My most recent work ‘Vaccine 2.0’.
I see the work as sort of a character intoxicated with an awareness of the troubles that embroil them, but also intoxicated with the ‘sad passions’ caused by disempowerment to the point of being far keen on petty vengeance. In this way it is meant to be a way of myself exercising my own toxicities using the country itself as a vessel for this. I often thought the work could have also been called ‘stories from a very Spinozan Dystopia’.
I’m really pleased that I’m contributing a one off work, a map/book print ‘THE LONG NIGHT OF A NEEDLESS STORM’ to an Art Auction for Barnsley Rough Sleepers Project, an auction which begins this Monday (30th November) and ends on Saturday the 6th December. All in all there’s over 20 Barnsley based/linked artists contributing to this, a real eclectic mix of talent.
There is a direct link to the auction here. https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/artauctionforbarnsleyroughsleepersproject1?fbclid=IwAR2GfXee7_2hKARekKjwVfgqBZBBhDw5WlOnhQf8mukyFAwC8g5ZcYT-oFw
I’m pleased to say that my 2011 installation ‘Achieving Things and Getting Things Done’ has been used as the image for Yarden Katz’s paper ‘Entrepreneurial Science’ for the editorial ‘Political Concepts’.
The installation was part of a show I did with Mikk Murray and Jade Lauren (two Sheffield-based artists) right back in the heated summer of 2011, and was a work which, although quite obscure, was one I was particularly pleased with, so I’m happy it’s resurfaced. Although knee-deep in the arena of academia, I share the paper’s core sentiments and concerns.
The editorial has lots of the other really interesting-looking papers on it to, so cheers!
‘When they came for me I Felt Nothing…’ (2020, mixed media on paper)
It Wasn’t the best day to put aside to photo-document my new work (lighting is terrible), but anyway…
If I’m to condense this work into one subject, ‘‘When they came for me I Felt Nothing…’ ’ is about an experience of desensitisation, likely caused by the anxiety and over-stimulation that is intensified by living in a time defined by communications technologies, and social media.
I was going to write much more, but it felt better here to ask others to discuss about their own experiences about desensitisation, the desensitising cycles of anxiety and addiction, in this kind of world, and also their thoughts/experiences about what Mark Fisher called ‘reflexive impotence’: where an assumption that we can’t do anything change to change our world, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy making us unable to act; which has not only has political consequences, but also personal/mental health ones.
Finally got around to getting these done! I’ve been trying to work out a way of making my work own able for years.
I’ve always found selling originals problematic; not only does it sometimes seem counterproductive to sell something I have spent 3 months developing, and then have nothing to exhibit, it also doesn’t make sense to the way I work, as my works are ongoing narratives; the closest resemblance I can ever muster is a song on an album. Especially when the work is fresh, I often can’t afford to part with the original.
But I also respect peoples’ admiration of my work, and respect the fact that they’d like to own something.
So this was the answer I came up with:
These are the first in a series of limited edition fold out map books of my drawings I have been developing.’
‘A Eulogy for a Lost Decade’ is a collation of works from a period between 2016/17, whilst ‘We Want To Live’ is a collation of works from 2019 to 2020.
Both are in an edition of 15.
Each one is individually signed.
I am charging £50 for each.
Do let me know if you are interested. Many thanks
John
WARNING: THIS WORK CONTAINS STRONG AND UNPLEASANT LANGUAGE ALL WAY THROUGH. THANKS
‘The Crucible of all our Traumas’
Mixed media on paper.
I decided it was best not to present this work with a formal ‘explanation’, as I’m hoping my next work will do the explaining. But I’m happy to discuss what it is about.
Been pretty intense trying put this work together, I almost ripped it in half at one point.
(2020, mixed media on paper)
‘Self portrait during a culture war’. (mixed media on paper)’.
In a sense I think I’m making this work for social media, for our over dependency on it during a time of restricted physical socialising, for the way it is shaping physical reality the more we rely on it. I made “Self portrait during a culture war” trying to find a way to critique the increasingly dividing arguments within social media, in the only way I could think of: making myself the object of critique, in a drawing that exaggerates the contradictory, and often ugly, emotion-cum-identity ‘matter’ in my own ego make up.
It’s the contradictory stuff that all of us carry (?), yet that cannot occupy the same space at the same time in our current forms of communication, which make it hard for us to find language that doesn’t ‘corner’ us against another side.
I put a big emphasis on the contradiction between having strongly held desires for social change, and many reactionary elements. They are divided into blacks and whites (metaphorically not literally!) because they cannot recognise one another, and this makes them ever more extreme in their differences.
The progressive side tries to ‘teach’ the other side, but the more it does so the more the ‘other’ side becomes entrenched around the beliefs/feelings it stands accused of having. This is because the progressive side, in all it’s good intent, overlooks both the way language travels over a space like social media, and also overlooks the emotional wounds, pride, even humiliations (relative to that person’s social/historical experiences), which I believe are prodded when progressive language makes us feel guilt.
Equally, I think that one of the illusions seen through the prism of ‘identity politics’ gives us the painful impression that it is we, out of all peoples, who have been ‘left behind’/’not cared about’, which I believe is a shared experience that connects the majority of us beyond the idea of ‘identity politics’.
Again, to prevent pointing this finger at others, this is why this is based on an exaggeration of my own contradictory feelings, and the raging internal arguments that flare up upon encountering the crossfire of social mediation.
After using drawing as the main mode of expression for my art for well over 10 years, a couple of years ago I just stopped. I didn’t stop making art, so to speak, but it felt like drawing, my way of drawing, had not only run out of steam, but relevance.
The reasons for this are plenty, and complex, and I’m happy to discuss them elsewhere, as they relate to a whole matter of things, but at the moment this would be a messy digression.
To cut a long story short, from September 2018 to September 2019, I worked on a film which was a fictionalised account of my own experiences. During that moment it felt like the last move I had left to make, if art was a strategy game. But in life, it felt like a gigantic full stop, from one thing to the next; for, despite perhaps it’s awkward introduction, when I finished ‘Wall, i’ I thought “that’s what I’ve been trying to fucking say for all my adult life!”.
It was a massive version of what all my drawings had always been: long meditations that would take me months to produce, and leave me (on a smaller scale) thinking the grass (of the none-artist) was greener on the other-side.
Now, every word that isn’t about the huge current global, societal issues, feels like it is walking a tightrope of accusations (the accusation of ‘privilege’ is a specifically prevalent accusation, as we can always see one for what they have, and we don’t, over our tech-mediated field of comprehension). But it has been precisely these current crises, in our streets, on our screens, and crucially within our inner dialogues, that suddenly made drawing relevant again. Suddenly it felt apt to try to finds compositions to depict the Now, through drawing. Yet, like always, I am a slow worker. So the works below are my ‘works for the Covid 19’ era, thus far.
1. A New Spring has Sprung.
2. Nausea
3. All of Your Gods are Pounding my Head’
I’ve made another video introduction to this work. A work that I got into a real moral tangle about revealing right now, amidst current affairs.
John B Ledger