Beatrice Gibson | Crippled Symmetries

About

Taking American author William Gaddis' epic modernist masterpiece, JR(1975) as its departure point, Crippled Symmetries features Solo For Rich Man, a new film by artist Beatrice Gibson. An eerily prescient, biting social satire that turns the American dream on its head, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who inadvertently creates the single greatest financial empire the decade has seen, spun largely from the invisible confines of the school pay phone. Using the novel as a score for its production, and orientated around an experimental music workshop for kids, the film also draws on the work of radical educators and composers Brian Dennis and John Paynter, who infamously took the work of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen into primary and secondary schools and were at the forefront of radical post-war utopian shifts towards child-centred pedagogy.