Doug Fishbone Slaps Together Speech and Image in Engaging Performance Lecture
Mashing together mere 1200 images downloaded straight from the internet to create his narrative arch as he fluidly walks his audience through a a landscape of political thought and culture.
Fishbone's satirical work takes contemporary society as its subject focus as he comically jumps from one idea to the next, asking big questions without necessarily offering an answer. With the freedom of interpretation, the audience are able to. make up their own minds on subjects such as: What has the price of fish and chips and Pablo Escobar got in common?
In a performance lecture, Doug Fishbone stands at a podium whilst projected visual imagery races behind him. Fishbone presents and performs a time-based collage. Images found from the mass media and the internet bombard our retina. A baby holding an apple referring to an oversized penis makes the audience cruddy giggle. Mid jaunt, a horrific picture of severed limbs punctures the room turning our laughing states into uncomfortable stirs of movement within our seats.
Surreal: images follow one another creating tangental leaps of the imagination that build a story. Trump mining for coal: Coal, the organic fuel. Organic: the buzz word that makes us buy strawberries at 6 times the average market price. Organic products sold on broadway market. Broadway market- a place you buy cereal for 5 squid a bowl from men with great beards, thick rimmed glasses and round tummies- The hipster. Trump the Hipster. Naked man humping a donkey?
Singing from political commentary to the humorous rhythm of a comedy sketch show Fishbone uses a push pull strategy as a performer. As the audience, we don't know what's coming next. Fishbone laces the work with visual and vocal returns, narratives, and 'kicks': shocking the audience with randomly (or not so randomly) placed offenses: I'm a family man, here are my kids and now here is a woman- naked and spread legged on a tractor. Offensive jokes range from sexualisation of bodies, using racial stereotype, political tag lines, bestiality and more. Although aggressively compounded, his pallets of offensive material serves as a satyrical political commentary as he highlights the absurdity of contemporary culture and post-truth politics; the rate that we ingest new information and how we carelessly breeze past day-old news headlines.
Whilst Fishbone interests lie in perception, and how audience context influences interpretations of the work, to the art-school lefties it is easy to follow his left wing political messages.
Fishbone notes the adaptations of his work: he describes how large swathes of his material have to be adapted and edited depending on his audience depending on their age, gender and nationality. A large critique of the American and Anglo-centric banking system would be lost on the German audience as their banking system historically and culturally resists credit.