For the past couple of months I have started to tackle the problem of how to utilise the large body of writing I produced during the first lockdown. I’m hoping to unfold these texts by incorporating them into installations and putting them into some kind of performance. I originally wrote the pieces from the stand point of various different narrators and personalities, I now hope to bring them together under the umbrella of a more specific persona, a semi fictional version of myself who is trying to forge together many threads for misguided and possibly unethical reasons.
As a method to delineate where the texts have come from I have written a series of dialogues between curious unbodied characters who discuss their strange, not totally consensual relationship with me, their protector/creator/captor. They could be read as parts of me or the antithesis to me. They discuss my audience, one that currently doesn’t exist, they ponder on what it is I am up to and what I want, how I will react to what I’ve made and the result of my reactions upon them. They are confused and curious about why they are in the situation they find themselves. They worry about the impact of what has been done, they want to please both for their own sake and for the greater good. They firmly posit the ‘author me’ into a role that has fictional elements. Hopefully this admittedly postmodern contrivance does not rsimply emove the fourth wall between the work and the audience, but repositions it from the page into a gallery space.
These dialogues are not primarily directed at me in reality, they are directed at the larger discourse of culture, both high and low.
I have built a number of boxes, some from scratch and sculptural, some modified, some readymade. I will use these boxes to house the speakers that will project the voices. I have also gathered and edited together snippets of dialogue from what could be considered ‘low’ cultural sources, films mostly. I specifically wanted to incorporate cultural signification that has been consumed widely as entertainment, not chosen for its obscurity but for its embeded-ness. These snippets will also be broadcast from the boxes as a sort of background noise to what has been made. The sources include the final scenes from the film Scott of the Antarctic, where the players recite the last words of the ill fated explorers as written in their diaries. The howling sound of the wind calls out the tiny distance that they had left to complete their epic journey. Another piece reorganises a speech given by a Russian submarine captain in the film The Hunt For Red October. This speech originally talks of the power the captain has in a silent platform that can move unseen about the world, able to deliver atomic weapons to any location on the globe. I have removed the explicit threat of physical armageddon but retained hopefully the existential threat of annihilation by unspoken ideologies. If the viewer has seen the film they might also know of the captains intention to betray the ideology of his homeland.
The purpose of the manipulated samples of speech is to both add texture and to hint at the potential action of long term exposure to persistent messaging from diverse and conflicting narratives. These are the voices that get under your skin, these are the things you will quote to your friends in passing, the things that will be recognised. They are not the footnotes in an academic essay, they are not high-minded ideals that others will be surprised and beguiled by. They exist in the greater social discourse, they are part of popular culture and I have manipulated them to what I want to hear, to what I want you to hear. Or more accurately what my persona in this installation is hoping to shoehorn you into thinking.
The boxes themselves display multiple traces, traces of minimal sculptures, speaker cabinets, scratch built models, scientific instrument cases, cabinets for religious relics, tombs, toys. They are an exquisite corpse of referentiality. They work as little doll houses for the disembodied voices. They parody the off the shelf cultural appropriation of contemporary artists who signify ideas rather than have them. It may be possible to incorporate into some box builds my modified typeface designs which explored this current trend.
I am using styrene plastic to build, having not worked with this material before a lot of my time has been spent learning how to scratch build with it. Its strengths and limitations are dictating many of my aesthetic decisions and therefore the narrative arc of interpretation. This is undoubtedly a major theme of this years work, this whole project is a product of the cliche of ‘unparalleled times’.
My current intention is to have a selection of the boxes in a space with the recorded dialogues conversing. I am in the process of working out the technical issues of multi channel recording. I think I am on the way to having these issues ironed out. I am sure that as I test the project it will develop and change.
I am constructing a single large composite photograph of my persona’s work space, which is also my work actual work space. This photograph will show the desk at which I work and will have in it many parts of what I am making, some real and some fictional. As well as the cluttered detritus of my constructions, there will be on the walls a selection of some of the things I have been writing. These texts will be readable. In the photograph will be books and images of paintings revealing my research, these items will not necessarily represent my actual research, but instead reveal a larger narrative of the past year or so. Primarily I want the photograph to be a method of presenting a selection of texts, but I also want it to provide context. My presence will be absent but implied. I also want to implicitly make clear the unreliable nature of my narrative. As a template for an artists descent into mania I’m planning to reference Richard Dadd heavily in the symbolism in this photograph. After his arrest for murder Dadd’s house was searched and it was discovered that he had been living on a diet of eggs and ale for quite some time, a multiplicity of these items will be included in the picture with eggs being another example of an off the shelf signification of the work of Marcel Broodthaers and George Batille. I had planned to visit the local areas in Kent that Dadd visited during his period of madness gathering material and doing further research, but as you know this has been impossible. Due to various constraints I will probably composite many images together to make the image, I will light each shot separately as I have in previous photographic work. I plan to shoot some film as well as digital but I am not sure if the results will be that effective given the equipment I have. I am not too hung up on the process of making the image, photoshop will be the main tool.
At the moment I envisage the photograph being a large print displayed in the same room as the boxes. The photograph being referenced by the voices.
I am aware that this plan seems specific and ambitious at the moment, but it is evolving and changing daily and I am certain that as I go on it will mutate further and move into new places. The technical processes in the construction of the photograph will dictate much of its content. I have a very small space to work in, and the constraint of this is probably the main theme of this piece of work.
I am expecting the modular nature of what I am making will create possibilities for individual smaller works that will divert from my loose plan, in fact this is already happening.
The context for my developing practice has been grounded in writers such as Nabakov and WG Sebald and their use of unreliable narration. I am very interested by moving texts through different discourses and revealing different frames of reference gradually that manipulate their context and hence the discourse, ultimately changing the inherent speech acts in the texts. This undermining or destabilising force is not intended as a refutation of anything but rather a positive force for the rehabilitation of the objective realm where objects can be brought into existence with integrity. The power and energy of an artwork has shifted with intentionality becoming increasingly inspected in the academic realm. The balance of this has perhaps become off centre with an over reliance on research and a basis of linguistic certainty at the loss of universal experience.
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