Reflections on ‘A Private Civil War’

First off I’ll start with a bit of good news; the exhibition I felt I had to cancel at the beginning of the year, is now back on, and scheduled for the coming months (I will post exact date).

I tend to throw the kitchen sink (metaphorically speaking) at exhibitions. This is because even though my art is my life, and the post-production is a mere tip of the ice berg of the planning I put in, it just does not resemble a ‘practice’, nor does my concerns resemble ‘research’. I call it ‘my art’, because to call at practice would confuse the word ‘dedication’ with ‘professional approach’.

For a start, I make no bones about being somebody who lives with, and makes through, mental health struggles. ‘Mental health’, and any specifications of ‘mental health’ are not a ‘field of research’; my work is a ‘lived in’ work. And I’m sorry if your response is “well, aren’t all artists doing this?” well, it doesn’t feel like it.

I didn’t choose to be an artist. It chose me. Because I couldn’t find anyway of being, of manifesting into adulthood, the normal rites of passage seemed cut off and alien. And as I began to struggle with eating disorders and other anxieties provoked by a extreme wish to negate a world I couldn’t find a footing in, art gave me another option; a third way, almost.

Art became the way I recognised and valued myself, it became the crutch upon which I would try and fail to make myself appear romantically appealing. It was the shield I violently defended myself with when the world came knocking, asking what the hell I was doing with my life.

What it has never been is a positive projection of what I want to be. It was, and still is, a ‘fuck you’ to a world that I increasingly began to feel criticised by as I reached my 30s, and still couldn’t provide an answer to, when a suggestion to do something became the growl of “don’t just stand there! do something!”.

It’s not a practice, and it isn’t flexible. It’s a protest, yes, and sometimes this can align with the larger social political critiques that I almost nearly always agree with, but it goes little further.

It’s a problem. Serious one to be honest. The problem’s core began to unearth itself a few years back, when I finally realised why an intentionally warmed utterance “just be yourself!” grated on me to the point that it if an associate said it to me, it would burn me for days/weeks after.

And that’s because I have no self that I can identify. All I can identify is voices mimicking others; be it caring family members, friends or potential social media trollers. They are always critical, but they have gotten louder over the past few years, as I reach middle age, and as an ability to ‘change’ has become a harder task. suggestions like ‘changing’, ‘taking responsibility’ or ‘doing something that makes you feel better’ even, are hard suggestions to take on, because it never feels like it’s coming from any sense of personal volition, more than a inner critic, who’s telling you off.

Prior to first cancelling the aforementioned exhibition, they had hit their worst point. And at their worst, they help create such a bad picture of myself, that I start to act out that picture. And that’s when things crash to a full stop. When the destructiveness starts to severe trust and friendship there’s a serious problem.

It must be added here, that what I’m describing is far more like a inner monologue in a state of panic, rather than schizophrenia; the latter being a type of psychosis. Which this isn’t.

But I wanted to share my video work, that I began working on this time last year, during the ending month of the second full lockdown. It was a fucking exhausting process, as often, the more you pick up on the inner monologue’s content, the more it can hence forth make itself audible all the time. But I think it’s one of my best works.

Thanks

John

New Map-book print

I’ve printed a new limited edition map book print. There are 9 of ten of ‘HIPSTER PSYCHOSIS (2021)’ are available. I’m selling them for 55 pounds. I’m decide for this one to donate 75% of proceeds to local food bank trust(s), feels like the right thing to do atm. We did something similar last year, and I’d had done it again over xmas period with more folk, if I’d had my act together. But anyways.

You can message me if interested.

Thanks.

Burn(out)

kept a low profile of late, began working on a series of smaller drawings, that became a project about ‘burnout’. It’s a word that’s more and more frequently used these days, it’s a word I’ve used recently about myself, and it relates to so many things such as the body, mental and emotional exhaustion, trying to keep up with machine rhythms. But also exhaustion of imagination, imagining things being different.

Works in order:

1. ‘Exhausted’.

2. ‘It’s easier to imagine being a billionaire on another planet…t’

3. ‘Being enmeshed in the world…’

4. ‘Image for the work of a Sheffield poet’

HIPSTER PSYCHOSIS NEW PRINT AVAILABLE

Hi, just to let you know, I’ve printed a new limited edition map book print. There are 9 of ten of ‘HIPSTER PSYCHOSIS (2021)’ are available. I’m selling them for 55 pounds. I’m decide for this one to donate 75% of proceeds to local food bank trust(s), feels like the right thing to do atm.

You can message me if interested, ta

John B Ledger

Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher took his own life this day five years ago. And it felt too emotional, to say that I’d never ever really met him.

And I feel like a prick writing about it, because I have met friends of his, and I could see how much pain their loss gave them. However, Mark Fisher’s work had such a big impact on my life that I remember how absolutely fucking gutted I felt on this day in 2017.

I miss waiting for his next blog, article or book. I waited and waited, because I knew that when it arrived I’d feel like I wasn’t the only person who felt like I lived in a fucking mundane horror-show (or ‘Boring Dystopia’ as he called it). It was always worth getting up when there could be a new Mark Fisher blog.

It seems like another world ago since I began reading the first couple of chapters of Capitalist Realism, in a Cafe Nero in Sheffield, wondering where the hell this book had come from. I’d never read anything like it before, yet at the same time it said everything I knew I thought, but couldn’t say I thought.

The world feels somehow the same as when I first read ‘Capitalist Realism’ in 2010, but also somehow wholly different. Fisher left us in January 2017, just before the peak optimism of the Corbyn movement, and then all that would follow – all that shit that somehow feels inseparable. I wonder if he could have cognitively squared it and put it within our grasp. Bit I also wonder if he would have found the sheer allure of the ‘touch screen capture’ in the ‘pandemic fog’ too much to resist also.

Admittely, I have been thinking about finding salvation from less politically critical realms recently. My mental state, marked by a sense of failure, feeling unable to picture myself ever escaping my parents’ house, and living independently, seems inevitably doomed to produce the repetitive self-destructive cycles, as my critically-leaning mind lures me back into a world of suspicion and self doubt.

However, impossible as it may currently feel in sorting ‘my shit out’, it is ‘my shit’.

But, when reading Fisher it never did like just ‘my shit’; it felt liberatingly collective – and this was in even his darkest texts, way before the unfinished project ‘acid communism’.

I no longer felt feckless, like a loser, or a failure, because Fisher so powerfully convinced me that these were just ailments of something that, although it convinced us it was permanent, was all-so temporary.

Oh, I wish you were here with us now…

Thank you Mark.

An overview of the last 14 years

14 years ago, I’d just turned 24 and left university. My art was, kind of, blossoming, and taking in many new approaches. As things progressed, the financial crash happened, and who knows how much these events change the course of our individual lives, but I feel it’s safe to say that I went one way, and although I continued making work I valued intensely, I got lost in time.

It’s not with self pity that I say this, just an honest assessment, which struck me as I walked around the nearby city of Leeds, still kind of expecting the shops of 2008 to be in place (Borders the book store, the old cafes). It’s not so much about “keeping up with the times”; for one, it’s hard to decipher what these times are anyway, as 2008 was at the precipice of a communications tech/social media boom, that would, no doubt, transform our collective experience of time away from a 20th century experience of time centred around Western media platforms and analogue technologies (and that’s me being kind to the shift).

But nonetheless, even as my art practice has tried to channel this (dis)Geist, I have also been largely dishonest (to myself) about why I put everything into it to the extent I did. I felt like I got stuck at some point back in 2008, and even while I may not have wanted to settle down, and do all those sorts of things, I think it’s fair to say I began using my work, as a ‘catch up’, an ongoing document of proof; proof that I wasn’t a failure, I wasn’t irrelevant, covering up the painful winces I’d get when even my most stowaway of friends would eventually settle down, and have kids etc. I promised to myself that it was ‘time to learn to live’ at the start of 2020, and, well, we all know how the course of 2020 went. But despite this, all learned is how hard it was to press activate on a different life setting.

So, just out of self-kindness I just wanted to share all of this work, (drawing, map-making, film-making, installations ) to look back on, from 2008 to now, in as much of a chronological order as is possible.

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Created with GIMP

2021 IN ART

I admittedly don’t use this blog as much as I used to. 10 years ago it was an ongoing projection of political and philosophical and personal wranglings. This was at the very precipice of a decade that wouldn’t only come to be defined by our immersion into the social media feeds, but also in how those feeds, and the algorithms that guide them, would come to somewhat define us, and what we believed.

Perhaps it was the emotional exhaustion of arguments, and sometimes being remotely pathologised for the honesty around my mental state in relation to a larger societal context, or perhaps it was just down to my sheer inability to hold a train of thought on one specific topical issue amidst what I’ve heard been called “the shitstorm”, but I gradually stopped seeing it as an effective tool, both for the sake of my own health, and for the health of my friendships.

Nonetheless I think this became a new challenge for my art: how could I more carefully work with the same things, thoughts, that I’d usually project, in a ever-more considered manner, especially when it came to deliverance?

2021 has, perhaps, like for so many people, been defined by the feeling of ageing more rapidly. Something about the conditions of the last year that cannot be explained away as simply as a product of isolation (as its persisted once we could socialise still) have made many people speak of how they feel much much older now. On a personal level I went into this pandemic in the mid 30s, and can now see 40 on the horizon.

2021 has been defined by begrudging acceptances. I started the year in a full time job – now it’s part time. And although I now enjoy the job far more, which is, in the grand scheme of work, a pretty good workplace, I have come to an awareness that, for whatever cluster of reasons, mostly down to mental health, I’m unable to work full time, and under a certain amount of work-load pressure. Fortunately, for the time being, I am able to live part time, and I have far more time to take my art from strength to strength again, but, when it comes to wanting to build a life for myself, in the world we’ve got, and with nearing 40, a lot of acceptances about what possibilities are left, have been bitter pills to swallow. However, I’ll never properly accept things as they are, and some may say this is my problem, but it’s also who I am; if somebody says “things are just like this, accept it”, I’m more inclined to fight it than before. One thing I’m fighting from now on is the feelings of shame I internalise around accusations of negativity (in all its shades of grey); one person’s negative is another person’s one bit of sunlight in an enclosed cell.

Nonetheless, without this turning too much into an indulgent blog of internal monologues, I’ll say more about my year in art, which has been productive, if not directly so.

I’ll start by looking at my drawings, which are large projects themselves, but have certainly been thinner on the ground this year, as I leant more towards video:

“Endure The Night of This World”

Perhaps this type of work is why I have been seen as making unremittingly bleak work. But fundamentally, this work is about the turning point in the dead of night, when everything feels over, it could be because something new is about to begin.

Hipster Pyschosis

This is more outwardly angry work I’ve made in a long time; anger not an individuals but at a culture fixed to a story that is evermore removed from reality in a post-covid landscape.

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The main focus of the year has been video work; it began with a “Inner Monologue: a 2020 review, which I think is pretty self explanatory, albeit incredibly complex to pull off in a small studio space, with limited resources at the height of the lockdowns.

The masked character, an amalgamation of things I saw as iconic of a specifically “English trauma” (a medieval plague doctor mask, and an overworked office worker, merging with a 21st century budget delivering chancellor) has become an avataristic-vessel, through which I could perform a lot of video performances, often in particular focussing on the state of the English soul, whilst also being a semi-self portrait.

This work was called ‘Compulsive Obedience”

Video work, I believe helps translate more dimensions of myself, the maker, than perhaps drawings, and especially writing can do. Because, although it is, dark, I do have humorous, albeit ridiculous humorous, qualities – often developed due to compulsive people pleasing, but nonetheless aspects of my persona that have often been missed by older works.

This was followed by “Looking for The Exit”

A Private Civil War was an attempt to mix my drawing with video work. Perhaps due to the nature of collating fleeting utterances of a critical inner monologue, and writing them into a script, it was the toughest work to make this year, and by that definition probably defines the year more than the other works.

So all in all, to para-quote the child in the car on the first Jurassic Park, “I’m back where I started”, regarding more straightforward, normative, although still often desired life achievements. But artistically I feel like I’m back in my drivers seat, which is a good thing.

Hipster Psychosis

‘Hipster Psychosis’ (2021, mixed media on paper)

I’ve long seen my works as successive chapters in a book I can never complete, because it is lived in. 

Thus ‘Hipster Psychosis’ is the latest ‘chapter’. I think what has motivated this drawing more than anything is the ‘post lockdown’ ‘back to normal’ culture, which feels like back to the split realities of life that emerged in the 2010s, but more intensified. 

I thought a lot about the title, and I thought often about changing it, but finally felt it was right to leave it like a nail stuck out of a piece of wood. Just for this once.