APPLES MARSHMALLOWS & HAY
This series of constructed scenarios originate from personal experience and engage in social critique and exploration. They are an impression of a society that gives priority to instant gratification and self-obsession, what social theorist’s term infantilism. The images have an air of melancholy and isolation intended to reveal the repercussions of a commodity led escapism delivered to us through the dream machine of advertising. The works intention is to portray the gratification gained through commodities, ranging from drugs to fashion items, is short lived with no depth. “Consumption gives us the belief that we can fulfill our fantasies. But the actual pleasures afforded by consumption always fall short of that which we aspire. We are dissatisfied with reality, we therefore seize any pleasures consumption can offer. By doing so we sustain a constant longing an unfulfilled longing.”(Miles, 2001, p70)
The work questions the rationalization that brings us to consume what can gives instant gratification, with the knowledge that in the long term this consumption can be of detriment to others and ourselves. In a recent article on public health in the Guardian it was revealed that 69% of three year olds know the golden arches of McDonalds yet 50% of four year olds don’t know their own name. This statistic seems to compound where societies priorities lie, in commodities and instantaneity.
The work incorporates metaphors for temptation and instant gratification, in most scenarios avoiding any explicit representations of forms of instant gratification leaving the work open to interpretation with the intention of denying an instant reading. The work makes reference to psychological experimentation of the 60s, art history, and postmodern theory. The intention is to anchor readings and reveal the evident construction of the images and to negate photography as an evidential medium, in turn portraying photography as an emblematic, allegorical representation. The work draws an analogy to living in Plato’s cave of shadows, and not wanting to face the harsh light of reality. Also raising issues of living in an image bound culture, a world of superficiality and simulation, so avoiding a reality to which we are dissatisfied.
The work not only explores instant gratification but the reasons for this type of gratification. Research has been directed towards the “risk society”. Ironically the world represented in the security of our caves, can sensationalize the crime in our society. The world experienced through the media can lead society and especially the youth to take greater risks looking to escape the harsh realities of the represented world. “Furlong and Cartmel argue that young people have become especially vulnerable to the heightened sense of risk and individualization of experience that has characterized the move towards high modernity.” (Miles, 2001, p135). Parental concerns lead towards restricted freedom compared to the youth of the previous generation, the freedom that the parents had experienced when they were children. A response to this sense of heightened risk is to “curtail children’s activities in ways that may restrict their autonomy and their opportunities to develop the necessary skills to cope with the world.” (Scott et al, 1998, p701)
Living in an age of individualism and subjective truths, which no doubt has a positive impact on society, for example the tolerance of difference. However it is not without its negatives. There is a degradation of social values, community and a sense of belonging. According to a study Changing Britain, Changing Lives there has been a dramatic fall in participation in local communities. The study reveals that 60% of men born in 1946 were members of community and voluntary organisations in their 30s, but a dramatic drop to only 8% of those born in 1970. We are living in a society where every man is an island, increasing the individual’s pressures of everyday life, which in turn increases the desire for escapism and instant gratification. The combination of a society where individual pressures are increased and a new generation, which Scott suggests, is entering adulthood less able to cope with the harsh realities of the world is surely a matter of concern.
The nine images in this piece of work have no structured narrative, the intention is to give an overall impression of the aspects of society mentioned above. The use of non-diegetic inserts, a filmic terminology, such as the hay (fools gold), road kill (risk) and the garage of rubbish, disrupt the narrative flow with the intention to bring the spectator into the protagonists subconscious and emotions, also throwing light on the futility of instant gratification.
Gary Sheridan, 2004
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