Bobby Fingers’ videos are an absorbing audio-visual sensory experience.
For the uninitiated, Bobby Fingers is a pseudonymous artist who has become a popular creator on YouTube. In his videos, he produces intricate dioramas ranging in scale from 1:9 to 1:26.
So far, they have depicted infamous moments in celebrities’ careers: Mel Gibson’s arrest for drunk-driving; Steven Seagal being humbled by a stuntman; Michael Jackson’s hair catching on fire whilst filming a Pepsi ad; and Fabio Lanzoni’s ‘goose incident.’
Perhaps his most absurd and memorable work is a Jeff Bezos rowing boat. Yes, a canoe in the detailed image of the billionaire Amazon founder. Simultaneously it is a functioning sea-faring vessel, a protracted and often introspective social commentary, and a display of high-skill design.
Absurd, surreal, elaborate and profound are the adjectives most frequently applied to Bobby and his work.
Wide-ranging and superdisciplinary; hyphenations and affixes are required to aptly describe his art.
When one piece of work is composed of so many seemingly incongruent elements it is difficult to comprehend it as a coherent piece of art. Visually his videos are a demonstration of highly-skilled prosthetic art and model making and an elaborate use of modern scanning and 3D printing equipment. His surrealist humour delivered in a Limerick semi-whisper, deep poetic narration, and parody musical numbers supplement his physical expertise to create a wholly unique, satisfying - and mostly coherent - work of art.
The humour and medium may not be everyone’s cup of tea. At times, the commitment to jokes can be indulgent. The videos’ lack of rhythm can be momentarily disorientating, but their erratic narrative is reflective of the artist and his stream-of-consciousness method.
Although you are glad to return to the circadian rhythm of real life after watching him, each episode is a brief insight into the mind of Bobby Fingers: he is fascinating, an unconventional genius, and should be relished.
Bobby Fingers is the new pseudonym for Bobby McGlynn, who was once Mr Chrome in The Rubberbandits, the Limerick-based comedy hip-hop duo who were memorable for hiding their identities by wearing shopping bags as masks.
They found fame in 2010 with their comedy music video “Horse Outside,” which married genuine musical merit with a sensational depiction of urban life in Ireland. Their characters’ veneer of imbecility was a way to satire the embedded tropes of youth, violence, and republican ideals in Ireland. In their pomp, they hosted a series on RTÉ and performed at festivals across the country.
Separate from that, Bobby has spent fifteen years as a prosthetic make-up artist and model-maker, most notably designing gashed faces and severed limbs for the television series Vikings.
In his new guise, Bobby has moved on from direct commentary on Irish social politics, but has retained his penchant for irony and satire. Bobby’s narrative medium has moved from the national stage to the internet, but his creativity and freshness sustains.
It is easy to disregard YouTube as a medium for artistic exhibition. However, as it has been embraced as a tool for academic and artistic education, it is quickly becoming a dynamic platform from which to present art.
The art of Bobby Fingers is as much the models he creates as the videos themselves. What makes his videos such an impressive artistic experience is the unusual fusion of so many art forms. One might suppose that this would dilute the audience’s appreciation for each art. Quite the contrary; it is the being caught unsuspecting that makes Bobby Fingers’ humour, skill and depth so compelling. Just when you think you understand the narrative Bobby is taking you on, he zags.
The videos’ unpredictable oscillation between surrealism and profundity are their greatest feature. When the interchange between satirical and authentic commentary is so unpredictable, you find your orientation is at Bobby’s mercy. Observing art when feeling unsettled or unsure makes you feel vulnerable. When an artist is as fiercely intellectual as they are absurd, their work can be mystifyingly attractive.
Bobby’s latest reinvention has allowed him to depart from the intrepid persona he popularised as Mr Chrome. Although he appears keen to separate the two, it is fruitful to see Bobby Fingers as the legacy of his character in The Rubberbandits.
Bobby Fingers is certainly a departure from Mr Chrome. His Rubberbandits character was almost exclusively on-screen, whereas now he is behind the screen with the crucial exception of his sculpting fingers. He has become less of a performer and more of an artist. Bobby Fingers’ self-narration combines surrealist humour, the sharpness of scripted satire, and the soothing sensory experience of a hushed Limerick accent.
In Bobby’s latest character reincarnation, the audience sees a much more complex and authentic version of himself. Bobby Fingers is Bobby - quite literally - unmasked.
To best examine the art of Bobby Fingers, it seems absurdly apt to conduct an analysis of six lines of poetry that he delivers in one of his videos. He reads the lines as he observes the casting of his 1:10 scale Michael Jackson model in the heat of a furnace that his brother, Billy Fingers, has created in a medieval-looking west coast location. In free verse, his ode to the lost-wax casting process is profound:
Then you stare into the wet metal.
This soup of light that screamed from the guts of a star as it shed its skin aeons ago.
And yet, in the life of the universe, only a few grains of sand have fallen into the glass below.
Our mother is an infant. Still we take the purest of things from inside her and leave her with such burdens.
Because we break the things we love.
And monsters sharpen their claws in the void where youth is confused with beauty.
The phonic consonance of the ‘wet metal’ into which he stares illustrates the fluidity with which Bobby uses material and abstract concepts in his work.
Much of Bobby’s work is underpinned by anthropomorphism. Through the creation of his dioramas he explores the climate crisis and the transience of life by attributing human characteristics to non-human entities. His dioramas never attempt to be overtly political; in fact, you can see that, for Bobby, spending months touching and moulding someone’s face engenders a certain empathy for his subject.
His metaphorical description of the star’s ‘guts,’ shedded skin, and its light as a ‘soup’ that screams creates a human prism through which we can question the immortality of the celestial realm. The loose metre, too, reflects the molten and notional nature of his metaphysical subjects. Somehow, at the same time, he is talking about the dewaxing of a seven inch cast of Michael Jackson and the human relationship with the universe.
When Bobby says: ‘Our mother is an infant,’ the possessive determiner ‘our’ suggests that he is not referring to his mammy, but rather to something larger and more conceptual. Ireland? Earth? Humanity? Whichever it is, as he describes that ‘we take the purest things from inside her and leave her with such burdens,’ it is clearly an allegory for human destruction and the unsustainability of our existence.
Soon the observer forgets that they are watching the making of a Michael Jackson mould and suddenly they are struck by the profundity of his poetry: ‘Because we break the things we love.’ Whether it is the earth, our friends, our lovers, or our art, he explores the perverse human impulse to damage what we love.
As he describes ‘the void where youth is confused with beauty,’ one cannot help but discern the allusion to Dorian Gray. A reminder that the consequences of selling one’s soul for eternal youth and beauty will always be suffered. Again, at once, this also refers to Michael Jackson and our role in ecological destruction.
On the surface, there is very little that is Wildean about Bobby Fingers; however, his work can be seen through the lens of Aestheticism, the movement that Oscar Wilde epitomised. Bobby Fingers’ art is certainly ‘for art’s sake,’ as the famous dictum goes. The value of his art’s appearance is unquestionably more important than its function.
Bobby Fingers is Wildean in an unorthodox and modern-day manner: bringing humour, artistic precision and philosophy into a coherent and decadent piece of art.
Wilde said that “it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
In 2016, Bobby’s former Rubberbandits partner, known as Blindboy Boathouse, described the purpose of the pair’s art as “distracting ourselves from the inevitability of death, and having craic.” Inconsequentiality is the plain upon which Bobby wishes his art to exist. As tedious as his videos might sound, the profundity of his poetry and the intricacy of his design skills juxtaposed with the utter futility of creating small scale dioramas of disgraced public figures means that his art, at once, bamboozles and charms.
Though most importantly, it’s a bit of craic.
