Guy Louden’s anti-capitalist capitalisms
by Darren Jorgensen

Guy Louden’s latest installation, Dance Dance Revolution (2026), is a dance arcade game, complete with interactive floor mat and vertical screen. Speeding the footwork to a frantic pace, it is near impossible to keep up with the flashing instructions to move back and forth, side to side. The experience is more like being inside a pinball machine than trying out some electronic dance moves. This sense of mania is Louden’s point, as the screen showers us with banknotes, coins, and what look like government bonds to create a ‘metaphor for the experience of contemporary capitalism.’[1] Over the noise of techno pumping through the floor speakers, we are invited to contemplate precisely what it is we are doing on the dance mat in the first place.
        Louden may not have anticipated the skills of some dancers who turned up on the opening night of the show, finishing multiple levels and gaining the applause of the crowd. Loaded with sweaty pleasure, the ‘contemporary experience of capitalism’ was there for all to see, overseen by the flashing lights and pumping beats of the machine. The automation of dancing did not so much condemn its commodification as the body plugged into its own pleasures, the dancer isolated and alienated from the sociality of the dance floor but happy to be told how to move.
        The metaphor of the machine as capitalism is also reversed in George Orwell’s 1984 (1989), as the novel’s hero Winston Smith listens to a woman singing a song composed by a versificator made of pumps and valves. Smith realises that, ‘if there is hope, it lies in the proles,’ and it is a humanising message in an otherwise dystopian novel, as music represents an authentic experience whatever its source. After Louden’s Dance Dance Revolution it is also possible to conclude that whatever capitalism is doing it is not inspiring revolution, but an endless dance-a-thon that makes us feel that things are okay, wherever the music is coming from.
        Anti-capitalist didactics turn up throughout Louden’s exhibition history. Previous Louden shows have documented ‘our inability to think outside of a capitalist ethos,’ while another makes ‘a critique of techno-capitalism.’ There was also a communist exhibition that referenced Louden’s grandfather burying his leftist pamphlets way back in 1951. What is lost, Louden mourns, is ‘my grandfather's understanding of communism – utopian, but moral, hopeful, and experimental.’ Today, and just outside Underscore Gallery at the dirty end of William Street, a Falun Gong banner asks us to REJECT THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY. Louden’s anti-capitalism is staged amidst a frenzy of Asian supermarkets, karaoke bars, junk shops and roast duck restaurants. The energy of Dance Dance Revolutionfits right into this neighbourhood while Louden declares that its politics are against it.



Dance Dance Revolution is the most recent of Louden’s shows in short-lived ARIs and pop-ups that have appeared and disappeared over the last decade. He was a founder and exhibitor in the legendary basement gallery Success (2015–2016), showed bluish digital prints at Pig Melon (2019–2024), and an animated dungeon map at Light Works (2022–). For readers who do not move in Perth’s tight ARI scene, these are all DIY affairs. Pig Melon was in someone’s sharehouse, while Light Works is in a cavernous and spooky building that was once the Scientology headquarters. Underscore (2025–) is the most recent iteration of this history, a small gallery amidst the small businesses of northern Northbridge, and Dance Dance Revolution suits its experimental focus, with performances, readings and screenings taking place in-between shows.
        Louden’s expertise with digital art suits the generation of artists championed by Underscore. Often 30-somethings, they saw the hopes of the early internet of the 2000s with its blogs and torrents collapse into the corporate hegemon we are familiar with today. The pessimism of Louden’s art is the pessimism of a generation cursed by a convergence of apocalypses, damned to watch environmental, cultural, and economic singularities illuminated by fires and floods, unaffordability and war through intimate, handheld screens. Wet End, Louden’s video game for the 2025 Fremantle Biennale, simulates riding a jet ski through flooded Fremantle, scooting around buildings sinking into the mud. Again, Louden wants to emphasise the politics of the work, saying it is “crass and unhinged to reflect the psychology of this moment,” and yet it is difficult not to sense a kind of liberation at the end of the world in its bright approximation of familiar streets. In Preppers, an exhibition about hoarding, conspiracies, and training for the end times, Louden put Wikipedia into a bomb proof suitcase in Ark (II) (2019), carefully packaging away all the idealism of its crowd-sourced knowledge. The tension here is between human ingenuity (Wikipedia) and its fallacy (apocalypse).
        Perhaps Louden’s most profound, anti-capitalist work is RPG (Romantic Post-human Geography) (2025), first exhibited as part of Dungeon Crawl at Light Works, a 2025 show about role playing games. On screen, two monsters from the Daggerfall game wander endlessly around an LED forest, occasionally crossing paths. If this is what revolution looks like, as these monsters no longer have to fight but are free from their place in the capitalist labour system, the emotion we feel upon watching them can only be described as dread. We look in upon these monsters as upon a world that does not know itself, and upon creatures that do not know themselves. Simulating their freedom, Louden deprives the monsters of the choices that they were predetermined to make.
        If Louden loads his didactics with the lost hopes of a revolutionary time, of an alternative to capitalism that haunts his simulations, his work also outlines some of the conundrums of anti-capitalist thought. Dancing and playing computer games are part of the pleasures of contemporary human life. Using them to critique capitalist society, in all of its manifold complexities, also simulates the pleasures that this society affords. The melancholy within these works lies in the way that they ask us to partake of these pleasures while knowing that we are part of an artist’s ideological experiment. Louden turns pleasure into enjoyment, recreation into compulsion. The freedom that we thought pleasure consisted of becomes another type of labour, as its repetition creates the very alienation that our pleasures were attempting to short-circuit.
        It is tempting to describe Louden as Perth’s leading communist artist, but this would be to simplify the way that his works are double-coded to critique the very hopes for communism that they also gesture toward. Invited to exhibit at Lawson Flats, Louden shattered a virtual model of this members only club for (and I quote their own promotional material) “remarkable people” in a photorealist rendering of its walls, floors and fittings piled atop each other as if after a fire-free explosion. Lawson Flats Capriccio (2022) pictures the destruction of the venue that it was exhibited in. Fellow artist Sam Bloor asked Louden whether he ‘turned down the money in this radical protest,’ saying that the work is ‘suckling from the teat while protesting the milk,’ but this is surely the point of any institutional and one might add anti-capitalist critique.[2] It is one of the ironies of being trapped in a closed system that artists are more successful the more they protest it.
        This image of a destroyed gallery, and of the artist trapped in a loop from which he cannot extricate himself, are metaphors for Louden’s declarations of anti-capitalism. Making art about the capitalism that lies all around him, and that he will never be liberated from, Louden illustrates a hard truth for all 30-somethings looking forward to the dystopian future that capitalism has created. Art is no longer hopeful but a way of bringing its enjoyments into focus for a moment, as if to step outside the simulation and look from behind a screen, to see ourselves as monsters wandering aimlessly, and occasionally crossing paths.

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Footnotes:

1. All quotes from the artist are from the catalogue sheet from the Dance Dance Revolution exhibition, and from https://guylouden.com/

2. Sam Bloor, comment on @guyyy_guyyy’s instagram post, 2002.

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Images: Guy Louden, Dance Dance Revolution (alpha), 2026, custom hardware, custom software, dancepad stage, television monitor, stereo audio, window vinyl. Commissioned songs from Blood Knows, Business Partner, Lia T, Lyndon Blue & Danyon Saxon, and Neapolaxi.