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David Blandy, The Barfeoot Lone Pilgrim

As he looks to perfect his fighting art, Ryu wanders the earth barefoot as one of the main protagonists in the cult arcade game Street Fighter Zero 2. David Blandy is expert in guiding Ryu through his adventures and has subsequently embarked on a few his own under the auspices of the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim. Blandy’s virtual adventures integrate with real life scenarios, each choreographed to feed into the videos, performances and comic illustrations that have prefigured his work to date - through playing arcade football he became an Arsenal fan, in playing Street Fighter took up Shaolin Kung Fu. His ensuing tales, though, take on rather more complex cultural issues through the use of a vocabulary and phraseology belonging to hip-hop, rap and soul music and the relationship of language, as described by Lacan, in the formation of identity and a sense of ‘otherness’.

The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim’s journey began in the Hermitage at Painshill Park, a folly conceived by 18th century architect Charles Hamilton, set in the Elysian fields of a country house in Surrey. Dressed in the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk, Blandy - barefoot, tall, white with long hair and glasses - took up temporary residence, a contemporary equivalent of Hamilton’s original hermit who was supposed to stay in the hermitage for seven years. Armed with ‘a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for his time piece, water for his beverage and food from the house’, the original hermit would receive payment of 700 guineas if he survived the course without leaving or cutting his hair. In the event, he lasted only three weeks before being found intoxicated in a nearby hostelry.

Blandy occupied himself more successfully - getting some insight into the isolated self by utilizing the solitary pursuits of the 21st Century, reading comics and martial arts magazines, listening to records and playing Game Boy. The coda to his stay, and the anthem of his subsequent travels, was a song by Ben E. King What is Soul?, mimed by Blandy in an earlier video work of the same name (2002).

Like many classical country house gardens, Painshill is essentially a recreation of an Italianate idea of paradise - evoking every kind of space except that which they actually are, from alpine glades to gothic towers, Turkish tents to Chinese bridges, pictorial carriers of a nostalgia for something utopian. It is long way from there to Manhattan, the path trod by Blandy in his search for the heart of Soul in New York, documented in a recent video TheFive Boroughs of the Soul (2004) which reconciles his diverse interests in martial arts, Black American history, music, psychoanalysis and its interface with linguistics.

In the Lake District Blandy took a bunch of teenagers from the heart of Queen’s Park in West London to the market town of Ulverston. Curious locals discussed hip-hop, Tupac (the rapper famously shot in a feud with Biggie Smalls) and freestyle rapped with their metropolitan visitors while Blandy did human ‘beatbox’ that he had learned in London, mimicking his teenage collaborators while documenting their street slang. An earlier video Ya get me? (2003), made with Artangel, shows this clearly defined group breaking down the rules of language, and reinventing it for their own ends; a defining characteristic of identity, which is ultimately undermined as it crosses social and economic divides.

David Blandy, What is Soul?

Blandy’s use of mime and mimicry, his appropriation of others’ language, is a constant throughout his work. He began with a BDP song Poetry, in which KRS-One explains the artistic merits of his raps, which was quickly followed by Hollow Bones and From the Underground (both 2001). Arguably the most successful of his first mime videos, Hollow Bones, saw Blandy mouthing along to Syl Johnson’s infectious soul classic Is it because I’m black? Mastering the timing, he appears to sing ‘The dark brown shades of my skin only adds to the colour of my tears’ while maintaining a sincere expression between phrases, matching Johnson’s lyrics word for word. Blandy is, as suggested by Dan Smith (Art Monthly, 11.02, No. 261, 32) separated from the discourse of a song that tells of a life of discrimination and marginalisation. But music is at the heart of Blandy’s own personal sense of identity, as his extensive record collection proves. In transforming the original plaintive call into a rallying cry of his own, he focuses on the essentialising of music in a world where pretty much anything goes; this apparently simple strategy has created a provocative genre of its own.

His imitative role as a white fan of black music has been contextualised with other artists for whom race, language and identity are cornerstones to their work, such as Coco Fusco and Tracey Moffat. Blandy’s mime of Wu Tang Clan’s rap Bring Da Ruckus while descending into the tube, in From the Underground, neatly underscores the paradox of everyday linguistic relationships between white and black culture. While he is swept along confidently by the lyrics – ‘I rip it hardcore, like porno-flick bitches / I roll with groups of ghetto bastards with biscuits’ – his posturing is undermined by nervous pauses in which he looks distinctly nerdy between verses. The implication is that while we readily adopt music coming out of black culture, the same cannot be said of meaning when it comes to rhyming slang, hip-hop and skater speak. There is gap between what is said, what is heard, and what is understood.

And so where will the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim head next? Computer games have at the heart of their fascination a formal engagement with their virtual, imaginary spaces. Apparently (to refer back to ancient history) during Blandy’s first degree all his work was based on computer games, emphasising the strange way the viewer is complicit in being controlled by the machine - as he says, very ‘The Matrix’, again using the strategy of mimicry. The imaginary is the psychic place where player – teenage or adult - project their ideas of ‘self’ onto the image they see. Lacan called this the ‘mirror’ stage, which previously was something else or ‘other’. Along with Karaoke, second only in popularity in the far east to computer games (whose champions are treated like football stars), maybe computer games offer a clue to Blandy’s own deferential and very English mimesis; a tool to navigate a way through, and make sense of real life, a contemporary derivé in landscapes defined by something other than temporary social categorisations.

© Bruce Haines 2004

This article originally appeared in Untitled magazine

A selection of David Blandy’s videos is now available through LUX – see the online catalogue for more details