Step 3. ???? at Plicnik Space Initiative
This Halloween season, I've been thinking about how deeply anachronistic it is to even consider summoning evil spirits. Perhaps it is my Catholic upbringing talking, but every time I walk past a house adorned with iconography of the underworld, I shudder. Mortal, human evil is all around, and we are deeply aware of its existence in our world. Some of the evil is mundane, small, a brick in the wall of that which breaks us down as individuals before breaking down our communities and our environments. Many of us fight this evil in different ways, and in parallel, many would rather tell the conscious to stop crushing the good vibes, stop being a killjoy. The latter group are also guilty of reading and watching (but not absorbing) the horrors of the year before coming to 31 December and posting that this year was the best of their lives.
The evils lurking beyond the visible are a point of departure for the group exhibition 'Step 3. ????' at Plicnik Space Initiative in Deptford. The gallery has an ongoing ambition to challenge the possibilities of what can and should take place within an exhibition space, and they have certainly achieved that on this occasion. I have been there a few times in the past year or so, and each time there has been a distinctly eerie feeling within the space, holding artworks that are somewhat isolating and disorienting. Subverting the consumerist, dominant class narratives that galleries and museums uphold is about as exciting as it gets in the contemporary art world, where change is (always) desperately needed.
Even referring to 'Step 3. ????' as a "group exhibition" feels like a disservice to what the gallery is working towards. This is not a group exhibition. It is much more reminiscent of the three artists involved (Lily Bloom, Michelle Lee Johnson, and Romane Courdacher) gathering together and pushing their thinking and their respective practices together in order to produce a cohesive presentation on a particular message or atmosphere. This, in theory, is what group exhibitions should all be doing, but this is very much not the case, and until seeing this show, I hadn't realised how most group exhibitions are vehicles through which the curator's whims can be indulged.
This sense of cohesion is mostly courtesy of Lily Bloom's installation-style work, 'Terror on Main', which wraps around all the wall space the small gallery has to offer. Its overwhelming power is immediate. Reminiscent of the days of proto-social media networks including MySpace and Piczo, 'Terror on Main' is an extensive, repetitive collage piece that hones in on low-res images. In Hito Steyerl's 2009 essay, In Defense of the Poor Image, she states that this kind of image "is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious...It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology." [1] Whereas the internet and its residual technologies felt thrilling two decades ago, we are now drowning in immaterial nonsense at best, and violence at worst. Once Bloom's use of the poor image is established, we can allow ourselves to look at the reality of the images that make up this work, and a sense of horror prevails.
Multiple layers of 'horror' are at play, and the lesser sense is the lack of digital privacy and the throngs of surveillance. These images are poor in quality, but in being low-quality, low-impact, copyright-free images from around the world, they could also belong to us. In theory, we could spot ourselves on the wall in some kind of uncompromising or unanticipated position. There is an enduring lack of context which also makes the imagery unnerving. If we isolate our thinking from the now-quotidian practices of doom-scrolling, digital advertising, and onslaughts of imagery we are confronted with at all hours of the day, why would we realistically be subject to imagery that is so markedly devoid of context? How do we reconcile with that? We have the world's knowledge at our fingertips, but we are now used to the absurd, the obscene, the meaningless, the distorted, and the disturbing image. 'Terror on Main' is a hugely varied collection of images, but mashed together in this way, there is an unhygienic sense of hoarding and claustrophobia. Images include: a man in a bright orange outfit (supposedly a prisoner uniform) facing away on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back; the vast expanse of the ocean; a horizontal surgical scar across a stomach; dirty soles of feet lying motionless on a bed; a room filled with Santa Clauses and assorted Christmas tchotchke, and an abattoir. There is so much to see that it becomes a truly overwhelming experience, one that makes the heart race, and the head spin. I have learned from the artist's Instagram page that the work is a Flickr installation, which epitomises all of this. We have access to everything but insight on nothing.
'Terror on Main' anchors everything together, and Michelle Lee Johnson's 'Collection of leaflets gifted to the artist by friends and gathered by the artist in various location' is fairly self-explanatory, specialising in evangelical religious leaflets found by the artist and their friends. The consumerist and corporate aesthetics of these leaflets and wider faith-based media are integrated into the horror of the sensory-overload image already explored by Bloom, with an added hint of the cult for good measure.
Without a wealth of contextual information about the show, (which, let's face it, makes the experience much more interesting and fun to explore) one might overlook Romane Courdacher's sculptural piece, 'No late comers will be admitted'. An LED spotlight casts its glow onto a small glittered curtain, resembling a small box. There is nothing under the curtain, and it doesn't move, but the mystery and concealment again adds to the general unease that sweeps the exhibition, to an almost suffocating degree. The show's press release pegs 'Step 3. ????' as an "inquiry into our times", and "offering a glitched, virtual interpretation of a simple architectural premise" [2]. While the show itself evokes an unwavering sense of both impending and present doom, the ongoing ambition to do more with a static gallery space is intriguing and keeps the viewer tantalised for what may be to come.
The aesthetic and emotional experience of the exhibition ensures us all that the overwhelm and terror that we experience at the world around us is not an individual dysfunction, but something of a collective psychosis: we never know when we will be surveilled or photographed by the state, the police, strangers, our stalker. We can be exposed to horrific and genuinely traumatising imagery at any given time, and we can be subject to this same violence through the internet and in real life (that's if we dare to make a division between the two).
At the time of writing, there is no official documentation of the exhibition in photographic form, and it feels apt to have used my own amateur and fractured photography to illustrate this indie, unnerving show. I went to see 'Step 3. ????' during Frieze week, the apex of London's contemporary art calendar which definitively separates those who are included in the art world and those who have to peep in from the periphery. Shows like this feel like the very antithesis of Frieze, and all it stands for. While it would be undermining to say that the works wouldn't suit a Frieze booth (after all, anything goes if it's marketed by the right people in the right place), there is a certain sense that at Plicnik Space Initiative, we are being asked not only to think about the world we're living in, but take a moment to bask in the quagmire of it all.
[1] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image
[2] https://plicnik.space/questionmark/
