white magic on black friday
“Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation. Though at least around the Devil heresies and black magic sects could organize. Our magic is WHITE. No heresy is possible any longer in a state of affluence. It is the prophylactic whiteness of a saturated society, a society with no history and no dizzying heights, a society with no myth other than itself.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society
Photograph by Steve Copley (National-Provincial Press Service) 1964
In 1964, British newspapers reported that an artist had abandoned his full-time teaching post at a prestigious girls’ grammar school to take up a job as a dustman, eschewing the materialist culture that defined the sixties in order to focus on his art practice. His insistence on wearing impractical white clothing on the job earned him the nickname ‘Gatsby’.
He never relinquished his disdain for consumption and lived most of his life in relative parsimony, becoming a scholar of the American writer Jack London, with whom he shared fundamental beliefs - dialectically divided between essential socialist principles and powerful individualist drives.
To celebrate his 60th birthday, Gatsby planned a pilgrimage to Klondike, Alaska, where Jack London had found his literary voice. Sadly, he died quite suddenly of a stroke before he was due to leave and his body lay undiscovered for several days. In an ironic twist of fate, his death occurred on Friday 29th November 2002, the day that, annually, USA celebrates materialism and fiercely encourages consumption - Black Friday.
A poetic construction drawing on concepts of consumerism, the American Dream and alchemy, White Magic on Black Friday represents the liminal period between Gatsby’s supposed death and the discovery of his body three days later, during which his pilgrimage to the Klondike was magically realised…
