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
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.
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.
Thanks for everybody’s help and support.
A 2022 film by John Ledger and Jordan Blake.
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.
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’ (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.
New work published:
‘Looking for The Exit (in solidarity)’.
. WARNING: WORK CONTAINS STRONG UNPLEASANT LANGUAGE AND UPSETTING REFERENCES. IN SOLIDARITY THO.Thanks
‘A Private Civil War’ is my most recent work, and is a semi autobiographical monologue in relation to living in what I call a ‘cult of self-belief’.
This work is more than anything about the crisis of knowing oneself in age that is perpetually telling us to be just that, our selves, but with attached conditions and requirements; that is, a self that is conducive with being successful via the market-based competition of neoliberalism, a culture I call ‘a cult of self-belief’.
It’s obviously got semi-autobiographical tones. A truth, my truth, being that I never really feel I have created an identity, I feel identity-less.
Or at least I’ve never successfully created an ‘Identity in Capitalism’ (a weird term, but I think it works…?). I always found it near impossible to become, in a sense of becoming something, often feeling like I exist in the shadows of those who are made manifest, be it,by their own or others’ hands.
I spent most of my out of work time in my 20s and early 30s, on trains, buses, and admittedly pubs, anywhere to escape the growing alarm call to ‘self actualise’, as I literally just didn’t know how, and I’d feel a sense of paralysis at the very ask to choose what I was.
Once I hit the slow approaching ice berg of ‘turning 30’, I kind of fell into my own inner monologue, a deeply self critical one, toxic space, full of confused and frustrated morality injunctions into the debate about why I still hadn’t ‘become’, why I still hadn’t found a life(style) etc that I wish to exist in. I entered ‘a private civil war’ that I’m still more or less within.
But I think/hope the work can extend to other peoples’ experiences. If only due to how many others likely found themselves falling into their own inner monologue during this age of lockdowns and isolation.
Of course, many people, especially those who know me, would reject my feelings of being of failure. But we all do this for others don’t we? We all see others’ as manifest and confident, whilst we are plagued by doubt. So, more than anything I hope this work can shed light on what I believe is a big ‘public secret’ fuelling the fires of much identity politics in the pre and post-covid age; the feeling of being left behind, of having been mis-recognised, and more than anything, of having failed.
There are many reasons I’ve wanted to fuse the idea of self actualisation with tree shapes, and depicting, even merging the idea of a psyche with that of an ecology, that is managed, mismanaged, damaged, and rebuilt. But none more than using the unique shape trees take almost as a direct conversation with their immediate environment, as a form in which to discuss the being human, in an age where being ‘self made’ (be it through in terms of money, or lifestyle, or character) very much overshadows the experience of the power of our external environment, that literally make us sometimes feel like plants bending in the wind and twisting and turning for sunlight.
New work:’Compulsive Obedience’ from my ‘stories from the cult of self-belief’ series.
WARNING: It’s a potentially unpleasant and ‘triggering’ work. Just so you know, ok.
>2021 CENSUS FOR POST-COVID DESIRE <-
Excited about this new project with the artist-led collective ‘the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe’. I think all of our projects play around with the possibility of making a real-life impact, and also the possibility of finding a New common ground, amidst big societal divisions.
Please do take the time to fill it in, and also please help us share the project!
Many thanks
John B Ledger