Ready made, this is each hand crafted cassette tape, proposed by artist Marcel Duchamp proposed in 1915. Each tape represents an altered state, a mass produced commodity customised by hand into something individual,
like some fictional droid that forms its own character and consciousness once let loose into the world. These are Tapes of Wrath that take as their theme modes of oppression and its continuous defeat by those who resist control but also the flourishing of seeds on barren land awoken from their dormant state by swee sun and fresh rain.
There is also the relentless vigil that is the perspective of the flaneur, who strolls effortlessly through streets of Blade Runner cool, except the scene is set in Charles Baudelaire’s time, fifty years before Duchamp famously exhibited his urinal art work. The same era that sociologist Walter Benjamin described feeling ’empathy’ as an intoxication, to which the flaneur abandons himself in the crowd.
Tapes du Mal, each side is filled with the detritus of a modern decadence, the fairy tale that is capitalist achievement, an evolutionary monkey tail that one day may fade away to a stump. Art is the greatest myth of all, the most alluring Republic yet created, an alchemy of pure magic that turns lead into gold and gold into lead before our eyes, money for nothing, money that grows on trees.
Popular culture is the crowd, intoxicated by the phenomenon of fame but what makes someone famous is less important than the spectacle of fame itself, modernist platitudes of philosophical merit have been superseded by reality TV consensus.
Celebrity is the thing that drives our culture ever onwards, a super real, super normal, even super natural phenomenon, drawing us with magnetic certainty into the labyrinth of superlative marketing strategy. A super marketed, superficial maze of digital replication and downloaded fantasy, that is out of date the moment it is released into the omnipresent market.
