David Blandy, Crossroads, 2009London based artist David Blandy (1976) produces videos, performances and comics that deal with his ambivalent relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. His work is based on transforming personal references from records, films and television into meta-narration that deals with questions about his cultural position. David Blandy`s first comprehensive solo show in Germany “Child of the Atom“ transforms the 2nd floor of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart into a movie theatre for cinematic experiences. Displaying a selection of his video works in loop, the main installation with red curtains, seating platforms and a huge screen is designed in collaboration with the team working at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. The videos are presented as a specific program that aims to create a retrospective look at the fundamental steps in his artistic career and his approach to the filmic language.
The first video work, “Enter the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim: Origins” (2006) integrates Blandy`s real life experiences and virtual adventures, blurring the distinction between artistic authenticity and popular myth. Donning the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk, portable record player in hand, the Lone Pilgrim has been a hermit in an 18th century park in Surrey, made an American road trip, and searched for the places that had associations with soul songs in New York. Since 2004 Blandy has been producing a series of filmed performances where he performs for camera rather than a live audience. In “Samurai Story Parts I & II” (2008) the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim attempts to live out aspects of the samurai Hagakure amid an English recreation of a Japanese Tea Garden. In “The White & Black Minstrel Show” (2007) Blandy lipsyncs to Syl Johnson’s underground soul classic, ‘Is it because I’m black’ like a vaudeville performance by an inverted minstrel/clown /image of death, filmed in vast ArtDéco cinema, mixing soulful grunts and yelps with air guitar on his plastic cane. As a geeky white guy trying earnestly to embody some black soul, Blandy questions claims to originality and emotional attachment to another cultural heritage.
In “Crossroads” (2009) the White and Black Minstrel reappears, this time as an apparition on Blandy’s mission through rural Mississippi – a quest for guitar skills to match those of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, a quest to regain his soul. The video has been developed out of the artist’s investigation into the mythology surrounding Robert Johnson with three gravestones, 29 recorded songs and only two known photographs. A figure roams the landscape, yearning for Blues authenticity, re-enacting clichéd images from popular culture; guitar picking on porches, walking dusty roads, finding the crossroads. The film is also a portrait of the Mississippi Delta, a place that is still deeply, but not officially, segregated.
In relation to recent discussions about the atomic energy production in Germany, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is pleased to show David Blandy’s recent work “Child of the Atom” (2010) as part of other selected video works in a cinematic setting. Discussing his video piece, “Child of the Atom”, Blandy states: “There is a familial myth that my late grandfather would not have survived being a Japanese prisoner of war had the atomic bombing of Hiroshima not occurred. So it could be argued that I owe my existence to one of the most terrifying events of human history and the death of 110,000 people.” This family lore regarding David Blandy's grandfather, held as a POW in Malaya and Taiwan from 1942, provided the genesis of “Child of the Atom”. Generated by an underlying guilt about his own and also his daughter's existence, Blandy's film documents their visit to Hiroshima to literally and symbolically search for their 'origins'. The exhibition also offers free copies of a special edition poster, which is a collage of Blandy´s drawings.
The exhibition includes an installation entitled "Duels and Dualities: Battle of the Soul (Arcade Game)” (2011), a computer game machine, which is a rendered 2D fighting game featuring the fictional characters generated from Blandy`s previous work. The viewer can choose to fight as and against his array of alter egos, such as the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, Orochi Pilgrim, the White and Black Minstrel, the all-powerful Child of the Atom and David Blandy himself, who only has light and hard punch. Within the exhibition installation, a special design table displays various forms of artistic research and production from David Blandy`s artistic practice such as cartoons, publications, objects and notes as well as ephemera.
Finally an earlier video work "From the underground" (2001) shows Blandy when he was recording himself at the Archway tube station in London miming a song (‘Bring da ruckus’ by the Wu Tang Clan). The conjunction of his retro-rock look with the Black American voices of the song provokes difficult questions about the racial politics of taking another’s voice as your own. The exhibition “Child of the Atom” encapsulates the conceptual issues at the centre of David Blandy’s artwork. In these pieces Blandy works through his teenage obsessions as a means to analyse how much of his adult identity has been constructed by the icons and ideas found in the mass media.
