I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper.

— Jack Spicer

The pig taped to the wall is the colour of smog. Hung vertically by the snout, its pear-shaped body has had a sizeable chunk sliced from its back, revealing the hammy flesh within. A knife sticks out from the pig’s side, but this looks less like a wound than a sheath. The exposed blade has a bag of cigarette filters stuck to its base, and a blister pack lies close to the pig’s forelegs. An upside-down bunch of white daisies hangs down its centre. Superimposed onto the pig’s body, the orange space behind the daisies suggests some kind of dimensional rupture, a gulf between two worlds—pig and wildflowers—haphazardly sealed by blue tape. Strapped with trash and plants, the animal serves as both feast and landfill, producer and consumer, pork and pig. The image originates from Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Land of Cockaigne (1567), which depicts “a peasant fantasy land of bloated plenty and no work,” as Irish artist Sam Keogh notes. Recorded during a live performance where he read from a scroll on the gallery steps, Keogh’s voice is looped and broadcast as part of his installation Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London. Alongside the soliloquy, Keogh’s installation comprises ceramic sculptures in tandem with collaged paintings, the latter attached to big red pieces of crepitant paper. 

In addition to borrowing figures from Bruegel’s imagined world devoid of work, Keogh also adopts techniques associated with textile art. Taking his cue from The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries from 15th century Flanders, he describes his collages as “cartoons, one-to-one scale drawings which tapestry weavers would use to replicate the designs painted by the artist,” meaning that most of the pictures of food, cigarettes, and phones scattered across the installation are life-sized. The video game avatars from Fortnite that Keogh includes are proportioned in the same manner, as though they too could gulp from the inhalers and bottles of Saka populating his collages. Not merely an idiosyncratic blend of art history, mass culture, and domestic garbage, the collages’ one-to-one scale serves as a realist provocation. The historical and contemporary desire to abolish the wage relations and market imperatives that mediate huge swathes of social experience, that is to say, is here rendered in the humble vernacular of tape, orange peels, and free-to-play cross-platform gaming.

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Keogh’s performance calls attention to a historically specific mode of artistic sabotage derived from the intricate design of the millefleur or “thousand flowers'' in The Lady and the Unicorn, “That their detailing could slow the work of the weavers to their own pace, using the flowers’ beauty as an alibi for a less strenuous production process … siphoning as much time and money and silk out of the aristocrats who commissioned the work in the first place.” In a kind of dialectical Double Dutch, Keogh suggests that the textile artists’ extension of the labour process within the constraints of feudal patronage affords them the time, space, and resources to pursue pleasurable forms of art production. Regarding the millefleur taped to the trees and Safari tabs of his own installation, Keogh remarks: “I drew each and every one of them during a Microsoft Teams meeting. It looked like I was taking notes, but I wasn’t, I was drawing pretty flowers on thin layout paper. The drawing of these flowers was narrated by the venal drone of dead-eyed bureaucrats, picking over the corpse of the university.” Confronting the neoliberal university’s executive committee—akin to a feudal aristocracy for the present—Keogh’s millefleur thread around austerity and are drawn out of the timelines of departmental redundancies. As Keogh speaks, unicorns peer out of the corner of their eyes toward PlayStation controllers and disposable facemasks. A pocket watch gets smashed by a mallet while an anthropomorphic clock looks on in horror.

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So why The Land of Cockaigne? Bruegel’s painting is doubtless saturated with earthly abundance: a cactus of bread rises from the earth, a half-eaten egg waddles in the foreground, and there’s a mountain of porridge in the top right corner which, once one has spooned their way through, acts as the portal into this land of plenty. The recumbent figures at the centre of the image—the eponymous soldier, peasant, and scribe of Keogh’s title—would appear to lead a life freed from work, yet they’re unable to stop feasting. This is a world of muddy greens and tepid greys, where meat, bread, and beer march across a landscape of dead trees and tapioca-coloured grass. Cockaigne ripples with spatial contrasts; unable to adapt to this emancipated world, the characters redirect their Protestant work ethic toward food consumption.

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Bruegel’s portrayal of animated food and bloated figures evokes anti-work as an unsettled landscape halfway between city and countryside, a transient space paradoxically dominated by abundance and exhaustion. The anonymous textile artists of 15th century Flanders similarly amplify the dialectical conjunction of anti-work, insofar as weaving imaginary flowers allows one to obey yet repel the dictates of commodified artistic labour. Taken together, Keogh places these methods in productive tension, with Bruegel’s attention to geography encountering the appropriation of time in The Lady and the Unicorn. Furthermore, the artist arranges these two art historical references around a contemporary visual language of procrastination and consumption. As big as circus tents, the towering robes from The Lady and the Unicorn resemble an acidic smudge, and have been bandaged with a submarine sandwich. If the millefleur lets one steal time and silk from the aristocracy, playing Fortnite day in and day out might appear to be a comparatively less poetic task. However, by making these different space-times of anti-work contiguous, Keogh sets in motion the uncapturable value concealed within the juxtaposition of artistic parts (materials, practices).

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Elsewhere in Keogh’s recording, he recounts passing through UK customs at Stansted Airport in London with his collages stuffed inside a suitcase. Three border guards greet him—“A unicorn, a worried cartoon clock, and a pig”—all of whom are convinced he is smuggling tobacco into the country. “Oink oink oink, ‘allo sir, how’re you today, do you smoke cigarettes or tobacco sir?” As Keogh begins to crack under the pressure of border police paranoia and “a base urge to gorge on roast meat,” I shuffle around and try to parse the thick layers of paper that drape the gallery walls. Bushranger, a skin in the video game Fortnite that costs 1200 V Bucks (about $15 CAD), gazes over me, equipped with a bandolier of hand-grenades and a placid smile. Beside him looms a replica of The Lady and the Unicorn. Here, two headless figures but about five pairs of hands grab and stroke a pale blue unicorn. Strewn across the collage are cartoons of hand sanitizer, Sensodyne, and a card reader used for online banking. I spot some wildflowers plastered to the unicorn’s hysterically tall horn.

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The household schlock isn’t so much an aberration in the pictorial field as its primary link to reality: trash catapults the collage into the present, the pandemic, the 21st century bedroom. Yet the cross-pollination of Renaissance tapestry and contemporary video game worlds also draws connections between the two. Broadly conceived, both are allegorical systems with figures who represent something external to the artwork—the senses in The Lady and the Unicorn, the player in Fortnite. They’re also structured around oddly similar conceptions of time: the tapestries are synoptic in the same way that the “Battle Royale'' is iterative, governed by an inverted chronology that foregrounds repetition over linearity. Fortnite perhaps also extends the market logic of 15th century tapestry production, insofar as its micro-transaction trade system incorporates aesthetic creation, commodification, intellectual property, and patronage, the result of which is a mercurial tableau where John Wick and Thanos fight to the death. Staring at Keogh’s cartoon of The Brat, a bipedal hotdog from Fortnite, I decide he’s a distant cousin of the pig from Cockaigne.

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The border agents are now rifling through Keogh’s luggage, scrutinizing the value of the art object along an x-axis of suspicion and a y-axis of incredulity. “What the fuck is that?” the Clock asks. “It’s a big Microsoft Teams calendar with the days cut out. I was thinking of making it into a kind of trellis for the flowers,” Keogh replies. This exchange somehow initiates a spike in the Earth’s gravity. Keogh now lies supine and offers, “Some people say that the red flag of socialism originated in Merthyr Tydfil in 1831 when one of the rebels dipped a white banner in pig’s blood.” The Clock slurs: “I cannn ffeeelll tthheee grraaavvviiittational ttiiimmmee diiillaaatttiion.” The red paper curtains are both backdrop and horizon, socialist past and communist future upon which the collages move. The aesthetics of anti-work merge, in a planetary sense, with the aesthetics of time. Everywhere the masking tape underscores the provisional status of the ensemble, easily taken down and rearranged because it’s barely held together. Keogh has redrawn the anarchist sab cat to remind us how precarious workers can mobilize in a crisis, while the tape retains some traces of the manual labour baked into the installation. UK customs concretizes the boundary conditions of Keogh’s art, requiring these crumpled images to navigate a background of border violence and geopolitical arbitrage. “Oink, oink, oink. May I open the bag sir?”

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One of Keogh’s unicorns is more empurpled than its Flemish predecessor. The reflective paint paired with the ruddy light of the installation makes the creature look sweaty. An iPhone has been taped to its throat, a pouch of Pueblo tobacco adhered to its sternum, and a banana peel is gored by the horn; The Lady and the Unicorn meets the contemporary smoke break. The first time I see Keogh’s installation I’m dimly aware that it’s the ten-year anniversary of Occupy and the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11, both of which spurred new rounds of anti-work mobilization and border militarization, respectively. Not a response to such events per se, Keogh’s narration of moving through UK customs nevertheless bears the scar of these histories. I return a few weeks later and notice that one of the cartoons, an anxious clock face in a prospect of flowers, has fallen facedown onto the floor, leaving an empty outline of blue tape on a red horizon. This blank space becomes an improvised anti-work emblem in its own right, with the paper, tape, and art handlers unknowingly (I presume) withholding their labour. To the left, Keogh’s cartoon replica of a Situationist poster depicts a figure fast asleep, and at the foot of the bed there’s a slogan illustrated with the same bilious  paint as the pig: “LET’S TAKE CONTROL OF OUR LIVES AND LIVE FOR PLEASURE NOT PAIN.”