Chaos instead of anarchy in the solstice
‘We Were Promised Anarchy, But What We Got Was Chaos’ is an exhibition of new works by visual artist Alan Butler, currently running at the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan. The body of work brings together numerous approaches that lament the potential of the world wide web as a platform or device for free expression and democracy. Through the use of an assembly of new and traditional media, Butler’s work here presents the current state of the internet as a giant surveillance machine-cum-shopping mall.
The Solstice galleries are transformed into a realm of psychedelic colour, headless bodies, bodiless heads, frenetic moving images, and bombastic waffle. Manipulated pieces of seemingly unconnected information and online discourse are melded together into artworks. These attempt to critique the nature of image production, consumption and technological infrastructures. Utilising artefacts from Internet history, the works see this territory as profoundly connected to how power operates on a global scale.
Perhaps the centerpiece to the exhibition continues with Butler’s oeuvre of creating immersive, dizzying installations. The three-screen, surround-sound video artwork ‘Modern Postism. Chapter: Aubergine Emoji’ (2015) takes forms from video games, science fiction cinema and vlogging to bring together a interweaving of moving image that depicts young men from around the globe who rose to notoriety after mistaking the internet as a forum for free speech. YouTube posts and chatroom transcripts from male journalists, activists and intellectuals are re-contextualised and displayed in a sort of virtual limbo resembling a malfunctioning ‘holodeck’-cum-collective memory bank.
This notion of collective memory and its relationship to power is a recurring theme in this exhibition, none more so than in the seemingly benign stack of books that were ‘curated’ through the online browsing habits of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the elder of the Boston bombers). In *Surprise Party Breath* (2015), Tsarnaev’s entire Amazon wish-list has been purchased and stacked neatly in the gallery, meditating upon the relationships between the corporate web and surveillance.
Shopping as a medium resurfaces in many of the works. The act of trolling takes physical dimensions in another video, ‘Add to Basket Activism’ (2015), which documents the artist sending a ‘gift’ to a well-known Australian dissident, reducing the act of protest to a financial transaction.
We Were Promised Anarchy, But What We Got Was Chaos is a collision of misanthropic narratives, passive aggressive trolling, pop-culture, geo-politics, morose internet existence and cyber-warfare. This exhibition takes a comprehensive, if not subjective look at the function of Reality, as mediated by screen-based interfaces and algorithmic forces in the 21st Century.
Alan Butler has participated in artist residencies for Temple Bar Gallery and Studios; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, South Korea; Solas Nua, Washington DC; and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. Butler’s work has also been featured in projects for Graffito Books (Psychedelica, forthcoming 2015) Tumblr.com and UNIQLO (NYC). He lectures at the Department of Fine Art (Photography and Lens-based Media) at Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland.
With a BA in fine art from NCAD, 2004, and a masters from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, 2009, Butler’s has been featured in many solo and group projects/exhibitions in galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore; Hatje Cantz Con prefazione di Angela Vettese, Venice; Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; Cake Contemporary Arts, Kildare; The LAB, Dublin; G126, Galway; Galway Arts Centre, Galway; The Mermaid, Wicklow; The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Dublin Contemporary 2011; Solas Nua, Washington, DC.; Mina Dresden, San Francisco; RUA RED, Dublin; Demon’s Mouth, Oslo; Eastern Edge Gallery, Canada; Ormston House, Limerick; Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, Supermarket, Stockholm.