Vampire - Junkie / Curated by Blue Marcus
Samuel Guerrero, Hampus Hoh, Callum Jones, Scott Keightley
14 March - 27 April 2024
223 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 0EL
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Courtesy of the artist and Rose Easton
Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards
We understand that ordinary men and their clumsy instruments are transformed by an art of possession. We are aware that he is not really making the music, it is making him–if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us. – Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1968
A painting depicts a stadium-cave-UFO launchpad [transcendental light beckons, as do the stadium lights–a red herring]; another[-ish] with a stain, residue of an image or several hundreds [faintly imprinting or soaked and pooling on the page]; a pane of glass, studded with dead bolts and wooden horns–together circuitry, or an instrument; music stands, encrusted in ornaments and objects, fused with music sheets and digital metronomes, standing together awkwardly: these are novel inventions, crystalline and pure.
The works in Vampire-Junkie are objects, frozen: visual articulations that implicate the prospect of sound.
Samuel Guerrero documents a stadium. The space conjures images of performers-athletes-cavemen huffing and pursuing feats of human great- ness. Foregrounded is the absence of bodies, where ancient rituals [a roaring cacophony of voice, the echo of music, of chanting] are replaced by modernity [a tinnitus, an empty building, the drone of machinery].
Hampus Hoh’s assemblage is adorned with studs, tips of wind instruments and lock mechanisms bisecting the glass, deploying them as subtle utilitarian gemstones. We expect to hear the slow swivelling of machinery. Memory beckons with the desire to blow into the mouth pieces. The sculpture bas- tardises the architectural-industrial in service of a quiet gesture–glass is no longer to see through, locks are no longer to be dead-bolted. Within Hoh’s instrument is romantic subversion, the search for harmony.
Scott Keightley presents us abruptly with music stands, punctuated with spherical glass finials and knobs. Implicated are complex scores for an instrument not-yet invented. The spheres slide off the stand and, caught in free-fall, become tear-shaped in motion. We pause to hear a foreign song, or at least, the crash.
Callum Jones autocannibalises. Machine becomes an extension of flesh.The printer is exploited, ink bunches and paper jams only to be erased and regurgitated once more. But, preserved delicately in these itinerant layers is an artefact, weathered and trampled on. Run-off ink bleeds from the original to the copy. The relief left behind reverberates, entombing fugitive, atemporal visual relics within paper.
The gallery gathers the quartet in dissonant harmony. In concert, the works reverberate off some larger, looming ‘invisible’: the contemporary condition. Consider Morton’s Hyperobject, a thing of such scale and magnitude that it cannot readily be understood beyond the theoretical [i.e., an auditorium’s capacity may say 60,000–we can’t visualise that number but we believe it to be true]. The contemporary condition follows the same logic: it is a pervasive atmosphere more-so than a material thing. Its perfume lingers as a residue on the collar of the Vampire-Junkie.
In 1977, NASA sent its twin Voyager spacecrafts into the unknown, armed with the Golden Record. Inscribed with image and sound, the record indexed the essence of life on earth, held in time, floating through space. Similarly, Vampire- Junkie is a catalogue of works that act as artefacts of the contemporary as it accelerates into the unrecognisable post-apocalyptic.
The works are: Contemporary Hieroglyphs noun
1 asserted so completely in contemporaneity that they are in a state of specu- lative fiction. The present has been pillaged, strip-mined under the regime of a neoliberal world order. The expansion of the universe is matched only by the net of consumption that steadily nips at its heels: pure Fordism. In the face of such depletion, one must turn to the future to say anything about the present. The Contemporary Hieroglyph is charged at once with prognostication and historicism. Affirmative mutations galore.
2 defined by acceleration. The essence remains a symbol. As hieroglyphs become networked and fragmented, they risk implosion: Only this can produce such bastardised things in the first place. Vampire-Junkie concerns controlled demolition, the works exist at the edge, locked in a volatile position on the brink of cataclysm. There is a paradox in the human urge to (1) suspect the end and (2) build for a future that lies beyond it. The Vampire-Junkie is innately speculative. It gambles. The Vampire-Junkie pursues to the bitter end. It is an unsated addict.
[Aside]
Capitalism-incarnate, the Titanic was swallowed whole by the ocean. Sticking 22 degrees above sea level, a string quartet stood on the foredeck playing.
As they held their violins to their chins at their posts, looking into the unknown with a sense of duty, they too were swallowed up, holding their breath, waiting for one last note.
1 An insatiable subject that pursues “their desires up to the point of self destruction, [...] never crossing the line into annihilation. The junkie chooses to be addicted – the desire to get high is only the ostensible motivation for the drive, just as “winning money” is only the official alibi for the gambler’s enjoyment.” (Mark Fisher, K-Punk, 2018)