We need more flags (2015)
Lauren Edmonds
Mixed Media automaton
This automaton is from a series that looks at the spectacularisation and aestheticisation of Australian politics in the media. Each automaton refers to specific media events or what I perceive as constructed ‘images’ surrounding political figures that are circulated by mass and social media.
With their dependence on participant interaction to animate the images, I was interested in how these objects draw the spectator in to become a participant in the spectacle making. I had hoped to use this to critically engage the participant to consider their role in the production and circulation of spectacles, particularly on social media.
The chattering onslaught of almost-daily political polling has become a droll background to our everyday lives. In these works Edmonds had used the already outmoded detritus of the morning newspaper to fabricate the already outmoded detritus of yesterday’s political policy making. Like wind-up toys form a former epoch, these artefacts parody the power and control associated with national politics and reduce them to fragile redundant playthings. If this political critique is unflinchingly direct, the approach is mediated by the quiet absorption of the objects’ careful construction – the viewer is made all-too-aware of the time and consideration the artist has brought to the fabrication of these items. In sharp contradistinction to the soundbytes and info-grabs of what politics has become, the artist’s slow deliberations of thought and care and concern are the residues of an alternative approach to dealing with the concerns at hand.
