LOOKING UP
“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography or Das Kapital, a monetary value.”” – Mark Fisher (1)
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Lockheed Martin, ‘Hellfire AGM-114 R9X, "Flying Ginsu”. Year unknown.
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At the centre of the show is an object that shouldn’t be here. In fact it doesn't actually exist according to its makers, Lockheed Martin and the US Department of Defense. The Hellfire AGM-114 R9X, unofficially known as the "Flying Ginsu”, doesn’t explode. Instead, six blades deploy outward a split second before impact, allowing a ‘clean kill’ of the target, usually while sitting in a car or having a snooze in bed. Sold as an ‘ethical’ precision weapon (who knew there were nicer ways of killing?) it’s the ultimate bureaucratic fantasy of moral warfare. A performance of ethics you could easily schedule between meetings.
It’s displayed here within the context of an art gallery without a shred of the usual irony. It is not a sculpture, nor an artwork of any kind. The Hellfire R9X is aesthetically legitimate. It is beautiful. Morally inert. Genderless. It has no need for ambiguity, or irony, or context. It doesn’t ask to be understood. It doesn’t care what you think. It has no other meaning. It is post-meaning, post-history, posted on Instagram. The missile as ideal form. Technology as theology. A desire-object. The perfected machine.
Can it even be art at all?
The American art philosopher Arthur Danto once declared the end of art had arrived when anything could be art as long as it could be contextualised by its relative meaning at the time it was made.2 In terms of contemporary art, he reckoned Warhol – with his Factory-made multiples and machine-like productivity – was the full stop, and everything since then the ellipsis…
Danto saw the gallery as a place where perception is suspended, and where ontology (what reality is) gets a bit slippery. By my logic, if a supermarket Brillo box belongs in MoMA, why not a Hellfire missile in a small gallery?
Surrounding the missile are various work by six internationally-recognised artists.
Two chainsaw-carved wooden effigies by the irrepressible Jake Chapman (UK) take on a different kind of (comedic?) power in this show – confronting the ludicrousness of late stage capitalism and its institutionalised zombie policies such as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) which have served to do nothing except make art powerless and even more irrelevant, frozen in a paralysis of decorum, as everything else in the world – such as genocidal maniacs – carry on regardless. Here, prayers for deities contrast with algorithms for guidance systems, each swirling around these two ‘sacred artefacts from the NeoLiberalithic era’3 Ah well, every god has its day.
One of New Zealand’s most accomplished and thoughtful painters, Rebecca Wallis (UK/NZ) gifts us Sūnyāta for a welcome moment of zen-like tranquillity – the perfect beginning and end as you circle the space; the gently stained silk allowing us some breathing space in the cloying gap between the illusion of life and death.
Fresh from representing Aotearoa New Zealand at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) features a large screen print, part of a series incorporating traditional Maori iconography as part protest/part middle finger to the contentious foreshore rights debate. ‘Foreshore Defender’ is clinical in its graphic execution, yet rooted in place. Land, Graham reminds us, never feels neutral.
The Sage by Australian artist Wanda Gillespie is sensitively carved from a gnarly lump of wood. In a room dominated by precision and power, this presence brings a different kind of authority; a quiet shift in our centre of gravity. Rooted in the earth, it suggests that knowing isn’t always cognitive. That there are forces which see without the need for metrics or algorithmic scanning. The Sage feels timeless and stoic – a reminder that endurance may be the only form of resistance left.
Oliver Cain (UK) was commissioned by the gallery to fabricate the R9X to near-exact specifications – an especially difficult task given the absence of any official references. As an artist, his own contribution to Looking Up is a delicately carved ‘patu’ – a hand-held Māori fighting club traditionally made of pounamu (greenstone or nephrite jade). Isn't it fascinating how we can easily romanticise weaponry as ‘art’ within the right context? Yet this pakeha (white person’s) patu raised eyebrows and sneers about ‘appropriation’ when it was displayed in New Zealand. All the more jarring when you realise Oliver was taught by a local kaiwhakairo/master carver throughout his carving course. With no Maori heritage to speak of, is Oliver’s work any less meaningful as a result?
Snapped on my iPhone in Inverkeithing Station, an accidental crucifix form made from tape stuck onto a bit of flooring. It’s part of an ongoing series called Stations of the Cross. Nearby, an 18th Century narwhal tusk, originally from Penicuik House (“one of the finest Palladian houses in Scotland”) looks like a precision weapon in itself. Or maybe a unicorn horn, as it was once thought to be. Completing the line up is a screen print by the late Ian Hamilton Finlay (UK), Topiary Aircraft Carrier from 1972 (a collaboration with Ian Gardner, no pun intended) from a private collection.
Looking Up is full of mosaic-like contradictions: darkness and light, laughter and death, stillness and violence, artefact and threat, irony and sincerity, stuff and nonsense.
This is the world we inherited.
And these are the Gods we will make from it.
Scott Lawrie
August 2025
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NOTES
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Danto, Arthur. What art is. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Jake Chapman in conversation with Marc Sanders in the exhibition catalogue for Flotsam and Jetsam published by TELEGRAPH gallery, Czech Republic, 2024. telegraph.cz
Images are copyright of the artist/lenders. Views of the gallery may not be those of the artists.
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