Michael Doocey

Michael Doocey: "Basically my work is a response to THOUGHT ACTION FUSION, a psychiatric concept that denotes a melodramatic belief in the expediency of abstractions. TAF happens when you start to believe that thinking too much about evil acts can make them happen. It's a fancy new term for obsession, and a good way to think afresh about conceptual art. My art is an experiment in piecemeal indulgence of TAF through object oriented performances. Performative objects can attain some level of responsibility for their own fate: they are like the allegories described by Walter Benjamin; myth dragged into the shameful light of history; the fetishes of dead perverts. I see my role as articulating a sense of how the IMAGE OF HUMANITY confronted with a totality is an image of a trans-historical death. There is no better example of this than Lars von Trier's exploration of the depressive's ultimate destructive fantasy – the end of the world - in Melancholia. My angle on this process has been to pursue a complete conflation of creation and destruction, in a series of ephemeral works which went mostly undocumented: performances where I stood in the street and spat in my eye; or poured a bucket of water over my head and waited to catch a cold; sculptures that crumbled into dust, washed away in the rain, or fell down, because sellotape won't hold a hunk of steel to a wall. Beyond the veneer of idiocy this process was an attempt to collaborate with fate on developing alternatives to existing forms of argument. I'm interested in representing the degrading nature of human reference. This underlies the process by which articulated elements are over-determined and end up as quasi-hieroglyphs or parodies. It's about paradox and falsehood;and developing a self-referential visual language that describes how "media” can blind and wreak the possibility of primary experience".