Viewers of my paintings might think that connections between moral degradation, greed and trade deals are tenuous, or limited to religious fanatics (both Christian - in Texas - and Muslim- in New York). They might ask what evidence there is, beyond religious extremism, that a New World Order was born in 1993 and with it, moral corruption.
The ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh warned how a societies can self-destruct because of greed and moral decay. We might similarly expect moral corruption and degradation to follow a New World Order that prioritises free trade and profit at all costs. We do not need to look far to find it. 1993 was a watershed year of moral shock and outrage. When Robert Thompson and John Venables killed James Bulger there was widespread indignation. After their conviction, The Sun newspaper gathered a petition of nearly 280,000 signatures demanding that the boys’ custodial sentences be increased. The Home Secretary folded under the pressure and overruled the judge (although this decision was later overruled by the Lords, who deemed the intervention to be illegal).
The murder of Stephen Lawrence (also in 1993) shocked British society to its core. The Lawrence murder highlighted racism on an institutional level for the first time (the subsequent report coined the term “institutional racism”). An 1993 was the year that Michael Jackson was first accused of child molestation. This example links back to the Runway Train missing kids.
Such moral panics and huge new global trade deals were either coincidental or they could be linked. The viewer can ponder both possibilities while viewing the paintings and the truth of the paintings’ materiality – their obfuscation between the photographic, the digital and the painterly – prompts questions about the truth of the subject matter.
