THIS IS NO SAFE SPACE: Art in Capitalist Realism

Essay by
SCOTT LAWRIE

You can also download an illustrated PDF version here

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“We live in a contradiction, a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.”1 - Alan Badiou

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INTRODUCTION

You don’t need to be familiar with the concept of capitalist realism to understand this show, nor read this essay – you can just enjoy a small selection of contemporary work by interesting artists from around the world and let yourself decide how you feel about it on a subjective level. It’s a handy way to look at art sometimes, as nobody else is the judge except you.

For this show, I’ve chosen robust work by interesting artists who could hold their own in the space between my questions, and Fisher’s landmark book. If you want to dive a bit deeper into the why underneath the what, this essay will, just like the work on display, hopefully fire-up your brain a little.

Capitalist realism is a term that’s been heard before in the art world, but it was only in 2007 that British theorist, philosopher, music-critic, blogger, and writer, Mark Fisher, repurposed and refreshed the meaning in his influential book Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? – the inspirational starting point for this project.

At the nub of it, Fisher’s slim volume questions the enduring unfairness of life under the economic and philosophical system that we know as capitalism – but it does so in a way that steers away from tired old political, economic, and cultural legacy tropes, and populist pro-Capital whataboutery. Despite the death of political communism and the new neoliberal order which replaced it in the 1980s, Fisher demonstrates, with a mix of intellectual rigour and quirky humour, that capitalism remains our default setting even now; a phenomenon that you can’t necessarily see but feel every day in its pervasive dampening across every aspect of our lives. For Fisher, part of the problem in identifying something so ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere’ at the same time, is because “capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and [that] it would be nothing without our co-operation...Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and Zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the Zombies it makes are us.”2

Fisher's work interrogates the ways in which capitalist realism affects culture, education, mental health, and politics. He argues that it limits the very scope of ‘possible futures’ and explores the paradox of capitalism's durability despite its crises and contradictions. He demonstrates how this resilience is maintained through a cultural and ideological dominance that naturalises capitalist values and practices as ‘the norm’, instead of a purely social construct, or, as Fisher puts it, “an ideological position that can never be really successful until it is naturalised, and it cannot be naturalised while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact.” 3

For this project, I was keen to apply Fisher’s ideas onto the structures inherent within the art world. By the ‘art world’ I really mean the current systematic processes and powerful influences which essentially control it; from the ‘blue chip’ galleries and institutions such as public galleries and museums, to the wealthy benefactors, brands, and cultural forces which surround it. How art is made, seen, experienced, challenged, and debated is, after all, dependent on an honest reflection of the cultural conditions from within which it’s created.

Fuelled by questions that had been smouldering away in my mind for some time, I wanted to explore why artists – the shaman of our cultures – end up at the bottom of this hierarchical pyramid? How does £35 Billion worth of art get sold in a single year, while most artists – the actual producers – can’t even afford a space to work in? Why is the art market an indicator of anything? How can art be made more relevant? And who let the brands in, and why were they even invited?

None of the artists in this show created a specific artwork as a response to Fisher’s text. But rather than merely illustrate it, I considered practices that aligned to, or contrasted with, similar conceptual themes in Fisher’s book; Patricia Piccinini on technology and ethics, Felix Gonzalez-Torres on institutional boundaries (what is an artwork? Who ultimately ‘owns’ it?), Benjamin Aitken on medicalisation and mental health, Rebecca Wallis on concepts of otherness and the sublime, and Jamie Chapman on the space between binary polemics.

There is a pressing need for such alternatives. The philosopher Theodor Adorno warned us decades ago that, “The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of ‘goodwill’ per se... Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.” 4

You don’t have to look far to see this in action, the current 2024 Venice Biennale being a pertinent example. Under the brand positioning of ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ it attempts to dress art up as an emotive (but completely inert) call to address racial inequality against a real-world backdrop of rampant anti-immigration sentiment. Setting aside the fact that art in this context is unable to send any meaningful message to the audience which needs to hear it most, Adriano Pedrosa’s spectacle of – in his words – ‘foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, exiled, or refugees’ feels very worthy at face value, until you see the sponsor logos on the front page of the website, which make for a gaudy contrast of conflicting geopolitical and commercial interests.

Such emotive, but ultimately performative, optics merely wallpapers over the cracks. It doesn’t offer us any practical dismantling of the systems and processes which led us to such historic exclusion in the first place. Fisher would likely critique these institutional gestures as significant components within the framework of capitalist realism, knowingly or unknowingly playing a role in perpetuating the system they might otherwise seem to criticise. While art could potentially challenge or offer alternatives to capitalist norms, art institutions frequently normalise and integrate these values, automatically limiting the transformative potential of art itself.

It is necessary for art to take ‘sides’, to celebrate the fractured and the complex. We are not all the same. Art cannot belong in institutional contexts forever. True diversity and inclusion means exposing the viewer to artists and thinking they may have never encountered before, if only to cross-pollinate ideas, skills, and knowledge – rather than garner likes and increase visitor numbers by capturing safe trends as a marketing exercise. Critical thinking and rigorous alternative counterpoints might not bring money into the gift shop, but abandoning them altogether is downright dangerous.

In this show, my first since arriving back to the UK, every artwork presents us with a possibility. Each is a portal to explore the world through a different, hopefully challenging, perspective. In this way, art becomes a powerfully liberating transformational force, one that can make us think well beyond the confines imposed on us by any societal or marketing norms. “Art is the last place we have left,” my high school art teacher Jim Dalziel used to say, “where there are no rules.”

Fisher’s work is a rallying cry for such an alternative; a rethinking of the value and importance of art in all our lives, away from the restrictive dogma which shape how we experience art today and into a place which encourages a radically-free approach to provoke meaningful, uncompromising, and ferocious artistic responses. A place indeed, where there are no rules.

To open this show at the heart of Granton, in a place of such strong working-class heritage, makes me feel very proud indeed.

Scott Lawrie 

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Artist: BENJAMIN AITKEN

Destruction, 2019
Acrylic on canvas. 45 x 99cm.

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“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” 5  ― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting.

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As a city, Edinburgh has held many titles over the years, but none so depressingly awful as the label “AIDS capital of Europe” bestowed on it by a headline in the Sunday Telegraph in 1986. By then, like many cities around the world, HIV transmission had already gripped a fearful and largely unsupported local gay male population. The most shocking increase in infection rates, however, came from local drug users sharing their works to get a fix of cheap heroin – easy when you could pick up a ‘starter pack’ for just a fiver at the local shooting galleries, usually a flat in the run-down housing estates where users got together to share needles and shoot up.

Granton, like many housing estates at that time, was struggling. Socially. Economically. And culturally. Yet the 1980’s was a time when relentless neoliberalism and ‘free market’ economic policies injected British culture with a heady mix of money, legitimised selfishness, wealth-disparity – and drugs. As the crisis grew, the police were clueless as to what to do. But bolstered by severely misguided drug policies led by Thatcher’s neoliberal Conservative government, settled on a complete crackdown… of clean needles. The resulting catastrophe led to scores of deaths, an ignominy compounded by fear and ignorance, not least sensationalist headlines.

All this happened before the young Australian painter Benjamin Aitken (b.1991) was even born. Yet the universal time-resistant experience of addiction is remarkably similar wherever in the world you’re injecting, ingesting or both.

Ben’s painting ‘Destruction’, 2019 resonates not so much as a lame warning or a nod to hedonism, but as an honest, intentionally mundane, portrayal of addiction. It is neither glamorous (if you’ve ever withdrawn from anything, you’ll know there is little in that process which you could call glamorous) nor moralising.

When it was first published in 1986, Trainspotting blew up the literary world, taking a heap of proscribed morals with it. An entire generation of working-class readers went on Welsh’s rollercoaster – a relentless, shockingly familiar, laugh-out-loud adventure set in the council schemes in the suburbs of Edinburgh, the famously high-brow Festival City. Written in raw local dialect and set in Leith (just along the road from Granton), it is packed with characters which anyone growing up in a working-class suburb would be immediately, possibly traumatically, familiar with. What is so powerful about the book’s narrator, Mark Renton, is his self-awareness, his clarity of choice, and his ownership of his drug taking which rarely ever breaches into pathos and self-pity, cheekily declaring to us at one point while high, ‘Thir must be less tae life than this’.

This pushes back against the neoliberal view that all drugs are bad, addicts are scum, and all addiction is a personal choice, while simultaneously ignoring the socio-economic context of Renton’s disillusionment and any lack of meaningful alternatives. Drug addiction, like mental health, is viewed from a distance as an individualised, personal experience; it’s not – God forbid – happening to you, it’s something within you that’s causing all this chaos! Or as Renton explains, “On the issue of drugs, we wir classical liberals, vehemently opposed tae state intervention in any form.”

Fisher had various takes on drug use, seemingly wavering from a place of caution that the resulting numbness and lack of clarity made any meaningful long-term practical change impossible, to the power of the communal intimacy created by the rave scenes which flourished throughout the late 1980s and early 90s. But he also acknowledged how neoliberalism insisted on framing drug use as some kind of personal moral failing, or a medical condition to be ‘managed’, isolating individuals further while simultaneously exempting society from addressing the root causes of these issues. Besides, taking drugs as most of us recognise from firsthand experience, can be good fun, and some might argue, even productive.

This schizophrenic position is fascinating. The relatively modern phenomena of an imaginary border between big pharma and street drugs is interesting, if only because the concept can only exist if enforced via the regulation of our social bodies. Michel Foucault explores this in Discipline and Punish, arguing that institutions such as medicine, law, and education do not merely adopt a neutral stance aimed at harm reduction, but actively reinforce this fundamental schism. The drugs aren’t the problem – how you’re getting your hands on them is. Foucault argued that drugs are considered especially harmful when used outside state sanctioned control apparatus which, paradoxically, likely perpetuate the need to take them. While it’s tempting to blame the motivation for corporate profit – recent estimates for Big Pharma’s global market put it at around £1.2 trillion (6)– the bigger picture is more complicated. Here, Foucault's notion of ‘biopower’ is particularly pertinent, highlighting how such institutional hierarchies exert control and regulate behaviours by defining and managing health – and any form of deviance – within society.

Ben’s experience with drugs is equally complex and as unique as his painting. As one of the leading painters of his generation in Australia, being a habitual user is an easy label to pin on an artist, but one which is much more difficult to remove. Arguably, his brilliance as an artist could be enhanced by his drug taking. How can we really be sure? What we do know is the slipperiness of Ben’s painting is not achieved so much in the lyrical painterly treatment of its subject matter nor his slick deftness of touch, but in its ordinary, bare truth. The origins of still life painting extend far back in time, even before the ancient Egyptians decorated their tombs with images of food to provide sustenance (munchies?) in the afterlife. This tradition evolved through most cultures, with the Romans painting emblems in their homes to signify hospitality and sometimes wealth. By the 16th century, the Dutch Masters were incorporating new and exotic curiosities like oriental flowers and rare fruits in their work, while painters such as Giorgio Morandi gave everything a more modern, gorgeously mundane, twist. Still life painting may have a rich history in the visual arts, but it pales in comparison to the history of getting a bit wasted, which dates back at least over 10,000 years. 7

Ben allows us an intimate glimpse into his (often not so still) life in this work, where boxed and bottled Fanta – his preferred choice of sustenance during withdrawal, and once traded for drink tokens in maximum security prison – is arranged beside drug apparatus in a classical configuration. This painting confronts us with a stark reality, highlighting the mismatch between real life and the sanitising ideological pearl-clutching that is infecting our public museums and galleries.

As the critic Rebecca West poignantly reminded us, "Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough." 8

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Artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“Untitled” (L.A.), 1991
Green candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply, overall dimensions vary with installation. Jointly owned by Art Bridges and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

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‘Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.’
– W.H. Auden, The Fall of Rome, 1951.
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Granton Station was more than just a transit point; it was a place of transformation. As men crossed the threshold of The Waiting Room to the steam trains, the emphasis shifted from industrial obligation to personal freedom – the essence of working-class labour in the early 20th century. From 1903 to around 1943, this was a daily ritual for the hundreds of thousands of individuals who worked at the Granton Gasworks.

Today, it has been transformed again, this time into a beautifully restored arts venue – yet its history is about as far away from a museum of contemporary art as you can get. Why then, does this show contain a unique work from one of the world’s most internationally recognised conceptual artists?

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) is widely known for his deceptively simple, often deeply moving artworks that embody themes of time, transition, and transience. His work challenges conventional art definitions, particularly when placed in unusual sites or unexpected configurations. His series of iconic candy works have now been experienced all over the world; a living manifestation of the artist’s practice, conceived within a robust conceptual framework which continually encourages fresh interpretations and ongoing relevance.

“Untitled” (L.A.) 1991 consists of a carefully placed mass of cellophane-wrapped green candy (sweets), with an ‘ideal weight’ of around 35kg. This is, by definition, unfixed – physically and metaphorically. Viewers can, if they wish, take one piece of candy from the artwork, as the pile is occasionally replenished due to its ‘endless supply’. Rather than diminish the artwork, however, this gesture adds to it, asking us to consider what an artwork is, who ‘owns’ it, and if time and place play a role in our experience of it. When you proudly show off your piece of candy to friends, keep in mind that while it is no longer an artwork, you have undoubtedly become part of its manifestation. In short, you’ve personally created a little bit of ‘art history’. Similarly, when the exhibition closes its doors on the final day, the installation ceases to be an artwork by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and the miracle of transubstantiation defaults to an ordinary pile of store-bought candy again.

It's a great idea. But it’s worth remembering that dissemination does not necessarily equate to egalitarianism (we only need to be reminded of HIV transmission – once a motivating factor in the origins of Felix’s later concepts – or more recently, COVID-19). Nor are ‘multiples’ a new idea in art. From Japanese Ukiyo-e prints such as Hokusai’s "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (1831), to modern works like Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Andy Warhol’s factory-produced soup cans, they boldly gesture toward a democratisation and multiplicity of ownership, suggesting that art can be equally accessible to all.

Yet "Untitled" (L.A.) also presents us with a fascinating, perhaps even uncomfortable, paradox. Although its concept is relatively straightforward to manifest – the only ‘real-world’ cost being the mass of the individual candies – the ‘art-world’ market value tells a very different story. This particular artwork fetched $7.67 million USD (apx £6m) at Christie's in New York in 2015, and its present value would likely extend to at least double that. Yet the work’s current joint-owners, Crystal Bridges Museum and the Art Bridges Foundation in Arkansas, are renowned for their generosity in lending this work, often allowing it to be shown in non-institutional contexts around the world.

Felix came from a working-class background in Cuba before emigrating to the United States. His political leanings were leftist, influenced by his experiences as a gay man and an immigrant. He was big on social justice and equality, making work which engaged with universal themes of identity, love, loss, and the politics surrounding the AIDS crisis. He frequently challenged institutional power structures, aiming to democratise art, making it accessible and relevant to wider audiences – which “Untitled” (L.A) achieves so elegantly.

Fisher was working-class too. Although he didn’t explore the effects of capitalist realism on the art world per se, he did interrogate many of the hierarchies perpetuated by the same capitalist structures. “Untitled” (L.A.) functions in part as a pertinent democratisation of how art can become a more interactive experience, as opposed to say, a painting, which is usually fixed and viewed passively. This ‘de-territorialising’ of an artwork is further enhanced by Felix’s openness to continual curatorial interpretation – as long as the manifestation stays true to the original concept.

Since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, such gestures have become increasingly problematic. Instead of undermining the market's focus on uniqueness, the artworks themselves often end up submitting to it, awkwardly selling for millions. This jarring symbiosis – a blatant ‘re-territorialisation’ of capitalism aided by an art world business ontology – demonstrates capital’s pervasiveness, even when anti-capitalism is the point. As Zizek explains, “Anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism… far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it.” 9

Art and capitalism have always had a tense, often contradictory, relationship but over  the past couple of decades, art seems to have lost the will to fight. Capitalist realism has become so deeply entrenched now, leading to a default assumption; that everything from art practices and art education to galleries and institutions must now operate under 'business principles.’ The art world is of course no stranger to this ideology, where the cultural value of art is increasingly measured by its capacity to generate more profit, attract sponsorship, manufacture careers, and garner media attention. (You won’t see much art in the news, but when you do, it’s most likely because a record price was paid, often in the hundreds of millions.) Proof that art is too important to be taken seriously.

Excel spreadsheets aside, Fisher actually warned against such reductionist views –arguing they stifled our ability to envision alternative ways of valuing and experiencing art, instead only narrowing creative expression within the rigid parameters of market logic. No Bodies without Organs here. What we can see, is the prioritisation of blockbuster exhibitions, increasingly ‘soft’ criticality, co-branded sponsorship opportunities, and the rise of Art Fairs which can only ever be retail experiences. Is it even possible to make ‘anti-capitalist’ artworks within a system where the critique of capitalism is – in itself – bought, sold, and owned? It’s an irony not lost on Fisher. “So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange,” (10) he acidly observes. Artists should take note.

On the plus side, you could argue that the true essence of “Untitled” (L.A.) lies squarely in its conceptual value, kept alive just as Felix envisioned, and witnessed only through the generosity, enthusiasm, and brave vision of its current owners. It may have a multi-million dollar price tag, but the chance to become an important part of its manifestation  – while creating a cool little bit of art history – literally costs us nothing.

Artist: JAMIE CHAPMAN

Dusty Dusk, 2024.
Oil on board, 29 x 37cm.

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“Everything is put into question up to and including the status of truth. Certainties and convictions are held to be the truth. Reason needs not to be employed. Simply believing in surrendering oneself is enough. As a result, public deliberation, which is one of democracy's essential features, no longer consists in discussing and seeking collectively, before the eyes of all citizens, the truth and, ultimately, justice.”11 – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics.

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The 19thC British art critic, John Ruskin, had a thing for clouds. He saw them as manifestations of the sublime in nature, inspiring both awe and reverence. For Ruskin, clouds weren’t just meteorological phenomena, but symbols of the divine and the ephemeral. This reflected the broader Romantic era's fascination with nature's power and mystery, whereas before then, landscape was seen as something scary and a bit weird – why on earth would you go into the dark and creepy forest where the wolves and witches lived? Eeek!

Jamie’s clouds, however, are different. They’re mostly composed of concrete dust and other heavy particulates, a cocktail of chemicals and gases, and probably even bits of vaporised human souls. Typical KPIs for a 2200lb bomb intentionally dropped on a residential building.

Suddenly then, as dear old Ruskin rolls over in his grave, so too does our perspective. What you’re seeing in this painting, with its beautiful hues and voluptuous clouds in the warm evening Mediterranean sky, is the aftermath of a missile explosion. We don’t know who dropped it, when, or why. But we do know it’s somewhere near the Israel/Palestine border. This immediately poses a relevant problem for us in terms of how we view art, and the comfort zones from which we choose to do it.

For many, the enjoyment of visual art is a necessary escape to ‘not here’, its role simply to provide a place of refuge and retreat from the enshittyfication of world-outside-gallery-walls, usually achieved through optical jizz, or comforting visual platitudes.

In Jamie’s ‘Dusty Dusk’, 2024, the gently seductive cloud painting is about as far away as you can get from trauma (especially if you can turn a blind eye to feeding the war machine as an underlying necessity for capital growth). Any political judgements deduced from Jamie’s painting, then, are in fact pure conjecture. And because you don’t know what you can’t know, what we are presented with is not the atomised individuality of ‘taking sides’ as a comfort stop for needy tribal connection – it’s the space between this dichotomy of choice which makes us feel so powerless and eerily uncomfortable. (Our only alternative at this stage might be to post a ‘CEASEFIRE NOW!’ message on Facebook, and know that we’ve played our part, while sitting on the sofa with our wine and crisps, under a comfort blanket of complicity.)

Fisher refuses to accept such easy polemics, choosing instead to offer a critique that unravels the ideological fabric holding these ‘default’ positions in place. He highlights how capitalist realism co-opts our perceptions of conflict, agency, identity – even protest – by turning them into marketable commodities everywhere across culture and commerce, to the arts, sciences, and beyond. He calls for a re-engagement with the simplistic for/against binaries that capitalism perpetuates. This is where real transformative potential lies—not in the choosing of sides, but in the challenging of the entire framework that compels us to make a choice in the first place.

We impose snap judgements at the speed of digital to issues that are often nuanced, or have a deeper underlying complexity. I hate Trump. I love Trump. Foreigners out. Immigrants welcome. Independence now. Independence never. Israel. Palestine. Our ability to envision anything beyond a left/right polemic, let alone an end to capitalism itself, remains fuzzy and confusing. It all just feels a bit too… hard.

Not that Jamie’s painting offers us any easy resolutions. No quick shortcuts for us to performatively condemn, condone or take a side, here.  Jamie doesn’t allow us the luxury of a barrier to our belief in the first place; a chance for us to divert our armchair anger away from that which we cannot see (experienced, as opposed to imaginary, conflict on the Israel/Palestine border for example) to that which we apparently can (social media, the news, demonstrations, our friend groups, etc). The point is, our protest doesn’t have anywhere to go from this painting, certainly not to any place that can realistically affect change. We’re stuck with opinions that we can’t really do anything with.

Fisher explores this at length in Capitalist Realism explaining that, contrary to what you might expect, capitalism loves an anti-capital protest. In fact, performative protests within culture are welcomed and encouraged; the right to protest is enshrined in liberal democracies, but only – of course – as long as the underlying systematic structures remain intact and inert.

As a result of the shocking brutality of the Israel/Palestine conflict, one of the most jarring effects in the art world has been a similar form of active censorship. Artists have not been allowed – by institutions and their dealer galleries desperate to not upset their owners, benefactors, or funding – to speak out about the war in the Middle East, let alone engage with it. Careers have been brought to a ruthless end, contracts terminated, and people harshly ostracised. It’s tellingly indicative of what art has become in our culture: we can no longer even pretend that art stands for freedom of expression because there are always conditions attached, always a price to pay. Yet surely art remains one of the few spaces left where we can challenge such narratives. Isn’t that what art is for?

It must never feel like a safe space.

Artist: REBECCA WALLIS

Clearing, 2024.
Acrylic on silk, 210 x 101cm.

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“The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."12 – Jean Baudrillard

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In contrast to the towering two-tone presence of her monumental white painting on black silk, Clearing, 2022, seeing the world in black and white terms isn’t particularly interesting to UK born, NZ-based painter Rebecca Wallis.

Nevertheless, it’s a work which electrifies the space; you can almost hear the crackling of its uncanny energy ripping not only across the surface plane (and our eyes, our eyes!) bringing an immediate, electrifying tension into the gallery space. Originally painted for a large-scale installation in Auckland, New Zealand, the motivation behind this particular work runs a lot deeper than it’s polemic signalling might suggest.

During her Postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths in 1990s London, Rebecca was influenced by the writings of French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, and that of philosopher and cultural theorist Julia Kristeva. One of the conundrums the artist wanted to explore was if the body of a painting could be separated from symbols and signs of ‘self’ – painting objectively from the outside in, if you like, rather than as an internal ‘expression’ of the artist’s subjective psyche. These were the early origins of an obsessive, decades long quest to separate (she might say free) her painting from one-dimensional subjectivity, while exploring ever-intriguing concepts of abjection.

Abjection is a term used in critical theory to explore themes of marginalisation, alienation, and the dynamics of power and social exclusion. A good example might be when you see a puddle of sick outside the pub. It feels gross, and you definitely don’t want to be looking at it or even be near it, despite it being intrinsically natural. Taken to a cultural level, abjection explores how societies define and maintain boundaries — whether social, moral, or existential — by  excluding whatever is deemed abject.

To help that happen, capitalism continually finds clever ways to frame otherness in vague, yet bold, proclamations which at face value appear hard to defend; ‘the war on terror’, ‘trickle down economics’, ‘consumer choice’, ‘clean coal technology’ ‘we welcome diversity and inclusion’ etc, fuzzy terms which nevertheless occupy a simple, if confusing, binary position. For Fisher, this process of exclusion by stealth simultaneously strengthens societal norms as well as the identity of the community, defining it in solidarity against what is considered different or ‘other’, basically anything outside the collective, socially constructed limits of acceptance. (How, for example, do you even begin to challenge ‘the war on terror’ without fear of being deemed a terrorist sympathiser yourself?)

In the context of Fisher’s arguments, Rebecca’s exploration of the abject in her paintings reflects the alienation and fragmentation of self, so typically characteristic of life under capitalist realism. You could argue that her rejection of simple, pleasing aesthetics in this painting might also reflect a resistance to the insidious commodification of art and emotion in capitalist-driven societies – sunshine and lollipops sell bro!

You might feel some sense of discomfort or disconnection when looking at this painting – but don’t look away yet, because it’s entirely intentional. Most people don’t want to see work they ‘don’t like’ in a gallery. But for dedicated artists like Rebecca – that’s the stuff that fires up the neurons and forces us to think differently.

Speaking of which, let’s jump back in time to around 1780, when the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was thinking in a different way to almost anyone else on the planet. Kant is a tricky, intellectual philosopher, and his work can feel complicated to get your head around (Google is your friend). But his ideas remain enduringly important to concepts such as reason, ethics, and aesthetics.

Kant’s theories of the ‘sublime’ become relevant when engaging with Rebecca’s work. Pop down to the Firth of Forth and stare out to sea, or stand on top of Arthur’s Seat and take in the impenetrable sky above (where you might get to encounter one of Ruskin’s pet clouds). While there, you may feel a sense of awe, what Kant called the mathematically sublime – a space vast beyond comprehension that stirs an intangible sense of wonder.

By contrast, Rebecca’s painting does something quite the opposite, what Kant defines as the dynamically sublime. This only ever occurs in the presence of great power or force, where you might feel a bit overpowered, momentarily lost, or threatened but also safe from any real danger, leading to a kind of dark exhilaration and eerie reverence. Whenever you stand before a painting that sets your nerves on edge like this one, don’t ignore it – it’s having a powerful effect on your psyche, a bit like a visual circuit breaker. There’s no easy, pretty sunrise or sunsets here, only your brain fizzing in vibrant debate. You no longer become a spectator, but an extension of the work itself, challenging the mind’s capacity to grasp and organise, while your imagination stretches to encompass the unfathomable. This tension, this searching, is neither comfortable nor calming, yet it is thrillingly enriching.

This is where Fisher’s critique of the cultural malaise under capitalism becomes relevant. He frames it as a sort of homogenous gloominess called depressive hedonia where genuine sublime experiences are replaced by the endless simulation and repetition of experiences mediated by capitalist media and the culture industry. Consider the ubiquity of social media and the simulacrum of social interaction it presents. It flattens the complexities of human relationships into marketable narratives, curating and commodifying personal experiences as consumable goods in a virtual marketplace. This is already encroaching on the art world, which despite its public commitment to ‘pushing boundaries’ has instead reinforced them. All we are left with is a confirmative beige mass, with the odd tiny splashes of contrarian genius here and there. Convention, after all, is an easy default.

Artist like Rebecca are important. They make us question our self-perceptions and give us valuable critical tools to shake us out of our stasis, whether that’s challenging our own sense of identity, or the complacent acceptance of the socio-economic conditions we encounter daily.

So, the next time a work of art like this makes you uneasy or prompts a frown, lean into it. Try not to see it as an annoying disturbance to be dismissed, but a swords-drawn, big battle of dialogue between you and the painting itself. What is it that you don’t like about it, and more importantly, why?

Artist: PATRICIA PICCININI

Teenage Metamorphosis, 2017.
Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, found objects, 138 x 25 x 75 cm.

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"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust." 13 – Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto.

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The seemingly unstoppable rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through current Large Multimedia Models (LMMs) such as ChatGPT are as exciting as they are confounding. Despite efforts to curtail and regulate the shiny new potential that AI offers, tempting as it is, stupid old human nature would suggest that now the cat is out of the bag, anything might happen.

A small chimera – a genetic cocktail of a pig, teenage girl, and the sole of a shoe by the looks of it – lies on a blanket, pondering the meaning of life, with the glassy-eyed gaze of a dreamer. A millennia of hard science, decades of experimentation, and extraordinary feats of complex gene engineering through CRISPR technology, seemingly reaches its pinnacle at the same pointy end of our universal search for meaning – who am I?

With over 120 international solo shows to her name, Patricia Piccinini’s work has confronted millions around the world. It’s undoubtedly popular, and always prompts stark responses wherever it’s encountered. Her practice explores the deep ethical, emotional, and existential questions that arise at the tidal intersections of human and technological evolution. Patricia’s work offers us moments of great possibilities, a bit like Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the 'Body without Organs' operating outside of any constricting frameworks, while celebrating a continuous flux of desires and energies that resist hierarchical organisation. Organs, like capitalist systems, have defined purposes and functions after all. This prioritises a perpetual 'becoming', an agitation to stability and permanence, which runs throughout much of Patricia’s work, and leads to its gripping, uncanny effect.

Despite the initial awed response to Teenage Metamorphosis, and whatever you might feel about it, Patricia’s work reminds us of the emerging choices that humanity will inevitably have to make – if indeed such choices are still even possible. Her role is to make the abyss of decision-making a little safer for us to stare into.

For those game enough to peer into the precipice then, what might we see?

The bubbling, molten intersection between accelerationism and post-capitalism is one such possibility. This tectonic schism offers us only stark choices; resignation to a future that will simply happen to us irrespective of any decisions we make (which arguably capitalist realism does now) or, ironically enough, a future shaped by something like good old-fashioned democratic socialism, where reduced labour, an equitable distribution of resources, and the negation of profit via Universal Basic Incomes can only be made functional by the same inescapable technological tsunami.

Mark Fisher was no stranger to accelerationist theory, which was explored by many of his radical peers at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University. The CCRU was an experimental cultural theorist collective set up in 1995 by Sadie Plant, who was soon joined by Nick Land, Fisher and a handful of other thinkers, writers, musicians, and artists. The basic essence of early accelerationism (muddied now by its more recent adoption by the alt-right) was that if you couldn’t change capitalist structures, at least you could accelerate its processes, technologies, and inherent contradictions to the point of breaking, thus propelling society into a new post-capitalist, technologically advanced future. At this point, fresh equitable structures would eventually rise from the ruins, and a new era for mankind thus begins, yada yada. Today, as all good critical thinking is wont to do, accelerationist theory has mothered many argumentative offspring.

Fisher’s ultimate position was that neoliberalism wasn’t accelerating fast enough, to create meaningful change, especially given its determination to continually rehash increasingly belligerent14 ways to exploit us in favour of shareholder returns. As the writer Adam Fitchett explains, “… the 21st century has delivered only stagnation and nostalgia, and the only way to overcome this is to think beyond capitalism, to accelerate to a post-capitalist system.” 15 Which, in our current post-COVID moraine, might feel further away than ever.

In sharp contrast, Nick Land’s shockingly disruptive, amoral vision of accelerationism takes an even more reactionary turn, looking beyond any post-humanist discourse and embracing the dual vortices of capitalism and technology as one singular unstoppable force – with no working brakes, a steering wheel that’s just snapped off, and a chilling conclusion that capitalism cannot be destroyed or dismantled only pushed through.16 With typically sharp insight, he explains, “The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.” 17

Remember the version of the digital revolution where humans ostensibly remained in control? This ain’t it.

Empathy is Patricia’s Sword of Legend to all of this.

With it, she defends the integrity of protective maternal impulses and refuses to yield to the bitter irony of postmodern cynicism, even if her most bland critics might write her work off as twee or inconsequential. Hybrid. Chimera. Monster. Frankenpig. It doesn’t matter. Here is a teenager, growing, evolving, searching, still vulnerable. Our gaze, perhaps repelled at first, slowly forces us to recognise something of ourselves (there’s that portal again) only to radiate back out as a strong, protective shield for this fascinating other before us. We may not be sure what the creature is, but the impulse to protect her remains. In this way, Patricia’s practice specifically highlights the emotional dimensions of living with the results of our technological innovations – something that accelerationist perspectives often underplay or disregard in favour of machine efficiency.

Selfishness is easy. Enlightenment values such as knowledge, freedom, empathy, and happiness, despite their glaring flaws and patchy application, may yet be the only thing that stands before such a dark version of our collective post-human futures.

For now, stupid old human nature may be the only thing we have left to challenge it.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m grateful to WASPS and Creative Scotland for their support and shared vision in this project, which I’m hoping will inspire many of you to keep the conversation going. Thank you to the whole team at Art Bridges and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the USA, owners of “Untitled” (L.A), particularly Ashley Holland for her extraordinary support and generosity. To Gillian Cantley for suggesting the space, Jim Dalziel and Henry Rogers for decades worth of inspiration, Caitlin Callaghan for her guidance and support, Audrey Carlin for her enthusiasm, and the whole WASPS team. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to the artists; Patricia Piccinini, Rebecca Wallis, Felix Gonzalez–Torres, Benjamin Aitken, and Jamie Chapman. And of course, the real star of the show, the late Mark Fisher. Without all of you, the world would be a far less interesting place.

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NOTES

1.      Cabinetmagazone.org (winter 2001–2002). On Evil: An interview with Alain Badiou, Christoph Cox, Molly Whalen, and Alain Badiou

2.      Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative. Zero Books, 2022. p15

3.      Ibid., p16

4.      Theodor Adorno, Culture industry Reconsidered, New German Critique 6, Fall 1975 pp12-19

5.      Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting. Vintage, 2013

6.      This contrasts with the illegal drug trade which is estimated to account for between US$426 and US$652 billion. C May (March 2017) "Transnational Crime and the Developing World" (PDF). Global Financial integrity 3

7.      Nicholas R. Longrich, When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs? The Conversation, July 16, 2021 (theconversation.com). Archaeologists found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC. Cannabis seeds from 8,100 BC in Asia, and evidence of Cocaine use around 6000 BC in the Americas

8.      Attributed to Rebecca West (et al), from The Strange Necessity pub. 1928

9.      Mark Fisher paraphrasing Zizek. CR, p12

10.    Ibid., p13

11.    Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2019. p55

12.    Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

13.    Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. p9

14.    A recent example of which would be the deeply cynical introduction of ads into streaming services for which we’ve already paid a premium to avoid such disruptions, including platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and now even within the gaming sector. ‘Shrinkflation’ being another, where you pay more, for less than before.

15.    Adam Fitchett, paraphrasing Mark Fisher. https://cybertrophic.wordpress.com/2020/01/04/on-nick-land-the-weird-libertarian/

16.    For a quick and dirty overview of Accelerationism by Nick Land, see: http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.com/2017/05/nick-land-quick-and-dirty-introduction.html The Wikipedia entry is also very good.

17.    Ibid.

© Scott Lawrie Gallery, 2024. All images are copyright of the artist/lenders. Felix Gonzalez-Torres appears courtesy of Art Bridges and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. To join our mailing list for future shows (including our project space, SPL/NTER) please email your full name to: scott@scottlawrie.com / www.scottlawrie.com