Installation view from 1996 exhibition Popoccultural featuring Simon Bill, Ellen Cantor, John Cussans & Ranu Mukherjee, Jeremy Deller, Cosey Fanni Tutti & Chris Carter, Jason Fox, Dan Graham, Paul McCarthy, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Simon Periton, Jeffrey Vallance. Curated by Cabinet Gallery.
We are surrounded by an invisible host of angels, a world closed to our own five senses. What happens when these creatures slip or are dragged, or perhaps of their own volition, cross over into this world, is that in order to appear to us at all they must become ‘worlded’. Picture it as a layer in the atmosphere through which they must pass, and within which they must be constituted for us, rather like a cloud of iconographic garbage. The distorted contents of the collective unconscious. The stuff that’s in our heads whether we want it there or not. In order to become visible to us, they must assemble bodies, (or perhaps have bodies forced upon them), form the contents of this enormous reject pool of discarded but stubbornly persistent images. Like painting your body with glue and running through a thrift store. They crash through the layers of dross and stumble into this world with bodies composed from a wildly heterogeneous and functionally inappropriate collection of parts.
