The title for Steven’s show is curious for the way it inverts the truism ‘what goes up must come down.’ Whereas this original phrase ends in a negative (to be ‘down’, interpreted here to mean ‘down and out’), Steven’s re-work ends on a figurative high. The change is not only linguistic but metaphysical, a reversal of gravity and the laws of nature.
At the conceptual heart of the installation is the video work Master of none, re-presented for this show at the end of an elongated metallic arm. It looks and sounds like a game you might play on your phone, in which one’s objective is to successfully repeat particular movements quickly against the clock, almost like a training exercise. McKenzie Wark in her Gamer Theory: video games provide an allegory for life today, which we engage as a ‘gamespace’, and whose ludic features feel predetermined (Sisyphaenely so) by the rigid physics that sustain a popular idea of progress (the accumulation of capital), and the well-worn narratives that communicate the value of this attitude towards metropolitan life today (the institution of marriage, the property market, career advancement etc.). ‘Ever feel like you’re playing a game’, she wrote in 2007. ‘Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be?’1 These words will ring true particularly to cultural workers who see Steven’s show – even while university degrees today prioritise learning as it leads specifically to job outcomes instead of intellectual nourishment, in Australia, Creative Arts degrees rank the highest in unemployability rates at 57 percent. Lol. The title for Steven’s show quite evocatively brings to mind the phrase ‘it’s only up from here.’
Master of none is counterbalanced by a large rock, like the one Sisyphus pushes up the hill along his eternal grind. The balancing of these two forms implies their proportionality, creating a long, horizontal vector between the two that informs the way one reads the gallery space.2 Balance becomes an outcome of an equation between the two, and an important framework for understanding the thematic of the show: that the way our lives and their contents are organised under the current order isn’t necessarily good for our mind or body. The line between rock and video reveals many others in the space – the line of the floor, of brick trophies (Bronze still gets you on the podium) and the carefully measured spaces between them, invisible vectors that nonetheless inform an appearance and real experience of the room. What might seem ludic has in fact been carefully conceived. At my most cynical and dramatic I might say that life is a pyramid scheme, structured in a way that might appear ‘natural’, but on careful inspection is so obviously the consequence of the decisions of people other than You, who have the power to decide. Very quickly, ‘balance’ feels rigid rather than harmonious. What might we do to tip the scales? In an art installation it would require one to flout aesthetic convention, even to the point where whoever has autonomy over the space might cancel the show. In both content and form, Steven’s What goes down, must come up gives an allegory and a framework for seeing our lives as they are informed by the vectors of superstructure.
Sebastian Henry-Jones, Steven Bellosguardo’s What goes down, must come up
1. McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007. P.1.
2. I have been deliberate in my use of the word ‘vector’, which in geometry is a line of fixed length but no fixed position: Most prominently in her Hacker Manifesto, published in 2004, Wark writes often of vectors – a technology that moves something from somewhere to somewhere else, a line of economic activity between two points. Vectors have been important routes for the transportation of raw materials from colony to empire, or the lines of communication that sustain globalisation. They move material and information all over the world, and are usually owned privately by a member of what Wark calls the ‘Vectoralist class.’ Someone’s vector is always someone else’s horizon line.