“I call the interim state of life-affirming world loss ‘being in life without wanting the world.’ It occasionally gets pointed to as a symptom: of trauma, depression, or anomie. It could be better understood as a state in which the drive to stay attached to life is met by a world of inadequate objects.”
—Lauren Berlant, “No World Poetics, or, Elliptical Life” (2022)
In their book, On The Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant proposes a political distinction between life, an animated and dynamic embodiment, and the world, a set of felt conditions for collective sociality determined by institutions, events, and physical actions. In this schematic, the world is produced as a multi-layered lattice of delimiting norms. Berlant’s refrain–to be in life without wanting the world–might then suggest a possibility for life to proceed, even as the world recedes as a scene for desire. A necessary survival tactic, albeit one riddled with internal frictions: the constitutive discomforts and pleasures of touching the unknown, or unknowable.
Spread across both stories of the lofted apartment gallery Bologna.cc, Francis Whorrall-Campbell’s solo exhibition, A Picture of a Horse is Not a Critique of a Horse, stages two distinct lifeworlds. On the ground level, an arrangement of 10 ceramic horses are scattered haphazardly around an ordinary desk lamp–as if suddenly abandoned during the frenzied pivot between playtime and obligation. Modelled after the franchise My Little Pony, the handbuilt figurines are adorned with crimped tail ribbons, flowers on their flanks, and bows so large they appear to shift an overall center of gravity. Patented in 1981 by American toy conglomerate Hasbro, the source ponies were released to fill a perceived gap in “high fantasy” play: an attention to the cosmetic. An emphasis on grooming–washing, detangling, braiding–remained central to their departure from realism. When I mentioned my background research for this text to a friend, she replied, I have a memory of having the most perfect, beautiful My Little Pony, but I don’t know if it’s real or dreamed up. A pony with such large, dazzling eyes, she could only exist as the figment of a child’s imagination.
Whorrall-Campbell’s All The Pretty Horses are, however, a distinct formal slant of their corporate counterparts–perhaps understood here as populating Berlant’s world of inadequate objects. They are mottled, lanky, convex, lash-less, sculpted from one contiguous, unbrushable clay. The sole pegasus of the group balances on triangulated points of its otherworldly wing, rounded forelimb hoof, and tip of a glossy, khaki green ear. Muzzle down, quarters up; communing with the offcut of yellow marmoleum that serves as the outer boundary for the scene of make-believe. This proclivity for the ground is perhaps a gesture of the refusal intrinsic to fantasy, the abject necessarily embedded in the sublime (or as Sianne Ngai might describe, “ugly feelings”). The pegasus’ physical contortion might also be read as a nod towards pre-existing fandom inversions. In one popular theory, Equestria, home of the My Little Ponies, is actually a post-apocalyptic earth–each pony, a human who survived through species mutation to better suit their new planetary conditions.
The single channel video, Escaped Army Horses Run Wild in Central London During Rush Hour (Reuters), inhabits the next level of the gallery. Presented on a flatscreen TV with four small legs resting on the ground, the floor once again utilized as an exhibition surface, the work loops newscast footage of two military horses escaping from the King’s Barracks in Hyde Park, London. Spooked by the sounds of falling debris from a nearby construction site, the pair buck off their riders and gallop on adrenaline. This unidirectional movement provides a potential image of saturated life, animated and dynamic desire expressed through a risky exit. The white mare, Vida, is drenched in blood of an uncertain origin and charging towards a Pret-A-Manger. The off-screen specter implied by this startled motion is the sonic reverberation of development, the production of the city itself, which is fictitiously reproduced in the work–through the cyclical repetition of footage–as a racetrack-esque artifice. The feeling of scenographic reenactment is further induced by a non diegetic audio of Susan Boyle’s 2009 cover of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses on Britain's Got Talent. From a set of stout, unimposing speakers on the opposite side of the space’s upstairs platform, Susan belts out, Faith has been broken, Tears must be cried, Let's do some living, After we die.
In Whorrall-Campbell’s previous work, research into the synthesis of estrogen from mare urine entailed a consideration of the horse as anatomical material in close concert with other trans-species bodies. The works on view at Bologna.cc both emerge from this lineage and chart a necessary departure. An accompanying essay by the artist, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse…,” draws attention to the horse as a framing device–cautioning the viewer against a purely symbolic engagement with the animal as an inherent source of aesthetic or representational meaning, all the while detailing narratives of horse-as-harbinger within Christian theology. Within A Picture of a Horse is Not a Critique of a Horse, this critical ambivalence is mirrored by the multiple equine figures’ indiscernible alignments along the axes of sky ↔ dirt; spiritual ↔ material; phantasmal ↔ real; celestial ↔ terrestrial; life ↔ world. Whorrall-Campbell writes:
"The works depart from a Biblical setting in order to reconstruct an earthly logic of apparition. This movement from heaven to earth in some ways mimics millenarian treatments of scripture, which use the book as an accurate material description of the apocalypse. Yet the question of critique destabilizes a one-to-one relationship and suggests viewing this instead as setting in motion frames of aestheticization which herald a more prosaic end of the world."
What constitutes an ordinary apocalypse? The proliferation of a multinational sandwich shop chain investing in colonial violence on a global scale? Doing our hair in the aftermath of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and forest fires? If the world is continually ending, maybe Whorrall-Campbell’s horses and ponies ask us to take Berlant’s proposal, in all of its vacillations, at face value. To take this regular ending not as a blockage or suspension of action, but rather a “dissociative poetics when life as an x keeps on hitting the limit.”
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Francis Whorrall-Campbell (b. 1995) is an artist, writer, and sometimes art critic from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and the digital, their work undertakes a materialist investigation of sexual subjectivity.
Kristina Stallvik (b. NYC) is a Berlin based artist and founder of the publishing project, cover crop. Their work is based in a reciprocity between moving and printed image, often interrogating the technologies mobilized to construct and mediate the category of “nature.”
