I love museums and in London they are free. So on days where my brain was too full I'd go to my favorite, The National Gallery, and wander around escaping into the paintings. What do you do when you look at paintings? Me, I make up stories. Sometimes I might actually read the history of it but often I wonder what some guy in the background is thinking about or what happened an hour later to the subjects. To me, the still image was always just a part of a longer narrative, usually a silly one. The days I would go and amuse myself with masterpieces were some of my best in London.
One day I took a friend and shared, in a polite, museum whisper, some of the stories I would make up while looking at the paintings. And we laughed like fiends. Over the next few months I began keeping a record of the paintings that I found most story-worthy. At the same time I started mapping different routes through The National Gallery while. Doing the audio tour, I found it to be dry, informational and certainly not fun. Interesting, sure, but not very entertaining. In this way, organically, The Tour de Farce began to take shape- a site-specific show that could be experienced by anyone as an audio tour.
