review

Lindsay Seers

First published by Art Monthly, October 2018

Every Thought There Ever Was, Focal Point Gallery, Southend, September 2018

Despite its litany of somewhat clichéd abject metaphors for states of distraction, infiltration, infection or superstition (think fluttering moths, meat flies, writhing larvae and alchemical symbols), a monstrous image worthy of Lindsay Seers’s hyperbolic exhibition title lay at the core of her eponymous film Every Thought There Ever Was (2018): a testicular glob, kaleidoscopically bejewelled with myriad autonomous eyeballs. Suggesting a mammalian evolution of the compound optics of an insect, this pulsing oracle provided a disquieting bodily allegory for Seers’s idiosyncratic exploration of consciousness, namely, the experience of heightened forms of perception reported to occur in the event of psychosis.

As such, the work attempted to create the dysphoric conditions through which a state of unease and piqued receptivity might be induced in a viewing subject through an admittedly impressive display of kinetic projections, heavily echoed audio and animated spotlights. While a large central orb projected onto the back wall of the gallery relayed the film’s most consistent series of images, it was a pair of smaller projectors, each housed within their own bespoke conical screens and mounted onto the arms of industrial robots, that performed a kind of cinematic interjection, feeding their imagery into the work as a series of paranoid discordances.

Developing an interest in a recently successful form of psychiatric treatment known as Avatar Therapy - in which digital personages are created to simulate and thus provide a form of safe exposure to the hallucinated persecutory entities encountered in schizophrenia - Seers had derived her film’s narrative through the emulation of a therapeutic process. The viewer becomes a patient confronting an intermittently glimpsed robotic avatar tasked with helping them understand their own agency in a state of mental distress, illustrated here by animated emblems of telecommunication and arcane knowledge that appear and recede rhythmically in a flux of nightmarish fits.

The film’s avatar channelled the life of James Miranda Barry (1795-1865), a military surgeon born Margaret Ann Bulkley who lived a life of ambitious medical practice as a man, eventually serving as Inspector General of the British Army. Called into existence from a hazy future, Barry’s avatar executed a form of post-human fictioning through which he declares that his robot form has in fact been determined by a parochial presumption of how a human future might appear, opposed to the reality of which the avatar itself is borne: a kind of wetware, hive-mind, hermaphroditic futurity that seems to recast the omniscient symptoms of psychosis as holistic oneness. In other words, a future characterised by fluidity and the absence of ‘filtering systems’, be they cognitive or bodily.

Such a sentiment, that a ‘soft, organic system arises more effectively’, was galvanised by a backdrop of hopeful swelling strings that it was difficult not to be allured by. But this is where the film appeared to splinter into a series of questions that I’m not sure it seemed immediately equipped to address. Soft systems are no less ideologically constituted or politically instrumentalised than the hard machinery of industrial capital. Similarly, emergent and digitally appended models of psychotherapeutic care are no less invested with normative expectations and cultural oversights than existing clinical practice. If Barry’s avatar arose to invoke a reassuring future in which the symptoms of schizophrenia are placated (normalised) by a borderless networked consciousness, then surely the patient is responsible for emulating a therapist’s fable as a mode of self-regulation? What might such a practice actually do to a person?  

Seers is deeply reverent towards the subject and experience of schizophrenia, as her wall mounted research library and co-authored works (with participants undergoing therapeutic support for mental illness) displayed in Focal Point’s corridor and second gallery attested. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the title work prioritised an artistic fascination with the metaphorical potential of the altered realities and perceptual peculiarities of psychosis, rather than engaging some of the broader and more testing problems it provoked, for example in the material configuration of the work itself: slick animations and hyper-fetishised robotics. Principally, a fuller acknowledgment of its own complicity within the ubiquitous distribution of images that cultivates schizoid subjects.

Evan Calder Williams has coined the brilliant phrase ‘Shard Cinema’ to describe the digital ecology of fractured screens, anxious distractions, composite images, prolonged render times and the insufficiency of the labouring human body to comprehend, let alone manufacture, the plethora of seamless images that comprise the technologically suffused present. Every Thought There Ever Was performs a shard cinema of its own, its many thematic splinters provoking a series of troublesome propositions that it will no doubt take a while to tease out.