In the weird future there’s a techno-spa where they can grow a full clone of you from just a single tooth. You are very appealing and aspirational, a hot commodity, dazzling etc. Visitors come to the spa to lease your clone, your Cherub. They temporarily decant into the Cherub’s body — living, seeing, feeling as you—I MEAN her, the Cherub. This was, of course, a booming industry. Because, just think about it: neoliberalism dissolved the boundary lines of capitalism and turned it into a soup we all swim in. Every aspect of the self is up for grabs, capitalism is all-encompassing and it wants our hobbies, our social lives, our personal lives, our digital existence. To buy or sell, I can’t tell which is worse. We are just tiny useless fish, we must make a living in these ways if we can.

Industries die, bubbles burst — the techno-spa has become obsolete and is left to rot. Mercy was a glamorous starlet, her Cherub was a real bestseller back in the day. But now, her Cherub’s become a bad investment. Luckily, it is Founding Day! The Cherub’s birthday! And today, Mercy can choose to terminate her subscription or renew for another year. Mercy isn’t taking any chances. She goes to cancel in person.

The billboard ads are peeling, creepy and tight. The doors are creaky, the corridors are derelict, all cobwebs and broken furniture. The receptionist is some kind of cackling vaudeville ghoul. She leads Mercy to her cherub, she has been locked away in a cryo-cannister, all alone for 364 days. How sad! Poor Cherub! Sign on the double-sided mirror with this hot pink lipstick bullet please. Both of you, on either side, in curly cursive. Time is of the essence, we must have the signature before sundown! But Mercy and her Cherub commune, mind to mind, they have words with each other. Mercy isn’t strong enough to bring this place down, but Cherub is. She knows the exit route, she can torch it. So they swap. Mercy goes into the cannister and the Cherub staggers out through the eerie passages, backrooms and foyer, blinking as she steps out into the sun — FREE.

This is the (spoiler) plot of Jenkin Van Zyl’s film Enclosure, on in Somerset House’s Lancaster Rooms. When the credits roll I look out the corner of my eye and see a mechanical pigeon on a stick, flapping against the floor, all sad and limp. I am blinking like a baby. Feeling woozy because I only meant to pop out of the basement for a meal deal between my to-do list tasks. I was writing something completely different, but here I am: holding my lunch, rearranging my Wednesday because this was amazing and horrible, and it’s making me squirm.

Jenkin Van Zyl’s work sprawls out across the various zones and compartments I have built to keep myself upright: my critical interests, my personal obsessions, taste and enjoyment and excitement. Sometimes I want to be a fan and not a critic, writing about something I love can kill the joy of it because language flattens abstract joy into a rational formality. I love strangeness, a quality that’s best preserved in a kind of wordless mystery. I’ve never written about Jenkin’s work because I’ve wanted to guard my enjoyment (out loud: I guess criticism is some kind of fatal incident).

But, I don’t know bro. Recently I have been thinking a lot about strangeness and Shklovsky, simulations, hyperreality, Baudrillard and Umberto Eco. I don’t want to conjugate all of this in some theory-bro wordwank but maybe my obsession and interest is colliding. Yeah, yeah, criticism as self-destruction, the big gaping void where all my thoughts go to die.

Here’s what I really think: Jenkin Van Zyl is interested in strangeness too. I would say that, I want company. In all his works that I’ve seen, he creates these worlds that are full to the point of bursting, and there are tropes »

Liminal limbo — a suspended theatrical space where we banish disbelief, norms and conventions, the laws and facts that govern our universe without an imaginable alternative. It is purgatory, the bardo, the barzakh, alternate dimension, hidden hell realm tucked under the skin of reality that’s only accessible by freaky portal. You cross a threshold into a space that is palpably different. That makes it sound woowoo but it’s also waiting rooms, reception areas, endless hallways.

The purgatorial limbo of bureacratic failure, systems that are meant to be total but are actually on the brink of collapse. Crumbling institution administrates grotesque horrors. Creatures that desire a transcendent release or an escape in some twisted form. Must be twisted, the narrative closure of a happy ending is too neat, too simple. The stories that play out in these worlds are infinite loops, mobius strips, samsara, the ouroboros eating its own tail, stuck on repeat in the labyrinth forever and ever and ahhhhhhHHHHH.

The body itself is a site of various horrors, squelches and sucking noises, a system of holes and crusts. It compells and repells at the same time, they’re near enough the same thing anyway. The vaudeville ghoul at reception and the airbrushed babygirl in the billboard ads, near enough the same person. The body as superslick ubermensch, the body as Cronenberg mutant, near enough.

So the desire for release comes out in these twisted ways because what we want is always tangled up in what repulses us. Or, wanting is the basis of revulsion, a grotesque and monstrous hunger. Satisfying the desire is not the point, or it’s not the end point, or if it is the end point then I guess (out loud:) desire is an annihilating force, sex and death drive (near enough, near enough) because oh god, maybe Freud was right, DO YOU FANTASISE ABOUT SELF DESTRUCTION????? Baby, don’t we all? But it never lands because that would mean The End rather than The Inevitable (endless cycle of creation and destruction). What we want and what we think we want and what we want to want — all very different things and they spin around my head like I’m a dizzy cartoon.

The system administrates a horror, or we satisfy our heart’s deepest desire, or surrender to perfect ecstatic release— and at some point in some way, the boundaries around the individual sovereign self dissolve and blast apart and we merge!!! We enter into each other, we eat each other, we decant ourselves into each others flesh suits or simmer in the same sweat or tangle up into a rat king, perfect swarm, endless copy. Creation, destruction, repetition, proliferation. We come together, dissolve, release over and over, time is a cycle and not a line moving forwards.

This world, full to the point of bursting. It is not that different, actually. Creation > destruction or cycles of boom and bust. It is quite familiar, just heightened to the point of overstimulation. I am a stuck record, looping: the carnivalesque, cartoon logic, the raucous delight of exaggerating something to extremity so everyone can see HE’S BEHIND YOU!!!!

If hell is real I think we are in it right now: capitalist realism and the past-and-futurelessness of our infinite present tense. Reality as it is, to be honest it’s just so repressed. Amping it up to a peak extremity is the closest we can get to escape/release, but if that’s impossible then art is just edging (near near near enough).

I keep saying this to myself as an example, even though I know it is not real: oh yeah, Nick Land and his weird accelerationist theory that we’re trapped in a simulation run by alien-gods, we have to accelerate AI-technocapitalism to its absolute limits (superintelligence, singularity) so we can glitch the matrix and break free. And then I laugh, because hahaha he thinks chatgpt is Jesus, what a freak — even though that’s not Nick Land’s thing and that’s not what accelerationism means.

Nick Land’s whole schtick is that capitalism is a form of machine intelligence, and it’s like really really good (capitalism has unleashed infinite desires beyond the biological standard-issue desires: sex and food. Now we have commodities too, so capitalism = ¡muy bien!). We need to let that bad boy rip, corporate authoritarianism and CEO-Kings, the full shebang. The machine-daddy knows best, we should just let it optimise, so humans can be free. By free he means: able to surpass the biological limitations of our bodies and interface with reality in its unmediated purest form. By this he means: dead. Hahahaha, freak! Nick Land is an apocalyptic tech loser who’d rather lick the robo-boot and clap for human extinction than experience the transcendent ecstasy of loving and being loved by other people.

The point I am trying to make is: OF COURSE I’M THINKING ABOUT SIMULATIONS LOTS AND LOTS. The world as it is exists is so completely divorced from unmediated reality in its purest form, we live in a system that is like 8 symbolic meta-layers deep and the tech-oligarchs want to push us over the threshold into the 9th, centre of hell and the gaping mouth of the batlike beast. I JUST WANT TO SCROLL THROUGH WIKIPEDIA PAGES AND LEARN INTERESTING THINGS but in this circle of hell we call Babylon, I need to pay rent/submit to the power of crumbling institutions that administer grotesque horrors, so nevermind that. OF COURSE I FANTASISE ABOUT SELF-DESTRUCTION, because I dream of release from capitalism’s deathdrivedeathgrip. I think Jenkin Van Zyl does too, because this film isn’t an infinite loop, mobius strip, samsara, ouroboros eating its own tail, repeat repeat repeat in the labyrinth forever and ever. In this one, the Cherub lives and breaks free.