Cynic's Bedtime

Let’s get cynical.

But what does it mean to get cynical today? We call someone a cynic when they are distant, skeptical, or disenchanted, caught in an attitude that seems to reject sincerity. The cultural drift of words always gives us clues about our own drift as individuals, societies, and communities of knowledge. Perhaps one and the same thing? As a philosophical school, cynicism once meant something quite different: a radical, even humorous posture of leaning toward virtue against power, of reducing life to its essentials. That is another kind of cynicism: not resignation, but a performative form of resistance.

Jack Burton’s first solo exhibition at Tube Gallery, Cynic’s Bedtime, unfolds within this tension. The title carries a double edge: to “put the cynic to bed,” suspending the inner skeptic and making room for sincerity, but also the restless night of a cynic who cannot sleep, haunted by runaway thoughts and external noise. The sixteen photographs that compose the exhibition, all hand-printed in the darkroom, form an allegorical group of works: coffee cups, an unmade bed, shattered shells, vinyl records, neon lights, fragments of insomnia. Some images are carefully staged, others improvisational, as if thought itself had pierced the frame. In the artist’s own words, “Art is not a rational activity but a rush.” ¹

Burton’s universe expands into the gallery space: on the floor, shredded paper from past tests and prints; dice inscribed with titles and ideas for future projects, open to chance and participation; and firecrackers that evoke both sleepless noise and historical references to revolutionary thought, some inscribed with the names of figures from the French Revolution. The gallery walls have been intervened to mirror the environment where the photographs were staged, eroding not only the fragile boundary between sleep and wakefulness but also that seemingly insurmountable distance between the studio and the gallery.

Here, the cynic is also a “self under siege,” in Rick Roderick’s words: a divided, restless consciousness, saturated with stimuli and contradictions. The booth Burton built to produce the images—initially just a technical solution—now functions as an ironic commentary on the reduction of contemporary art to transportable formats: compressed, portable, yet still capable of opening spaces for reflection.

So, let’s dream ourselves cynical.

To dream cynically might be not to give up, but to share with others the restless wakefulness of thought. The exhibition opens a collective space of doubt, insomnia, and imagination, inviting us to wander through the fragments of a mind that resists easy answers. How to make art in a time of crisis? In its mixture of the intimate and the theatrical, Cynic’s Bedtime is not only about insomnia, but about what keeps us awake as a society.

Esmeralda Gómez Galera

¹ Unpublished conversation with the artist on September 3rd.

² Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1993), lecture series produced by The Teaching Company.