‘Locked inside The Maddening House’ (2026, mixed media on paper, 190x190cm)
It’s hard not to confuse the sense of life’s potentialities afforded to your younger self with those experienced by a wider collective at the same moment…
For myself, not so long ago, the online communicative space appeared to contain an open-ended if volatile dynamic, which opened up a space within everyday life for another kind of world to feel genuinely believable.
It’s what all of us born, for morally wrong or right, with a sense of the slow triumph of civilisational equality felt was kind of always bound to happen, and previously merely waiting in the dark to be uncovered.
In a sweet spot between succumbing to what Mark Fisher called ‘touch screen capture’ and the post 2008 crash, I encountered a flurry of books and essays all seemingly pregnant with proof that the 21st century we all needed was already here, it just needed arranging properly. And surely we all would want that?
Yet between the mid 2010s and the post-pandemic world such a sense of potential has been replaced with a version of a world with no alternative that feels far more claustrophobic and final than the 2000s that Mark Fisher saw in ‘Capitalist Realism’.
Words and ideas began to feel captured and siloed prior to their conception. The advance of algorithmic culture wars seemed to cancel out even the speculation of something that wasn’t already marked and captured by one of 2 camps. We became prisoners to opposing ‘mind camps’, where dialectical materalism was starved of oxygen, as ideas began to bounce off bunkers harbouring atomised people always expecting the worst.
At the same time, we have never witnessed so much flesh in image form. There’s the ones we produce, as if out of some dictatorial command, of own self-perfection missions (gym pics, body positivity….that is always Only Fans adjacent), and these exists side by side with live stream footage of dead babies, burning flesh – pure nihilistic carnage. Human flesh itself has become the foundational base upon which a new psychosis has emerged,
Art, the will to express, is now in a existential contestation with content creation. Art has always been, at least on a personal level, a contested space between the projection of hope and a projection of despair. And how to navigate both without accidentally endorsing thinking that harms others. I share because only by sharing could whatever I say be acted upon. Yet, in a world of Instagram artists, the potential agency of art often seems asphyxiated by the need for attention, to be seen and validated.
The theorist Franco Baradi (Bifo) spoke of ‘Morphogenesis ‘as opposed to ‘Regenesis’. Regenesis is kind of the expansion of the same, whereas Morphogenesis produces the wholly unexpected. Bifo suggested that we need ‘the poet’, ‘the designer’, and ‘the engineer’ to combine energies to bring the latter about. However, in recent years, since the pandemic, his work has shifted suggesting that the only way to go now is to quit: to perform spiritual, existential and intellectual resignation.
In England, Britain, this is the first year where runaway climate change has felt undeniably and tangibly part of everyday life. Yet, as things stand, we still feel trapped by systems of habits that will continue to make us burn. Old that rhythms, movements that merely reproduce the old hat, become manically charged and, in turn, finally exhaust us. Optimism uses codes that regenerate the bars of the prison.
Many of those books that once gave me so much hope I’ve just simply ripped up, sacrificed in a sense.In this drawing they now occupy the space of other worlds that we can we can no longer reach inside The Maddening House.
We are trapped inside the maddening house. Yet madness may be the only way out
John B Ledger 