The exhibition has been inspired by one of the many unrealised projects pitched for the artist collective ‘the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe’ – this one in particular built on the theorist Byun Chul Han’s argument that in last few decades we have come to live in something he calls an ‘Achievement society’.
Han argues that we have begun to see our lives, and everything that circulates it as a project to achieve. Not only have we internalised the external oppressive forces of the state, but also the meritocratic paradigm that dominates our post-Thatcher society. Further more in age of social media we are all arguably ‘achievement’ subjects, perpetually stuck on project-building treadmills… and nobody more than the artist in the age of Instagram.
‘Achieving While Rome Burns’ came from my own understanding that whilst ever in an achievement society we never can truly reach towards our own humanity, and although we may desperately crave to connect with that which is beyond ourselves, to truly come together and help fight for the things that truly matter on this earth, we find ourselves locked inside achievement loops.
My parents didn’t have much money in the late 80s/ very early 90s, so we could only borrow the very basic Atari console from friends. I can’t even recall what game I liked, only that I definitely use to play it.
In 1991/1992, before we had a family car, we’d go to my grandparents’ caravan at Ingoldmels on the Lincolnshire Coast (for anyone not from the UK, this is a quite typical kind of working class holiday pursuit). At the Arcade there was a game called ‘1942’ by Capcom. It was a shoot-em-up based on the battle of the Pacific in WW2. I loved this game.
Xmas 1992: my parents could finally afford to by me my own games console. I was given the Sega Master System. The Platform game Tom and Jerry (based on the famous cartoon) was the first game I ever completed, which felt like a significant moment in my short-lived time as a computer games child.
What’s something you’ve done that you never thought you could?
When I was 21 I began writing my first ever songs. Before this point I’d put down words, lyrics, and unfriendly chords, and believed songwriting was a magic I’d never reach. By 2008 I was writing songs for fun. And although this is also this the time I gave it up to pursue visual art, I now realise I was in a road which, if taken, would have lead me to have been a great crafter of songs. I recently put this ecclectic song selection together to remind myself of this https://john-ledger.bandcamp.com/album/my-imaginary-noughties-indie-life
I’m glad I pursued art instead, but I also miss music-making every day. Hence, why I keep on returning to it via art.
‘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
By the end of next week I will know the conclusion of an assesment for a diagnosis.
The amount of little wars I’ve reactivated on myself from years of accumulating theories of doing life wrong.
Many have accused me of having a victim mentality, and there is some evidence. Yet it was and has been at least at times a defence strategy, when I could not adapt to be what I was told I should be….
And to this script, I have done life wrong: I’ve failed on most counts of being a valued adult. It doesn’t matter how much blood and sweat you put into life, if you can’t ascribe it to the script, then you can’t play.
And the majority of my adult life has been a case of watching others do the adult life whilst I could only observe.
In my mind, I have tried my damn hardest to always do the right thing, but the pervasive evidence of the script says I haven’t.
I am not sure what the conclusion of this assessment will be, but the one thing I wish to take away from it is an ability to arrive at some kind of peace with the life I have accrued for myself.
“The Final Battleground of Thatcherism” (160x100cm)
It’s been a very long time, recalibrating after a personal milestone of an exhibition. Reconsidering what affect art in an age where image bombardment has the same impact as a climatic shift. But also realise you must keep going.
This work’s title came from one of my last conversations I had with my former art tutor Garry Sykes, before he passed away 2 years ago. His verdict on Social Media was that is was the ‘final battleground of thatcherism’. I have been working on trying to use that as a title for years now, and this is the visual outcome.
Thanks.
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
…and if you feel drawn in. If you feel that desire to get ‘one over’ someone in a more vulnerable position to you, stop and walk away!
I was sat on the 20:45 bus home this evening. The warmth in the UK atm is wierd (weird but also worringly the new normal) and there is a wierd smell, the kind of smells that warmer countries are either used to or know how to prevent.
The heatwaves have traditionally produced our worst behaviours here in the UK.
Although I am 42, I am still the kind of person who makes no trouble, keeps themselves safe from harm. But if there is something that triggers pure rage in me it is being a witness to bullying.
A group of young, attractive and confident teenage males, were spread out at the back of the 95A bus out of Barnsley. When they started shouting ‘bender!’ again and again.
In front of me was a youngish looking man, who I am convinced has learning disabilities because he is normally with a personal assistant.
He always wears a face mask, probably has done since it was mandatory back in the Covid 19 pandemic. He was wearing an black vest that show off your arms.
I overheard somebody speak about ‘skinny, weedy arms’, and me being me, even at 42, I assume they are talking about me. I also look a little odd; I only ever wear shorts when the weather is frightenignly hot, and I already feel vulnerable.
But it turns out they weren’t on about me. They were clearly picking on this young man in a vest and with a face mask, as I saw him stressfully react as another ‘bender’ slur was aimed his way.
In between overheard accusations of him abusing a girl, I still knew that this man was vulnerable; a man with learning disabilities left exposed to the whims of lads showing off to the young women on the bus.
I couldn’t help it. Even in my silly prescription sunglasses, I kept looking back at behind me, trying to make them aware that I am aware what they are doing.
At one point I saw this young man hold is head in his hands in despair, and then aplogised to the person behind him for accidentally kicking their back. This was a deeply vulernable person.
I HATE BULLIES.
I hope I haven’t been a bully, but I probably have at least ALLOWED others to bully someone at my expense.
I have been bullied more than I recognise. There is nothing nice to say as I know that I still would be bullied if I put myself in those environments.
Yet seeing others being bullied makes me want blood; i’m sorry to speak like that, I just hate bullying so much.
Maybe the little pricks on the bus will grow up and be decent people, but I know so many people who have gone on that path, whilst their victims never recovered.
The best I could do, after trying to stare with disaproval, was to submit a complaints form to the Stagecoach company.
