The Good-For-Nothing Screening Room

About

Dostoevsky tells the fictional story of Prince Myshkin, a foolishly honest and naïve character placed in the salon society of 1860s St. Petersburg. He struggles to lie, won’t get involved with corruption and refuses to use his power for financial gain, wherefore he is referred to as idiot in the sense of a mentality disadvantaged person. At the same time, he is confronted with a society dominated by social hierarchies and meritocracy. Social tensions, contradictions and suffering result from these structures. Prince Myshkins inability to operate within this society pushes him to seek refuge in isolation.

Within the same century, Joseph von Eichendorff created a similar fictional character in From the Life of a Good-For-Nothing, who as well disdains philistinism and prefers a financially poor but culturally rich lifestyle over the principles of chastity and pretence. 

These rather anachronistic references portray heroes who feel alienated by a performance system and are incapable to operate within social structures which treasure economics over ethics. Those two lyrical figures are not individual cases. Examining literature from the nineteenth century, the lyrical outsider was a common motif. 'Having studied the lives and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, James, H. Hesse, G. I. Gurdjieff, H. G. Wells, and Sartre, Colin Wilson defined the Outsider as the one man [ / woman ] who knows he [ / she] is sick in a civilization that does not know it is sick. The suffering Outsider seeks an essentially religious answer to the crisis of value and the loss of individual worth in a secular society. ” (Wilson, C. (1956) The Outsider)

This makes the idiot a hero.

Just like the novels, the Good-For-Nothing Screening Room doesn’t dwell on the sickness within a neo-capitalistic system, but on ways of bypassing, resisting and satirising it. In Paul Rudnick’s words: “Comedy is often the only feasible antidote to a completely justifiable, but not very entertaining hopelessness. Sometimes a wisecrack is a weapon.”

The tensions which the ‘idiotic’, lyrical figures face are reflected in social problematics and mental health issues of young individuals today. The screening room displays artistic practices that humorously mirror society and its ethical flaws. The portraits drawn in those works reach from hilarious, tongue in cheek and bittersweet, often narrated from a personal point of view that invites the viewer to identify with an ‘idiotic’ hero. Enjoyment without academic or intellectual purposes is strictly allowed in the Good-For-Nothing-Screening Room. Besides humorous aspects, the artist’s works offer pointed social critique, satirical reproach to capitalism and surreal visions of the future.

As all works are time-based, the beholder is invited to ‘waste’ precious time, to be unproductive and to engage with film and artists’ moving image and visual art for the sake of nothing but pleasure and reflection. This requires slowing down and in the playful spirit of the homo ludens, to rediscover potential in leisure. 

Allow yourself to be inefficient and waste an afternoon in the Good-For-Nothing Screening Room. 

VISITOR INFORMATION:

Private view: 17. May 6-8 p.m.

Exhibition: 18.-23. May 2-8 p.m.  

Closed in Sunday & Monday

Generously supported by the Goldsmiths Friends & Alumni Fund