Apparently, the first of many mass-extinction events is scheduled to occur around 2030. It would seem, then, that dystopian fiction is bending the world around us in a belligerent curve towards George Miller-directed wastelands of dunes and cannibal leather-daddies. With barely a decade left before the bubble of the West bursts, a vision like that of Laurie Steer’s Meditations, while refusing to court utopian solutions, nonetheless strikes a gleefully hardy and carnivalesque note that is, against the odds, heartening.
Steer’s totems occupy the Tim Melville gallery space in ritual formation, facing each other with fanged conspiracy, effigies of futures that have not yet (but surely will) come to pass. Unlike the miserable hauntology of unrealised futures Mark Fisher wrote so succinctly about before committing suicide in 2017, Steer spins a schizophrenic syncretism of the minor works of a collapsed civilisation: omnivorous survivalists turning the detritus of fallen empires and defunct popular cultures into a new canon, into a new register of demons and deities. Judging by their exuberant expressions—perched on Jenga-stacked, boobytrapped catacombs like black emperors—it would appear some of Steer’s presiding figureheads are not just happy about the fall of the West. They may, in fact, have orchestrated it.
An alien Lady Liberty. Mickey Mouse as a militarised-NGO plague rat. An Appalachian hermaphrodite. Obviously, Steer’s underlying spectre is decidedly American, but rather than choke on its incessant image flow, Steer’s scopophilic (to look but not engage) answer seems to be one of condensation, gathering signs like wool and muddling them into readymade pyres. From a defensive flattening of never-ending American noise, Steer carves out a pathway to post-apocalyptic meaning—presumably, a beyond-human religion for the Cthulucene.
