Glitchcore Bosch

Above Côte Brasserie in Kingston upon Thames, overlooking its Riverside Walk, there was for a week in mid-November a very long billboard depicting crowds in sackcloth and red hats trimmed in white, wading across water towards us. Yuletide synapses fired first: here was a Victorian Christmas card rerun of a Renaissance nativity painting, snow-covered fields in the distance, past-times rural types massed up front. Happy shopping!

Except: that was a really big crowd. And a lot of stables. Look closer, and the smiles were smudged and strange, more feral than festive. When the website thispersondoesnotexist.com was launched in 2019, it conjured plausibly personable imitations of human features – until your focus shifted towards their nightmarish ears, their indescribable headgear, their occasional meat-botch companions. Imagine a whole army of them wading ashore at you through the snowmelt, writhing fused limbs and non-Euclidean torsos, every zoomed-in detail a hideous AI patchwork. The chicken-dogs were even worse. If this was Renaissance art, it was Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding and Triumph of Death commingled as glitchcore Bosch.

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There was a spate of hostile glee, on Reddit especially. Was this a commercial art blunder, lazily unpoliced, or an art prank, bad by trolling design? Unsettled by the wrath of passersby, according to Jim Waterson at LondonCentric, the Brasserie and Kingston Council became uneasy. ‘There’s clearly something political about it,’ the manager of another local restaurant said, ‘but nobody knows what it is.’

To the hooting social media pundits, this phrasing was catnip, an emblem of everything idiotic about the times. They scorned the protesters as either spiteful Brexitmongers hating to see migrants normalised in Santa hats, or liberals horrified at the vulnerable being monstered. The mural’s creator fared little better. Their message was declared unclear and irresponsible: satire, if it was satire, should arrive well labelled. As for dabbling in AI, didn’t the artist know this slop is flooding our brains and frying the planet?

The restaurateur was clearly onto something, though ‘nobody agrees what it is’ probably states the issue better. Can the rival moral mobs both be correct? Both certainly consider their own reading obvious: that’s a first step towards the political. The second is scoffing commentators exaggerating the difference between them.

Unconfirmed rumour suggests the artist may be the one-time YBA Mat Collishaw. If so it’s the first time for a while that any of these provocateurs have escaped the stifling context of the Charles Saatchi collection and the moneyed-up gallery crowd.

Even as a guess, Collishaw’s name is clarifying. He was Frankensteining exotic plant-forms with AI long before the technology went viral. Ultra-modern techniques, near-traditional topics – he’s well versed in art history and the evolution of the means of mechanical reproduction and representation (including such 19th-century gadgets as the zoetrope). He likes to poke at what our brains seem to be doing, especially when it’s nasty: moral ambiguity, sexualised ugliness, the sadness of the hyperreal, the secret robots and algorithms that allow us to depict flesh and flowers and forests with precision.

One day in Rome in the late 1400s a young man fell down a hillside hole into a grotta and found himself in Nero’s long-lost Domus Aurea, the walls busy with frescoes of inconceivable animal-plant grafts and hybrids, a writhing biodiversity. Raphael, Michelangelo et al went cave diving in Imperial Rome’s bestial underworld, and soon the grotesque was bedded in as a whispered, ever-morphing counter-melody to the proper delineation of category, inquiry and the march of science. The grotesque fuses Bosch to Lovecraft, and the slime of AI’s anti-intellectual energies to the convulsive flailing mutancy of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

One way to answer the question ‘How did this artist get here?’ is with another question: ‘How would we get there?’ But as AI speedruns Collishaw’s ten thousand hours of immersion in the massed histories of art, our capacity to mirror his journey is blocked. The technology floods our imagined recreation of his choices with a billion tweaks of its own, all imperceptible, all interchangeable. Looking at the billboard, we don’t understand what we face: is it a gothic ironist’s forbidden craft or the malevolent bludge of a context-collapse machine?

In a gallery, jokes arrive pre-explained in catalogues and captions and ambush as a device is spoilered. Banksy’s solution, as graffiti art crept into the art world, was to project some of the better questions back out onto the city walls. What are we looking at? Did we want this? What is it saying about us? Are the old good values lost? Are jokes ever art?

Was the mural in Kingston ever meant to be looked at carefully, even? Or was it a bogus inkblot test intended to be misread in multiple ways? Agit-prop dada to reflect our disgusted faces back at us, stamped with the many conflicting fears projected onto it? Who made which kind of incorrect assumption (from ‘intelligent, empathetic’ to ‘foolish, ill-informed, cruel’)?

Some art is description and some prophecy, of the shape of things to come, magnificent or demonic – and some falls into the overlap, marking symptoms in the futures that the flailing people convulsively envision. But in this joke of a country already at war with itself we are all flailing, and as we mock we are also flinching – from something alien or from something hideously ancient in ourselves.

Just as suddenly as it appeared, the three-day obscenity was torn from view. Like a common or garden Banksy whitewashed into oblivion for embarrassing the neighbours – or buried, like Nero’s golden palace, to re-emerge when we can make better use of it.