The limitations of satire (from a-n)

 

I made a new piece today called ‘You have Bean watching’. To extend on using iconic British characters, I borrowed the image of Mr. Bean with his teddy and placed it on a BBC news broadcast still image. I put one of my diagrams on the screen at the back. This time with scribbles over it. I’ll leave it to the viewers’ imaginations as to why.

What I’ve noticed about the characters I’m using is that they were created initially as a satirical move of figures who are ‘institutionally approved’, and then the characters became institutions in their own right, which became bigger than the setting that housed them. The limitations of creating work that aims to be satire is popularity being the kil-unaliving point. I think that’s partly why BANK art collective separated, because they became too well-liked. I’m imagining that they probably partly felt stuck after they received the Arts Council funding for one of their shows, because funding is in some ways a limitation.

I’m using my own situation to generate that kind of thought, because at the moment I’m not getting any funding for my work, and haven’t received funding in the past, but because I haven’t tried applying for funding, I don’t have to be as predictable with what I do. I can change my mind, and no one would be none the wiser, which is a sort of danger to institutions.

It’s partly out of self-defence to think this, but the mind gives us mechanisms to protect us, which in the reality of getting funding in the 2020s, isn’t strictly an unhealthy mechanism as perceived compared to previous decades. Would you rather have people who are bitter about not getting funding, or people who have accepted their non-fundable status and have a different perspective on it? I actually think this is key to coping with structural unfairness, because no one has solutions to change the current structure.