Spooky Affects At A Distance is a solo-exhibition from David Burrows, hosted by the IMT gallery (Image Music Text). Engaging with contemporary politics and cultures – and their aesthetics of appearance – it proposes a cosmopolitics modelled on the “nature” of Black Holes.
David Burrows is a Professor of Fine Art whose work explores “notions and concepts of the new in avant garde, utopian, sacred and mass media cultures. A second research concern is the investigation of the ways in which fiction and performance are transformative processes, or processes through which worlds and relations are formed and maintained. This research draws on continental philosophy and theories concerned with subjectivity, ontology, performance and performativity.”
For a number of years, Burrows has attempted to fathom what he has termed Black Hole Ontology – an idea about what can be said to exist, or a notion of being, from the perspective of “a sentient black hole that was produced when the Hadron Collider was switched on in CERN, Switzerland in 2010.” In Burrows mythology, this black hole (which is neither black nor a hole) was not produced by scientists exactly, but by the Celtic god Cernunnos, the god of the forests, as a prank and to confront human subjects that believe themselves to be privileged agents of reality, with the reality of being as non-appearance.
Further encounters with, and communications from said sentient black hole are recorded and translated through artworks that venerate it as a being that can consume spacetime, that can hold everyday language and media in a red-shifting event horizon, and which sucks the light from enlightenment culture to reveal its shadowy underbelly. The black hole appeared to Burrows in a half-dream in 2011 and the first thing the singularity communicated was that ‘in outer space there is no painting or sculpture, Gysin was right.’
Since 2005, Burrows has collaborated with figures such as Simon O’Sullivan, addressing the relations of aesthetics, politics and the sacred through the ‘performance-fiction’ Plastique Fantastique (a group of human and inhuman avatars). Using open-ended practices such as events, films, comics, writing, installations and artefacts, Plastique Fantastique deliver communiqués from the extreme past and future that are baroque, express a subversive urgency and are frequently participatory. ‘First Manifesto of Plastique Fantastique’ proposes a practice that moves participants “from work time (utility) into sacred time (play)” by executing practice as ritual and performance.
In this way, Burrows and O’Sullivan explore how fictioning can offer alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of ‘post-truth’ and ‘perception management’. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human, and non-human bodies and societies to come. This looping-back complies with what Burrows and O’Sullivan find to their own surprise is the anamorphic aspect of their work, being both an academic survey, but equally “a document of a journey, or itself a performance.”
David Burrows’ work suggests that his choice of book is probably the copy of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) found clutched in Roland Barthes’ lifeless hand after his fatal collision with a laundry van. The scene is a good indication of the things buzzing around in his head. Ontological issues make him tick, along with accident scenes, pools of blood and discarded clothes. Within Burrows’ artistic accidents, the viewer always arrives a little too late. Our instinct is to reconstruct a cogent Then from the messy Now, to try to put Humpty together again.
Through his eschatological explorations and extrapolations, “These research concerns address the ways that impermanence and immanence, violence, destruction, crisis and disorientation are important structural elements in both popular and avant-garde culture.” Singularities are not metaphors but agents – pointing not to god, or the death of god even – but another cosmology entirely in which many gods (invisible and all consuming) collapse spacetime and pour forth from the resulting breach.
