Mike Stubbs - Holding all possible worlds, Artists as Conduits: Absorbing Pain
“In All Possible Worlds” infers our situation wherever we be, is utopian in outlook, my glass if forever half full…. Until I read the ‘newspaper’. Genocide and trade wars make uneasy reading. I get out of bed to hear someone having a rant in the street, its 6.30 am, and I am reminded of Boys from the Blackstuff. Mental un-health is not only reserved for those facing a lack of traditional forms of employment but also anyone sensitive and triggered by atrocity and injustice. Some of us share the possibility to live in more fluid, self-defined modes of existence, yet within an internationally hostile environment where support for the Palestinians might lead to artists and institutions being threatened or incarcerated. How can this situation not inform our selection of artists for an arts festival? MAW provides the opportunity to bring attention to artists we have spent difficult times with, who choose unflinching to gaze at those unpleasant situations and scenes which many of us choose to block out or need to look away from, absorbing social, psychological, and environmental breakdown, playing with other possibilities in ways they only know how and often reflecting their own or societal trauma.
Artists often pick up on what the rest of society struggles to acknowledge. Whether working through grief, protest, satire or endurance, many artists absorb difficult truths and reflect them back in ways that resist simplification. Rather than offer closure, their work holds space for discomfort — creating forms that allow pain, confusion, and contradiction to surface.
Not individual catharsis alone, but trauma processing and attempts to find agency.
During the Vietnam War, figures like Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann took radically different but equally uncompromising approaches. Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971) — a silent, unscored film of autopsies in a Pittsburgh morgue — demanded the viewer’s presence. There is no narrative or voiceover. You simply watch the body being opened. In the context of Vietnam-era media sanitisation, Brakhage’s film made clear: to see something, you must risk being changed by it. Carolee Schneemann, by contrast, used her own body to critique the violence of both war and patriarchy. In works like Viet-Flakes (1965) mediating newspaper photos to a montage of contemporary pop sounds in collaboration with James Tenney. A film collage of war atrocities alongside live performance and sound, exposed the horror beneath the numbness of mass media. Schneemann’s response was emotional, embodied and direct. Her work reminded audiences that the political is always personal which we saw throughout her lifetime practice as a feminist.
This historical legacy continues in today’s conflict-ridden world. Artists like Darren Cullen and Simon Poulter respond to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, though they work with different tools yet radical approaches.
Cullen’s satirical interventions deconstruct the machinery of state violence, propaganda, and militarisation. In Action Man: PTSD Edition and Pocket Money Loans, he mimics the graphic language of advertising and military recruitment to expose how trauma is packaged and sold. Apartheid Apartments, shows Britain’s role in arming Israel, using the aesthetics of branding to highlight the contradictions in public policy and private profit.
Cullen’s work is rooted in research. He uses humour to disarm, but the emotional payload confuses. His satire goes beyond irony to strategy. He replicates institutional aesthetics to flip them inside out — showing us how language, design and repetition function as soft power.
The new series New Normal and Flooding the Zone by Simon Poulter, contains water colour painting scenes from the Donetsk region (sourced off reddit initially) at the beginning of the Ukraine war –an act of resistance, in confounding the immediacy of electronic mediation through learning the Turner technique of water colour, during pandemic lockdown and his Brexit period. His practice is far from immediate in fixing the image, but immediate in the slow process and accident of watercolours mixing on the paper. The media work focuses on the systems that mediate conflict: surveillance, data, digital propaganda. In the age of the livestreamed battlefield and algorithmic feeds, Poulter’s work asks: how is our perception of war shaped, filtered, and often numbed through an alternative timeline.
The wars themselves are not abstract. But our access to them often is. Poulter and Cullen confront this distance and try to make it visible — whether through absurdity, recursion, or stark confrontation in the stealthy public space of a ‘fake’ estate agent – more ‘Trump Gaza’ than Trumps’. This artists selection includes people who can claim to be working class or of that heritage, certainly none have had an easy ride.
Linda Cassels performs slow, quiet acts in public space — walking, tracing, speaking — as ways of tuning into urban situations and transmitting a strong sense of memory, grief and anger. I've Got the Power, her new commission for MAW and ArtBomb, unfolds through a performative presence which is hard to look away from. Cassels doesn’t depict suffering, she registers it — physically, durationally, ritually. Her work is an emotional barometer of social justice, informed by her own background as black South African, nurse turned artist and mother.
Rosie Gibbens develops a new work Unimate for MAW and ArtBomb, which continues to play and explore the friction between the body, sexuality and technology. Her new work uses home-made prosthetics, and kitchen implements to highlight the awkwardness of being human in an age of optimisation and as a new mother. There’s humour in the work, dark humour and discomfort, sharing that edge found in Semiotics
of the kitchen by Martha Rosler a work she admires. Flirting with her own sexuality and the efficiency of time sits at the heart of Rosies work as a feminist.
John B. Ledger is un-afraid to reveal the internal conflict of male identity and how that is informed. Son of a coal miner in South Yorkshire we see direct reference to ecology, class, aspiration and perceived failure. The large paintings are often framed by modern history whether austerity, patriotism or asylum seeking. His layered drawings, writing and collages channel working-class experience, and the mental health effects of marginalisation. A place where possibilities for many have been removed through the impact of economic, social engineering on communities, his family and him. His works include titles Long Night of the Needless Storm, Debtland and Stuck in the Sediment of Suffering. Ledger’s visual language is organic - a visual of protest of slogans, full of ghosts, conspiracies and scars. There’s something Brakhage-like in his forensic intensity, though emotional expression is central to the work. As if semi-conscious, mapping a society under pressure, through the self and experience in some way and reminiscent of ‘automatic drawing’ practiced by Andre Masson a surrealist, himself badly injured as soldier in the 1st world war prior to joining the surrealists.
Filippos Tsitsopoulos stages surreal, theatrical performances that channel historical trauma and myth. Using masks, puppets and absurdist gestures, he explores the space between mourning and play. He has a repertoire. His works often evoke ancient rituals through Shakespearian language, while engaging with contemporary instability and pain “Where my pain killer, where’s my pain killer”— making visible the emotional disorientation of modern life and finding a strategy of not going crazy in world media saturated in war and destruction. The new work The Auction of Morality moves beyond reflects on what it means to shit in our own bed, (me misquoting Chief Seattle), but who has the right to claim the moral high ground, and can afford to outsource the dirty, which raises important reflection on cultural appropriation and virtue signalling.
All these artists share something essential: a commitment to noticing. This is cultural labour, doing the slow work of paying attention — to conflict, to grief, to structural violence, to the emotional effects of inequality on the self and societies.
This work comes at a cost. Artists absorb pain — whether that’s personal, geopolitical or ecological — take it into their nervous systems. They carry it in ways that can be isolating, draining and the same time liberating. Institutions, curators, and funders may recognise this, but sometimes not enough. Not just in words, but in how we structure time, resources, and support and acknowledging our own limitations and so on.
The question isn't “What is this art about?” It’s “What is this art carrying?” What load has the artist taken on? What are they holding that the rest of us would rather not look at?
Absorbing what we disown, giving it form and holding it long enough that maybe, some of us can face it. These artists have been friends in hard times and help process acts sometimes unwatchable.
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to see for oneself", In The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes, a film made in 1971, Stan Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes." - Hollis Frampton.
Chief Seattle’s Letter to All
https://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/seattle.htm