This blog page has become far less frequented, and seems to represent a different stage in my (artistic/philosophical) life – a time when I wasn’t so bogged down in the affect of words, not only on others but on how they rebounded onto me. I retain deep core ideals, yet also a muscle memory of mildly traumatic online exchanges, and an awareness that the legacy is arguably our deeply divided, sectarian world – a dividedness few anticipated with the advent of mass internet use.
Equally, part of this change has been a slight sideway shift in the way I make work. Indeed I’ve often recently found myself considering whether ‘making’ is the right thing to do at all, being that the ‘artist’ self-hood I developed in conjunction with coming of age in a neoliberal ‘cult of self-belief’ has often been problematic to say the least.
Yet, despite this constant awareness of our footprints (carbon, social, self-perpetuating ones etc) nobody has yet, to my mind, come up with a better practical philosophy than ‘onwards and upwards’.
This is so hard, because in one respect our society is saturated with a ‘cult of self-belief’, which is, to a large part, what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek sees as a core principle of the current capitalist culture that has brought us into a many-faced crises, which is arguably even more existential than anything. Notions of self-help and self-improvement can easily become indistinguishable from the survivalist anxieties we all experience from feeling that how we look, how confident we are, how positive we are, is vital to whether we ‘survive’ or ‘lose’.
The task is to distinguish. Just because our capitalist culture asked us to smile and live healthily, doesn’t mean we should never smile or eat only in Wetherspoons to prove a point (a mistake I have certainly made). Just because hyper competitive YouTube adverts have appropriated the language of self-improvement, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want to improve ourselves on our own terms. It’s just not an easy task: the driver to be the opposite of what is healthy for body and soul is often a result of the experience of the sheer internal violence (a violence we are so used to we just call it low-level anxiety) of feeling that we must constantly be happier, healthier and more productive than we already are, for a cultural superego that tells us to love ourselves, whilst reminding us that our right to self love is conditional upon our success.
‘Wall, i’ here played by actor Ben Crawford
‘Wall, i’ is a film-based work I have developed for the University of Leeds MA degree show. It has tried to work around this difficultly of living to a better self-script, taking the reigns of ones own destiny, actions and health. It is autoethnographical (which basically means using your own experiences, and of those you grew up with as a sort of social/cultural study). Rather than the more bold political statements that my older artist self thought he had to make (and, to be honest, I never really felt I made them, I was just employing the wrong form to dicuss larger questions of self in relation political and historical circumstances – hence why even jesterly claims of hypocrisy felt painful) ‘Wall, i’ is a semi-fictionalised collation of experiences and phenomena for a generation who’s formative years were around 30-20 years ago, when the dominant cultural narrative had shifted towards one centred around being ones true self and believing in one’s true self.
Scripted by songs (co-written and produced by long time friend Lee Garforth), the narrative has sort of a ‘pop’ form to it (us first wave millennials were probably the last for whom the TV chart shows and radio played a pivotal role in our growing up). Additionally, loosely playing with the structure of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ , ‘Wall, i’ is kind of an inversion of The Wall’s ‘Post war’ narrative, to where a dominant cultural story of individual freedom goes awry. ‘Wall, i’ is a character who gets trapped within himself, and, enabled by new communication technologies, falls into a spiral of loneliness, addiction, bitterness hate, and finally self hate, whilst all the time being told individual freedom is the way out of this.
Scene filmed for ‘Wall, i’ with the help of Yew Tree Theatre Group based in Wakefield.
Yet the best part of doing this hasn’t been the telling of ‘this story’, it’s been the fact that a lot of people have been keen to help me do it. It seems appropriate that our group show is called ‘Becoming After’, because, although it is always hard to remind oneself, it’s those bits where you’re actually on the go with the making, with a group of people, that makes the project take on the significance within your own personal life story. We often neglect the ‘becoming’, turn a blind eye to this grey matter, in favour of the ‘after’ moment. It’s so easy done; our culture is very individualistic and competitive; allowing the co-inhabitation of our own stories, and even the ability to get a group together in one space are sizeable asks, when most of us spend most our time anxiously guarding our selves from failure.
Yet this project was very much about the failures of the individualism story to deliver well-being to both ourselves and those we interact with. I wish for people to come see this film (and the larger group show) and connect with it (maybe I’ve found a new way of communicating I didn’t think I had), but more so I hope that it isn’t a point of closure and closure, period; but also the beginning of a new path.
Becoming After will run from Weds 18 – Saturday 23 September 10 – 6pm. And Sunday 23 10 -4pm
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University Road, Leeds LS2 9JT
Below is a small text I wish to give as a presentation during the Fine Art Masters Degree I am currently undertaking
….Or ‘Wall, i’
A paper that keeps becoming art/art that keeps becoming a paper
I’m here to make a presentation about my ‘practice’.
But what if this practice keeps on becoming something other than a study focus, or skill base? Where the boundaries of disciplines become criss-crossed as everything gets dragged into an ongoing negotiation at the border of a self that is perpetually straining to get beyond this self, because the self always becomes the only reference point?
With a cyclical nature to this negotiation, any academic skill-set that is reasonably applicable beyond it, continually feels re-disembodied. Every day the body in question must be re-applied for. “You’re still not quite ‘it’ – not yet”. An audacious attempt to ‘do my own thing’ succumbs to the fears of dismissal or ridicule from what appears to be numerous superego structures, from whom one confusedly, but necessarily, asks for a body. Give me a body for this, ‘your‘ world.
This is important, because I wish to frame my work within this very proposition of a paper that keeps becoming art, or art that keeps becoming a paper – never having its own body.
Yet I argue that this is a dilemma concerning what a body is, and should be for, in the Modern industrial age. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault saw the conjunction of the development of the scientific discoveries, especially relating to the anatomy, and the technological advancements that led to industrialisation, evolving a use of bodies specific for the Modern age; what he called ‘docile bodies’, would be trained in the school, the factory, the prison, the military camp, to be of use to the machinery of the industrial processes.
Yet, after the processes of the past 40 years this feels somewhat antiquated.
40 years ago Pink Floyd released ‘The Wall’ a work about the trauma, sadness, violence and hatred, born from what we can call the alienating affects on the body under this Modern experience.
Yet 40 years ago is when Margaret Thatcher was elected as UK prime minister, promising liberation from that world of factories and discipline, for individualism over collectivism.
30 years ago the Berlin Wall collapsed, bringing a symbolic end to a faltering communist experiment in collectivity and equality; simultaneously Western countries saw the end of a traumatic decade of de-industrialisation; Francis Fukuyama would tell us it was the end of history; global capitalism was the best system to offer us individual liberty, and, despite its problems, was our arrival in the best possible world.
‘So go forth and be yourself. The big decisions are all done with. It is your personal destiny that matters.
But 10 years ago I embarked on a conceptual work that tried to link the then 30th anniversary of ‘The Wall’ with looking for socio-political causes for anxiety, depression, disorders, and the inability to enjoy, when I’d grown up around so much positive encouragement to choose my own destiny. If the project was to change this it failed; the search for the answers became a work of superstition, in the sense of the philosopher Spinoza; overcome by feeling a lack of personal power to change, I laboured as if labouring for divine intervention.
In 2019, I try again, within the context of Masters Degree, and a different kind of future.
‘Wall, i’ is a playful re-employment of important themes in Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’, for the generation that grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, amidst what I call the ‘teenage kicks’ of neoliberalism (the 1990s); a semi-fictional amalgamation of personal experiences and those of my piers.
If Wall, I could be said to mark out a practice, then it is an auto-ethnographical one; a self-reflective practice, seeing ones experiences as part of a larger group, who are defined by certain common experiences, throughout the last 30 years.
It was a time of the ‘cult of self’, leaving behind the factories and armies of Discipline and Punish, but only to find ourselves in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Control Society’, where “[Each time one is supposed to start [again] from zero…” No longer bodies subjected to power, but bodies arriving into a void of a guaranteed function, only gaining a body role by proving their superior individuality.
Suggesting ‘imposter syndrome’ is a phenomena that corresponds to how ‘being yourself’ often means the opposite of enjoyment, as enjoyment may occur beyond the parameters of such a ‘designated identity’, Wall, I only has addictive sad pleasures to feel any kind of connection, and justifies it through a vengeance-ridden conception of his circumstances. His, ‘i’ for Individual, IS THE WALL!
Addmittedly, although Wall, I could be a confident bodying of a skill set, it could also be a panicky releasing of distress signals to every superego that could grant me a body. As a highly collaborative work of animation, drama, film and music, it promises to bring to life flattened gestures, and abstracted goals, embodying the very thing in question in a way that suggests overcoming it. Equally,‘Wall, I” is, for me, my perfect gesture for the past 30 years; a gesture on symbolic breaks with the past from the personal to social level. Yet they reveal a weakness for placing meaning in signs, the superstition of divine intervention.
Regardless, I speculate that overpowering what I call my ‘designated identity’, will allow an overcoming of ‘imposter syndrome’ when the chance of overpowering an inhibiting identity reveals itself.
However, I conclude, that what Wall, I says about individuals and this brief history of sadness, is vital to understanding a lot of what is fuelling the reactionary identity politics in the social media engagement with the world through what the late Mark Fisher called our ‘mandatory individualism’. Heavily inspired by the philosopher Spinoza’s conceptions that it is related to the body in its positive encounters that we truly to get to know ourselves, I take heed from Fisher’s latter thoughts, suggesting that what is causing the hurt and hatred is very much connected to being stuck in our identities, stuck in an idea of what we are, and that overcoming our ‘designated identity’ may not only alleviate the pain of taking everything personal, but could allow for joyful ‘consciousness raising’ ideas that are a potential antidote to today’s miserable political inertia
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about not only the pitfalls of mistaking moments of symbolic catharsis with real changes, but also (speaking as somebody who makes art, projects, events) in the real emotional dangers of putting all your hopes for change, to be changed, in such symbolic gestures – relying solely on great moments of external validation to align the internal and external disorder of things.
Yet, I don’t believe that ‘Songs for my punch-drunk idealism’ is merely containable in such a category. Firstly, it was a cassette tape for a ‘beautiful day’; the ‘what if’ General Election of Governing Emotions (or ‘#GE18’). More-so, it was a project that not only tried to ask participants which songs pick them up and give them fighting spirit, but put out there the proposition that we all have songs that evoke a distant horizon of a just and peaceful world/life; a proposition explored within this #GE18 project, that, albeit on many different frequencies, we all have Utopian desire.
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What is Utopian? Well, it isn’t ‘Utopia’. To be Utopian is the longing for the aforementioned; justice, peace, fully-realised social and individual potential, all across our known-world. Utopian is a pathos, a pathos that refuses to accept a shut-down, emotionally closed up landscape of ‘miserable Monday mornings’, forever in debt to the entropic givens of historical tragedy as an inevitable. It is in defiance against “the idea that life is essentially drudgery”.
Anyways, ‘Songs for my punch-drunk idealism’ is those songs that are maybe more than a ‘pick me up” – a mixture of potential songs that form the inner interplay between being pulled out of despair, and (re)believing in the very best of humanity once again. And with those last sentences in mind, I felt I had to make another cassette sleeve full of songs I’ve come to hold dear for these reasons.
A potential critique of this could be an open goal for those who wish to score an easy goal. The reason I’m writing these blogs is that I’m trying to reconcile things that may in turn be shown to be incompatible with one another. Yet I’ve found myself at the bottom end of a road I’ve been walking for years – unwittingly, I’d say (others may dispute this…), and I’m either at an existential dead end or about to find new pathways. I’m not seeking sympathy, I’m reaching out on the wager that I’m not at a dead end.
I have no idea how to seek well-being in the present. I can only defer dealing with this by indulging in sad ‘torporous’ pleasures that entertain the ghosts of my out-of-date day-dreams. Certain songs arrive me visions of some future moment of ‘rightening’, for the ends of justice, peace, and collective joy. These familiarized songs repeat a sense of mounting momentum driving towards a space where this burning hollowness no longer has to justify itself to the cruel judge of dead time; 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 – the moment still feels pending.
The inability to enjoy the Now. A deep longing to do so, but a genuine inability to shirk what always seems frozen into the horizon – an horizon that captivates due to its sense-making of the disorder of things.
Only in that frozen horizon am I the person who isn’t anxious, dismissive, negative when in contact with the people, groups and moments I have utmost longing to share collective joy with; a joy that would come from within and spreads outwards.
I know I have developed cognitive foundations that are cemented in an alienated understanding of life, but it isn’t completely fucked up, I’m sure of it. My perpetually frozen horizon refuses to accept a life-plan that sees a gravitational pull of life’s potentiality towards a naturalisation of miserable life-jobs, poverty, crime, finger-pointing justice systems, and finger pointing warfare.
I often feel cognitively paralysed by the dominance of a ordering of things I see as fundamentally negative; can’t help feeling in a competition I don’t want, nor can succeed in.
The songs (the 2nd list of songs!) I have submitted here are at least a refusal to accept the depression I so often struggle to beat away. I often listen to these songs in the morning, when I’m out jogging, And although my jogging is very much part of a control routine, listening to these songs keeps alive my spirit for inner and outer good.
As an artist collective, something binds us. Speaking frankly, I don’t think we even share the exact same ideals, life goals, or approaches to creative practice, or even a shared understanding of what creative practice means. We really are a motley crew. But this motley crew have converged through finding one another’s company comfortable enough to have honest reflections on what seems to be the grand unspeakable.
Basically, what has brought us together is the public secret: everybody knows this thing we are in (call it capitalism, liberal democracy, modernity, whatever you like) isn’t working, and is beyond tweaking; it’s unable to meet the required needs of an unbelievably self-aware connected planet; mental well-being is collapsing in the old industrial nations of modernity, as ecological and social stability collapses in the old colonised nations of modernity.
We all know it; all see it, yet rarely speak it to anyone but our closest friends. Few of us truly like what we see in the world beyond our comfort blankets, but somehow it remains in the realm of self-doubt; the TV’s, radios, even the signage in the café is saying business as usual, “so who am I to speak?”.
I feel this sense of the great unspoken is what bound the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe. Our collective doesn’t read from the same page; our vocalised points of priority in this urgent need for change all differ, as do our inherently preferred ideological bases in the categories of old modernity (yeah, most of us still cling to one when we feel cornered).
One day…some day…
However, I have recently had to come to terms with the fact that such self-assured prose (that, uncoincidentally, I’ve never felt confident enough to publish beyond my own blog) faces falling flat, on my part, for the reason of what it omits.
If you scour my decade-old blog you will find plenty of content that on the surface appears to be self-pitying. What you won’t find is the comments from anonymous sources. I deleted them. They hurt me.
The reason for this is that I wrote these blogs not for sympathy, but for the purposes of understanding, recognition; parachuted-in help, I guess. If anything, a desire to be released from my ego, not an ego-boost.
The reason that so many of my blogs have confusingly meandered between a sporadic critique of contemporary life to very honest reflections on my own life is that I have always been seeking help from anywhere but within. A need for a paternalistic recognition of both my external concerns and how they connect with my inner distress(even if heroic intervention came in the form of the infamous relationship between O’Brien and Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, which is basically an abusive but yet reassuring father-figure).
For this reason what I am now about to write, in an aim to try to understand if my ‘post-capitalist desire‘ (to use a name that Mark Fisher gave one of his essays) is a product of perpetually placing happiness outside of myself, comes with the disclaimer that I am writing from a position of trying to take affirmative control of my life. For the sake of myself and whoever, ego-based interventions into my own affairs are no longer required, thanks (if they ever were…).
Here goes…
What is the purpose that drives me? I have intent, sometimes it burns away leaving pure drive, but I have intent.
Is the desire for a post-capitalist world my intent? Or is the post-capitalism just over the brow of the horizon what I use as substitute for the sense of inner disarray that I have felt since as long as I have known?
I am no longer in the business of asking honest questions right here on my blog in blind hope that somebody with some cure will come and make me whole. I have spent far too long as a backseat passenger in my own life. A back seat passenger who has thrown things out of the window, even jumped out of the moving vehicle (bruised and broken, only to heal and get back in), yet always remained passive.
Nobody wants to leave their life regretting the life they had; regretting that they were constantly chasing or waiting for something, with no arrival; or that what they did do is so regretful, largely due to be being motivated by sad, negative preoccupations.
Well, with above disclaimer in place, I’ll be totally honest: if I was to die tomorrow, the moments beforehand would be spent regretting my entire life.
Trying to break down the compulsions, routines that I live by is proving very difficult. Nonetheless it is a task I am not letting any individual compulsion-driven act forget; I’m not wanting to meet that ultimate regret at the end of it all.
I often feel convinced that when Kurt Cobain sang that there was ‘something in the way’ he was speaking from a similar, if not far more desperate, place.
The biggest, and most convincing argument I, and many others who are emotionally loyal to the post-capitalist desire face is the one that aims to defang any argument made by anybody who is unable to find peace and inner enrichment in the here and now.
Despite the way I have posited this commonplace argument making it glaringly obvious that not all of us can find peace in the here and now, there still persists an undeniable truth to it. And I know that as a white, educated male, who has a perpetual existential itch, that I am very susceptible to it; I often clumsily walk into a corner where the undeniable half-truth reveals itself: “why don’t you just learn to enjoy your life!”
And it’s true. Why don’t I just learn to enjoy life?
So, I need to begin my way out of this maze of brutal dualisms and unhelpfully vague holisms by beginning from scratch (disclaimer still in place…).
From being a young child, what fired me, motivated my successive obsessions was always an abstract; an image of some future moment, where (to quote a psychotherapist I saw at much later date) the universe aligned. I was constantly day-dreaming about some future landscape that had no distinctive features apart from the fact that the disorientating cluster of signifiers in the present tense had gravitated to a central point of meaning. The fact that my encounter with the social was initially poor, fostering a low self-esteem I haven’t until now properly challenged, encouraging self-pity and withdrawal, certainly did nothing to hamper the persistence of the libidinal investment in this abstract future whole.
I came to see the negatives that played themselves out in those years (from school bullying, people without enough money, right up to stories from far away about tropical deforestation) as unnecessary states of affairs that were to be ‘righted’ as we travelled further from the ‘olden days’ of my parents and grandparents to some point when it would all be merely history.
World War to End of History…?
These dreamy expectations of a just and coherent universality certainly cluster together around the final decade of the 20th century. I have pondered ever-since on this as being more than coincidental; I didn’t need to know of Francis Fukuyama’s premature triumphalism about ‘the end of history’ (as in, an end to the chaos and brutal upheavals of competing ideologies played out in the previous 250 years), to pick up on a specifically 1990’s optimism, constituted by the fall of the repressive Soviet system, the teenage kicks of ‘neoliberalism’, and the pre-millennial computer-generated utopianism, glued together by the momentary flattening of counterculture (think of squeezing down femimism into The Spice Girls) into a mainstream consumer palette.
But this is irrelevant now; we are, culturally speaking, still vomiting up the 1990’s, in our social media exorcisms (from where nobody, like in an William Hogarth etching, is spared – perhaps rightfully), but this doesn’t heal the void, certainly not in my own life. And it’s high time I acted.
I’m now a 34 year old, who has spent most of his ‘going out’ evenings of the 2010’s drinking alone – although it is the sense of having failed which has had a larger influence on my actions than alcohol, as swathes of friendships have stretched into non-existence, leaving me like a caretaker of places we all once haunted, 11 years into a low-paid job that most barely spend a year doing before moving on.
Where I work, where I live, and how long I have worked and lived in these circumstances would be of no-consequence if I associated with them positively and (much more importantly) confidently; if my relationship to home and work was a somewhat more positive affirmation of my life. But it couldn’t be further from that.
Fuck me. I’ve been writing this shit that seems very much like the aforementioned for as long as the piece of string named ‘getting old’ is long.
I have always placed so much emphasis on the passing of time; I gave each passing year a certain identity distinct from the others. When I was young, growing old was anticipated for all the life-affirming rites of passage it would deliver. The future would always align and straighten the disorder of today.
However, the future intervention that would align the world stopped being a rite of passage and instead something I clung to for hope of rightening a new inner turmoil. Since my mid-to-late teens I have been driven my compulsions and routine, bent on either maintaining or losing control. Always from the sense of needing a higher hand to intervene, I went from late teen eating and control disorders, to aiming my sights on ‘big nights out’ in my early 20’s where getting pissed up and momentarily losing my controlling habits would free me – maybe a woman would come into my life, and a validated obedience to patriarchal norms would liberate me from the things that caused anxiety.
During this time, the moment of universal righting moved towards more Dystopian seas, I became rapidly politicised and super adept at turning pub conversation towards pointing out to others the iceberg we were heading for (metaphorically speaking of course) – unaware that they too had seen them, probably before I. It was another means of seeking external validation, seeking an external answer to the inner gulf. What ensued was a situation where I was still waiting, whilst everybody around me went on and did other things, until I found myself hitting 30, being drunk in pubs by myself. The drink was still used to liberate me, but by now was from a daily sense of failure as life passed me by, and once inebriated it was no longer a means to liberate me from the negative controlling habits of my youth, but merely a means to access more regrettable avenues for negative pleasure-seeking. Again always as the back seat passenger.
Yet, I admit I am sat here, alone in bar, drinking, writing this down.
But I’m here now attempting to actively break this circle, rather than wait for it to break.
But how does this relate to political ideals? Surely I have just expressed that the issue is internal to me and not external to the world?
Well, I have harboured a certain paranoia since my political ‘awaking’ fell further back onto negative pleasure seeking: that many who I felt I shared post-capitalist desire with began to see me as an hypocrite. They see me as unwilling to act on what I see as right and wrong; in one respect they are right. On the other hand action is born from self-worth and pride, those who can act on their own behalf feel a joy from doing so; they love being alive and fight for it whenever they see it being taken away.
The reason those with political ideals, who become so reliant on them as a crutch, are easy targets to those who have found an inner sanctuary but are more or less happy with the status quo, is that they are clearly people who aren’t happy with their ‘lot’ and communicate out of unresolved traumas and grievances. This is true. I don’t not distinguish myself from this group, as disparate as they are.
However, these traumas and grievances are real.
I will be honest, what has often scared me from undertaking a course of intense self-confidence building is that I am scared that I would eradicate my entire identity in the process. I cannot differentiate my who I am with my entire concept of the abstract utopian ideal.
But the truth is I have never really known myself anyway. Me, I, John Ledger, has never stood tall in the here and now, but always in some abstract future point. My sense of fashion (intrinsically bound up with self-worth) has been at sea since I was a teenager, I don’t really know what I am meant to be, and to get back to the question of politics, I do not know how to act in this world.
What I have to convince myself is that making a life for myself, finding out what gives me a joy to be alive, isn’t in opposition to a post-capitalist desire. I have visually illustrated the experience of being trapped in a late-stage capitalist world for the best part of 15 years. It would be foolish of me to see this as time-wasted, but that time has gone, and there so much more to do, not out of duty but out of joy.
Being happy and being part of the emerging movements to transform the world are far from mutual opposites. My self-made task, is to find this out for myself.
2018 was the year when I had to ask the question the above title poses…
Neoliberal Me (An Exorcism of) and #GE18 (The General Election of Governing Emotions)
2008 to 2009 – I learnt a harsh lesson: devoting a year to mapping one’s inner and external fortified walls into one symbolic gesture (one which was nod to Pink Floyd’s concept album The Wall) cannot wish it into a transformative moment.
Surely only an idiot would expect such a ‘Big Other’ moment transforming their life? Surely only an emotional wreck, somebody who wasn’t thinking ‘rationally’, would expect an higher body to come down, wrest its hand on their head and suck out their demons?
Maybe, but apart from being ideologically-highly strung and being obsessed with the poetry of The Event, am I that different to everybody else? If we were fuelled by rational choices, devoid of the sense of higher powers, good and bad, fine-tuning the grand scheme of things, why did so many people reject the more ‘sensible‘ options offered by the Remainers and Hilary Clinton in those infamous 2016 elections?
Of course we can take the higher ground. Cathartically rage at the bigots and culturally uneducated who fucked it up for everyone else, totally ruining something that just needed ‘tweeking’ here and there… “They aren’t like us…”
But who’s side am I on? My heresy is that I was so so close to voting Leave back in June 2016, and mainly refrained from doing so due to knowing I couldn’t back up my reasons in ‘rational’ debate amongst my more educated friends. Equally, I felt hurt the next day when the supposedly most neutral news broadcaster in the UK presented people from my home town as at fault for the decision to leave the EU; clickbait for the educated to share and condemn these undeserving citizens.
I knew my reasons for almost voting leave, for wanting to press the ‘do not touch!’ button were deeply emotional. I knew that those feelings, personal to me, were also a justifiable reaction to the experience of the texture of life in this country 16 years into the 21st century. As the country became the most passionately divided and judgemental it had been for a generation, I saw people responding emotionally to their own experiences of the past.
Why am I focussing on this? Because it forced me to revaluate what sort of language my art practice was using. My work had always been explicit in showing my ill ease with life in an advanced capitalist world. But was it the fault of ignorant ( = bad) people for climate change? Were people who voted Tory my sworn enemies? Are the people going crazy on Black Friday personally to blame for the shame upon the human race? Are the people using derogatory terms in passing conversation inherently a set of scumbags?
What I have learned is that calling them so isn’t going to change their ways anyway…
7 years ago I would have rejected such a suggestion…
…but I’ve been pretty lost in those years since any youth-based substitute for confidence kept me airborne. I’ve become more at home sustaining sad-passions, drifting into dead-end pleasure-seeking. Although I’ve maintained a practice that I believe as depicted the experience of the past 10 years pretty fucking well, I’ve also been unable to find any positive to fix my identity on; my pride and self-worth has been non-existent, allowing my work only a reactive, compulsive, and inevitably fatalist response to contemporary lived experience. It became clear that I had no right to judge others on how they should and shouldn’t think and act.
But in 2018 I decided I didn’t want to be this shadow of a human being. Yet I also recognised that my practice could work through this.
Through the violence of language on and offline during the past 2 years I began to see trauma and lived-pain as the main things all the opposing sides had in common; ego’s formed out an entrenched sense of there being a need for self-preservation; hatred formed out of slow and sustained humiliation; nobody free from anxiety or bouts of mental ill-health.
I came up with two project proposals that were fundamentally one of the same: one a symbolic point of closure in my own life, and the other, a wager on the premise that what I was wishing to put a closure upon what was, to a large extent, a shared longing: a wager on the premise that many features of contemporary life pressure us into emotional states and behaviours that feed negative and unhealthy cycles and close down our receptiveness to the possibilities around.
I can roughly describe this as an endeavour to put into practice a recognition that emotional and social/political transformation go hand in hand.
I gave the introspective side the loaded, yet necessary name ‘Neoliberal Me (An Exorcism of)’. This work borrows from a body of work I have been developing over the past 5 years, in an attempt to but a closure on it – most notably, my work ‘the Mary Celeste Project (The Scene of The Crash), which I completed in 2014 , and ‘Stories From Forgotten Space’, a series of both psychogeographical and hauntological accounts that I made into a book.
The box in the work was ‘symbolically’ buried on the moors above where the work is largely focused (geographically-speaking), with its peaty mud it acquired giving it the look of something exhumed.
If it was a closure on a body of work which I would class as a kind of mourning process, of lost futures, both personal to me and socially felt, and greatly inspired by Mark Fisher’s works on hauntology, then the grossly oversimplified explanation of these recent projects is that were paying respect to the writers/friends who picked up the pieces of defiant optimism in Fisher’s later works before he took his own life; probably best encapsulated in the work on ‘Acid Communism’.
But it was a post titled ‘A wager on a Shared Experience’ (since seemingly taken down) by an old friend who knew Fisher that gave punch-drunk emotions to a cause that was neither dogmatic or classifiable, but for something beautiful in the face of the ‘depressive realism’ Fisher critiqued so passionately.
was apprehensive, burnt-out by the prospect of engaging in political debates over the Internet, that I wanted to speculate that by and large the majority of us shared a common experience of trauma adjusting to the fabric of contemporary life, that outweighed political standpoints, and that here was the appropriate ground upon which to propose that my wish for a symbolic act of closure on aspects of my life was a shared experience.
This became an event held on June 21st called ‘#GE18, the General Election of Governing Emotions’.
It was premised on the idea that there had been a mental health strike earlier in the year, born from a collective agreement to mentally withdraw from our libidinal economy, because the contemporary conditions were making it all but impossible to maintain good mental health. The ‘what if’ strike was trying to reimagine the theorist Franco Berardi’s jaded belief that ‘depressive withdrawal’ may be the only way to grind the contemporary capitalist system to a halt into a proactive moment of collective consciousness.
#GE18 was motivated by a wish to build a participatory practice that makes political conversations seem like they aren’t political by holding them up in empathic structures, that not only locate commonalities but also create a real space for idealism about our life and society.
The project was instigated by trying to put a call out for people to make cassette tapes based around their own take on a specific set of songs I held dear as ‘songs for my punch-drunk idealism’. I don’t have the most eclectic music taste, it is more one that is woven around my memories, ideals, lost futures. But I felt that others must surely have punch-drunk idealism songs; songs that [to use a line suggested by a friend] punch a hole in your heart that is both political and dogmatic/romantic; songs that put the fight back in you when life and times seem so dark. I asked participants to imagine making this cassette tape of personal moments as a gesture of good will to the nation for such an election night.#
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The election night itself was held over two venues: Leeds Print Workshop and the Art Hostel, also in Leeds. A series of prints wrangled with the difficulty of stepping into the unknown as personal and social transformation meet in political events, playing on the analogy of a cross roads point in a psychotherapy process: recognising we have the problem; that for the sake of ourselves and of others, we cannot carry on like this. However, the alternative seems far more frightening, because it is the unknown.
At the voting booths, people were given 3 votes. Which asked questions both of how they, and society feels, and how they would ideally like themselves and society to feel.
A good number of people attended, and the ‘votes’ are currently being typed up by a neutral source, to be revealed in some form in the next event to be staged by the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe, later this summer…
But what is the real result? If symbolic acts alone cannot be transformative, has anything been set in motion that is working towards empathic enabling? Both personally and politically there is a real desire to square a circle here, inside of which the symbolic moment still reigns supreme…
There is a deep struggle against waiting for the universe to align, it requires proactive development that years of aimlessness and what Fisher termed ‘reflexive impotence’ try to prevent at every move. Because we live in a neoliberal ‘ecology’, telling people to take responsibility of their own lives, and to ‘be the [fucking] change you want to see’, is received as a violent attack on ones negative ego that they’ve compromisingly had to build to survive such an hyper-individualist age. Even though such advice is delivered with empathic intent, it is received within this ecosystem as a right hook of one-upmanship.
The ghosts of yesterday’s near misses and own goals cannot be exorcised in one full swoop; the task is to challenge the stories they tell us as individuals and collectives. The symbolic exorcism was a wish to totally rid oneself of them. However, is a person banished of all ghosts nothing but a living blank?
Our ‘always on’ present relays these ghosts, even algorithmically sources the ghosts that retell the same stories. This isn’t to say there isn’t humongous transformative potential bursting at the seams in our hyperconnected age, yet the more potential the bigger the circle that needs squaring. It’s a huge task, because whilst ever the fabric of the present is so individualist, the challenge feels like a lonely one.
There isn’t a final outcome from these projects, there’s only an awareness that things (speaking more from a personal perspective here) cannot carry on like this, even as the resistance to change digs its heals further into the ground…
Over the course of the year, I’ve had to ask myself a lot of questions, for numerous reasons. Part of the outcome is that I largely class the work I do as part of the collective I am part of (https://retrobarattheendofuniverse.wordpress.com).
Here is the first event I am putting on since this deep point of reevaluation…
#GE18 (The General Election of Governing Emotions) is an event occurring at two locations in Leeds on the Longest day of the year! 130 Vicar Lane from 5-7pm and… Art Hostel, (83 Kirkgate) from 6:30-9pm.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ge18-the-general-election-of-governing-emotions-opening-night-tickets-46974019557 Born out of intense debates around the global political crises, the mental health epidemic, and the online factionalisation of opinion, #GE18 asks to us to engage in a ‘what if’ general election where we get to vote for emotions rather than through them. How would we ideally like to feel and behave in life? How would we really like the world to feel and behave like? Well come along to The General Election of Governing Emotion on June 21st and let us know…as well as seeing #GE18 art prints, cassette sleeves for a collaborative project called ‘Songs For My Punchdrunk Idealism’, and engaging in non-combative conversation!
The Mental Health Strike is part of a project I am building as part of the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe collective. The project is based on actions and moments that deposit social and political actions within the contemporary cultural landscape that would be seen as impossible asks, as if they are apparitions from near-futures where a completely different set of tools and demands are available to build a 21st century world where collective mental well-being is at crucible of social organisation.
The Mental Health Strike, which was set for the date of January 22 2018 (supposed to be the most depressing day of the year) is neither a case of ‘what if’, nor is it an actual strike that has been organised. It exists in the in-between, where it could become real.
The week before Jan 22 these placards were placed around specific areas in Leeds city centre. I chose the places the Jehovah’s Witnesses usually have their stands on a weekday; speculating that they had located the areas within each city which are the epicentres of spiritual neediness, the places where the most negative emotions prevalent in late capitalist life are felt on the street.
The above flyers were distributed on the night of the exhibition where I exhibited the audio-piece ‘(M.H.S) Sunscreen ’18’, an audio work put together for the project by myself and collective member Benjamin Parker.
The above flyers were distributed on the night of the exhibition where I exhibited the audio-piece ‘(M.H.S) Sunscreen ’18’, an audio work put together for the project by myself and collective member Benjamin Parker.
I’ve gone back to study this year. After years of wrangling over whether to go back or not, I finally decided that I had nothing to lose by doing so. Additionally, it has enabled me to have a bit more thinking space, away from working 5 days a week. Because no matter what job you do, I find repetitious work endeavours to corrode the will to be creatively and intellectually engaged with life. Although now in my 30’s, regrettably there are many things I haven’t experienced or engaged with, and in many ways I feel deprived of so much, but partly because of this, I still have much freedom from excessive responsibilities that many don’t, and this has enabled me to break free of 9-5, if only for 2 years.
I’ve still been working on my drawings, but spending much time considering and working on how the other main outlets for my work relate back to my drawings. I’m not a natural illustrator, I spend way too much musing things over than putting pen to paper, so it always feels a little disingenuous to go along with the ‘drawer’ tagline. It gives people the wrong impression about how I work.
It’s quite hard to explain this whilst also explaining how important my drawings are to the ideas and concepts that drive me to make and do. But the drawings are intermittent moments where the cognitive mapping of this chaotic world suddenly seems to come into focus, and make sense, even if this doesn’t seem to be the case for others who view the final outcomes.
Nonetheless, the current works are trying to take on the concepts of ‘dark optimism’ (which I borrowed some time back for my own uses, from ‘The Transition Towns Handbook’, by Rob Hopkins), and (my own) ‘punch-drunk idealism’, largely by pitting the capabilities we have before us, against the evidential mass mental breakdown that our current hysterical accumulation of modernity is causing. There has become within myself and my work an almost religious conviction that this moment, where we are at a saturation point regarding our ability to care and hope, will cause a tipping point where we will be forced to collectively transcend the ‘soul fracking’ of late-stage capitalism. I say religious to be cautious that I may just be fooling myself, but I guess if I didn’t at least have some belief that the future will be live-able the I’d be a nervous wreck.
One of the most important works, for me, was a written work, accompanied by maps, that sadly became an unrealised project. ‘How did I get so old? (Pre GE2017 musings)’ was a response to the then-upcoming snap election called by Teresa May. Although Jeremy Corbyn himself would never pretend he was the ‘golden ticket’ to a post-austerity, potentially post-capitalist society, his unexpected popularity with symbolic of a desire to break out downer-fuelled neoliberalist Britain. And this work was an attempt at reckoning with the potential of choosing to vote to challenge these depressed, foreclosed horizons, alongside trying to come to terms with my own depressed experiences of adulthood, and a willing to change this, also.
I’ve always found the balancing act of these two seemingly separate issues very difficult to communicate, because the language to effectively communicate a notion of a societal depression is inherently flawed, whilst when I veer more towards my own experiences as a better form of explanation, it appears merely pathological, or, at worst, that I’m wallowing in it.
The election, however, did surprise us somewhat, and was probably the last period of collective optimism, before the absurdity of Brexit, and the sex scandals that seemed to hover around it like accumulating flies around its rotting carcass of [the illusion of] neoliberal society, began to overwhelm such capacities for optimism. I guess there’s always next year..
WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE THE 20TH CENTURY PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?
The biggest project was also to be the most spectral.
In 2017 The Retro Bar at The End of the Universe [the collective I am part of) was given the chance to curate a disused pub. The pub, which epitomises the weird and eerie landscape of post-industrial West Yorkshire, was situated on the relentless Otley Road, within the Saltaire/Shipley region. Yet, the building itself contained ghostly remnants of a political and cultural era which the RBATEOU argues is currently coming to an end.
Due to a location made ‘strange’ by our descent into a commuter existence, the event ‘Will The Last Person To Leave The 20th century Please Turn Out The lights?’received NO VISITORS. This was an exhibition at the end of the universe, making the collective wonder “are we the last person?”. Perhaps it was meant to be?
We curated both floors of this large building, to create something that actually began to creep us out as a collective, as if we’d uncovered a truth about the era we arguably just leaving that wasn’t comfortable.
The Eternal Blip(A Mary Celeste Decade)
I have some projects that I am wanting to conceal until the new year, but they will, without doubt, be documented upon here in good time. But perhaps the last point of interest to finish on would be my rookie attempts trying to map an idea of society’s emotional patterns in response to certain political upheavals during the past decade.
Working on ideas put down in 4 years back in ‘The Mary Celeste Project (The Scene of The Crash)’, The Eternal Blip (A Mary Celeste Decade) basically tracks the past ten years, since the year when the financial crash happened to now, asking if others feel the same way as I do: that with retrospect it feels like a lost decade (?).
Now, I haven’t been forced to rely on food handouts, had to choose between heating and eating, or found myself on the streets (an awful new normality in the past ten years). But in hindsight I feel like it has stunted me, almost caged me in a previous point of my life. I feel like when I shut my eyes and reopen them, I can’t remember the decade, as it has been sucked from under me.
The parallels between a long depression, and the memory loss it can cause are very closely tied, and I can only hope that it isn’t a lone experience, because I want the other aspects of the work to make sense to people, as they are where the optimism lies. Within this submerged soundscape there are points of emergence that correlate with times within the past decade when I felt ruptures in default reality fabric occurred. For good or for worse, new horizons felt palpable, as was a sense to act. Ultimately the default reality fabric reasserted itself, and, arguably the depression/memory loss resumed.
From the 2011 English riots to Trump, from Corbyn to Brexit, constructive or destructive, the fact is that these ruptures offer(ed) alterior possibilities from the business-as-usual outcome. I don’t know, I just know how I feel /felt in these moments seemed to contain some kernel of something other, that allowed me to imagine myself in relation to the world in a different manner.
Next year is going to be a real challenge on so many levels. But I feel far less of the objectless and hopeless confusion I had in many of the previous years. I’m hoping I, and those I work closely with, are onto some great ideas for 2018…
![A4_MA Final Show Flyer[4245]](https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/yyyQXe3rUbSDcFy8_g_ESJTiwRKylFBaxRw3Q6Qp0BN8Q-3FWI8bAbLKiv8XRB8ord9vPNtQUy2ads0UKrW6jCUzshYU582Q8DkHYR2oO1xxWd0oA5FUkJ1Nz8LCufikRYLpZ9yJ=s0-d-e1-ft#https://johnledger.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/a4_ma-final-show-flyer4245.jpg?w=479)
John B Ledger 