Today is the launch of my year long manifesto, For Our Love Of War. Over the next twelve months I will be exploring the child like representation of war, the child held hostage to a militarisation of perception, and the youthful affectations of structural violence.

It seems there is a culture where the collective fascination of war is divorced from its’ reality. Where war is seen as heroic, glamourous, a vast arena of entertainment and political hitch hiking. Where society is corralled into a love of war, existing in a state where those who present war have learnt to love war, post adolescent men seeking transcendence love war, political leaders love war with all its classical adornment of youth and its purveyance of international gravitas, the military love war, it’s what they do, and then there are many who love a good war film, computerised interactive war game, war mag, war porn, or the soft touch of war tourism.

All of this relies on the disparity between the signifier and the signified and an unquestioned blurring of reality between the child’s world and the adult’s world, where each is parodying the other. Much of my work over the coming year will focus on the overlap between these two points of perception and how war inhabits a perpetual space, engulfing both the world of the child and that of the adult.

Mark Cator, Rubber Duck, 2012