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"Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths" = C. H. Spurgeon.
I'm in a good place at the moment (thanks primarily to being surrounded by wonderful friends, having many and varied interests, and being of (reasonably) sound body and mind) but there have definitely been times, and some of them comparatively recently, when I have been so beset by anxiety (bordering on depression) that getting out of bed, facing the day, just bothering, has felt almost too much of an effort. So I was curious to find out what a visit to The Science Gallery's recent On Edge:Living in an Age of Anxiety exhibition last weekend could teach me.
Oddly enough, I didn't know I was going to attend this exhibition until I got there. I'd actually travelled to The Science Gallery (a pleasant and free new space near London Bridge with a range of temporary exhibitions and a spacious cafe for coffee and cakes afterwards) with the intention of seeing their Hooked show about the affects of addiction. When I got there, however, it didn't appear to be on. Completely contradicting their website. Never mind, no need to get anxious about it. I went with the flow and visited the exhibition they did have on instead - and I was glad I did.
Harold Offeh - Mindfully Dizzy (2019)
It's difficult to report upon On Edge as an art experience (though there was, indeed, plenty of art there) but, equally, it's not a full on science lesson either. The curators took a risk of falling between stools and sometimes they did just that. Some works just didn't work out and one or two others, perhaps because the exhibition was nearing the end of its run, were looking a little careworn or weren't as functional as I assumed they should have been.
Others were confusing, bewildering even (as life can be when suffering from extreme levels of anxiety), and there were even a couple of examples that seemed a little bit too instructive, a little bit "yeah, but you do know", and left you with the feeling that you'd been trapped in a corridor with a person who'd just done a first term of a sociology course and was determined to tell you, ignorant you, lots of things they thought you didn't already know.
They're worthwhile complaints about On Edge but they're far from the whole picture (and, anyway, it was free so stop moaning, Evans). The show did, as I feel these shows must, make me think. It made me think about anxiety. It made me think about my anxiety. It made me realise that though it's very real, some people have way more intense experiences than I do.
Anxiety's not unique to me. Far from it. Everyone will suffer with it to at least some degree in their life. What's important is how we manage it, how we cope with it, and how, if we can really get a grip on it, we can harness it and use it for our own advancement. Stress and danger are inherent in life and anxiety is a normal, standard, response to those things. It gives us the adrenaline to cope with stressful and dangerous situations but it can also leave us riddled with self-doubt. It can be fleeting or it can hang around. It can be purely mental or it can have physical characteristics like dizziness or shortness of breath.
It can be a friend or it can be, to put it bluntly, a right bastard. The Science Gallery has provided quiet spaces for people to contemplate both the exhibition, their anxieties, and their responses to their anxieties but here I am fortunate. I'm not triggered by crowds, noise, other people, and I don't worry a lot about my status or how I'm perceived by society. I don't like being around people who are bullying, unpleasant, arrogant, or those I simply think don't like me but, mostly, I'm cool with various different groups and happy to be either the centre of attention (when I'm comfortable) or sit quietly on the sidelines (when I'm less sure of myself or not in the mood).
I'm equally content to wile away hours and days alone. I've had three week long holidays where I've barely had a conversation and I work, live, and regularly eat alone. Most exhibitions, this one for example, I attend solo and when I get home and write about them I do that alone too. I go to bed on my own. I wake up on my own. I'm okay with that. For now. But I am anxious about getting old alone, I worry about getting ill, I worry about money, I worry about the ongoing political shitshow and how that will develop in the coming years, and I worry about death. I worry I will die alone, unwell, and unloved.
But I don't tend to get dizzy (unless alcohol is involved) and I'm rarely short of breath (unless I've been for a run) so when I look at a work like Sarah Howe's Consider Falling I realise that my problems are at quite the opposite end of the spectrum to those unfortunate to find themselves with DPD. DPD (Depersonalisation disorder) is a condition in which the sufferer starts to feel that reality is unreal. Or even to feel as if they, themselves, are not real.
It affects between 1-2% of the population which is a significant minority and yet I'd never heard of it before. Those experiencing DPD may undergo a sensation in which they feel they are looking in on themselves, almost as if they are a second, or third, person and Howe's interviewed those accessing the DPD Research Units at King's and the Maudsley in an attempt to get a handle on what it might be like.
The resulting artwork can, of course, only go a very small way to articulating the condition. It would seem obvious that each person who has experienced DPD would have a very unique experience of it. Even if similarities would become evident should enough research have been carried out. The hands, faces, and eyes in Howe's work are reflected in oddly placed mirrors in rooms with unconventional shapes and discombobulating angles. It's confusing, for sure, to look at but it must be a drop in the ocean compared to the very real thing.
It's a noble effort and, in that, it's typical of much here. That's not to discredit it entirely however. There is still much to be done to understand DPD and other anxiety based conditions and this is certainly the first exhibition of its type I have attended. So anybody even trying to do something about it should be applauded. These, and works like Harold Offeh's Mindfully Dizzy (a sound work accompanied by an aesthetically pleasing 'lenticular' pattern that look at 'mindfulness' as a technique to reduce anxiety), may just be the first stones thrown into the stream that will one day create a bridge across the river of restlessness we all paddle hesitantly in.
Others were confusing, bewildering even (as life can be when suffering from extreme levels of anxiety), and there were even a couple of examples that seemed a little bit too instructive, a little bit "yeah, but you do know", and left you with the feeling that you'd been trapped in a corridor with a person who'd just done a first term of a sociology course and was determined to tell you, ignorant you, lots of things they thought you didn't already know.
They're worthwhile complaints about On Edge but they're far from the whole picture (and, anyway, it was free so stop moaning, Evans). The show did, as I feel these shows must, make me think. It made me think about anxiety. It made me think about my anxiety. It made me realise that though it's very real, some people have way more intense experiences than I do.
Anxiety's not unique to me. Far from it. Everyone will suffer with it to at least some degree in their life. What's important is how we manage it, how we cope with it, and how, if we can really get a grip on it, we can harness it and use it for our own advancement. Stress and danger are inherent in life and anxiety is a normal, standard, response to those things. It gives us the adrenaline to cope with stressful and dangerous situations but it can also leave us riddled with self-doubt. It can be fleeting or it can hang around. It can be purely mental or it can have physical characteristics like dizziness or shortness of breath.
It can be a friend or it can be, to put it bluntly, a right bastard. The Science Gallery has provided quiet spaces for people to contemplate both the exhibition, their anxieties, and their responses to their anxieties but here I am fortunate. I'm not triggered by crowds, noise, other people, and I don't worry a lot about my status or how I'm perceived by society. I don't like being around people who are bullying, unpleasant, arrogant, or those I simply think don't like me but, mostly, I'm cool with various different groups and happy to be either the centre of attention (when I'm comfortable) or sit quietly on the sidelines (when I'm less sure of myself or not in the mood).
I'm equally content to wile away hours and days alone. I've had three week long holidays where I've barely had a conversation and I work, live, and regularly eat alone. Most exhibitions, this one for example, I attend solo and when I get home and write about them I do that alone too. I go to bed on my own. I wake up on my own. I'm okay with that. For now. But I am anxious about getting old alone, I worry about getting ill, I worry about money, I worry about the ongoing political shitshow and how that will develop in the coming years, and I worry about death. I worry I will die alone, unwell, and unloved.
But I don't tend to get dizzy (unless alcohol is involved) and I'm rarely short of breath (unless I've been for a run) so when I look at a work like Sarah Howe's Consider Falling I realise that my problems are at quite the opposite end of the spectrum to those unfortunate to find themselves with DPD. DPD (Depersonalisation disorder) is a condition in which the sufferer starts to feel that reality is unreal. Or even to feel as if they, themselves, are not real.
It affects between 1-2% of the population which is a significant minority and yet I'd never heard of it before. Those experiencing DPD may undergo a sensation in which they feel they are looking in on themselves, almost as if they are a second, or third, person and Howe's interviewed those accessing the DPD Research Units at King's and the Maudsley in an attempt to get a handle on what it might be like.
The resulting artwork can, of course, only go a very small way to articulating the condition. It would seem obvious that each person who has experienced DPD would have a very unique experience of it. Even if similarities would become evident should enough research have been carried out. The hands, faces, and eyes in Howe's work are reflected in oddly placed mirrors in rooms with unconventional shapes and discombobulating angles. It's confusing, for sure, to look at but it must be a drop in the ocean compared to the very real thing.
It's a noble effort and, in that, it's typical of much here. That's not to discredit it entirely however. There is still much to be done to understand DPD and other anxiety based conditions and this is certainly the first exhibition of its type I have attended. So anybody even trying to do something about it should be applauded. These, and works like Harold Offeh's Mindfully Dizzy (a sound work accompanied by an aesthetically pleasing 'lenticular' pattern that look at 'mindfulness' as a technique to reduce anxiety), may just be the first stones thrown into the stream that will one day create a bridge across the river of restlessness we all paddle hesitantly in.
Sarah Howe - Consider Falling (2017)
Sarah Howe - Consider Falling (2017)
Sarah Howe - Consider Falling (2017)
Leah Clements - To Not Follow Under (2019)
'Mindfully Dizzy' uses Dizzy Gillespie's bebop track Dizzy Atmosphere alongside snippets of text about mindfulness and people explaining dizziness in clinical fashion. Offeh sees jazz, a form of music that arose in black America as a form of resistance to oppression, as an ideal metaphor for anxiety. The listener may experience relaxation and confusion at the same time when listening to jazz and with its celebration of improvisation and complexity it says, obliquely, many things about our own confusing relationship with the spaces we inhabit.
Sometimes I lay down on my sofa, turn all the lights, and just really listen to a piece of music. I go more for minimal compositions from the likes of William Basinski, Stars of the Lid, or even reggae artists like Keith Hudson than I do jazz. But the idea is the same. To immerse myself completely in the moment of music and to cleanse my soul of the anxieties and the (often minor and fleeting) concerns of day to day existence.
It helps me sleep. It's probably as close to mindfulness as I get these days (though when I used to run on a treadmill at the gym the sheer intensity of that helped focus my mind on one thing and one thing only). I wonder if these little things, taking time out of one's day to be really with yourself, help us. As a younger man, I'd have doubted it. But I've changed and now I'm convinced the net benefit is huge.
It may not work for everyone but it helps me. I've inherited, possibly, from my parents some mixed messages about sleeping. My dad can fall asleep anywhere and often does (I remember, as a kid, he dropped off in a sandpit in Pontins - Bracklesham Bay). He's a restless man and rarely sits still for long but when he does, it's not long before he nods off. It's a rare occasion he sees a film through to the end.
My mum, however, is beset by insomnia. She would consider two to three hours a night a good sleep and regularly mentions how debilitating it can be. While at the same time, like my dad, being pretty active for her age. Sometimes I can't sleep well but reasonably regular routines, at least some basic exercise, not drinking too much, and lying in the dark listening to music seem to have helped loads.
I'm sleeping great now. But though lack of sleep can be a sign of anxiety, so can too much sleep. Leah Clement's To Not Follow Under takes a look at people who appear to be asleep but are probably not. People with sleep disorders who, not dissimilar in some ways to DPD sufferers, remove themselves from their situation.
People who 'go under' (as if experiencing hypnosis). Clements' intention is to reflect on the chasm between the sleep neurologist, the psychologist, and, er, the deep sea diver. Because they go under too. I'd not want to belittle a work that "includes a conversation about suicide" and makes very real attempts to express the pain in never being able to reach another person once they've closed themselves off to you but the video of a lady stood on her bed and another of people talking in what looked like some kind of spaceship didn't make a lot of sense to me.
It may not work for everyone but it helps me. I've inherited, possibly, from my parents some mixed messages about sleeping. My dad can fall asleep anywhere and often does (I remember, as a kid, he dropped off in a sandpit in Pontins - Bracklesham Bay). He's a restless man and rarely sits still for long but when he does, it's not long before he nods off. It's a rare occasion he sees a film through to the end.
My mum, however, is beset by insomnia. She would consider two to three hours a night a good sleep and regularly mentions how debilitating it can be. While at the same time, like my dad, being pretty active for her age. Sometimes I can't sleep well but reasonably regular routines, at least some basic exercise, not drinking too much, and lying in the dark listening to music seem to have helped loads.
I'm sleeping great now. But though lack of sleep can be a sign of anxiety, so can too much sleep. Leah Clement's To Not Follow Under takes a look at people who appear to be asleep but are probably not. People with sleep disorders who, not dissimilar in some ways to DPD sufferers, remove themselves from their situation.
People who 'go under' (as if experiencing hypnosis). Clements' intention is to reflect on the chasm between the sleep neurologist, the psychologist, and, er, the deep sea diver. Because they go under too. I'd not want to belittle a work that "includes a conversation about suicide" and makes very real attempts to express the pain in never being able to reach another person once they've closed themselves off to you but the video of a lady stood on her bed and another of people talking in what looked like some kind of spaceship didn't make a lot of sense to me.
In the context of the show, at least, the lack of sense did make a kind of sense. The next room was adorned with tables, chairs, and books to flick through and it was, as an advert used to say, "the science bit". It took in the GLAD Study (the largest study ever of depression and anxiety which looks into Genetic Links to Anxiety and Depression), research that has shown links between climate change, anxiety, and activism, polarisation in society, and entrenchment in one's own belief systems,
There was even an interactive part you could do but as it involved completing a half hour long questionnaire and sending a bag of spit through the post I decided to opt out. Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg were touched on. Which should suitably annoy many men, roughly the same age as me, who seem to get particularly triggered by a teenage girl doing exactly what they've been telling teenagers to do for years - getting out of her bedroom and stopping moping about and doing something because she doesn't like how things are.
You can never please these grumps. You're either a lazy good for nothing or you're an interfering do gooder. I'm sure they're just angry because they're closer to death. Perhaps they're anxious about their impending demise and that anxiety is manifesting itself as hatred towards anyone different to them. Thunberg has spoken about how her own activism helped her own mental state by giving her life more purpose. Maybe they need to find a positive purpose in life instead of their raison d'etre being to slag off everyone, and everything, else. Piers Morgan's not a role model. He's a nasty little prick who hacks murdered children's telephones.
Lots of stuff in this section would no doubt turn him (and his fellow travellers:- Julia Hartley-Brewer and Laurence Fox) puce but then most things do. They're professionally angry. Taking Jeremy Clarkson as inspiration they've seen how you can monetise fake outrage and create a place for yourself and the TV shows and newspapers that book these people and pay them for writing columns must shoulder some of the blame for lowering the tone of debate.
For the most part (Fox generally does seem as thick as he makes out) these are intelligent people faking ignorance so that those who genuinely lack the skills to think for themselves (or simply lack the vital human trait of curiosity, thus assuming they're always right) feel empowered. The sort of pricks who started online campaigns for Clarkson to be Prime Minister are, I feel certain, happy now that a boorish liar very much in the same mould as him actually is in Number Ten.
Righteous exhibitions and studies like this won't change anything though and artworks like Cian McConn's Infinite Label List will simply be sneered at by those looking to start a pseudo (or actual) culture war. Hell, I'm roughly on his side and I wasn't impressed. McConn says "I began this work in the lead up to the Irish abortion referendum in 2018. I was struck by the fact that many Irish women I knew had experience of abortion and yet it was illegal" and mentions how people will wear t-shirts with meaningless slogans and wondering what it'd look like if the words really said something about us.
Cian McConn - The Infinite Label List (2019)
Cian McConn - The Infinite Label List (2019)
Cian McConn - The Infinite Label List (2019)
There's a page of examples of words people might like to have emblazoned on their chests for every letter of the alphabet and though it's well meaning it's a bit dull. Such an emotive subject could have been handled in a defter, and far more dynamic, way surely. If you want people to take notice you have to grab their attention and the words 'pregnant', 'abused', or 'fuck' on a sheet of A4 in a gallery that will probably only be visited by those already on your side won't make a blind bit of difference.
McConn did a lot better with Some People Have No Shoes. An audio experience inspired by a day in London when McConn was running late and stressing about doing so. He noticed a person with no shoes and put into perspective his anxiety about minor tardiness in comparison to the problems suffered by the person with no shoes. Or the person with no legs. Or the person with no home.
It's a simple message really but it's one that bears repeating. "At least you have a roof over your head" is, of course, a cliche but many don't (more and more in Britain following ten years of Tory government, that's an undeniable fact) and it does us no harm to sometimes, another cliche, count our blessings instead of bemoaning what we haven't got. Like his Infinite Label List it was a small gesture but, unlike that work, it carried power and spoke it to people who might need to hear it.
Cian McConn - Some People Have No Shoes (2019)
Alice May Williams - With You, If You Need (2019)
Alice May Williams - With You, If You Need (2019)
Alice May Williams - With You, If You Need (2019)
Positive thinking probably can't help with genuine clinical depression but if you're just a bit down in the dumps it's always worth a try. Ring a friend, put some music on, make a cup of tea. It'll change your mood for the better in the tiniest of ways but these small differences are the ones that make up the big differences. Another thing you can do is a join a club. Or a sports team.
Alice May Williams, with her With You, If You Need, series has looked at how team sports can impact positively on mental health. She's interviewed female football players with experience of anxiety and the message she got from them was the combination of focusing mind and body at the same time and the use of positive, supportive language from teammates as well as the feeling of being needed by others, even if it's just for ninety minutes on a Sunday morning, all helped players to feel like their life had more worth, more meaning. The art she's made uses the designs of football jerseys overwritten with the sort of things these players shout out to each other on match day to give a nice, warm Roy Lichtenstein vibe to an exhibition that, elsewhere, is a little grey and scholarly.
Sarah Howe - Consider Falling (2017)
Benedict Drew - The Bad Feel Loops (2019)
Benedict Drew - The Bad Feel Loops (2019)
As are the two equally baffling video installations shoved into the corners of the show and easy to miss. Benedict Drew's The Bad Feel Loops was in a room with some rather comfy cushions and I nearly did my daily 'mindfulness' there and then (I did mention how well/much I'm sleeping atm). But Drew's work was far from relaxing. It wasn't intended to be. Inspired by the Italian theorist Franco Berardi's book Breathing - Chaos and Poetry about information overload, Drew has given us just that. An overload.
Feedback, awkward rhythms, jarring imagery, and meaningless text constantly flash in front of the viewer on two screens but what, at first, you might think would give you a headache soon becomes ambient background noise. As the cushions get comfier, the noise becomes less obtrusive and, as generations of city dwellers have done, you learn to filter it out or even start to enjoy it. It's coping - live - and you're the star!
Lislegaard's Bellona (After Samuel R.Delany) was less interesting and with no cushions to recline on I spent less time taking it in. A story (supposedly) unfolds in an imaginary American town that had been destroyed by a mysterious event. An event which has transformed the town into a "place beyond reason", a kind of city-cum-maze whose flexible architecture reflects our own state of uncertainty.
That makes it sound way more exciting than it actually is. What really happens is you watch another couple of screens as heavily illuminated geometrical shapes warp and blend into each other. It's pleasant enough but to what end I couldn't be sure. The accompanying text only confuses things further with its talk of how "the miracle of order has run out", "a deceiving warmth that asks nothing" provided by dual moons, and a "spaceless preserve" where "any slippage can occur".
Ann Lislegaard - Bellona (After Samuel R.Delany) (2005)
Ann Lislegaard - Bellona (After Samuel R.Delany) (2005)
Ann Lislegaard - Bellona (After Samuel R.Delany) (2005)
Cally Spooner - Notes On Humiliation (2017)
It looked like it'd be a nice place to visit - but it didn't sound like it. Cognitive dissonance and anxiety based for sure. But not all that interesting. Nor was Cally Spooner's wordy Notes On Humiliation which transcribed extracts from an interview with a psychiatric doctor with drawings of the adrenal glands that produce cortisol. It seeks to draw parallels between the now discredited medical condition of 'hysteria' and a media who made out anti-Trump and anti-Brexit campaigners to be hysterical.
But, as someone who is anti-Trump and is anti-Brexit, I can vouch that plenty on my side see the others as hysterical too. If you're going to accuse people of being unreasonable, it's probably best not to be unreasonable about it. Even if you're right. Which I am.
Less didactic and more restful was Resolve Collective's Common Thread which looked at how anxiety is perceived across cultures and languages and how our feelings about it have changed over the years. A little tent (for want of a better word) contains books on the subject and there's a tapestry around it to encourage relaxation and even speaking to strangers. Shock horror!
Resolve Collective - Common Thread (2019)
Resolve Collective - Common Thread (2019)
I wasn't particularly in a chatting to strangers mood and, anyway, the two people already there seemed happily deep in conversation with each other so I passed on to the final part of the show. Suzanne Treister's Post-Surveillance Art Posters. Which are hung above and around the stairs you exit the exhibition space down. They were colourful and fun and they looked like adverts for late eighties rave events.
But, like so much in the show, a information board told the visitor that actually they were about how "pervasive and deeply entrenched use of data collection technologies" affects contemporary culture. Treister's take is that we accept this as a given, stop fighting against it, and celebrate it. Or at least mess about with it. Try to fuck over the data scrapers as much as they try to us.
But plenty have tried that and plenty have failed. For the most part they've done it in slightly more interesting ways too. In that respect, Treister's work was typical of this well meaning show. It had great intentions at the heart of it but just didn't really come up with answers or, more pertinently I felt, ask the right questions.
I think the idea behind On Edge:Living in an Age of Anxiety was a great one and some artists (Alice May Williams and Sarah Howe particularly) managed to do interesting things with it but elsewhere the potential was never fully realised. In that respect it was as if the show suffered from its own anxiety. As if it was not confident enough to say what it really wanted to say and, instead, fell back on cliches of contemporary art and cod psychology. I'd like to see the curators of this show come back to the theme in a couple of years but with braver art and braver artists that aren't afraid to resist convention and say what they really feel. I didn't feel anxious as I left to meet my friend Darren for a curry and a pint. I just felt a bit underwhelmed.
But, like so much in the show, a information board told the visitor that actually they were about how "pervasive and deeply entrenched use of data collection technologies" affects contemporary culture. Treister's take is that we accept this as a given, stop fighting against it, and celebrate it. Or at least mess about with it. Try to fuck over the data scrapers as much as they try to us.
But plenty have tried that and plenty have failed. For the most part they've done it in slightly more interesting ways too. In that respect, Treister's work was typical of this well meaning show. It had great intentions at the heart of it but just didn't really come up with answers or, more pertinently I felt, ask the right questions.
I think the idea behind On Edge:Living in an Age of Anxiety was a great one and some artists (Alice May Williams and Sarah Howe particularly) managed to do interesting things with it but elsewhere the potential was never fully realised. In that respect it was as if the show suffered from its own anxiety. As if it was not confident enough to say what it really wanted to say and, instead, fell back on cliches of contemporary art and cod psychology. I'd like to see the curators of this show come back to the theme in a couple of years but with braver art and braver artists that aren't afraid to resist convention and say what they really feel. I didn't feel anxious as I left to meet my friend Darren for a curry and a pint. I just felt a bit underwhelmed.
Suzanne Treister - Post-Surveillance Art Posters (2014)
Suzanne Treister - Post-Surveillance Art Posters (2014
