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'AT
THE END OF THE DAY...' Mike Dawson returns with his particular mode of infrastructural performance in 'AT THE END OF THE DAY…' an installation created to coincide with 'artranspennine03' curated by Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson at 'The Cornerhouse' Gallery, Manchester, again employing his trio of alter ego's; 'The Gallery Guard' - a pro-modernist interventionist and authoritarian academic driven to police his beliefs against his rebellious wannabe art star protégé 'Robin Nature-Bold', both under the watchful eye of capricious Post-Modern 'gods', an art collective known as 'The Someone'; twelve agents acting as task masters - sitting atop their curatorial cloud with all the conscious determinacy of simmering chess masters. Through the ongoing dialectic between these characters Dawson continues to dissect the multifarious discourses of media and art-world mores as any Grande art autopter, through the idiosyncrasies exhibited by each alter-ego - ripping into the amorphous wet ware of current cultural fare. Highlighting the continued ruction between the mechanistic, Newtonian structures of Modernist ethos now (and still) undergoing a steady dissolution in their 'Post' era - a losing battle for a Freudian ego mythologised by a 'self-consuming media vector' that must create it's heroes from a weak ether in an act of self-perpetuation. An orchestrated symbiosis, a co-dependant relationship lived out in gloss, there is after all no such thing as bad press - much to the delight of Dawson's character 'Robin Nature-Bold' and to the horror of his ardent academic 'The Gallery Guard'. In an interplay between artifice and structure Dawson seemingly turns the nature of 'gallery' inside out with the application of his 'extillation' - brick wallpaper surfacing the two front columns at the Cornerhouse entrance, the two respective columns emblazoned with sound bites ('WAKE ME' and 'SHAKE ME') in vinyl lettering. The very structure of the building is made into a simulation, it's Modernist singular sense of purpose defused by layer upon layer of Post-Modernist 'complication'. Making Manchester analogous to Biblical Mesopotamia seems a stretch of the intellect, but like two towers of Babel these columns hold a similar Yahwist narrative. The Tower of Babel (11:1-9) continues the story of rebellion against God and depicts the overreach of human aspirations. A united humanity (of one language and the same vocabulary) initiates an enormous project to build a turret that would reach heaven. 'They said to each other, "Let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." So they had bricks for building blocks and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said "let us build a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves so we will not be scattered around the earth." '(11:1-4) Upon viewing this ziggurat and humanity's intentions - God took their activity as yet another attempt to seize divinity by reaching heaven by their own 'devices', rather than waiting for God's blessing - God confounded their ability to communicate effectively through the creation of new languages. They could no longer co-operate, so their building plans had to be scrapped. The result was human disunity and humanity was scattered across the earth. The twentieth century's excitation at the basic Modernist manifesto and its unequivocal embrace of technologies as an 'Endism' - "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution'' as stated by Francis Fukuyama - draws a direct parallel to the rather Modernist idea of that tower. Upon Modernism's mechanistic 'breakdown' and failure to fulfil its aspirations in being an 'Endism' and reaching Utopia, the Modernist language and vocabulary suffers the same disjunction. The thoroughly baked bricks of Babel (Modernism) are replaced by Dawson's simulacra of bricks entombing the outmoded authoritarian stance of the Modernist white cube. This simulation is well placed in context with Dawson's other simulacra; that of his alter ego's. Exploring that ongoing disjunctive narrative of a Modernist super-ego rent and sundered into a 'triptych' of psyche's scattered across the art-world-scape; once of 'one language and the same vocabulary' now fighting for re-unification or a new balance of power, each believing they are the evolution of the other. This dialogue - like a Post-Modern feedback loop of disparate whispers and cries - finds its new testing ground in the Media, adjusting its operation according to differences between the actual output and the desired output in the forum of global simulation. In this instance Media's desire to cling to the Freudian ego of a 'Newtonian I' obsessed with Modernist desires and capitalistic production (like 'making a name for ourselves') as stated by Marx, resulting in 'exploiting the proletariat' (the Media's utilisation of the artist) with increasing intensity. Dawson's alter ego's explore their disjunctive narratives as a triangulation of a single outmoded psyche struggling to regain a primary self over a series of sub-selves, battling to build a new 'Endism' after dividing up the bricks, resulting in a Post-Modern tension and an unrealised stale-mate - all under the auspices of Dawson who sends his guinea-pigs out into maze upon maze; a trio of 'scattered languages' attempting to rebuild their Modernist 'Babel's' - in a simulated experiment designed to illustrate the need for a paradigm shift into a true Reloaded-Modernist age. Paul
Anthony Black is an artist and freelance critic for Flash Art.
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