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DOUG FISHBONE
Doug Fishbone, is an American artist living and working in London. He earned his BA from Amherst College in the US in 1991, and MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003, and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004. Selected solo exhibitions include: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2020); Tate Britain, London (2010-11), Rokeby, London (2010-11, and 2009), Gimpel Fils, London (2006) and 30,000 Bananas in Trafalgar Square (2004). Selected group exhibitions include: the Jewish Museum, London (2019); a collateral show at the 56th Venice Biennale in (2015); Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, Tate Britain (2010), Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2008); Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery (2008), London; British Art Show 6, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester (2006). He performs regularly at both international and UK venues, including appearances at London’s ICA and Southbank Centre.
His film and performance work is heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy – he was described by one critic as a “stand-up conceptual artist” – and examines some of the more problematic aspects of contemporary life in an amusing and disarming way. Using bizarre combinations of found images from the internet, Doug Fishbone uses satire and tragicomic humor in his films, performances and installations to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, and its corollary, the underground and avant-garde. He is particularly interested in examining questions of relativity and perception, and how audience and context influence interpretation.
Fishbone’s 2010 film project Elmina, made in collaboration with Revele Films in Ghana, had its world premiere at Tate Britain in 2010 and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. Elmina was recently voted no. 35 on Artinfo’s survey of the 100 most iconic artworks of the past 5 years. He is currently at work on a follow-up, to be filmed in Ghana.
Fishbone’s practice is wide-ranging, using many different popular forms in unexpected ways. He curated Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a bespoke art/crazy golf course featuring some of the UK’s leading artists, at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and in the same year, he collaborated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the nation’s most prestigious Old Masters collections, on a solo project involving switching one of the Gallery’s masterpieces with a replica made in China. Other recent projects include a series of guided bus tours in Aberdeen as part of the Look Again Festival in 2016, and a series of riverboat performances on the River Thames called Doug Fishbone’s “Booze Cruise”, originally commissioned as part of the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival in 2013 and 2014. His project Artificial Intelligence (2018) was commissioned by werkleitz within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and Co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, and he took part in the exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum, London in 2019. He will be presenting a major new commission at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork Ireland in 2020.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGENCE (2018)
Video, 2 min 38 sec
On loan for COVIDecameron, courtesy of the artist.
Spanning from the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 to the shortages of sausages in the German Democratic Republic to the Mahabharata, Artificial Intelligence offers an unusual perspective on the rise and fall of human civilization through the prism of the chaos of 20th- century Europe. Two years after its creation, MOMENTUM shows the video in the context of the Corona pandemic in the COVIDecameron exhibition. Making light of even the greatest darkness is a better survival mechanism than despair, and in that sense, Doug Fishbone’s Artificial Intelligence, made two years before the Corona pandemic, paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times assembled from images found online. From food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a wilful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we all hope this is not how the Corona pandemic will end for us.
Whereas the video Artificial Intelligence remains on loan to MOMENTUM for COVIDecameron, the original artwork embeds this video in a singular installation for public space.
The installation, Artificial Intelligence, is a machine that dispenses wisdom in return for a 10-cent investment. A short meditation on time, impermanence and loss, it was originally installed in the Marktplatz in Halle, Germany, in the city’s main square, where it was commissioned by the werkleitz Festival with funding from the European Union.
Assuming the form of a conventional touch-screen kiosk like those found in cities and public spaces all over the world, the piece grants a moment of pause to consider the fragility and vanity of our daily lives, though with a light-hearted touch. A machine that might normally do something very straightforward, like process a ticket or parking receipt, or issue directions to tourists, has been re-tooled into something strange, injecting a brief dose of ambiguity into the daily urban routine. The piece is a kind of art robot of the lowest order – a mechanized deliverer of intellectual content, but already outmoded and behind the times. After all, who pays for anything with cash any more, let alone ten-cent coins? In this way it reflects an ambivalence towards AI, as it stands poised to replace huge swathes of human labour and make many of us redundant in the process. Sitting outside contemporary financial logic, it finds an awkward space to occupy – offering a potentially useless product (the artist’s speculation on the state of the world) at a price that is virtually free.