Democracy
Democracy is about not having a choice, obviously. It presents one or more arguments in the form of images, while we listen to the radio and the artist mainly stands on one leg. The Elizabethan Age in England was not democratic but has everything to do with Democracy now, being the first age of spectacle; authority, ‘love’ and power in every sense are intertwined to such an extent that they determine each other, spectacularised to the extent that the spectacle becomes them. One thing stands for something else like a web of nothing that hangs in the air and this web is also authority, ‘love’ and power in every sense. The Elizabethan garden was not as Dan Graham writes about the Italians that inspired it a museum-theatre where the inscription of power was determined by lines of perspective. It was of a different order: mystery, possibility and trap. Robert Dudley built one to seduce Elizabeth I in 1575, as if simply walking the labyrinthine paths around its phallic fountain would make her marry him, as easily as Robert Morris’s Column (1961-73) falls over. But he was her prisoner. Walk away. This garden stands for a system of power and is a spiteful fabric and we are still in it. What I mean is, I am in Berlin now and – turned upside-down – the famous Fernsehturm (TV Tower) looks like a hypodermic syringe that Francis Bacon might have painted for “a nailing of the flesh onto the bed.” Walk away. - I.W.
“In Ian White’s performance Democracy (2009) portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and pictures of her formal garden at Kenilworth Castle begin a 25 minute long automated PowerPoint presentation that is projected onto the gallery wall. The artist, standing in front of them, makes the painstaking transition from a durational pose, balancing on one leg, to removing his jeans, leaving one leg in. He then performs a series of steps constructed by slow, rudimentary ballet-like positions and slap-stick lunges while the audience listens to a live broadcast of the BBC World Service. As White heads for the exit, the free leg of his jeans drags behind him… White sets the insidious codedness of contemporary Empire against his reading of Elizabethan society as the “first age of spectacle”. Despite their apparent amateurishness, his dance-like movements appear as ballet – a form which itself evolved from the choreographic hierarchies of behaviour in the courtly life of Elizabethan England, or Renaissance France and Italy – and as its corruption, simultaneously.” - Catherine Wood
First performance: November 2009, Ecstatic Resistance, Grand Arts, Kansas City
Subsequently:
December 2009, Ecstatic Resistance, X Initiative, New York
April 2010, Here and Now, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf
July 2010, daad galerie, Berlin
Live performance with radio and a powerpoint presentation | c. 30mins
2009 - 2010
