Boredom that thing that encompasses us from time to time, envelopes you with that sensation that you really should be doing something, shouldn't you? Well you would if everything wasn't devoid of interest. It may sound like a contradiction but from boredom there often comes creation; a prime example would be Bowie's Sound and Vision. It's this paradox where boredom meets unbored that is the theme of The Royal Standards 'Black Sun Horizon' exhibition.
A collection of four video pieces which deal with this concept. Take Samuel Williams piece Natural Habitat where a camera is dragged around in a homemade dolly through a small scale landscape. Watching the video you get the sense that this is something done to fill in time, the journey of the camera has no other aim then its own existence. So there's a combination of boredom and means here, an equation of time plus materials equals something, the kind of downtime where people make sculptures from Kit Kats.
This equation is also present in Dick Jewell's and to a degree Corey Arcangel's pieces which employ editing software to manipulate the elements from the sea of digital transmissions. Looking at these pieces I begin to consider whether having access to all this methods of creation will lead to a vacuum of choice, being able to produce something may not lead to something being produced. That maybe this is my subjective laziness, laziness that close relation to boredom.
Something occurs to me as I watch various edited cats bash out a Schonenberg piece, I begin to think about the many stupidly clever internet videos out there (including this one) and how they exist simply to be, to distract and pass time for both the creator and viewer. At poses a question if so many people are creating stuff which serves simply to elevate boredom and has no life outside of that remit what happens after that? Is more to be created to continually fill the space then are we stuck will a lot of distracting yet empty culture?
It's a possibility, boredom is a motivator yet it mustn't be the sole motivator for it happens as quickly as it can be quenched.
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