I took this post down from my social media account, as the act of sharing this specific sort of work, at that point, was more a reflection of certain self-destructive aspects that bubble up when I feel like I’m drowning in harmful emotions.
The work was called ‘Monster’, and was an installation within my most recent exhibition A lot of friends encouraged me not to do it, or at least said use somebody else’s face. I felt otherwise; I felt that the only way I could make it work was to use my own, albeit mashed up face. Criminality, wrong doing, and consequential punishment is very black and white for some people, and others just find a place in society where the variables that bring one closer to criminality become more easy to judge free of a sense of both potential complicity and relatability.
A deep concern running through all of my work, time immemorial, is the friction between having the freedom to choose, and being a puppet to the whims of everything that happens around you and to you. I have struggled with this all my life, because I’ve struggled with obsessive compulsive thinking and behaviours, often where I don’t feel in control, sometimes with regretful external consequences. I’ve always been the person to try to understand the baddy, always wondered what made them turn out this way, because I have often felt like i’m pacing down a hill with no breaks to the next calamity, and the ‘you can choose to be like that’ platitude often felt alien, and purposefully a closing down of conversation. We monsterise that which we cannot categorise, as if we didn’t it may make us look too closely in the mirror. When compulsive inner monologue brings you into the realm of such things, it no longer remains black and white.
It’s not a case of saying abandon the need for right and wrong, it’s not a case of saying ‘do’ anything. It was a response to living in an age where not being addicted, and dragged from situation to situation becomes increasingly harder, and we reach for social media often addictively to put the world to right, to ‘get the baddy’. On a local newspaper level, whatever the justice we see fit to deal criminals, the mugshot, posted onto social media, for people to metaphorically spit at, I find as barbaric a act as some of the actions of the perpetrator (sometimes more), and makes you wonder who is the monster.
I also wasn’t meaning to say that perpetrators should be called victims, but that this is a more direct, intentionally extreme form of my work’s long and enduring concern with the violence that occurs internally, in the melting pot of utterances and reflexes, in addiction to thought and actions, and the competing voices all claiming to be ‘the self’, that has been an experience I’ve endured around this assertion “you make your own choices”. In our current moment, we are fighting our online battles for justice (rightful and much needed justice) in a relentless storm of purified assumptions of what a self is, that have been born from decades of responsibilisation. There’s a lot of people who bereft of answers to their selves in an age of perpetual crises, are endlessly scrolling the internet for self-help guides, but it’s very hard to find help that isn’t a purifying ideal of the perfect self. Responsibility and no responsibility become black and white. But neither alone can be the full answer.
A Radical Redemption was purposely trying to ask at what point are things irredeemable, on a level of justice, socially and personally, and on a level of politics and environment: at one point can this no longer be healed? Are we already in the long process of reacting to the irredeemable acts of the past, or is there still a space to break out of it, whatever it is?
John B Ledger 