COMMENT - Get Your Geek On

Turner Prize? Yawn. Tilly Michell takes a moment to ask where the artistic greats of our era will reall be found

By Tilly Michell

Geek art has long been something of a guilty pleasure of mine.  It may seem odd to some that an ordinary 21-year-old with no history of partaking in medieval recreations, internet romances or Vaseline on toast should enjoy spending seven hours intricately hand painting an Urukhai Battle Fortress. But when having young relatives over for Christmas, one discovers strange things about oneself.

It was only recently, on reading that the Ivor Novello awards will this year host a brand new category that recognises the artistry behind video games, that I began to consider the position that geek art holds in our current cultural climate.

For many years the world has been somewhat dismissive of purportedly low-brow art mediums, such as comic book illustration, computer game design and elvish poetry, but all this may be about to change. As the public become increasingl

y disinterested in the shock tactic antics of the contemporary art world – (the Turner prize nominations, once headline grabbing, raised little more than a ‘meh’ amongst tabloid papers in 2009) – people are beginning to turn to the culty underbelly of mainstream culture.

Are the artists that will stand the test of time living in basements in Shoreditch, designing digital worlds whose 3D intricacies hold a unique understated beauty? One only has to look at work such as Afro Samurai, a game adapted from Takashi Okazaki’s original manga illustrations and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, to know that this may well be the case.

Perhaps my favourite example of the underappreciated geek art genre comes from Mike Rea, an artist whose wooden sculptures of giant robots and sci-fi time machines evoke a powerful image of childhood fantasy and lost dreams. In the artist’s own words, his work ‘offers a sense of what could be and what could never be simultaneously.’

Based in fetishized mainstream pop culture and constantly updated by the latest technological advances, geek art has the ability to reflect contemporary society in a way that no other medium can, making it the perfect antidote to much of the gimmicky artwork that is currently chosen for the public by elite institutions. Geeky artworks, scoffed at now, may one day be lauded as the Rembrandts of the twenty first century.