sam bunn

10.7.22

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From glorious sunshine in a cobbled courtyard, I took a torch and swam down carpeted steps into an underground vault in the Graf (stately home of sorts). There was some kind of funky, dramatic music playing as I explored my way past various columns until I found myself in front of a cute little white cube. Four sides, one door. A weird gallery artifact to find amidst dramatic, funky music in a darkened castle basement. Like stumbling across some kind of bizarre post apocalyptic accident of circumstance.

 

Entering, I rounded several corners before finding myself crouched before a weird mutant chair facing a flatscreen news broadcast of sorts, wickled like a snail inside of its white shell in the bowels of this ancient place of power. The music was louder here, more urgent. The video played in a nice long loop: 

 

My sense of apocalypse increasing, serious looking youngsters with microphones are spewing aesthetically appealing gunge out of their mouths, all over their nice news reporter clothing. It’s like Mr Whippy sick, in lurid colours. The vibe is cool, but also distressed. There is urgency - and a critical feeling of no escape aside from complete mental rejection.

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I watch enthralled for two run-throughs. 

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Distinct sequences start to emerge. Headlines flash up and imprint: Portal 308 is losing moisture, (I see a dry, cracking bench thing)  Over and out i.n.t.e.r.n.e.t., pedestrians are back, as I observe these vomiting broadcasters looking urgent in office spaces, kitchens, a warehouse of sorts.

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The frame is chopped up, with different panels of information, like a Japanese game show or indeed The News. At a certain point the whole screen shows this vast, empty warehouse with a man hurrying through it. It takes TIME. About halfway through I think I might be getting bored, when he starts to lose papers from the stack he is carrying. Several more fall off, keeping me hooked until he has crossed the space from rear left to front right. Every frame has something to keep you hooked and looking. A scrolling bar at the bottom feeds you extra nonsense. There is a great sequence straight out of the Pink Panther where all the reporters and more are opening and closing doors in a coordinated stream, piling up papers on an earnest young woman’s desk. Behind her on the wall is a weird painting. In other shots art is being taken down. Weird beasts or dissections or something. Another caption reads something like: No new art needed. We have enough in storage. Nobody breaks character. At some point there are eggs on a zebra crossing. Serious, beautiful young folk wearing weird scrawled-on clothes with shoulder pads and something 80s, something not, striding po-faced down desolate, slush filled streets. There is an epic weather report, an aborted cooking show. It keeps me on the edge of my toxic fibreglass seat.

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The second time round I read a bag that says, If you’re reading this I love you, which makes me feel smart and special.

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It’s serious, yet tongue in cheek. Critical, yet aeshetic. I get the sense of lockdown coming back to me, of enough of too much news, and hints of further events that I know I don’t know quite enough about: There was an exhibition planned that never happened. It just sat there during lockdown. Parts of it got recycled, into this weird form - raising serious questions about how art ought to be consumed, who young artists are and what they are for.

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A toxic, magical thing for the internet, or for this weird bunker / out of space and time.

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Why it is called Mr Sunshine I cannot fathom. But I don’t care. I would watch it again in an instant, if it wasn’t a 29km bike ride away. So long, and thanks for all the fish.