Mark Spelman - 'The Weights Progress'

About

The Weights Progress

In 1995 I was drunk in Leicester Square when the ghost of William Hogarth drew close to me and made a joke about a constipated mathematician, after which he bellowed: “There are three things a young man should know when he first comes to London: never run for a bus and never queue for a Greggs” “And the third?” I asked. “That” he said, nodding sagely, “you will have to work out for yourself”

In 2020 I was drunk in Leicester Square when the ghost of William Hogarth once again drew close to me, poked me in the belly with his gallivanting stick and asked “What the fuck happened to you?” “I never ran for a bus. But I may have queued for a Greggs once or twice” “And did you work out the third thing?” “I did” “Namely?” “Learn Nothing”.

The Weight’s Progress is a conversation between dead men. It draws from Hogarth’s seminal work “A Rakes Progress” as both an homage and an act of theft. It reconfigures the moral fable created by Hogarth, that of a foolish young man who squanders his fathers inheritance, and asks what the notion of inheritance is in lieu of a fortune. It questions how heavy the weight of things are that have no form. It’s about the dissembling of self, absence, loss and alienation. It is also about getting fat. 

Mostly it asks “How do you display a comic strip in an art gallery? And shouldn’t this be funny?”