Plinth

Could you introduce the new exhibition?

‘I love you, you say, / I know, they say’ is preoccupied with a certain kind of fantasy, the moment when desire, or the fantasies of desire, take on a kind of pathetic tone. The exhibition is trying to explore this terrain via a – fairly weird – combination of found photographs, either from the Instagram account of Dan Bilzerian – a fairly dubious nepo-baby playboy – or social media images of dressed-up Sphinx cats.

Alongside these images there is a film made from footage I shot in a party hostel a few years ago, in which a man in a latex flamingo head dances around in a pink satin toga. The film and the show also have a text which – like with a lot of my work – will probably be reworked after the show into something longer and book-based.

Some of the photographic works have little imperfections that look like cracks and glitches.

Yeah, with photographic works, which are all sublimation prints on velvet, there seems to be these patches where the images glitches or breaks up into a kind of kaleidoscope. Rather than ‘screenshots’, these works were made by photographing a phone screen at ridiculously high resolutions (160-200 megapixels, with a macro lens), so that the texture of the photographs is actually the LCD cells of a phone screen, and the glitchy bits are actually patches of thumb grease … It’s subtle, but this is a nod to the fact our experiences of a highly-mediated world (Instagram etc.) are actually firmly embodied experiences – behind or in front of every deeply problematic playboy’s Instagram account, or the IG post of a cute, hairless cat, is a real-life, greasy thumb or finger scrolling.

A lot of your artworks involve a lot of endurance on your part — some of which sounds deeply uncomfortable. Could you talk a bit about that?

Well, that’s true! For example, a film and series of photographs I made a few years ago involved pretty much not sleeping for around a hundred days, in order to document the party hostel scene in Thailand, and then I’ve also spent weeks locked up on kind of hedonistic party boats in the Mediterranean, and witnessed what seems to be an inordinate amount of stag do’s in southern Poland and Hungary… But these are also just symptoms of wider phenomena that my work is really interested in thinking about, mostly systems that mediate our emotional worlds: tech, globalised capital, cultural discourses about masculinity, desire, pleasure, freedom, which then often entail environments that are uncomfortable or difficult on some level.

I should say, though, I’m not really interested in producing work that is a ‘critique’ of this stuff (partly because critique is always also reductive, partly because that moment of judgement is something I want to leave to the viewer). There’s a psychoanalyst and philosopher, Jean Laplanche, who suggested that the only way to confront sensations, emotions, artworks, without committing a certain kind of intellectual violence, reducing or ignoring part of the experience via logical critique, was to simply ‘point’ to them. So, embedding myself in these systems, or the cultural phenomena I’m interested in, is a way of ‘pointing’, and this then involves some kind of endurance – whether living in Thai party hostels,, or moving into a very corporate ‘co-living tower’ – that act of enduring one’s own complicity in something is a means to this ‘pointing’. I mean, it’s quite exhausting sometimes, but then making work is always pretty exhausting.

You shine a light on some of the darker aspects of modern masculinity. What's more, to some extent, in the way that you capture it, you almost live it too. How do you make work about bad masculine behaviours without simply reifying and reproducing them?

I guess my work starts from both an ethical and a practical perspective: I don’t think ignoring things makes them go away. And simply criticising problematic masculine behaviours does not speak to the emotional side, the sensation, the affect of the thing one is critiquing. The hope is you find artistic ways of not reifying, or of reproducing from a slightly different angle, that you find enough of a weird, uncanny angle that the viewer or reader is then seduced or spurred into thinking intensely about that thing too, in feeling that thing, and in paying a kind of attention which, I think, can be as powerful and destabilising or subversive (perhaps more so) than simple criticism. There’s also the fact that the systems I’m interested in are often so widespread that the viewer is, or certainly I am, also complicit in some aspect of them, so self-reflexivity is part of this, on some level.

Outside of tourism, what are some the other industries your work explores?

I’m currently working on a new body of work – painted photographs, a film, a novel – that started in the three months I spent photographing and filming in high-end yoga retreats and wellness resorts in Indonesia. If you take a Balinese (Western-run) yoga retreat as an example, I’m interested in the incredibly problematic economic context, and system, of a luxury, culturally appropriative commercial enterprise situated on a South-East Asian Island – an island with obvious wide-spread poverty and exploitation, where the per-capita income is so low, that these businesses can offer ‘luxury’ experiences to Western tourists at affordable prices.

And at the same time, I’m interested in how good it feels to stretch out completely at the end of a yoga class, or how good a probiotic protein smoothie feels at the end of a HIIT class. And, most of all, I’m interested in the fact that as absolutely distasteful, and unethical, as these things might be, they both exist simultaneously and in a way that each speaks past the other, that the macro-critique of a complex social/economic system, the language of that critique doesn’t have the words for the micro (the individual, or self-absorbed) experience of pleasure (or any other sensation, whether desire, or grief). And I guess part of what my work tries to do is to blur the lines between those two kinds of attentiveness, the micro and the macro, to point to them both simultaneously, without either dominating the other…

Could you tell us about the role of text in your work?

I started out as a writer… I published three books of poetry before I went back to art school, and then, after that, started showing art. More specifically, I think of the visual work that I make as a form of thinking that my writing can’t achieve, just as writing is something that film or photographs can’t do… What this means in practice is that the work I show almost always has some relation to text, to writing, even if that’s not present in the work, although it often is. In the context of the exhibition showing at the moment, there’s a text that came before anything else – a kind of lyric, or poetic, micro-story, that is also an essentially bathetic sexual fantasy – and which underwrites the photographs and the film (it’s also the actual text in the film). Although there’s no hierarchy, the film and photographs are both speaking to the text, thinking about the same things in a different mode, and vice-versa…

Could you say something about the vibrant colour scheme? It's like a perpetual pool party...

Aha… well… One thing is that a lot of the photographic work I make, whether I take the photographs or, in this instance, they’re found images, is that they all go through quite a painstaking process of editing and post-production. And, part of that, is that I’m almost always changing the colours, taking what will be a random array of different colours, simply because if you’re photographing lots of people in public spaces, they don’t wear colour co-ordinated outfits, and the same for social media images. But, part of that colour shifting, of rolling out a kind of uniform of colour and tone, is also both about signposting the level on which the things I make work about are all a kind of facade, or theatre, and partly about foregrounding a ‘system’ (even if its a colour code), about visually demarcating a systematised experience which, even if it’s ‘hedonistic’ party hostels, is also a particular system, with rules, a discourse, expectations…

In that sense, this uncomfortable interplay between feeling, sensation, desire, hedonism, and the rigidity or absolutism of social, economic, cultural systems, is mostly what my work is about, and I also think it is mostly how we all live our lives – as the embodied intersections of feelings and systems – which is one way of saying ‘perpetual pool party vibes’ works as a metaphor for how most of us exist, at least in a certain social and global context. And the Flamingo head? Well, as much as I love them, flamingoes are ridiculous birds, they feel intrinsically, aggressively performative, as is so much of masculinity in the situations I film and photograph…

Talk us through the cats.

Well, firstly, there’s a reason my Instagram Explore Feed is mostly cats, and that’s because the algorithm works, lol… But yeah, within the context of this show, the cats are doing something specific. All the cat images I’ve made works from are Sphinx Cats, so bred to not have fur, and often called ‘nude’ cats… Because of this, I guess, a lot of the internet seems to like to dress them up in very fancy costumes. And there’s just a lot going on here… Firstly, the act of dressing them up increases the absurdity of their lack of fur, it turns their ‘nudity’ into part of the performance, and there’s also an uneasy frisson between their performativity, as both dressed up, and as Social Media cats, with their own accounts (their existence as a completely constructed and commercialised facade), and the fact that, despite this, they’re still incredibly cute.

That feeling, of their cuteness, is an emotion, an affect, that persists despite the commerciality of their artifice, and in that sense they’re an absolutely ridiculous analogue for how most of us experience the fulfilment of our wants, whether dating apps, or fashion, or the love heart that the Barista has artfully embossed in your coffee foam