“Formlessness is freedom. Neatness is compliance.”
— unofficial motto spray-painted on their mobile sculpture-bus, The Slosh Engine
Overview:
Messiness Without Shame (often abbreviated as MWS) is an amorphous coalition of performance artists, sound designers, bio-hackers, speculative chefs, curators and conceptual artists who believe that coherence is the final gatekeeper of middle-brow aesthetics.
Formed in early 2023, largely as a counterstrike against the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence (whom they refer to as “The Neatlings”), MWS rejects all imposed hierarchies of form, harmony, legibility, or tonal consistency.
Their work has been described by critics as An insult to geometry and a tide of half-melted meaning, both of which are helpful ways to sum up the movement.
Founding Members:
1. Oona Crunge
• Role: De-programmer-in-Residence
• Claim to Fame: Once fed a gallery’s entire wall text archive into a text generator and projected the results in Comic Sans on the outside of the Belarus National Galley.
• Belief: “Narrative arcs are surveillance.”
2. Vic & Vick (They/Them/Themselves)
• Role: Twin-headed choreographer (a shared persona played by two different people, sometimes simultaneously)
• Favourite Medium: Improvised zine writing with edible ink
• Motto: “Dance like meaning is collapsing.”
3. Blargh R. Treacle
• Role: Sonic Shatterer
• Former Job: Sound technician for YouTube
• Art Practice: Broadcasting brown noise through hacked hand dryers in museum toilets
• Signature Move: Plays 17 Bluetooth speakers out of sync and calls it “Time’s Divorce”
4. Layla “Slapcrust” Njume
• Role: Theoretical un-curator
• Writings Include: The Ethics of Drool, Why Frames Are a Microaggression, and Elegance is Just Oppression with Better Lighting
• Rivalry: Publicly called M (of the Guardians) a “bourgeois tuning fork with a Napoleon complex”
Recent Actions:
• “Unopenings”: They shut down gallery openings by bringing in leaking bags of kombucha and nachos.
• “Soup as Critique”: An ongoing durational piece where curators are invited to eat soup while wearing headphones that play recordings of their previous exhibition statements, sped up by 200%.
Counter-Manifesto: “The Slop Doctrine”
A chaotic, typographically unstable, deliberately unnumbered screed against aesthetic restraint. Some key un-footnoted theses:
• “To strive for elegance is to rehearse your own burial.”
• “Taste is the most bourgeois of narcotics.”
• “Coherence is how power hides its itch.”
• “If it fits neatly in a frame, it is already too late.”
Relationship to Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence:
• MWS refers to the Guardians as “The Museum Monks.”
• Once infiltrated a Guardians silent protest by hiding Bluetooth speakers in nearby fig trees.
• Planted fake manifestos in Eastern Europe with titles like Refinement as Violence and 12 Easy Ways to De-Stabilise a Sonata.
• Continue to send them unsolicited soup.
Current Campaign:
“The Cringe Biennale” – A proposed roving art festival where every participating artist must present a work stolen from a friend. Already banned from fourteen European cities.
