Being Kind

short 1m video work (sound on) 2024

We know the people who exhort us to ‘be kind’ on social media are also those most likely to behave in a conspicuously sociopathic way. They tend to be the self-same authoritarians trying to force people to adopt their very narrow world view, no variation permitted, on pain of cancellation. They will attempt to beat you, and your dissent, into submission.

Cancel culture shows us humanity’s nadir – a kind of primal psychopathy unleashed from any civilising force, yet cloaked in sanctimony, faux-righteousness, and constantly sweetened with this saccharine ‘we’re being kind’ rainbow glitter bullshit.

It’s fascinating that the imagery from the woke movement is so suffocatingly infantilising and cute. Ewan Morrison’s ‘Cute Authoritarianism’ https://areomagazine.com/2023/03/15/cute-authoritarianism/ elucidates this beautifully. 

With this piece, I’m trying to evoke the cognitive dissonance of this. The unsettling and absurd nature of raw violence from a unicorn. That the thing being bludgeoned is the oldest symbol of womanhood (the venus of willendorf) – itself cute and crocheted – is not a coincidence. Universalism, ancient civilisation, art, universal truths, materialism and, of course, ‘female’ – all being psychotically vandalised and destroyed by a vacuous hot-air blown-up authoritarian, hiding its psychopathic destructive rage behind this empty ‘cute’ exterior.

This work was included in the Passion For Freedom NY show, 2024, along with my piece Inclusion.