Yayoi Kusama at The Tate and beyond

Exhibition Review by Philip Ginsberg

The current travelling retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama – after it leaves Tate Modern, catch it in Paris, Madrid or New York – literally sparkles with engaging and diverse art. The show lays out the whole career of the 83-year old artist before us, showing us both her own trajectory, as well as how she engaged with some of the most important artists and art movements of the century after her arrival in the United States as an artworld outsider in 1957. From painting to photography to whole-room installations filled with twinkling lights and infinity mirrors, there are more than enough stimuli for us to contemplate, interpret and chase for themes and connections.

Yet frustratingly, Kusama’s art is normally never discussed on its own terms. Instead, the critics’ common consensus has been to speak about Kusama herself first, and then filter her art through the character they have created. More specifically, writers and broadcasters like to explain Kusama’s work in terms of the mental health issues for which she has been treated full-time since the 1970s. They take care to mention that she lives and works in a mental hospital. They emphasise that making art is simply her way of dealing with her illness. Apparently, they say, she has even “nurtured” her own “insanity” (The Guardian) in order to create her works. In this way, they reduce Kusama’s art to a mere expression of her so-called madness.

Thus the critics rehearse the well-known journalistic trope of the deranged genius, on this occasion in the form of a visual artist. This cliché is one that our (self-styled) popular thought-leaders might have expected to have overcome in the 21st Century, now that science has robustly complicated the idea of what it means to be ‘mad’. Unsurprisingly then, their angle is superficial and unhelpful – which becomes especially clear when we manage to ignore their interpretations and tune into the art itself.

This is particularly important to do in Yayoi Kusama’s case because, when we interpret the art before we construct the person – and therefore arrive at a version of Kusama that is anchored in her works, instead of anchored in her life – we not only begin to challenge the idea of what it means to be a mad artist, but an artist as such. In its sweeping and eclectic overview of one artist’s career, Tate Modern’s exhibition thus enables us to question what it really means to classify any creator and what, if anything, might be suspicious about the processes of (high-) cultural acceptance, genre-building in cultural production and canonisation.

Two works in particular exemplify these questions.

The full-room installation Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show from 1963 is one of the most striking works on display in the show. It consists of a found wooden rowing boat that is painted completely in white. Its surface is completely covered with stuffed cotton phalluses that are twice as large as cucumbers and also white, bending and jutting out in all directions. There is a pair of white high heels in the vessel, too. The room itself is covered in a total of 999 black-and-white posters of the same boat.

Given its simple manufacture and disturbingly clear imagery, Aggregation thus invites us to ask what qualifies it as art instead of as outsider art. Analogously, the overwhelming amount of phalluses and images of the boat encourage us to interrogate the theme of obsessiveness in art. Is their repetition enough reason to diagnose Kusama as a mad artist? As the exhibition brochure dutifully tells us, Aggregation’s serial posters could be compared to those of Andy Warhol, who may have been eccentric, but who was also an ingenious analyst of the Zeitgeist and a shrewd businessman.

The final piece in the retrospective, Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, from 2011, is an even more immersive installation. In contrast with Aggregation, it is clinically precise and technically sophisticated, a three metre high, six metre long cube with an entrance at one end and an exit at the other. Its walls, ceiling and most of its floor are completely covered in mirrors, except for the meandering path that leads viewers through the room. The darkness is broken only by what seem to be thousands of tiny, floating lights at various heights, reflected endlessly by the mirrors. The lights all glow in the same rich colours, such as purple, red or yellow, which they change in unison at varying intervals.

Overall, the smooth glass and electronics of Mirrored Room seem calculative and post-minimalist in their restrained emotionality. The installation would fit well into a commercial contemporary art gallery. Unlike Aggregation, it does not hint at obsessiveness. Viewed alongside Aggregation and the rest of the varied works in the show, it not only proves that there are more sides to Yayoi Kusama than arbiters of culture would have us believe, but more variety to art itself than they might feel comfortable with.

An Action, Event, or Other Thing that Occurs or Happens Again

 

Exhibition review by Theo Reeves-Evison, originally published in Frieze, issue 145.

Bonnington Gallery, One Thoresby Street & Trade Gallery, Nottingham UK.

Faced with the prospect of working in a food processing plant for three months, an artist friend once opined that since he didn’t expect the job to be mentally taxing, it would be possible to spend each shift thinking about his practice and generating ideas. If his enthusiasm didn’t seem misplaced at first, as the weeks rolled by it soon became clear that repetitive actions give rise to repetitive thoughts, and in a repetitive environment even reflections on the idea of repetition can become repetitive.

The principle conceit of the group exhibition ‘An Action, Event or Other Thing that Occurs or Happens Again’ was to show work that escaped this deadlock, allowing visitors to think about repetition while still under its influence. Initiated by artist and curator Candice Jacobs, the show was spread over two main venues: the roomy, university-affiliated Bonnington Gallery, and the decidedly less roomy artist-run studio-cum-gallery complex One Thoresby Street, which houses a third space, Trade Gallery, under different curatorship. As well as containing more than 20 works, the exhibition also encompassed an extensive public programme of talks and events, with selections as diverse as a daily screening of Robert Ashley’s multimedia TV-opera Perfect Lives (1977–83) and a DJ set by techno mainstay Surgeon.

As if the concept of repetition wasn’t enough to take on, a second theme emerged with a selection of works that traffic meaning between sound, text and image. For example, the slender, stave-like frames of Athanasios Argianas’s Song Machine 18 (2011) were complemented by Dani Gal’s Zen for TV and the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (2010), which splinters its historical source material – a censored Israeli television adaptation of S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh – into three parts: a slide show of stills from the original recording; a radio play in English based on the script; and a projected black square intermittently cut by an audio-graphic white line (both a representation of what was originally broadcast to millions of Israeli viewers in 1978, and a nod to Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV, 1963).

Instead of being divided along the axis of these two guiding themes, the exhibition worked on the basis of a series of slight, subtle and seemingly arbitrary linkages. In One Thoresby Street, Katie Davies’ cacophonous video collage of Korean television advertisements, After the House is Burnt, Pick up the Nails (2006), was projected onto a freestanding wall measuring two by five metres. Less than a mile away in Bonnington Gallery was installed an identical wall, accommodating a disembodied slogan by Mark Titchner (The World Isn’t Working, 2011), the 2008 blueprint for which, in turn, sat back at Thoresby Street in the form of a roughly chiselled woodcut of the same name.

Another association connected Jack Strange’s g (2008), in which a small lead ball placed onto the keypad of a laptop exerts just the right amount of pressure to type the letter into a expanding Word document, with G (2010), an ink drawing by Jacobs herself based on the logo from the ’90s TV show Gladiators. In the same space, a deadpan text animation by Korean duo Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries unraveled to the soundtrack of a lazy bossa-nova score. The title, Samsung (1999/2011), appeared on screen with metronymic regularity, its final ‘g’ hanging in the air like an unvoiced echo.

As a curatorial strategy, forging connections between works of different origin, ambition and formal character is obviously nothing new. Although ‘An Action…’ sometimes felt as though it was trying to do too much, what was successful was that the strategy of repeating and connecting delivered viewers back to the theme of repetition itself. Signs, structures and forms shuttled back and forth within and between each art work, reminding us not to look for too much meaning in their content – in the letter ‘g’, the size of a wall, and so on – but to recognize rhythms of spatio-temporal distribution and their effects on our thoughts and our bodies.

On Beauty and Murder: The Hunger Games and other stories (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Review by Lara Choksey

The Hunger Games dir. Gary Ross 2012

When there are few other good things to say about a film, a critic might use the phrase ‘visually stunning’. At least a certain aesthetic pleasure might make up for an inadequate plot or bad acting. The Hunger Games is a visually stunning film. Visual references range from Song of the South to Gattaca to Ben Hur to The Wizard of Oz. But it is precisely its beauty that presents one of the biggest problems of the film. The Hunger Games employs techniques of generating aesthetic pleasure unreflectively, unrelentingly and ultimately, irresponsibly.

Viewed in one way, The Hunger Games is nothing more than a celebration of a particular trope of feminine beauty. The protagonist is a cross between Greek goddesses Diana and Athena, embodying an ideal of feminine strength, morality and beauty wrapped up in Western mythology. If the film simply explored and problematized this ideal (as it arguably starts to do in the last stages), perhaps it would be more successful.

However, The Hunger Games is nothing if not ambitious: it also strives to offer a new version of a dystopic, totalitarian future. But, due to its preoccupation with beauty, the film skirts around the brutality of its own dystopia, flirting with it while never really fully engaging with its own thematic landscape. It shows us only the costumes of state violence, rather than some of its manifestations. It could be argued that this is the point; if so, it is made unsuccessfully. The stylistic and thematic flirtation with brutality performs exactly what the film tries to critique: the spectator becomes complicit in the hunger games, as much a consumer of the violence and narratives of the games as the grotesquely-costumed consumers within the film.

My earlier use of the word ‘irresponsible’ in this context reminds me of a specific criticism of a scene in Schindler’s List. A critic – I forget his/her name – criticized the scene in which we see several of Schindler’s women standing naked in a shower room in Auschwitz, unsure whether they are to be gassed or saved. The critic argued that the women’s nakedness renders a scene, which should be divorced from sexualization or visually aesthetic pleasure, appealing in an almost pornographic way. The audience is invited to enjoy the sight of naked female bodies ostensibly on their way to the gas chamber, which – in his/her view – detracts from the gravity of the event (or in this case, non-event).

This is one of many arguments made against certain visual aspects of Spielberg’s film, some of which are convincing. It is a film with many problems. However, I disagree with this particular argument. The scene with the naked women, for me, is a fantasy, and deliberately so. Schindler’s List is a fantastical film; while based on a true story, it imagines how the Holocaust might not have happened by showing how a particular group of people were saved. In this sense, Schindler’s List is not really a ‘holocaust’ film at all, but a dream sequence in which the act of saving as opposed to annihilating carries forward the narrative.

To look specifically at the scene with the naked women: they do not die. They are not gassed. This is not representative of the reality of the Holocaust, and it does not claim to be. This is a counter narrative, a possibility, a moment in which the pleasure of seeing naked female bodies (sexual, aesthetic or both) continues past the threat of their destruction. A prevailing image of the Holocaust is the footage of piles of dead bodies being dumped into mass graves at Belsen; the image of the naked women in Schindler’s List proposes to act as a juxtaposition to this image.

For me, the scene is totally aware of mass graves full of dead bodies at Belsen; it is a very deliberate reversal of the image. In this moment of not dying, the spectator is permitted to take pleasure in living bodies – in the very fact of their survival. The brutality of the event still exists; this is unavoidable. The Holocaust happens around the fantasy. The piles of dead bodies still exist, shown explicitly in one particular scene. However, the visual and thematic fantasy of these saved women is a way of reading Schindler’s List as a whole: the film offers the possibility of survival, while still remaining deferent to the fact of genocide. Its use of beauty – in this respect, if not in others – marks out the parameters of its own fantasy.

Good fantasy works when it distinguishes the limits of its universe…

Continue reading this review: NXRB On Beauty and Murder by Choksey

Taking Care with Bernard Stiegler

Review article by Richard Iveson (forthcoming in Parallax as “Rewiring the Brain, Or, Why our Children are not Human”)

Bernard Stiegler Taking Care of Youth and the Generations trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford University Press, 2010)

Introduction

A hugely prolific writer, for more than fifteen years philosopher Bernard Stiegler has been seeking both to articulate existence itself, and to ameliorate its contemporary woes. In what is a vast undertaking, Stiegler moves from the originary emergence of humanity to the safeguarding of its future by way of multi-volume analyses that range widely between and across technology, political economy, art, palaeontology, television, democracy, and industrial and hyperindustrial societies.¹ Focussing on education and the changing role of the school in contemporary Western societies, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations continues this project, while at the same time going some way to explain the sense of urgency, which characterizes much of Stiegler’s previous writing.

According to Stiegler, we are forever engaged in a ‘battle of intelligence for maturity’, a battle ‘concomitant with the history of humanity’ (p.29). Today, however, this battle has been transformed into the life or death struggle of humanity itself. Unless things change rapidly, Stiegler insists, humanity as we know it will be destroyed, displaced by a dystopian posthuman future whose inhabitants would be incapable not only of heeding Stiegler’s warning, but of even reading it. Proclaiming himself thus a prophet of and from potentially the last generation of mature adults, Stiegler seeks to hastily recall us to rational critique before the new media has its way and irretrievably restructures the connections which constitute intelligence so as to render such constitution impossible (p.33).

To instaurate critique, however, is no easy matter. It is not simply a question of education reform, but of a revolution that impacts upon every level of society and beyond, intervening ceaselessly even at the neurological level. Moreover, a revolution by its very nature offers no guarantees. As Stiegler admits, the remedy he prescribes might also turn out to be the worst kind of poison. Indeed, one can all too easily envisage the appropriation of his discourse in the service of a right-wing defence of ‘family values’, and even in a renewed eugenicist discourse which (by way of A Clockwork Orange) deems synaptic rewiring a remedy for ‘delinquency’ within a regime of enforced ‘care’.

Throughout, Stiegler draws on three main philosophical supports in order to establish his notion of ‘rational critique as noopower’. First and foremost is Plato’s theory of anamnesis. A theory, which, according to Stiegler, constitutes ‘the basis of all instruction as the dialectic transmission of apodictic or formal knowledge’ insofar as it ‘requires a kind of attention the learner forms itself as a knowledge […] by individuating it’ (p.172). Secondly, rational critique requires the establishment of a ‘republic of letters’ such as formulated during the Aufklärung and by Kant in particular. Finally, Stiegler offers a sustained engagement with Michel Foucault, extending the latter’s notion of the ‘writing of the self’ while at the same time disputing Foucault’s earlier claim that the school is ‘only’ a prison of surveillance and control. Instead, through Plato, through Kant, Stiegler argues that the school in its broadest sense in fact constitutes the primary pharmacological site of the battle for intelligence. It is the school, in other words, which has the potential to produce both the curative individuation of rational critique (noopower) and the poisonous disindividuation of psychotechnologies in thrall to the market.

To understand this, however, it is first of all necessary to understand the specifically pharmacological nature of what Stiegler calls ‘tertiary retentions’, a nature, which makes of them always both poison and remedy at once (pharmaka). Social or cultural memories that have subsequently become materialized as memory supports (the book being the privileged example), tertiary retentions are for Stiegler the building blocks of the human world. During the process of instruction, these tertiary retentions must be re-internalized in order for knowledge to be individuated, as we saw with the Platonic dialectic. Such circulating intelligence is thus already collective at every level, forming an ‘organological milieu linking minors and adults, parents and children, ancestors and descendants’ (p.34). It is this which constitutes the ‘organological history’ of humanity. These same material supports, however, are also what allow for the destruction of intelligence. Thus it comes to pass that this history of humanity now finds itself increasingly under threat from the emergence of what Stiegler calls ‘grammatized media’, television and new media being his primary examples. These new symbolic media, he writes, constitute ‘a network of pharmaka that have become extremely toxic’ (p.85).

Stiegler, however, is by no means offering a simplistic rant against technology, nor a reactionary call to return to some mythic bygone era. While grammatized media – and their toxicity – are indeed unprecedented, they are, he insists, nevertheless the only ‘first-aid kit’ we possess with which to remedy the poison of their carelessness. In other words, insofar as they are necessarily pharmaka, the new grammatized media must therefore also constitute the condition for a new maturity, a new critique. It is here, Stiegler writes, that the contemporary battle for intelligence must begin, with a re-forming of ‘psychosocial attention in the face of these psychotechnologies of globalized psychopower’ (p.35). Such reformulations are what he calls nootechniques aimed at producing transindividual knowledge, as opposed to its short-circuiting in the fulfilment of base human drives under control of psychotechnologies…

continue reading this review: NXRB Stiegler by Iveson

New Cross Fine Dining

Restaurant review by Sophie Fuggle

Kung Fu Kitchen, New Cross Road, SE13

In the first of a series of features on the many culinary wonders of New Cross, NXRB samples the wares of the latest addition to the gastronomic centre of South East London. With its name taking full advantage of both alliteration and affectionate cultural stereotype, Kung Fu Kitchen, suggests a veritable assault on the tastebuds. It should also be noted that by name alone, the establishment sets itself apart from the less imaginatively named establishments adorning Lewisham Way which range from the feebly metonymic Noodle and Rice to the ironically grandiose The Thailand.

Emerging from the ruins of a former pie shop, known only (at least to this reviewer) for its distinct lack of pies, Kung Fu Kitchen appears to offer all the staples of the average high street Chinese takeaway. While the only real benchmark of both taste and quality can be discerned by way of their Singapore noodles and accompanying chilli oil, on this occasion, the reviewer opted for the hot and sour soup, the salt and pepper chicken wings with a side of prawn crackers.

After Singapore noodles, hot and sour soup tends to offer the most insight into the inner workings of a Chinese takeaway. The ability to create a soup which is both hot and sour in equal measure is no mean feat. It is also important that individual ingredients do not overwhelm the dish. A common error is to bombard the soup with either carrot or tofu. This is where otherwise perfectly respectable establishments lose all credibility along with the patronage of this reviewer. In the case of Kung Fu Kitchen, the hot and sour soup had an unorthodox prawn focus. While this did not result in any imbalance to the overall flavour of the dish, it was clearly intended to compensate for an aporia of pork and the limited and lacklustre presence of some weary chicken. However, at around 50p cheaper than Go-Sing and other local competitors, these minor shortcomings shouldn’t obscure the good work Kung Fu Kitchen are doing in bringing a passable hot and sour soup to the masses during a recession.

The salt and pepper chicken embodied a similar paradox. The outer coating was a joy to behold and eat – perfectly combining crispy, greasy and spicy in accordance with this reviewer’s personal predilection. The meat itself, however, was an unwholesome shade of pink. Although it may be safely assumed that the quality and cookedness of the chicken itself is not at stake here, for reasons of objectivity, it seems important to make note of this.

Where the prawn crackers did not cause any particular offence, being neither overcooked, too thick or too thin, they were also not a major source of inspiration. More importantly, perhaps, was the dearth of appropriate reading material available for patrons awaiting their orders. Besides a Cantonese version of LOOT, there was nothing in the way of the two week old Tv Choices that adorn the tables of Go-Sing. Given the Baltic winds blowing in through the open door, this made waiting even 5 minutes something of an ordeal.

Thus, while this review must remain inconclusive given the lack of data on the Singapore noodles, the quest for the ultimate hot and sour soup continues…

Different Drummers Review

Review by Jennifer Otter

Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (University of California Press, 2010)

Race is one of the most talked about and taboo topics.  Few writers have the chutzpah to openly question racial stereotypes, let alone trace the historical roots, which may provide insight into the origins, or, dare it be said, search for any truth behind assumed ideas of race still prevalent today.  In his book, Different Drummers:  Rhythm and Race in the Americas, author Martin Munro confronts the notion of innate rhythm being a trait attached historically to black culture.  Using this framework of rhythm as the common thread stitching together the struggles and triumphs of black culture over several centuries in the Americas, Munro successfully demonstrates how “rhythm is a contested concept that is sometimes vilified and repressed, sometimes glorified and valorized” (23).

Munro begins the journey exploring the perceived connection between blackness and rhythm in 1800’s Haiti.  The theme of tension between the perceived “threat” of black music and dance to white culture with the paralleling allure and pull to blackness has a legacy in the region.  Slaves were “prohibited” from “drum playing and singing other than when engaged in field labor” (27).  Celebration, religious rituals and practices such as Vodou, “incorporated dance and music…music was less of a social entertainment than a link to metaphysics and an identity that had their roots in Africa, but were inevitably mutating and being translated into their new context” (28).   Munro describes how “…African-derived music and dance were potent tools for insurrection, both in reality and in the white, European imagination” (38), as “some of the principal means of spreading news among New World slaves about [any] uprising[s] and of disseminating the “idea of Haiti,” were music, song and dance”  (38).  This allowed for “informal networks, oral communication and traveling songs” as a vehicle to convey information, “news of the revolt across the Caribbean, to Virginia and Louisiana in the north and to Brazil in the south” (38).

Munro then brings the reader to Trinidad, where “the history of creolized Trinidadian music” is the “classic case of colonial fear and repression of rhythm” (78).  He begins the voyage with Christopher Columbus’s first encounter of the area in 1498.  In an early example of wrongly interpreted meaning, the explorer’s crew attempted to show their “good intentions” to the islanders with dancing, and playing “fife-and-drum music” (79).  The natives responded “by paddling back to shore and raining arrows on the ship” (79).  This illustrates Munro’s idea of “music [holding different meaning] to different social groups,” and the way that “meaning [can] change according to context and…audience” (80).  He traces these varied meanings through Trinidad’s history of “planters- white and colored- and their slaves,” as they “transform not only…society and economy but also its culture and its rhythms” (83).  Munro pays close attention to Carnival, where white and black both participated in “transracial parodies,” demonstrating that “categories of race and class…were far more fluid and far less entrenched” than previously believed.  As Munro points out, “for all their purported disdain for “uncivilized” black culture, the white elites and especially the French Creoles reveled in this kind of interracial parody” (88).

In a seeming foreshadowing to the rise of hip-hop in the 20^th Century, “Trinidad’s white elite seems to echo the reactions of contemporary white audiences in the United States to minstrel shows.  Whites in both countries tended to view black culture with a mixture of disdain and envy:  disdain for blacks’ perceived crude manners and primitive culture, and envy of their supposed expressive and sexual freedom” (110).  This infrastructure was further underpinned by “the commitment of Trinidadian music to disc” which “seemed to increase its acceptability to the rich elite, those who could afford gramophones and records…thus a subtle chasm was opened up between the people, who were always the source of innovation (and also the most reliable reminders of tradition), and the music” (118).

In the third and fourth chapters, Munro establishes the connection between poetry and rhythm, as well as rhythm used in the black power movement.  Centering his argument on the French island of Martinique, he focuses on the legacy of key players in the areas “Negritude…literary movement” (132).   Munro then moves onto early representations of James Brown, showing the performer’s “Africanization…was largely brought about by the demands of the contemporary political context” (194).  While the thread of repression and expression is continued from the previous areas of discussion, the last two chapters do not contain the continuity of rhythm as a power leveraging access as the first part of the text.

Views on the View

Exhibition Review by Theo Reeves-Evison

All That Fits: The Aesthetics Of Journalism, The speaker (part one of three installments). QUAD Gallery, Derby. 28th May – 31st July 2011.

When the celebrated journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled through the majority world, he always kept two notebooks with him: one for detailed information and factual observations, the other for images and metaphors. According to a new biography by Artur Domoslawski,[i] Kapuscinski often allowed material to stray from one book to the other, writing for the Polish Press Agency on one occasion that the fish in Lake Victoria had grown enormous feeding on the corpses left to them by Idi Amin, a claim as affective as it was false.

Just like some of Kapuscinski’s journalistic prose, many of the artworks in All That Fits – a new three-part group exhibition at Derby Quad – operate in an area similar to creative non-fiction. Eric Baudelaire’s glossy diptych, The Dreadful Details (2006) is a case in point. Caricaturing countless other images of modern warfare, Baudelaire’s photograph depicts the immediate aftermath of a bomb blast somewhere in the Arab world. Complete with dusty shop fronts, grieving locals, and scattered limbs, the photograph was in fact taken on a film set in Hollywood. Referencing not only American war films, but also Goya, Alexander Gardener and a countless other war photographers, it is saturated with memories of other images, vibrating with the visual energy of all wars past. Baudelaire inhabits clichés in order to make us aware of how little they affect us.

But All That Fits is not just another exhibition about the plasticity of truth. What it really wants us to think about is the way truths are framed, the way they depend on rhetoric and convention in order to be perceived as truth. Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti and Simon Sheikh, the exhibition takes its name from the New York Times slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print!” According to the curators, the title refers not only to the content of the news (we’ll print anything that adheres to our ethical standards), but also to its formal characteristics (we’ll print anything in news-style, structured according to ‘the inverted pyramid’). In this regard many of the works in the exhibition highlight, emphasise, or flout journalistic convention, offering us a ‘view of the view’[ii], or a means to unmask truth-framing devices. The problem is, by reflecting on journalism and its determining structures, whether professional or semiotic, many of the works in All That Fits forget to deliver us back to the world journalism depicts in the first place. As an exhibition experience, it’s like someone reminding you that you’re looking through a camera by replacing the lens cap, alerting you to the fact that your gaze is mediated, but blinding you to what you were looking at in the first place

Writing of Renzo Martens’ Episode 1 (2004), Cramerotti and Sheikh claim that ‘The film is not about some external phenomenon, but about the terms and conditions of its own existence.’[iii] Episode I is a travelogue through war-ravaged Chechnya in which Martens plays the part of a narcissistic interviewer, waltzing through refugee camps and devastated cities in order to ask the disenfranchised what they think of him and how they think he feels. Like many of the works in the show, Episode 1 operates in a self-reflexive feedback loop approaching Peter Hallward’s category of ‘the singular’.[iv] In other words, it operates irrespective of geographical and historical difference, unconstrained by any logic outside the immanent critique of its own operation. Episode I could have been shot in any crisis zone, because it chooses to focus on a particular media figure – the popular news reporter – rather than a specific situation and its historical and cultural determinates.

Like much of the postcolonial theory that followed the ‘linguistic turn’, the first part of All That Fits concerns itself with enunciation in general (the subtitle for this section is The Speaker) rather than what is being enunciated itself. This is quite literally the case in Katya Sander’s Televized 1 (2006), in which the artist interviews anchor men and women about their use of the personal pronoun ‘I’. While Sander’s succeeds in exposing a journalistic device designed to give television news its air of objectivity, the curators stop short of applying the same logic to their own practice. Accordingly, All That Fits presents itself as an objective, balanced and impersonal ‘view on the view’. Wall texts and exhibition design follow conventions of their own, (the fist person pronoun notably absent) and subject positions are left unexamined. The exhibition would be a lot more rigorous if it married forms of institutional critique with a lesson from the notebooks of Kapuscinski. Namely, that by playing with convention, format and enunciatory effects, one need not eclipse the issues they frame.

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[i]    Artur Domoslawski, Kapuscinski Non-Fiction (Greenville: Agapea, 1990)

[ii]   Alfredo Cramerotti and Simon Sheikh, All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism [Publ. In Conjunction with Exhibitions at Derby Quad, 28 May – 3^rd July 2011] (Derby: Quad publishing, 2011), p. 6.

[iii]   Ibid., p. 14.

[iv]   Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)

Admitting the Indifference of Dogs

Review article by Richard Iveson (first published as “Negotiating Without Relation” in Parallax, 17:3 (2011), pp.105-108)

Review of: Andrew Benjamin Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)

Dogs run throughout Andrew Benjamin’s new book, both as figures and in their particularity. While Heidegger faces his dog facing him in the silence of indifference, another dog insists upon his or her presence before Goya. A third dog, meanwhile, forever awaiting a drowned human companion in a Turner watercolour, constitutes at once an icon of devotion and the moment of a “founding tear” – a rupture which opens the work to an unthought modality of friendship. Finally, in a doubling and displacing of the Heideggerian absence of relation, the indifference of the dogs of Piero di Cosimo announces a transformative co-presence which, incapable of being determined in advance, can thus only be lived. It is in running together, in this movement from indifferent silence to the in-difference of an undetermined co-presence which, Benjamin will argue, inaugurates not simply an importantly different philosophical project, but rather “a transformation of the philosophical itself” (p.19). In this, Benjamin’s latest work remains resolutely preliminary, in the sense of the tracing of a limit which marks both a closure of potential and the possibility of a radical new beginning and which, in the process, makes explicit the importance of the so-called “question of the animal” to the overlapping domains of philosophy, ethics, and politics. As a result, Of Jews and Animals is set to become a key text, alongside such works as Elisabeth de Fontenay’s Le silence des bêtes (1998) and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006), in constituting a further and necessary move beyond the utilitarianism and neo-Kantianism within which “animal philosophy” has for so long remained mired.

Central to the book is how the “work of figures” institutes what Benjamin terms the “without relation.” Exemplary in this regard is the positing of the figure of “the animal” in a singular relation to “the human,” a positing which, unifying both elements in their absence of relation, serves to efface both the enormous diversity of species and the already existing complex of relations in the construction of an identity whose function is “predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself” (p.4). Against this, not only does Benjamin disclose the insistent and originary presence of the animal with the human, but also the interarticulation of such figures which externally impose normative identities which then have to be lived out. It is this mutually-articulating “work” which both underpins the conjunction of Jews and animals in the title (an entitling which fully acknowledges the attendant risk which might appear at first glance to equate the one with the other) and at once serves to efface the working of this very conjunction.

By way of the naturalising construction of the other as “the enemy” within Plato’s Republic, Benjamin argues that, through the working of such figures, the threat of particularity comes to be excluded in the name of the universal; an exclusion, moreover, which, in its continuous reiteration, sustains that same universality. Hence, if this machinery is to be stalled, it thus becomes necessary to think a certain way of being just to particularity. One will recognise here, and in addition to the overlapping nexus of concerns with Derrida’s later work, the relation between Benjamin’s transformative project and that of deconstruction, a relation directly explored by Benjamin in this book both through Derrida’s notion of “play” [“jeu”] and through a critique of Derrida’s reading of Pascal in which, Benjamin suggests, Derrida fails to take account both of the doubling of “force” and of the link between justice and the figure of “the Jew,” both of which are integral to Benjamin’s own position. While never failing to acknowledge this indebtedness, Benjamin contends however that his argument for “a differential or relational ontology” necessarily leads in “another direction” (p.128). Indeed, by way of the notion of the “anoriginal” (which receives perhaps its most rigorous formulation in The Plural Event (1993)), Benjamin has been pursuing this project for many years. While the question remains as to whether the positing of a differential ontology can be so easily directed away from the founding gesture of deconstruction – a gesture which affirms the impossibility of a “finite living being, human or nonhuman, that wouldn’t be structured by [a] differential of forces”¹ –, Benjamin’s new book, in seeking to systemically mark and in so doing move beyond the work of dualisms, nonetheless constitutes a highly original and provocative opening, the implications of which for the ecological and the aesthetic, as well as the philosophical and the political, cannot be overstated.

Beginning with the production of  … please continue reading this review HERE

In search of deeper veins

Review article by Steve Hanson (2010) originally published in the now-austeritized Networks.

John Storey Culture and Power in Cultural Studies, The Politics of Signification (Edinburgh University Press)

These essays and chapters were originally written between 1986 and the present day, and are re-published here under the themes of ‘power’ and ‘the politics of signification’. This is not just an introductory book, or an arbitrary anthology, it bears repeat reading and contains a complex, well-linked set of critiques. Storey essentially begins where my students do, with Raymond Williams and his notoriously widescreen explanation of ‘culture’, before moving into its re-theorizing, via the work of Stuart Hall and others at the CCCS, who imported Gramsci and ‘hegemony’. Storey then takes us through ‘culture’ and ‘power’ many times, weaving example after example into theory. Raymond Williams began a similar journey across borders and ideas, through the lives and ruins of cultures, only a short walk from the lecture theatre in which I teach, for his essay ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, in 1958. Williams was collapsing high and low culture, moving away from F.R. Leavis and his generation. Fifty-odd years have changed nothing in that sense, ‘culture’ is still upper-case Ordinary, everyday, but worthy of serious attention, and Storey’s book holds strongly to that idea.

The point of this text is to allow people access to the tools with which they might take culture to pieces and see how it operates. Understanding signification creates more effective communicators in any media industry, and sharper contemporary artists. In my experience, students who are just starting out either leap right through cultural artefacts, searching for ‘deep’ meanings, which may ultimately be fugitive, or they remain on the thinnest of surfaces, tending to naturalize them. ‘Depth’ is a misleading term to use here though. What Storey often does is account for the way any one cultural artefact brings other significatory surfaces into play. In his example of recent car advertising, he shows how the automobile is often presented as solitary, rather than just another atom of congestion, essentially using discourse analysis to show that what is missing is just as important, sometimes, as what is presented or re-presented. The car advert reveals the myth of the individual, lone vehicle. This is a point Storey makes in passing, to illustrate something else, but it alerts me to the usefulness and scope of this text. It also serves, for me, as a metaphor for the doing of cultural studies, which should link isolated objects up to the wider social world and its issues.

Raymond Williams took his journey on a bus, Storey occasionally arrives in a Rolls Royce, grandly stepping out to declare it a charabanc: ‘Ceci n’est pas une Roller!’ He describes the increasing visibility of opera in advertising, on film soundtracks, tracing this back to the invention of opera as art, in nineteenth-century Manchester. He collapses the continuing distinctions between art and entertainment, rightly seeing the danger in elitist discourses. Storey then describes how ‘the sixties’ are articulated in an imaginary form, in and through the 1990s. Key to this is understanding how some seriously edgy narratives get channelled into consumerism for profit. This could be what Marcuse called, in that notorious mouthful, ‘repressive desublimation’, only Storey allows for agency at the same time as he accounts for the entertainment market’s unstoppable assimilation, on permanent cruise control. ‘Agency’ here is a kind of lower-case ‘resistance’, the often-overlooked caveat to Foucault’s work.

Storey turns things over thoroughly, viewing them as prisms. The range of examples he works through is appreciated. Taken together they explain how we can go in any historical direction, making different sized leaps, from the 1960s to the 1990s, or the 1880s to the 1980s, and make some very potent insights about now. Grand-narrative history may be off the curriculum for good, but Storey does what Fredric Jameson urges – he always historicizes. We know that Santa doesn’t exist, but the essay on how Christmas was invented is a gift, not a disappointment. Exposing historical ‘invention’ is Storey’s craft. He reveals the hidden, understanding how culture is made and re-made, rather than imagining it as developing from some original point of authenticity. This book does what all great cultural studies courses and texts should. It shows that the floor we stand on is less stable than we previously thought. As room-shakers we run risks though, if students leave lectures ever so slightly disturbed, things are going well. If they are so alarmed that they never return, we have gone too far. This book will rattle cages, but it also provides some advice on how to rattle back.

The humanities often unwittingly present easy targets for critics. This book’s index features ‘The Beatles’, ‘Ulrich Beck’ and ‘Beethoven, Ludwig van’, because Storey considers high and low culture to have been shaken from the shelves, through the history of cultural studies, and its aforementioned little quakes. ‘Foucault’, ‘The Four Tops’ and ‘The Frankfurt School’ are only a page away, but Storey presents a fast-moving target to the enemy, explaining how discourses are saturated with power at every step, staying with that core, undeniable drive. He takes his subject seriously, describing how signifying practices such as melodrama and acid rock can reach outside their spaces of signification, for instance in a three night theatre run, and point to issues and debates outside that space. These are crucial things. To see how power both shapes meaning and shape-shifts through it is possibly one of the few guaranteed transferrable skills left. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I, and perhaps I should also point to myself pointing it out, in a review of a book on cultural studies and power, by a cultural studies lecturer.

On my return from Planet Meta-, I find a country preparing to measure research via ‘economic and social impact’ again, so we do need to remember these points. Software packages change faster than Vice-Chancellors, but these issues remain, for media students as much as fine art acolytes, and understanding how signification and power courses through both Photoshop and institutional hierarchies can only prepare them for the ‘real world’, which critics of this kind of book claim to exist beyond its pages.

Each case study confirms this. Storey re-inserts politics into the work of Matthew Arnold, claiming that he was hegemonic, as essentially a reformist, urging for the middle classes to step up to leadership and displace the aristocracy, rather than the more revolutionary recommendations posited by Marx. Arnold had some unpleasant things to say about the middle classes, but Storey reveals how cultural critics need to go further than the rhetoric on the surface, locating deeper veins, and even blacker track marks, on the skin of culture. His ‘symptomatic’ reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shows how it attempts to construct ‘bad’ imperialisms, which are bracketed off from British forms. In this case, the ‘bad form’ is Belgian, re-situating Heart of Darkness in a nationalist discourse, even though it is identifiably anti-imperialist, thus teasing out and revealing hidden strands of hegemony. Storey returns us to the way in which cultural texts refer to grand-narrative power discourses such as imperialism at the same time as they resist them, creating ambivalences, as well as meanings, in their semi-lit, beating centres, with all of their shadows. This level of nuance in Storey’s critique is exemplary. At the end of this last chapter I sense a way in which reading Conrad like this might lead us to question more contemporary cultural documents and ask the ‘imperialism’ question of them all over again, in the manner Storey so ably demonstrates.

I have described how certain ‘c’ words have shameful connotations on this island before, connotations which need inverting, and so here ‘c’ stands for both ‘clever’ and ‘compliment’.

Timebanking

Film review by Sophie Fuggle

In Time (2011, written and directed by Andrew Niccol)

A film which obviously got short schrift when it came out last year but despite a somewhat bland performance from Justin Timberlake and his instantly forgettable leading lady, Amanda Seyfried, offers an interesting take on the accumulation of capital in a world where the cliché time is money gains a whole new currency (sigh).

Set in a dystopian future where everyone is genetically engineered to stop ageing at 25, time is now the only form of currency. On their 25th birthday, every individual is given a year which will count down to zero unless they earn more time either through their own labour or by transferring the time of others onto their own clock – the digits of which are embedded onto their arm. Everything is measured in time – a cup of coffee costs three minutes, a bus ride, two hours. Society is carved up into time zones. This is less a question of geography and more a division of wealth. But isn’t this already the case in contemporary Europe and North America? Those who have accumulated decades and centuries of wealth live in New Greenwich (see what they did there?). Trapped in the same bodies for eternity, the time-rich elite live in perpetual fear of dying by some careless mishap without getting to spend their time since time cannot be transferred postmortem. The poor live in the ghetto – anyone in possession of more than a month worth of time is at risk of having it stolen by time bandits or confiscated as suspicious by time keepers, the police force, led by the unrelenting Cillian Murphy. Hence, those in the ghetto live from day to day, hand to mouth, forced to work increasingly harder to survive until the next day.  Here, we are confronted with Žižek’s question about life and death – who is really alive today? No one, it seems. Those in the ghetto have no time to live let alone reproduce (the overpopulation in the ghetto seems unlikely given there is no time for the shameless depravity that was the scourge of the nineteenth century working class although there is still plenty of time for alcohol abuse). Those living in New Greenwich are sick to death of living but feel compelled to proceed with their tedious quest for immortality.

Thus, a 19th century model of labour achieves its apotheosis in Deleuze’s society of control. Individuals are reduced to the digital clocks on their arms. Ageing has stopped and so, therefore, has the reification of youth. Of course, we are encouraged to appreciate the obvious milf and even grilf references here. There is also some cursory exploration of the concept of speed, riffing on Paul Virilio’s notion of dromology. How quickly one does something identifies one’s social class. The rich have time to waste, the poor don’t.

The film posits the idea of what might happen if time was redistributed – a very thinly veiled attempt at critiquing the power and inequalities of today’s global financial markets. So the obvious criticisms are posed by both the time magnates and the time keepers. The system must be maintained at all costs. The stakes are upped here since there is now a direct link between the wealth one possesses and one’s mortality – ‘for a few to be immortal, many must die’ – a link often obfuscated in debates about the global economy. Yet, unsurprisingly the film doesn’t go far enough. There is the token emancipatory moment where the inhabitants of the ghetto awaken to a bright new dawn where there is enough time for everyone. But that’s as far as it goes. Timberlake and Seyfried assume the roles of Bonnie and Clyde posing as Robin Hoods, stealing time through a series of bank heists – a somewhat archaic form of robbery for a society which has dispensed with money altogether. We’re not given a glimpse of what a society in which wealth is fairly distributed might look like – just one in which fear has been (temporarily) transferred from poor to rich.

Still, a different perspective on timebanking (currently championed as preferable form of exchange to money). Where money functions precisely because it has no real value behind it, In Time inspires some (albeit superficial) reflection on the social reconfigurations – which are really only intensifications of existing social hierarchies and divisions – that would inevitably occur if alternative modes of exchange were to acquire primacy following widespread depletion of resources, environmental disaster and overpopulation. No longer a question of biopolitics but temporo-politics.