Eight poor copies (electric speech)

This article emerges from a series of phone calls with the visual artist Beth Emily Richards in anticipation of her exhibition Poor Copy at The Northern Charter in Newcastle and Jerwood Arts London in 2018. A gossipy piece, it draws lines of connection between telephones, telepathic cats, urban legends and ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson’s apparent visitation to Devon in 2003. This visit which, as lore goes, is also contested forms the basis for Richards’ subsequent show and sustained engagement with contemporary mythmaking. Calling up lovers of the telephone Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell, celebrity impersonators and television illusionists, this article writes in and through the mystics of ‘electric speech’. The outmoded phone call is engaged as both a ‘conduit for thought’ and a poor copy – the line is cut or stalked, or a story is interrupted or interfered with – revealing a forensic fascination with the sinister and the unknown.