Space is the final frontier; there’s a reason that everyone was watching when man took his first steps on the moon.
Living under a microscope was once a unique experience reserved for early astronauts- as artist George Henry Longley explained, “they were the first reality stars”. He has incorporated that feeling of constantly being watched into his newest exhibit, We All Love Your Life at Red Bull Studios. While most of the art deals in metaphor, such as the model kitchen area evocative of its title, ADHD, which Longley explains as not necessarily a self-diagnosis but more broad strokes of the constant distractive procrastination people deal in nowadays which was almost completely absent for astronauts except in cooking food, hence the space’s design.
One especially strange aspect to the exhibit is the twelve minute long snake video in the lower level of the studio. It does not seem to be particularly related to the overall theme of being watched. In fact, one observer offered tentatively an interpretation that it was about corporate greed, simply because the video is solely of snakes moving around Apple brand merchandise like laptops and keyboards. Longley explained that he very much likes snakes. That was the primary motivation for this portion of the show. Not sure where to go from there.
However, in the very same space, there was a cloaklike apparatus with moving lights that beyond being simply breathtaking to watch, was additionally incredibly touching, as Longley explained the performative aspect- that we exist as performers even in our everyday lives, albeit in a more metaphorical sense than early astronauts who literally never escaped the scrutiny of the camera (webcams abound in the exhibit, large and small, attached to the wall and just lying on the ground). Differently colored lights play about on what at first glance appears to be a dementor, for a surreal viewing experience.
“Even in space”, he said, “we are always tethered.”
We All Love Your Life is not really about space. Space is just the vacuum through which Longley can perform his own ideas and propel them further. When asked, he mentioned that he is currently working on seed ideas for another project involving deep ocean- another realm of existence utterly foreign to humans, where being watched is an impossibility in contrast with the inevitability of space. He has been studying the notion of divers who are left in the ocean forever, preserved in an odd way as footprints are on the moon. Longley has a spectacular exhibit with We All Love Your Life, and he doesn’t seem to be running out of ideas.
