Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters

Broken Democracy / Feeding Frenzy / Indefinite postponement / Too wired to concentrate / Digital Twitch Continuous Partial Attention / Hyperbolic Thinking

Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters

The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) has had a notable impact on students of contemporary art. Not only is his influential book Capitalist Realism (2009) taught – and a common sight among the busy recesses of the studio environment – but his writing offers counsel for those who need to recognise and avoid the repressive and now dispersed institutional models that lay in wait.

Writing under his blogging pseudonym ‘k-punk’, Fisher drew on caricatures to warn against the devitalising effects of both superficial enthusiasm and perpetual scepticism. Accordingly, Grey Vampires and Trolls are put forward as the dominant subjectivities of our present era. Grey Vampires, ‘feed on the energy of those who are devoted [to cultural production], but cannot devote themselves’. Whereas, Trolls present a perpetual and ‘hostile distaste’ as a matter of pride. Both remain distant and dead to the fulsome identification of the Fan, the F-word reviled by officialdom.

Fisher’s voice literally appears within Kerry Jones’ work. And his analysis of current cultural conditions and these predatory subjectivities offers a way to navigate the diverse works of this year’s Masters’ interim show. A number of works deal directly with the concept of trolling, including online bullying, social manipulation and technology’s encroachment onto personal experiences. Nadia Scola explores an extreme troll archetype, the ‘Fuckboy’, a male predator only interested in objectifying women and forcing dialogue towards sex. Constructed TV encounters are broken down by Amalia Turkieltaub to show women aggressively questioned about the subject of abortion. Works by Tessa Maudlin and Sorcha Mara consider the manipulation of masculine and feminine identities in contemporary culture, showing that the relationship of gender and power in our technocratic age is a key concern for these students.

Throughout the exhibition there is a sense that the membranes and surfaces of the body or body image are a contested territory. In Melpomeni Gaganeli’s video, the individual seems to be on an evolutionary course that leads to fragmentation, a state haunted by flesh and decay, as if remnants of the physical body. A yoga performance introduced into the space by Anthi Kyriacou plays back on a small monitor, absenting the real body whilst reminding us of its apparent foibles. In Michael O’Hanlon’s work, bodies are represented by translucent heads. The most real thing about them is the anonymous robes they wear. From one perspective they tower above, from another, they appear small within the large container of the gallery space - moving between demonization and diminishment. The body (and its absence) is also referenced in the Gallery’s stairwell where Andreas Dimofanous has transformed the windows with paintings that imply a fetishisation of both products and cleaning. In the era of self-presentation and self-perfection cleanliness can quickly slip into neurosis as an attempt is made to prevent the corporeal interrupting the surface. In Katarina Bramer’s work we walk through found plastic membranes whilst listening to the recorded sounds of the seaside – as if washed up with the flotsam and jetsam of a holiday memory. Large glittering canvases next to a video including archival footage from a historic Edinburgh gay nightclub, Fire Island (1978-1988), invite our hands to touch and change the ‘screens’, to trace our presence. Christopher Ward uses this piece to contrast queer culture with the tradition of large masculine painting and institutional exclusion.

k-punk, analysing Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Inception’ (2010), noted the emergence of a new kind of virtual catatonic body. Rather than waking up from a dream, Nolan’s characters could only seemingly progress to the next level of the dream, working their way up a hierarchy of states (the present always being determined by the next level of reality). In this exhibition, the real likewise seems to be governed by a succession of virtual realms. Steve Job’s hands, floating on a mobile silken screen, remind us of the power of silicone valley and the profusion of new interfaces that relocate information and mediate physical interactions. Stephanie Wilson is reminding us that whilst hands have come to be emblematic of interactive devices, it has become apparent that the hands of tech billionaires are manipulating data and affecting election results, undermining democracy and freedom of choice.

Elsewhere, multiple images reference search-engine culture, the trajectories of personal photos becoming a public display containing multiple displaced histories: Nina Alessandri’s work pulled across the walls to make constellation of different aesthetic associations. An archive of text messages by Stacey Jane Calderwood shows the extent to which lives are mapped out within technological systems, the most emotional of episodes being captured in limited-character bursts. June Cholsiri’s sculpture of wooden cubes seems as fragile as the construction of the ego, teetering on the edge. A fragility on a monumental scale, Portia Velarde commemorates brutalist architecture, marking the passing of the socialist beliefs connected to its inception and the specific demolition of the St. James Centre, one of the few examples of this architecture in Edinburgh’s centre.

Paintings and prints, such as those by Rhea Williams, equally express a fear of some kind of cultural slippage or loss of the real, hovering between the handmade and the digital. Large abstract paintings by Andrew Robinson play with visual recognition, offering a plastic movement of shapes to both evoke and deny a myriad of art historical references. In Rose Stuart-Smith’s work there is a subtle play off between digitally printed concrete poetry and abstract watercolours. A large projection by Josh Corkill morphs through different compositions, always haunted by the analogue (as it is referenced by the jerky movement of an originating mark). This sense of slippage and loss extends to language. A soft sculpture by Wei Song expresses a deadening of comprehension, whilst encrypted messages by Callum Russell high on the Gallery’s walls suggest the loss of some vital connection to meaning. In a series of drawings by Stelios Georgiou, featuring Antonin Artaud who wrote ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, we are pointed towards the absurd and taken to the extreme of this situation, the denial that ‘reality’ exists at all.

Across the exhibition there is a sense of anxiety and unease. It reflects uncertain times, buoyed and manipulated by technology. It also reflects the anxiety of being judged. Is it ok to be a Fan, to obsess over things and go so far as to enter into a kind of fantasy-identification with them? To be devoted, to feel truly connected? To feel that change driven by energy and vitality might actually take place? Is that even possible in our current age?

‘What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Allsop, try harder.’

This is the Master’s interim show. Come and engage with its energy before the Grey Vampires and in and the feeding frenzy begins...