The Trickle-Down Syndrome
- Submitting institution
-
University College London
: B - UoA32B The Slade School of Fine Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory : B - UoA32B The Slade School of Fine Art
- Output identifier
- 15515
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The output is a multi-media installation investigating the metaphors of neo-liberalism, specifically the (imaginary) material structures and forces implied by trickle-down economics (TDE). The output explores forms expressing alienation and the ‘low’ or ‘base’, referencing the productions of countercultures, made for and by those rejecting liberal economic systems or materialism. The output reveals TDE to be an idealizing ‘materialism’, imagining wealth as a substance trickling down through channels of some kind, from top to base (presenting vertical systems as ideal). In contrast to this, the output presents images of ‘base’ substances collecting at the bottom of this (imagined) TDE hierarchy. Alienation and mental ill-health as the byproduct of TDE is alluded to through psychedelic forms. These visual and sonic works – paintings, videos, a big band performance and drawings in a free newspaper ¬– also point to the ways in which psychedelia espouses collective experience, production and distribution (presenting horizontal systems or synthesis as ideal). In this, the output investigates how psychedelia affords alternative metaphors and concepts through which to imagine economies and relations, pointing also to psychedelia’s ecstatic transcendence of materiality that both emerges from and counters division and alienation produced by hierarchical economies. The research does not address whether TDE redistributes wealth; instead, the output reveals its underpinning concepts as supporting a self-perpetuating hierarchical model that necessarily produces division, from which a counter-cultural exploration of immateriality emerges as a conceptual antonym. To this end, the output, most notably in its sonic presentations, explores the inclusive and immersive aesthetics of psychedelia as a model for relations, particularly as set out in the ‘west-coast’ philosophy of designer Donald Buchla, who wanted to invent new ways of interfacing with instruments through the synthesis of noise rather than the hierarchical reduction and division of sound.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -