Monster

7 photos, HD Video, Mixed Material Sculptures/ Objects, 2019-20, collab. with Ruvi Simmons

MONSTER

2019

Work on MONSTER began in 2019 and incorporates photo portraiture, video, sculpture, textiles, and found elements. It is also a project uniquely tuned to the frequencies of 2020. With each element connected by a shared, central emblem - the spithood - MONSTER embodies the pathologies of anxiety, illness and protest that are fundamental to our experiences of present-day life.

In its contemporary form, the spithood is a restraint used by police forces to prevent detainees from biting or spitting at those nearby. It came to broad public attention when videos began circulating of the often shocking force with which they were used and the horrified reactions of those being held down as well as passers-by often unaware of their deployment. In this sense, these videos represent part of the public documentation of police brutality that has done so much in forcing the issue to widespread condemnation.

From this inspiration, MONSTER takes the spithood and expands its symbolic power. It becomes not just an emblem of contemporary policing but its own source of fascination and dread. In this way, it evokes historical echoes in the hooded victims of public executions and deeply rooted fears of criminality as a form of social contagion or disease. 

Drawing on Michel Foucault's studies of the expansion, and rationalisation, of the repressive state, MONSTER uses the spithood as the metaphoric topos around which it imagines and interrogates key features of our daily lived experience. At a time when democratic rights are under real, sustained threat, the contemporary use of a horror-object gives the modern spithood its mesmeric power while enabling its re-purposing as a means to subvert the very oppressions it embodies.

MONSTER does this in dialectical ways drawing on distinct, but related, media. In a series of glossy colour portraits, subjects pose in a spithood directly modeled on those used by police forces around the world. They stand before a blown-up image taken from the product catalogue of a private security supplier. The subjects all wear t-shirts emblazoned with the word MONSTER drawn with the font of the well-known energy drink. The layers of meaning are designed to build an associative chain between fashion, marketing, oppression and desire. It mimics the language of a magazine spread while also exploring the ambiguous, tense dynamics of portrait photography. Using both in the context of police repression, it illustrates the pressure-points where contemporary consumption and the aesthetics of the commodity meet state power and questions of individual visibility.

The same design pattern is used with a wide variety of materials from silk to latex in the production of a range of new spithoods that expand on and give physical form to this play of horror and seduction. They are individually installed on flesh-coloured iron stands of varying height that echo the heads of traitors once displayed on London thoroughfares to terrorise the population. The colorful hoods function like unseeing, unhearing sentinels, made in the spirit of Situationist theories of recuperation, where familiar elements are recombined to confront or negate those features of daily life that otherwise operate unremarked. The blank, cheap nylon spithoods used by the police are designed to erase and to silence. They make the wearer invisible and transform them physically into the symbols of their own guilt. The spithoods in MONSTER do the opposite. Not just playful subversions of fashion, they turn the symbol of erasure into its own riot of colour, uniqueness and difference.

Alongside both hoods and portrait series is a video work in which a group of individuals also wearing MONSTER shirts stand around a vase of fresh flowers that has itself been covered in one of the standard-issue police hoods. They take it in turns to spit on the hood covering the flowers, their actions shown in ever-faster video cuts until the work reaches a climactic velocity. The acts of subversion and rebellion become visually explicit in a form of mimetic performance where negation becomes a form of celebration or connection between individuals recalling the work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray. The alienating logic of the spithood, designed to isolate people by covering them up and rendering them invisible, is itself covered in human fluids that in their abjection connect us with the outside world and those around us. If the spithood is a brutal and brutalising tool used to quarantine self from other, subject from object - that objectifies the wearer in order to oppress - this simple act is the comprehensive gesture of negation.

MONSTER was inspired by the issues of oppression and liberation which have been the subject of mass protest and revolt. In 2020, however, it also speaks directly to the biopolitics of coronavirus. The face mask or covering has become a key symbol of contemporary life. Viral transmission, breath, spit, concealment-as-protection, intimacy as a source of fear, suspicion of strangers, are the conditions governing our present-day experience. The emblem of the spithood therefore takes on new and unexpected resonances, embodying ambiguities that in turn reflect the deeply troubled textures of how we wish, or feel able, to interact with those closest to our hearts - let alone overcome the system of alienations separating us from everyone else.

These ambiguities are not signs of indecision but core to the very nature of a work that operates both ironically and literally, that is as playful as it is serious. By making use of familiar techniques of fashion or marketing, combining them with symbols of oppression and fear, it finds new ways to bring into the open, interrogate and ultimately reimagine the parameters of how we see each other, how we are silenced - and how we might find other ways to speak.