Ursa Immodicus

Right, my blog was looking a little empty, so I've decided to update it with old news.
I made this just before I left uni. The assignment was to make an 'art'. It had to be printed, but that was all they said, other than you must later justify it.
So here it is, complete with my somewhat pretentious 'justification' of why I should be allowed to get away with nicking so many ideas from other artists.
Also, thought I've no right to complain, but a few months after I made this, a lot of Great Bear imitations appeared online, making this appear even less original. Pah.




Ursa Immodicus


March 2008


Essentially a re-working of Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (1992), which itself is an adaptation of Henry Beck's London Underground tube map, this print replaces each tube line with a particular theme, and while Patterson's creation dealt with famous explorers, actors and engineers, this piece charts topics of tabloid news stories.
As such, we see how casually topics as contrasting as horse racing, soft core pornography and child murder can be displayed together, prompting the viewer to consider the hypocrisy of such presentation.
The river Thames has undergone a colour change, increasing the presence of a tabloid colour scheme (in the vein of Gilbert & George's recent Tate Modern exhibition), but also implying drastic consequences of these journalistic misdeeds, as we are reminded of the biblical curse to make the rivers run red with blood.
At first, the map would appear to be a level playing ground, with only labels and names to go by, no one child is more adorable than another, no killer looks more suspicious.
Nevertheless, our eyes are inevitably drawn to the centre of the piece, which makes up a veritable who's who of missing children, public hate figures and Grand National winners, some names are inevitably pushed aside, meaning that the numerous dead of the recent Burma crisis will not be granted the same spotlight as that of a single infant who has been absent over a year.
Alas, infamy is also favoured over scale, hence your ability to recall the face, victims and miscellaneous details of a single murderer, whilst you are unable to recollect the region in which 100,000 people have recently died, contradicting the belief of 'the mors*, the merrier'.
We can also see that the centre of the map is surrounded, almost framed by an impenetrable wall of television channels, which, reassured by one another's company, can look out on all the distant people and incidents from their cyclical domain, endlessly following one another's leads.
While making numerous examples of tabloid content, be it good or bad, the piece also points out the omissions within the format, by including one theme on the key, but removing the corresponding thread from the map.
The name of the piece translates roughly as 'excessive bear', or in other words 'too much to bear', alluding to the grim nature of the tabloid content.

*[Latin: mortis, genitive of mors; death.]