You side-step yourself here, becoming a spectral spectator – observing with no fixed identity abode.
It isn’t just a physical hinterland, but a psychological hinterland: in-between the inner turmoil.
Shelter from the digital rain of micro-instructions that bodysnatch our mouths; muttering a thousand million choices of direction – commands to constantly become more, to do more, to have more, to be more.
But you don’t ‘have to be’ anything here, except somebody who’s bought a coffee and has a seat; somebody who only has to appear like they might have somewhere to be, someone to meet, and something to be. Momentarily you are a spectre, and you find great relief in this – side-stepping all forms and roles a body must assume.
You’re not supposed to love places like this, you’re only to supposed to like the ‘authentic’ the ‘earthy’.
But, if you take Mark Auge’s definition of ‘non-places’ to heart, around 30 years after he described the emergence of spaces of a transitory nature that have no regional characteristics to differentiate them from anywhere else on the planet, you could argue that it has both spread and intensified to encompass so much more of our lives, that nothing is now more false than the ‘authentic’.
Service stations are quintessential ‘non-places’, but the fact that this sounds instantly oxymoronic, says it all, really.
Service stations now haunt me with traces of the late 20th century, generating memories of half-way points on childhood holidays. The architecture and music, and the general longings they provoke, cannot help but fill me with nostalgia.
In many ways, they are a kind of hinterland within the mind-scape of capitalist realism, for here we can momentarily play act at being fugitives to our capitalist subjectivities.
I have been coming to realise that my entire body of work has basically been saying one thing: “Help, I want to escape. How do I get out?
The daily dread of being a mortal body in a space that has felt like it is remorselessly closing in. Baffled at others who find coping methods, and ways to appreciate the beauty, as somehow I haven’t, even now.
I was anorexic because I didn’t know how to be a body that had to become something in this world. I became an artist as a indefinite middle finger up to a reality that I couldn’t find a space to become in. Both were a rejection of assuming form, in a world where I would be humiliated.
Chain cafes, chain pubs, service stations may not be spaces outside of this, but they are hinterlands within it – air pockets inside a process of slow suffocation.
But I have to leave now. I always have to leave, flesh cannot be the spectre it wishes it could crawl out of itself into.
John B Ledger 