Contemporary Art

As a pacific anarchist, I find up to the minute art much to my taste.

The above installation is called “Gaslighting Device” by Laura Kazaroff and currently hangs in the ICA, in The Mall, London.

Some wax furious about “gaslighting” – whatever it is, but my strong suspicion is that the word, and probably the behaviour it purports to describe, is a modern and perhaps partly unnecessary invention, much like “hysteria” was in Freud’s day.

I have no doubt that abusive relationships exist but the problem with “Gaslighting” is that it has become a buzzword, a meme, a commodity. Suddenly, a new form of abusive relationship has come to exist and everyone wants a part of it. And of course it has become the male who is the perpetrator and the female the victim. The reality is that a female is also capable of being the aggressor in an abusive relationship. Think “Basic Instinct”.

Much the same thing happened with hysteria. Suddenly all women patients with an emotional or mental problem were diagnosed as “hysteric” – it became a fashion. Of course there are mental problems and a great deal of suffering and appalling anxiety. But commodification is no help to the sufferer. It leads to labelling and misuse. Abuse even.

Suddenly everyone is a Gaslighter.  And everyone suffering from any sort of abuse has been Gaslit.

Gaslighting has become an industry it seems, much like “mindfulness”. 

Laura is concerned to express her view that happiness has become commodified, as has much of the terminology surrounding mental health.

Another exhibit by another artist is a short film on a loop about the abuse of meditation and mindfulness by the shallow and greedy “wellness” industry.

Bravo, and to many of the other artists whose work was on show. Particular felicitation to Joshua Whittaker and his dark film on esotericism, which I found Delphic and captivating.

Laura’s installation is, apparently, “a gimmicky, non functional device, which playfully deceives and ultimately disappoints by its lack of function”.

Just like the wellness industry then.

I confess I was puzzled by the Gaslighting Device at first – it appears to be a phallus – and since I have no idea what gaslighting is, I was none the wiser, even after reading up a little on the life and times of young Laura.

And then I saw what she was getting at – there is no meaning to the installation, just as there is no meaning to the endless capitalist smash and grab of the wellness industry, which, like Laura’s installation, is actually found to serve no purpose.  And to be gimmicky and useless.

A young nephew, Toby Rampton , who happens also to be an artist (of a sometimes more conventional variety) writes:

It’s not that I don’t find it (contemporary art) compelling but that so much of it is parading as something deep. I think if you can weed that stuff out there is some absolutely wonderful material.

I confess that I would be unable to sort the wheat from the chaff.  Is “Gaslighting Device” “parading as something deep” or is it something to which I am justified in giving my attention?

I am inclined to believe the latter  but even if Laura or any other contemporary artist is taking the piss, I am persuaded that their voice nonetheless counts. And should count.

My favourite poem – Ozymandias – was written for a competition.  Was it “commercial” then? Is my respect for it unjustified?

I don’t think so. Ozymandias has meaning for me, great meaning, whatever the purpose for which it was written.

And as for “Gaslight Device” that too has come to mean something to me over the past couple of days.  I feel, as Laura does, that it is the world of commerce which takes the piss, not the artist.

And why is my anarchism relevant? As a peaceful, very inactive, and certainly wholly non-violent anarchist, I reject the concept of hierarchy and state. I reject brute capitalism and would dearly like to see a very different society, based upon New Testament values rather than the careless and unthinking greed of Thatcherism .

And so I naturally find myself sympathetic to the artist, or particularly the modern artist, who is, often as not, also a committed critic of society and the predator prey relationship by which life on earth has always been bound. And I mean all life.

I am no art critic, nor do I have to be. I have no interest in talking in meaningless trope, no desire to be a pseudo intellectual writing for some dire leftist publication. Or indeed “rightist” – god forbid.

Art is not for the critics. It is not to be monopolised by the bores and the pseuds.

Art is a means of communication, a mode of expression. And it can take you to sublime heights or plunge you into Stygian depths.

Or, it can simply inform you. Provoke you. Shake you out of complacency, force you to look at the world a different way and from a different perspective. Through somebody else’s eyes.

And so bravo Laura. I may not wish to have Gaslight Device hanging on the walls of my pedestrian middle class home in London, but you have made me think.  You are right to criticise, and the object of your criticism richly deserve it.

I may prefer Singer Sargent in my drawing room (would that I could afford it) but I find your art every bit as compelling and relevant.

What I do have on my walls (or rather, at the moment, sitting in my study and awaiting framing) is a magnificent painting by my nephew. I can not begin to express the meaning of the painting, nor why I love it. It triggers so much in me that is drawn to the mysterious and the mystical, to Tolkien and Bosch, to Narnia and Norse myth.