceptions of creativity, pushing back the boundaries of what pop-stars ought to be and how they…

I’m queuing up a list of my favourite ‘Trickster’ characters while I’m away in Italy… Hoping to hear some new ones when I return, and encourage more ‘dangerous speech’ in these troubled times. First up and top of my pile is Thomas Merton. If you haven’t read The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, the excellent…