The Failed Prophet (2013)
Installation view, Royal Academy Schools
Developed concurrently with a written thesis, Postmodernism and the Hegelian Turn, this installation gives physical form to the ideological conditions of postmodernism by curating and redistributing existing online voices and imagery into new physical formats. The organising metaphor is water — submersion, saturation, and the slow loss of ground.
The work occupies the floor entirely. Cardboard cut-outs of protesting women bearing the slogan “STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT” are cropped at varying heights — figures in the process of sinking, uniform and multiplied, bound by Adam Smith ties. Mop buckets of water, wet t-shirts, motivational posters reproducing misogynistic rhetoric verbatim, photography, and found imagery spread organically across the space. A Zazzle-purchased Milton Friedman t-shirt in heavy-metal typography, credited to an anonymous online avatar, sits among them.
Suspended overhead, iPods play a video montage whose original audio remains intact. The YouTube comments populating the screens are responses to that footage — a digital argument conducted above a space that has already gone under.
The title is borrowed from the montage itself.
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