Nick Waplington: Learn How To Die The Easy Way

Nick Waplington's contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2001 expresses a yearning for the artistic and commercial freedom that the internet might yet expose, and a celebration of the dislocated reason behind conventional thoughts and the media they use.

The limitless boundaries of the internet, and the endless possibilities that exist in cyberspace for communication and information, are what drives Nick Waplington's survey of what this new media holds for the artist and society in general. Not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations, the internet and its implications were elaborated on for Waplington's presence at the Venice Biennale.

Somewhere out there lies the new unchartered frontier of cyberspace. In that Babel there are images, dreams, inert and vital messages, anonymous ciphers and calculating incubi. Because it is faceless, as if somehow subterranean, human dialogue and the expression of ideas can multiply without responsibility, without the parameters of authorial disciplines or social conventions. Could this be anarchy, of the kind that artists linger on street corners for? For Waplington, the medium is certainly the message, but one far more profound than McLuhan's epithet, since this is a medium not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations. It is as if he had found himself a child again, locked in the toy shop overnight, where train sets would double as conveyor belts of ideas, and Action Man as a table leg.

"If, as I suspect," says Waplington, "the internet has broken the stranglehold of governments and large media corporations on mass communication, then we could be in for a very exciting period of development on a number of different levels. Would a breakdown of current modes of social, moral and political cohesion be too much for a man to ask for?"

UK and US-based artist Nick Waplington works with photography as a medium to submerge in communities resulting in personal involvement and visual work. He caught John Berger’s, Richard Avedon’s and the rest of the world’s attention in the 1990s with Living Room and has since then created recognisable, frank representations of people and their sociopolitical backgrounds ranging from a DIY, post Punk youth navigating Thatcherism, the heyday of House and rave culture in 1990s NYC or documenting the last collection of close friend Alexander McQueen at his London studio. Waplington has had solo shows at the Tate Britain and The Photographers Gallery in London among other institutions and his works are part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London or the Philadelphia Museum of Art.