166 x 210mm, 60 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2003

This catalogue surveys Beagles & Ramsay’s work made since 1996 and was published by Gasworks on the occasion of the solo show ‘Dead Of Night’ curated by Fiona Boundy.

Beagles and Ramsay’s first solo show in Scotland was posthumous. The artists attended Goodnight, Goodnight, at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery in 1997, lying in state in a fetching double coffin. In 1999 their severed heads could be glimpsed rotting in the murky depths of the lair of an infant serial killer in Head Lung Dead, a show at the Glasgow Project Room. By August 2002 they were dead again, when a press release announced the shocking news that they were brutally murdered on the eve of a major retrospective at the Hogslande Kunstverein in Hogsberg, Germany. If the myth of making art is described in all the best biopics as a means of achieving immortality – the transcendence of the artwork finally overcoming the daily humiliation and mortification of the flesh – Beagles and Ramsay’s art condemns them, in their myriad double self-portraits, to repeated and perpetual indignity. The evil twins, duplicates, dolls, doubles and doppelgangers – bearing the distinctive faces of the artists themselves – that rampage or slump through their oeuvre (the dominant modes of activity in this work tend to fall into one of two categories: complete inaction or hysterical overreaction) find that death is never a complete release. They repeatedly rise again to suffer the regular affronts of senility, tooth decay, impotence, flatulence, bad skin, inferior diet, and daytime television.

Essays by Moira Jeffrey & Francis McKee.

Published by Gasworks &