Janek Schaefer: 'Asleep At The Wheel'

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Windscreen View

It is of course, both a blessing and a curse of the Digital Age, that no single piece of information can any longer remain discrete or hermetically disconnected.  Each new item of interest is linked to a million others, and thus, our attention is quickly overwhelmed and shattered exponentially as we jump from link to link and topic to topic.  Never mind Ebola, information is the virus that will finally consume us all, I suspect.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', IF Milton Keynes International Festival,  2010

Thus it is that, whilst writing a supposedly brief synopsis of Janek Schaefer’s Sound Art piece, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’, (as a tangent to my own current artistic activities) [1.], I found myself also considering his far more ambitious, but clearly related, multi-media installation, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’ [2.].  All of that takes place in the context of several other half-written blog posts, all nested within one another in different ways.  There are just as many others laying around on my hard drive that just never made the cut, (so far).

Exterior View Of Venue For Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Milton Keynes, 2010

Yet, I want to consider ‘Asleep At The Wheel’ further  here, for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, because it appears, in itself, to have been a huge, multi-dimensional example of this viral quality of information and knowledge.  It was presented, at first glance, as a kind of immersive Ballardian riff on the thrillingly alienating effects of modern car culture, (as indeed is ‘Lay-By Lullaby’).  The venue, - a disused Sainsbury's supermarket, is a distinctly Ballard-like location and I'm struck by how images of the event capture a similar feel to David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Ballard's novel 'Crash' [4.].  However, further research quickly reveals a far more complex and politically engaged agenda, taking in environmentalism, geo-politics, economics. philosophy, sociology and, pretty much, the prospects for all life on the planet.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', IF Milton Keynes International Festival, 2014

Anyone visiting the installation, (which I didn’t), and spending just a little time absorbing some of the audio information piped into Schaefer’s ten assembled cars or available within the Library and Service Areas, would have left feeling they’d taken on enough mental cargo to last for years.  In fact, considering the existential, ‘big issues’ nature of it all, a lifetime would be nearer the mark.  There's food for thought here on a global scale, and critiques of so much of the way our society and economy are structured.  There are also suggestions about how change might be affected on a personal or local level, including the 10:10 campaign to cut carbon emissions.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Library Area

Having just downloaded and ploughed through the associated sound files [5.] from Schaeffer’s online archive, I can honestly say I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed myself.  And yet, I would recommend doing the same.  The sound element weaves together numerous sound sources, voices, addresses and radio broadcasts with Schaefer's own musical ambiences into a vast soup of information and ideas.  The general message of the unsustainability of modern industrial/consumer Capitalism, our dependence on rapidly squandered, finite reserves of fossil fuels, and the threat to both the planet’s survival, is hardly new, but becoming ever more urgent as the days go by.  Indeed, it can all seem so intimidating and all encompassing that the individual is left feeling impotent or apathetic.  Nevertheless, Schaefer has to be admired for his ambition and scope, and for presenting so much interrelated stuff in a sensually seductive and thought provoking manner.  It’s also worth noting how well he connects the issues with various insights into human motivations, and that he’s careful to include as many voices of optimism and advocates of constructive change, as he does prophets of doom.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Glovebox Mixtape.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Inspirational Rear View Mirror Message

Which leads me to my second point.  There’s no shortage of us, (Schaefer included, it seems), who get off on all the Post Ballard/Dystopian/Failed Modernism/Entropy-fixated stuff.  Let’s face it, there are real thrills to be had from hanging around under road intersections or abandoned factory buildings, cataloguing picturesque decay, trespassing into restricted tracts of infrastructure, or driving nowhere at night.  Such activities provide, to a greater or lesser extent, a frisson of transgression not available through the standard channels of consumption, just as they are themselves gradually accepted as new branches of mainstream culture.  Will all these rehearsals for the Apocalypse seem such fun once the sky actually starts to fall though?  Similarly, a fascination with the ways a life lived increasingly behind the wheel effects our perceptions of the world as an aesthetic exercise, [3.], can stand in for any deeper consideration of the real implications of all this dependence on the internal combustion engine and a petro-chemical economy.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Library Area.

Not that any of this signals any real change in my own agenda.  Indeed, a significant part of me still holds to the view that an artist’s real role is to respond to the world as they find it, as much as it is to seek to affect change.  Indeed, it’s all too easy to get tied up in an internal debate over whether one’s artistic concerns are a sub-set of bigger, global issues, or vice-versa.  In reality, it may be that for many of us, artistic practice is a manageable way of exerting some rationalising control over life in the face of all the stuff that just seems to big to influence.  I’d like to believe the two things aren’t mutually exclusive, though, and that one might be the thin end of the other.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Service Area

Mostly, I’m just glad that there are artists around like Janek Schaefer, with motives more noble or generous than my own, who are trying to prove it’s possible to produce thrilling, aesthetically resonant work, whilst still remaining seriously engaged.

Janek Schaefer

[1.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’, 12k, 2014.  Also Presented As A Sound Installation.

[2.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’, Multi-Media Interactive Installation, IF Milton Keynes International Festival, 2010.

[3.]:  David Cronenberg (Dir.), 'Crash', Canada/UK, Alliance Communication Corp./The Movie Network/Recorded Picture Company, 1997.

[4.]:  Or indeed, a kind of Post Modern relish for the Baroque excesses of custom car culture or the spectacular rituals of drag racing.  I'm aware of the irony.

[5.]:  These include the extensive audio elements played within the cars, along with Schaefer's accompanying 'Glovebox Mixtape'.  The latter is also presented as a cassette, designed to be kept in a car.  It is full of gorgeous drones and ambiences, and not unlike 'Lay-By Lullaby' in tone.  It omits the traffic noise of the latter for the most part though, which might, of course, be provided by one's journey in real time.