Artist’s Statement:
The inexpensive but highly valued material foundations of my photographs, (aka Beer Feet et al) will no doubt persuade you to invest your emoji’s in expanding my rapidly dwindling life resources. That’s not corporate thinking, its corporeal. C-type stands for affect enhancing qualities, AKA Feel more and think more purposively as a direct consequence. Discourses which privilege the object over the image miss the fundamental point that the image is no less an object than the object would have been if I hadn’t thrown it away. Although both trashcans are full, I have decided that despite the marginal and at times imperceptible difference in quality that distinguishes them, some of my objects should not in fact be drag and dropped, but rather elevated to a fetish-not-withstanding commodity form. Used here, the phrase ‘commodity form’ refers to the kind of experience from which we are all as yet unable to detach ourselves but through which various anomalies arise and come to appear as systemically disruptive and potentially meaningful. Whilst ‘the artist’ acknowledges that such potentially transformative anomalies will and probably already have been both captured and put to work within the ‘money-making-machine’, he nevertheless upholds the view that the MMM, (sometimes referred to as the Subject) is not, and cannot be, fully cognizant of its modus operandi and that as a consequence, certain residues of his materials, thoughts, actions and affects survive the apparatus which would otherwise employ them for its own ends. Ultimately the artist hopes that his work, or at least elements of it, will thus contribute to the feelings of wellbeing that most of us feel from time to time and which, if directed in a mindful and egalitarian way, help to enhance our capacity to form genuine not-for-profit relationships with material, image-based and living human objects.
Artist’s Research:
By the twitching of his thumb he was once, twice, three times drawn towards the distinct possibility of finding genuine gratification in some particular thing that might pop out of the interminable feed of junk to which he was about to subject himself. Three times he dropped his gaze and scrolled. (…) Feeling a bit better, a bit calmer, a bit more himself again, he paused to consider whether the result of gliding his ID across the glass was what brought forth the so-called pleasure, or if it was the act itself which pleasured him. Undecided, he scrolled on… [Obviously cats, but now also s. X with snorkel. J & J’s other half’s wedding venue. DC egging on his War Against…] Scroll on pause he EMAILCHECKED…One-New-Massage…DELETED…and returned to scroll. Then, and perhaps not surprisingly (given his relative inexperience with all-things experiential) the pop-up “why aren’t you ♯ing me? (:/)” popped up. This was quickly followed by “or at least ReTweeting me (:/)”. Perhaps likewise not unsurprisingly, and notwithstanding the pop-up’s inevitable guilt attachment, (attached), this made him feel better. Much better in fact J. The day wasn’t over >⁄<. And as if to ensure it he posts one. Not the one on the mail-out, but the better one. Immediate and in rapid succession the pop-up, “Fuck its shared ©”, was followed by ‘POP-UP-BOMB ALERT’ and then ‘POP-UP-BOMB’!!!!!!!! – thirty bad secs pass before eyes up emerging and reflecting, all philosophical like, with pop-up blocker “Can this be the W.W.Wish-fulfillment we signed up for? – forwardslash – logged on to?’. No answer, so like turtle-head, just about foreseeable, void head shows immediately filled with counter pop-up blocker “who g.a.s” …deep sigh…eyes down… “EYES DOWN!!” He scrolls on. “Xmz, Black Friday Giveaway, Man Friday (X again, still with snorkel), J’s Dad rehearsing his give-her-away day. Not without serious spending though. J’s Dad and J’s other half’s best have splashed right out, look the bee’s knees at the Bees Knees on Green Lanes snuggled up against the Turkish and the Craft beer. Obviously turkish tasting not quite so sweet (although the salad is still better than what it used to…). And BTW FYI ‘FYI’ is not needed as a suffix anymore, it just is. Scroll pause two and Googles ‘Silver Wallpaper’. On www.ebay.co.uk. Thumb can’t decide so hovers over one, and then the other . Hummingbird syndrome apparently, ID make its mind up, (fstop 1000bpm) cant settle on the singular, not unlike the Grind or its hetro’ equivalents. ECT. etc…
All text by Tom Groves, for CBS and Block 336
