"Prussian Blue" (synthetic seduction)

Daniel Jackson
Mark Jones
Jamie Robinson
Laura White
Thomas Draschan
Paul Sakoilsky
Colin Smith
Gavin Nolan
Denise Kum
Chris Fitzpatrick
Godfried Donkor

The Christmas season is upon us, conspicuous consumption at its most visible, credit cards are maxed out. More death and destruction on the news, another scandal to get our teeth into and we can't seem to get enough.

"Prussian Blue" (synthetic seduction) is an examination and exploration of the dynamics and complexities of consumerism during this season to be jolly. As producers and consumers we go round in an inescapable loop of culpability, responsibility and morality, caught in the world and trapped in time and place. Only creativity in its many guises can be either a way of escape or a way for redress.

The first modern artificially manufactured color was Prussian blue. Made by the colormaker Diesbach of Berlin in about 1704. Diesbach accidentally formed the blue pigment when experimenting with the oxidation of iron. The pigment was available to artists by 1724 and was extremely popular throghout the three centuries since its discovery. More unnervingly Prussian Blue is the name of a cutesy teenage pop duo Lynx and Lamb from Bakersfield California spouting racist and fascist ideology. Lynx and Lamb are scary new entrants in to white supremacist marketing, two pretty (bleached) blond cutesy teenagers expounding their parents racist and homophobic doctrines through words, pop music and seemingly innocent good willed saccharine smiles. Home schooled on a farm, their father's branding stick for cattle is reputedly in the shape of the Swastika. These girls can be found modeling clothing for Aryan wear, an internet "fashion" accessories company selling swastika patches and other supremacist and Nazi sympathizers tat.

Type in "swastika" on ebay and at any given time over 200 listed items, stamps, coins, nazi memorabilia are for sale 24 hours seven days a week. Type in "sex" and you get over 2000 listed items. On Ebay at least, sex and swastikas sell. Hitler's own personal copy of Mein Kampf sold at auction (not ebay) recently for $23,000. (There is a persistent rumour that Prince Philip has one of the world's best collections of editions of the book.)

You can pick up a watercolour by Hitler for around $50,000 and he was reputed to have made over 2000 paintings. He almost certainly would have used Prussian blue in his work.

Mein Kampf has only been outsold by The Bible and Harry Potter. The sale of Mein Kampf alone made Hitler a millionaire with every household having to buy a copy in Germany when he came to power. It's this year's bestseller in Turkey and it's also a hot item in Poland. Mein Kampf is translated in to all main languages including Urdu. It's sale is banned in Germany and Israel. It can be bought through Amazon and many sellers.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world rightly saw a menace to humanity and millions died as a result. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner. Its president, Thomas J. Watson, engineered a strategic business alliance between IBM and the Reich, beginning in the first days of the Hitler regime and continuing right through World War II. This alliance catapulted Nazi Germany to become IBM's most important customer outside the U.S. IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.

Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make clear that IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German subsidiary. A key factor in the Holocaust in Poland was IBM technology provided directly through a special wartime Polish subsidiary reporting to IBM New York, mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue.

In this season of good cheer Prussian Blue (synthetic seduction) is a more sobering examination and exploration of the dynamics and complexities of consumerism and the role art plays in embracing cultural norms and in critiquing them. Sex and violence have been a staple in art since the earliest markings on caves thousands of years ago. The history paintings from the rennaisance through Goya to Delacroix and Picasso.

artists, like the media, have always made work about the great themes love and death and artists whatever their politics become complicit in the thing they are critiquing.
Prussian Blue (synthetic seduction) therefore goes round in a continuous loop of questioning, absorption, regurgitation and inescapability.

But as artists and consumers, aesthetes, romantics, stoics, cynics and pragmatists, the directions that we choose to go, the dreams we act on, the lives we lead and the goals we strive toward are all compromised in some way or other. Politicians call it diplomacy, the young call it lies, but most people call it getting real.

Mark Jones's direct women look out defiantly displaying their wares - pornographic and seedy a deftness of touch and references to Courbet and Sickert make them compelling if not uncomfortable.

Gavin Nolan's disturbing brutalized portraits of men and women vertiginous vaginal eyes distorted faces ugliness and aggressive a psycho-chiaroscuro dark hell, a nod and a wink to Dali, the teenage within and inner demons.

Godfried Donkor's collages of Black Madonnas - provocative and engaging these women know their heritage and flaunt their sexuality proudly. Rising out of the bowels of slave ships and surrounded by black boxers they also explore notions of stereotyping, role models and taboo.

Denise Kum war wounded are actors she has made up and photographed out of context during down time. It is hard to know what to make of them but in knowing it is make up the gruesome wounds become less a horror. The amputee extra though is a real amputee and both soldiers fought in the Balcans. Paid more as extras than in the real war these men have to relive the past for our entertainment.

Chris Fitzpatrick Bug eyed girls are a different proposition to the advertising of goods. Mutant eyes and disfigurement. yet smiley, having fun, putting on their make up blind to the reality of their disfigurement and difference.

Jamie Robinson's photographs Punk Kunst shot during a punk festival in a village in the Basque country tribes of punks gather, take over the town and party. To the excluded a threatening potentially violent group, to those in the tribe a family get together. Swastika Stamps are bought on a whim from Ebay, uncertainty, guilt and politically correct pressure conspire together. The stamps on display are put back up for auction on Ebay (auction lasting the length of the exhibition) and the selling price at a profit!

Paul Sakoilsky takes segments from Mein Kampf out of context and drawn over one text on aesthetic decisions on designing the Nazi Flag and another on the ills of teenage dress and activities, seem like the rantings of a vainly stupid old man. and render the text impotent and laughable. In his video a man attaches a clamp to his nipple and screams with pain but the screams, pain and absurdity generate painful laughter. This is Jackass Art at its highest nee lowest level.

In Colin Smith's paintings a man lies bleeding from the head lying on the ground. One wants to walk past, not get involved, whilst in another painting a passenger jet lifts off in to a beautiful sunrise. deadpan and direct, Smith's work is matter of fact, dissafected. and detached.

In Daniel Jackson's 'Extraction, Freud’s Desk – The Interpretation of Dreams’ exhibited on Freud’s Desk in the ‘Royal Road to the Unconscious’ at the Freud Museum, January 2004‘Extraction’ can take any text and, in a given period of time, will extract all the words from that text, one by one. The process continues until all the words of the text have been removed. A word is removed from the text at random and displayed. The software is extracting the words according to a rhythmic timing, using a musical 4/4 time signature structure. The structure gives the extraction of the words a rhythmic feeling, suggesting an intonation to the presentation of the
words - as if the randomly selected words are being read out. The time given to extract the text is approximately the time it would take to read the text.

Laura White's projection in to a box of domesticated budgies.
Originally from Australia in the wild are only green but have been bred for a domestic market for their cuteness. Budgies like many pets are bred as much for their aesthetics as anything else and you can order your budgie in any colour now to suit your curtains. Laura Whites work explores nature as entertainment the budgies projected in to a box, where they can't escape moving between the colors red yellow and blue. nature is synthetised and sanitised to be switched on in comfort and turned off at will.

Thomas Draschan, cuts and edits film from libraries, seventies advertising, porn, His film set to a bollywood soundtrack is a cacophany of images which explode in to our senses.