Text that accompanied 2006 West Space images
I represent the stark reality of your preference for form ahead of content. (Dannii Minogue)
‘We
have all become addicted to celebrity. As phoney, airbrushed and
commercial as it is, we are awash in it and secretly rather enjoy it,
the new lingua franca of a media age.’
‘Like any addiction it is as compelling for the users as the suppliers, and as corrosive of both.’
Schultz, Julianne. ‘Stars, Lies and Propaganda’. From the introduction to;
I construct and segment my perception to match my social and cultural environment.
‘The
general characteristics of human nature participate in the work of
elaboration from which social life results. But they are not the cause
of it, nor do they give it its special forms; they make it possible.
Collective representations, emotions, and tendencies are caused not by
certain states of consciousness of individuals but by the conditions in
which the social group, in its totality, is placed… individual natures
are merely the indeterminate material that the social factor moulds and
transforms.’1
‘Notice, first, that the generation of culture is a social activity. A solitary human mind can not secrete culture.’2
1: Durheim, E. 1895. The rules of the social method. (1962 edition. Free Press)
2: Ridley, Matt. Nature via Nurture. (2003. Harper Collins)
Where the fuck is all this leading me? …I can’t do this anymore! (Sienna Miller)
‘Straying
is the original (if unintended) act of demystification, on which
reveals the coercive ‘nature’ of the prescribed path, the straight and
narrow. The path we thought we were on by choice we are in fact on by
arrangement, and in straying we discover alternative ways to
alternative futures.’
‘The masterless, without a fixed place, identity, or occupation, were perceived as a threat to the state and the social order.’
‘We
find evil conceptualized simultaneously as, on one hand, a foreign
force or agency at once alien, antithetic, and hostile; on the other as
an inner deviation, the more insidious for having departed from the
true, its point of departure from within the true being also point of
contact for the perversion of the true.’
‘When
authority forces us back into line it becomes apparent that power
rather than nature regulates the order of things; in the ‘fact’ of
natural destiny is discerned a process of subordination.’
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)
My mind forms the point of convergence of your lines of reference. (Liz Hurley)
‘A
culture-led process, acting over a long period of human evolutionary
history, could easily have led to a fundamental reworking of human
psychological dispositions.’1
‘The
denial of free will, then, comes from viewing a brain as being embedded
in a linear causal chain…free will and universal determinism are
irreconcilable boxes to which linear causality leads.’2
1:
2: Freeman, W.J. How brains make up their minds. (1999. Weidenfeld and Nicolson)
My identity hangs on my association with your collective threads. (Farrah Fawcett)
‘The
behaviour of a human being owes much to his [her] nature; but it also
owes much to the rituals and habits of his [her] fellows. He [she]
seems to absorb something from the tribe.'
Ridley, Matt. Nature via Nurture. (2003. Harper Collins)
I look to the side as you advise that my culture’s foundations rot, is this on sale? (Oprah Winfrey)
‘It
is an excruciating experience to watch the planet fall apart piece by
piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial. The situation
is reminiscent of Rhinoceros, a play written in the 1960’s by
Eugene Ionesco. The plays main character, Berenger, and his girlfriend,
Daisy, watch with dismay as, one after another, their fellow towns
people turn into Rhinoceroses. What makes this surrealistic comedy so
deeply unsettling is that, except for Berenger and Daisy, the remaining
humans in the town refuse to see these transformations. They simply
will not acknowledge the fact that, one by one, their colleagues are
turning into animals.’
Gelbspan, Ross. Boiling
Point – How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists
Have Fueled the Climate Crisis – and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster. (2004. Basic Books)
I’ve got my eyes on you cunt! (Kim Basinger)
‘To
contain and control deviance, and thereby to master it, is to supply
fresh and dramatic proof of the enormous powers that are behind the
social order. The visible control of deviance is one of the most
effective mechanisms by which a social order can tangibly display its
potency. The act of harnessing things that are dangerous helps to
revitalize the system by demonstrating to those who live within it just
how awesome its powers really are.’
‘The
work of policing boundaries crucial to maintaining of social domination
– boundaries of country, race and class – is effaced and dissolved into
the a priori internal regulation of nature.’
‘The
expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by the
punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the
inclinations. Mably formulated the principle once and for all:
‘punishment, if I may put it, should strike the soul rather than the
body’…a new character came on the scene masked. It was the end of a
certain kind of tragedy: Comedy began, with shadow play, faceless
voices, impalpable entities.’
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)
I’d give my left arm to be part of the cultural elite.
‘To become what others saw him [her] as being required great self discipline ‘simular to spiritual exercises’
‘I
wish to emphasize that our ‘normal’ ‘adjusted’ state is to often the
abdication… the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us
are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false
realities’
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)
I pledge allegiance to your flag, and resonate the colours of your spectrum? (Burt Reynolds)
‘Identity
categories have come to be considered complicit in the very structures
that their assertion was intended to overthrow.’
‘Identity
categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the
normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying
points for a libratory contestation of that very oppression.’
‘[Collective] Ideology reaches into experience and identity, re-emerging as ‘voluntary’ self oppression.’
Jugose, Annamarie. Queer theory. (1996.
My spheres of perception float in your ephemeral realms. (Nicole Kidman)
‘I
think we are dealing with an octopus. We have become the creatures of
these people. Advertising as news, it’s very skilfully done. The
methods of seduction in the media are far more sophisticated, and the
money that’s going into it, and the ingenuity of the spin, has reached
the point where we, as a general public, have never been lied to by
such sophisticated means as now. And, of course, this completely
compounds the modern notions of transparency, and instant
communication, its instant brain washing.’
Sheehan, Paul. The electronic whorehouse. (2003. Pan Macmillan)
My transient points of obsession are symbolic of your culture’s collective psychosis.
Malouf, David. ‘Fifteen minutes’. From;
OMG! Have I become my media persona? (Robbie Williams)
‘To lose one’s cover is to lose one’s soul, to be undone in the sense of socially ruined and spiritually taken apart.’
‘Mimicry becomes....’at once resemblance and menace.’’
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)
The cameras are inside of me, how can that be? (Nicole Richie)
‘Stars,
lies and propaganda have become the stock in trade of public life,
distorting reality, unhinging trust in institutions and corroding
confidence. Who can you trust? Who can you believe? Messages are now so
massaged and refined that the raw material is sometimes unrecognisable.’
Schultz, Julianne. ‘Stars, Lies and propaganda’. From the introduction to;
You monitor me covertly and infiltrate my thoughts surreptitiously. (Lara Flynn-Boyle)
‘If
we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group in mind, it is
now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will
without their knowing It.’2
1: Stockwell, Stephen. ‘Spinning the fabric of reality’. In;
2: Bernays, Edwards. ‘Propaganda’. 1928. Quoted in; Sheehan, Paul. The electronic whorehouse. (2003. Pan Macmillan)
