EXHIBITIONISTS

In a key scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, the protagonist Theo visits his powerful cousin at the Battersea Power Station in south London. The cousin, a government functionary, is holed up against the dystopian reality in which humanity has become infertile, leaving an ageing population to wither towards extinction. He is also the keeper of a slew of treasures, including Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica and Pink Floyd’s levitating pig: treasures preserved in a building that is itself a beloved heritage artefact. Theo asks, ‘A hundred years from now there won't be one sad fuck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?’ The cousin’s response is apathetic: ‘You know what, Theo? I just don't think about it’.

The scene recalls us to a simple truth: that the power and meaning of art depends, not merely on its quality but on the circumstances of its reception. Like the lives of the remaining human beings who cannot produce human beings of their own, the art sequestered in Battersea Power Station is in the process of losing its reason for being. If the point of culture is to set a frame to human experience and the human condition, what force can it have in a world from which the very category of ‘the human’ is fading? In such a world art too is rendered sterile.

In EXHIBITIONISTS, Tessa MacKay contemplates the nature of art’s reception in an era of shortening attention spans, deepfakes and AI-generated content. In a way that follows naturally from her SOCIAL REALISM body of work, which elevated low-value digital photos drawn from 2000s era Facebook user accounts to the status of ‘legitimate’ artworks, EXHIBITIONISTS asks us to consider the role and function of art in a mediated world – in a world where digital images have substantially replaced, or are in the process of replacing, embodied human experience. Here, indeed, the low-value quality of the source images has a metaphorical charge, speaking to our inability to engage with such works in the way they demand. What is the status of the work of art in an era of digital reproduction, especially when filtered through the dopamine-chasing reputational economy of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘infinite scrolling’?

For Walter Benjamin, who considered the work of art at an earlier stage of its mechanical reproduction, MacKay is alive to the effect such developments have on the ‘aura’ of great works of art. But hers is no dispassionate take. On the contrary, the paintings of EXHIBITIONISTS attempt to re-materialise or reembody their subject-works, through analogue materials and classical painting techniques; a kind of repatriation to their origins, of a particular place and time. These works, in other words, are continuous with their subjects, or rather with their subjects’ subjects: they are born of a deep reverence for the creative endeavours – for the artefacts – now receding before us.

‘Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort,’ wrote Paul Valéry in The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928), ‘so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.’ MacKay’s new work is both a meditation on that ongoing process, and a stay against it.