- Venue
- Bonnington Gallery
- Location
- East Midlands
It was with some trepidation that I allowed my ever-loving, seemingly ever-present girlfriend to drag me to the private view of 'Fictions' at Bonington gallery tonight. Besides course work piling up and my loan evaporating away, we'd been arguing more frequently recently. Not that time together can't be productive and useful of course. Lost in another realm of escapism such as a gallery, one can avert the ever-pressing conditions of day to day life, if only for a short while. And not that I normally start a critical review with my mental state and personal details either. It's just that, well, its all painfully relevant you see. Let me explain.
I am addicted to porn. There. That's the first step. Even as I write this I'm simultaneously surfing the next high speed porn stream site in order to gorge relentlessly on more simulated moving coloured pixels that are limited only by my fantasies. Anything I desire is at the touch of a search engine. And this is why the strain has started to show between my girlfriend and I. She can't compare with the fantasy.
The work at the 'Fictions' exhibition takes Jorge Luis Borges' fantastical, metaphysical short stories as a starting point for their work. Disinformation and mystery had surrounded the event prior to the private view, with the contents kept deliberately secret. In keeping with this suspense, I don't want to reveal to much of the actual work within this review, but concentrate on the events surrounding my experience of it.
Now that trepidation I felt was not unfounded. All the way to the show my girlfriend seemed nervous, distant. But seemed reluctant to talk about it, feigning tiredness as the distraction I saw. Upon arriving and going through the usual 'meet and greet' scenarios and picking up our obligatory free drink (a particularly pungent green punch I may add) she vanished into the throng of people leaving me alone in the crowd. Various sculptural pieces and a few text based works were dotted among the hecklers like islands of thought cast adrift into a sea of indifference. I hate private views. Everyone more concerned with looking over your shoulder to see if there's someone more 'culturally significant' they should be talking to rather than just taking time conversing with the work. Jostling for viewing space, I shuffled slowly round Bonington Gallery.
As I passed from one piece to the next, each dense collaboration after dense collaboration on the paradoxical seemed to blur in my mind, canceling their worth out in a cyclical game of bluff and double-bluff. The artists seemed so wrapped up in making juxtapositions they missed the higher spiritual flights and their limitations of imagination I admired so much in my own reading of Borges.
And when I get bored my mind always returns to sex. I start imagining strangers I see doing the dirtiest things I can think of with each other. Degrading things. Even at a private view of a show opening. Actually, the more inopportune the setting, the easier the filth seems to pervade my imagination. Porn is absolutely the sexual politics of fantasy, but the internet is fast bringing about in me the demise of expectation one can reasonably assume in a healthy sexual relationship.
Lost in my thoughts I turned the corner as I edged around the outside of the gallery space at the far left. A group had gathered around what appeared to be a small stage set with lights and a bed. It seems strange now looking back that I hadn't noticed it on the way in, almost as if it wasn't there before. My ears heard a voice that announced a collaboration between Glen Jamieson and Aaron Juneau, a performance, was about to begin. I was aware of formless bodies around me moving closer, tighter inwards. It felt like we became one huddled mass of a single perception. And yet as I thought this, the inescapable sense of separation from within the group still remained. A hushed anticipation drew over this crowd as the voice continued,
"The dissemination of information on the internet is Borgesian. There is no written or reenacted truth anymore. Language is evolving. History is ever present. Fantasy can become your new reality. In reverence to Jorge Luis Borges we present our final and most daring work."
A shadowy bleached blonde emerged from the throng at the front of the crowd, stepped onto the stage and slowly sat on the bed.
"For the past few months we have conducted research online to find a suitable candidate…"
It was her.
"…someone with the true genetic credentials…"
It was her. The words being spoken slowly faded away until they were a faint cry far away.
"…whose ancestor decreed the first obscenity law in 1846…"
But she was wearing a wig. I think. Things seemed so unreal I could not be sure of what it was I was witnessing anymore. She was wearing different clothes to earlier. And her physique looked, how can I say, enhanced. It was my girlfriend, of that I was sure. But at the same time the more I looked, I believed it was definitely not her. Both existed together and yet there seemed no incongruity to my logic.
"…all we need now is several willing volunteers, you know who you are…"
The voice echoed slightly.
"…identity is the plausibility of the imaginative subjective playground. This vessel is exactly what she appears to be to each of you both separately and historically…"
The voice had taken on a hypnotising mantra that we all seemed to indulge in.
"…she is your individual collective fantasy…"
I cannot trust my memory of what happened after that as I sit here writing this. Things all still seem so confusing and unreal. Accounts from various parties I've contacted differ greatly; from dead kestrels to pink dolphins. Of which I have no recollection. I really don't know what to believe anymore. My minds all messed up. I haven't seen my girlfriend since. I wonder if she'll be back tonight? Maybe when crawl into bed and close my eyes.