“Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat
I got organisms,
I got screams. I’ve got all the images any hick poet every should have
My power’s
coming, my power’s coming, my power’s coming
I got
millions. Millions, millions and millions of images of me, me, me.”
William Burroughs (he of the book, The Naked Lunch) and Gus Van Sant (he of the film, Good Will Hunting),
The Elvis of Letters, EP released
1985.
I grew up in the UK near a small village called Lacock in Wiltshire. It’s famous for a few things. It is entirely owned by the National Trust; it’s got a good pub (The Red Lion); the BBC’s mini-series Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version) was filmed there; but most important of all, the photograph was invented there in 1835 at Lacock Abbey, by William Henry Fox Talbot. This remarkable invention made painting at a stroke obsolete and means all our futures are now one of image appropriation.
The world of marketing and advertising has since prostituted photography so that every day we now wake to a photographic image onslaught attempting to make you and me perfect consumers. There is no escape from magazines, TV, the internet, and those sales and marketing people who are trying to sell you some new experience that you hadn’t thought existed and now can’t do without. The title of this show comes from a woman’s magazine I randomly picked up in the doctor’s surgery on a normal mundane day. The tag line was beautifully rendered and its syntax drilled itself into my memory banks, making me long for something perfect I hadn’t got – and I am not a woman.
Our feeble monkey brains already have too many images jammed into them. Attempting to find space for the new ones, might mean we all lose something important such as the power of speech or the memory of a late relative. Perhaps this is why today’s photograph is instant and available to all with the appropriate technology. Globally we are now experiencing a photographic vortex where anyone can capture an image and share it with the world. These then feedbacks into all the visual static we consume.
Everything visually assaults us with perfection disguised as marketing. Even painting, as a consequence we should all be giving up on perfection. I now no longer actively practice trying to get better at anything as I have been stunned into being a better consumer. You and I live in this manufactured world, high on quality aspiration, but in reality low on actuality.
Everything we see is demographied, appropriated, manipulated and used in conjunction with various fonts to get us to consume. Image marketing seeks to grab us with an expectation of animating our dull days, but reality sees us all experiencing repetitious days thanks to the power of consumption and we need more and more consumers just make the whole thing work.
My brain is full and I’m suggesting yours is too. Mine’s jammed with World War II, 1970 Horror Films, clowns, korabi and remembering how to walk plus all the other rubbish it’s taken me 45 years to accrue. Before your brain is conditioned solely into product recognition and reciting ads, I invite you to try backing your brain up and escape the sameness that permeates everything and work towards a personal memory dump to liberate yourself from just being a consumer. I tried during a moment when I wasn’t sleep-walking. I managed to create this image collision collage.
I was alarmed at what spews from my brain, so don’t buy or photograph anything here as it just adds to the problem.
"Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one woken suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, (1908), Chapter 7
