The Arts Cancel’ - 2023 (System drawing)
The complete decimation of the public arts reflects a gruesome shift of ideals. The value of art is no longer an investment in society, but as a tax loophole - to evade the investment in society. In the past twelve years, half of the public funding for arts in the U.K has been cut. Art is being removed from state school education, and artists are encouraged to retrain. The unregulated market system promoted as the alternative to public funding for the art. Replacing the religious, community, public, civic functions.
In the last year an additional fifty million in cuts were announced with latest victims targeted being the Colosseum theatre in London, Donbar theatre and more. These are well loved cherished institutions. I wanted to articulate this as a tragedy. This artwork shows stage set alive with symbolism, with actors performing a political pantomime to destroy arts and cultural institutions. This highlights the techniques, and funding narratives used to force institutions to closure. The artwork evolved from lived experience, working in the arts and third sector in the north of England. Pain is felt as millions of fundamental jobs, and livelihoods are unnecessarily destroyed through sweeping and badly planned cultural destruction. And my reading of the wider system of cultural destruction this exists within.
The image is a Crèchendo of activity akin to a final scene in an Opera. The destruction of the colosseum theatre, ropes and a spiralling Belvedere. characters plundering and pillaging marbles and sacred objects.
At the top of the scene is the faint outline of a Jesus Christ figure in heaven, reenacting the cleansing the temple - scene from the Bible. As the bankers and politicians try to enter heaven at the end of their lives they are met with Christ who throws their table to the floor. A reminder that those who destroy the sacred things in life: are ultimately going to hell.
The scene is entirely imagined, was drawn without life models. But it references the motifs of the city that situate it in contemporary london.
The scene is entirely imagined, and was drawn without life models. But references motifs and
Midnight London:
Lost souls 🐱 cats and foxes 🦊
Peak interest: London housing cycle and its social effect. 2023 (System drawing)
London’s credit cycle guides allocation of capital. In practice this means a credit cycle is more than just money, it is a driving of social interactions and emotional experiences felt by millions in synchrony. The artwork shows the housing market cycle of London, the emotions and the social-economic relationships. It developed from my lived experience of the tragedy of London’s housing market, and my understanding of housing cycles from economic theory.
Low-interest rates led to hysteria. Housing became a speculative asset rather than being valued for use. Now a steep incline of interest rate turns the over-leveraged over to a panic, and a depression. Politicians propping the market with disastrous policies like the introduction of 40-year mortgages. The result is that we are experiencing the biggest wealth inequality since 1870.
In the past two years inflation struck because of excessive money in circulation which linked to a drive-in prices, with too much money chasing too few goods. Now the assets of the middle classes are being eaten in small chunks and the lowest paid feel the worst effects, As a rising damp there is an increase of poorer living standards. Prospects of war rise, dissatisfied people quickly turn evil and the risk of human rights breaches increases.
Unemployment and economic hardship also affect the household level as financial depression is positively related to abusive behaviour. Further, rapid increases in the unemployment rate increase men's controlling behaviour toward romantic partners and unemployment and economic distress is caused at household level. We get marred in a boom and divorced in a crash.
In the downturn, the foreclosure wave will mean another great redistribution. as the market cycle acts as the invisible hand for the accumulation.But as a pinprick of hope, could see an increase in housing production after its all over.
Peckham’s price inflation
The piece has a backdrop of a street in Peckham, where I’m living.
The shops steal from the people who need to eat - using sky high prices as a way of taking their milk, but the families of these shopkeepers need to eat too and the owners justify the price rises as they are paying to support their staff wages and children. The inequality of work and life balance leads to an excess of pressure on children. The marginalised, unpaid workforce that make up a bulk of domestic labor - are feeling the brunt of the mounting tension and declining support. This transforms into violence and theft in the streets as the social pressure is never one sided - all are affected by the economic conditions being locked in a price spiral without a happy ending. A wage-price spiral is the unseen theme affecting peaceful people to act in hostility to one another.
The figures in the drawing are all drawn from imagination and are loosely based on Poussins dancers. This etching that has has multiple stages, with variations of intaglio line, tone and aquatint.
In between the actor and network (2023),
Inspired by actor network theory, the meaning of drawing and drawing with meaning in a constantly changing social system This artwork looks at the influence of the Share certificate on social culture. Within the view of actor network theory, relationships are primary, and objects emerge as nodes from pre-existing networks. Objects are what they do, or how they act through their distributed network.
The share certificate in this theory is as real as a solid wall; a node that defines the pathways people take through the city. Defining interactions as much as physical experiences. The city is the magnification of the shareholders desires and incentives. If the share certificate directly defines the work we do, then it also defines the phenomenon of life after work. Creating limitations on cultural appreciation and, therefore, British culture. The share certificate creates the base rules for billions of daily economic interactions and all commercial culture, public and private life.
The artwork plays with a sort of spiralling poetry, which amplifys the joys and tensions of human interactions within the expansive market system. The overwhelm of the dense commercial culture of London; between the coffee cups, the shoelaces, the joys and perils, the love, and the banality, in between the saltshakers, the radios, and the petrol station flowers, there are humans and love. The actors between all of the nodes.
The image itself is a social artwork because if is a new kind of share certificate. But it is as a practical, real device to accompany the articles of association of a new social architecture group called AB__ which I co-founded using a fair-share model - this form of multi-stakeholder social enterprise exists allow different forms of share distribution in land and housng and the production of cities. Therefore potentially resulting more equitable cities and architecture.
The Arts Cancel’ - 202
Capital city: the day the pound crashed in Liverpool Street.
On Thursday I spent some time practicing my observational drawing around the the banking sector in Liverpool Street. Growing up in London, I saw bankers moving on and off trains, spilling into pubs after work for my entire life. They vanish entirely on holidays.
Thousands of faces move in synchrony. Over time it culminates in the feeling of an ageless and eternal fleet as steadfast as the buildings of bank station.
Only when I got a bit older did I understand they weren’t just non-playable characters. Britain is one of the worlds largest exporters of financial services. Reading more about the economic system we live in you start to see how Issues within the global economy reflect themselves in the city of London. The wild volatility of human emotion and high irrationality of the global market are almost echoed in the daily expressions on the faces of the bankers. A secret mirror of the global market forces
This drawing was made during the time that the pound crashed to historic levels against the dollar, narrowly avoiding dollar parity. With everything happening in the world economy, you can tell if it’s a good or a bad day just by looking at the expressions of the bankers.
Journey to Goloka Vrindavan (2023), ink drawing, canvas
Growing up as a Hare Krishna devotee, every Sunday I would go to the temple in central London in Soho Square. The Hare Krishna religion is a non-materialist religion. Which deems the excess of material possessions as gross, something that stops you from reaching the liberated spiritual world. I wanted to create an image that depicts the conscious understanding of the place situated within the understanding of Hare Krishna: an auto-ethnographic piece depicting the way Oxford Street is perceived and the phenomenology of myth in relation to space. At the heart of the image is a struggle for transcendental realisation against the forces of the material world, where the familiar buildings of Oxford Street are just temporary material realities, represented here as a sort of dollhouse or model village.
On the left and in the sky are the symbolic references from the Bhagavad Gita, the scripture that forms the basis of the religion. Showing a fierce struggle between the consumers in Oxford Street and Hare Krishna's, the image echos the battle of Kurukshetra, the ethical precipice of the Vedas. The people on the ground represent the counterparts and different modes of material nature and their symptoms. The Hare Krishna devotees grapple with the means to escape through Kirtan (public song) and chanting (private meditation); along with them is Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, dressed as a devotee. The most recent incarnation of Krishna was from Mayapur. On the left of the image is a banana tree. Krishna’s eternal abode, Goloka Vrindavana, is often shown with the upside-down tree below—a banyan tree. Which represents the material world as a perverted reflection of the spiritual world.
So above the banyan tree is Krishna as a child from the butter theif pastime. His mother, Yashoda, is chasing him. Surrounding him is the Dance of Divine Love (the Rasa Lila). He is pouring butter onto the devotees below, creating a flow that represents the thread of consciousness, the Java Attma, and landing on the light-emitting Lord Jagganath. This is the deity from the Shri Shri Radha London Ishvara temple, based in Soho Square. Below this is man being tugged away from the spiritual world by the five figures that represent the forces of illusion they pull at him with the strings of the five senses as he attempts to transcend from the material to the spiritual.
The material conditions of financial packages in greater london.
This piece looks at the urban housing conditions and lived experience in the Londons outer boroughs. On the edges of Greater London the psychological and spatial conditions merge so closely to become one single lived experience of deficit.
In the image I show a cul-de-sac of small terraces, a stranger smoking in a muddied parks grass, a man in the foreground opening a bill and holding a child. All of these are familiar moments of normality in the Greater London boroughs such as Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge. The image is a hybrid of familiar experiences growing up.
The Arts Cancel’ -
The language of vandalism has been assimilated into the visual language of the current generation. Vandalism is no longer a sublanguage or colloquialism - opressed resisting opressor. But rather has asserted itself as a valuable new means of expressing human emotion and human relationships. As the urban realm shows patterns and changes with layers of accretion these layers can be used to show the internal struggle of a human psyche. As materiality give a strong language of place, it’s effective use can manifest a new form portraiture and post-vandalist representation.
In the post-Vandalist figurativism, the image is developed as a process and relationship between material. Addition and subtraction, the buffing, the vandalism, the weathering, repeat. The language formed from cracked wall, layered bright scrawls, the opaque musty grey of recent buffing, red paint, scrawls of white emulsion paint, the damaged surfaces showing aggregate underneath, bolts and steel, the etching, blotches of ink, iron oxide, chalk, copper, plastic-based paint, water-raging plywood, spots of mould and algae weathering, salts and spalling, petroleum based paint, mortar and layers of gypsum, tar, stickers and vertical cracks, clay, feathered velvety spray paint, direct clean surfaces.
These material relationships of London are the new grammar that can be used in new poetry, which enables us to reflect new layers of understanding between humans and environment. Just as ambient and noise artists use sampling to create new music. The material juxtapositions can ignite a familiarity, that allows cognitive behavioural chords unique to the new generation - expressing the inner psychological states which are otherwise not expressed. Aswell as changes in a person. The urban is an environmental relationshionships and our sensorial adaptation to this is the phenomenology of the contemporary human- therefore it is the language of the new.
The Arts Cancel’ - 202
Manchester accident and emergency 2023 but instead with the doctors as avocados.
Recently I was exposed to Pierre bonnards pictures of his everyday life. They had bright colours and tones and imaginative moments. This is the language of beauty and memory. It got me thinking about how I could apply this way of representation to my everyday life too. After some conversations with jo, who is a doctor in accident and emergency, and after a trip to Manchester and visiting the A&E this weekend, I decided to try and represent Manchester hospital emergency department memories in these light and airy colours.
Currently there are 20 hour waiting times in accident and emergency despite some patients being excessively ill. There are varying degrees of trauma in the waiting room. Also there are about 4 managers to every doctor, making the resource allocation completely skewed.
The Arts Cancel’ - 202
Recently I was exposed to Pierre bonnards pictures of his everyday life. They had bright colours and tones and imaginative moments. This is the language of beauty and memory. It got me thinking about how I could apply this way of representation to my everyday life too. After some conversations with jo, who is a doctor in accident and emergency, and after a trip to Manchester and visiting the A&E this weekend, I decided to try and represent Manchester hospital emergency department memories in these light and airy colours.
Currently there are 20 hour waiting times in accident and emergency despite some patients being excessively ill. There are varying degrees of trauma in the waiting room. Also there are about 4 managers to every doctor, making the resource allocation completely skewed.
The Arts Cancel’ - 202
‘Bathing in the Peak District National Park for the mental wellbeing aspects.’
All drawings and paintings copyright of Louis Pohl (2023), photos of the work in studio copyright Tomas Folan Hasici.