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Borrowed Vocabularies

For his first major solo exhibition, the British-Kenyan painter Michael Armitage has delved far into the past to create some of his most strikingly contemporary work to date. One of the exhibition’s key pieces, a bold, vividly colourful yet macabre painting, shares its title with Titan’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which ranks among the most famous depictions of the Greek myth. As the myth holds, the satyr of the title befell this gruesome fate by boasting too loudly about his musical talents and, rather ill-advisedly, challenging the god Apollo. Titian’s painting captures the glee that results from punishing those who disrespect the law, its focal point is the motionless body of Marsyas surrounded by a greed-ridden group of creatures. Each leans close to the body to get the chance to peel away an inch skin, gorging themselves on the one who dared to dissent. Michael Armitage’s Flaying of Marsyas builds on Titian’s depiction of this mythical scene. He takes the composition of the original as a template: in the centreground is a figure hung from a tree, surrounded by men pointing their blades at him. However, the main character of the piece is unknown. Armitage shows the sacrifice of an innocent African man, someone who had done nothing to deserve such brutal punishment.

The Chapel, Armitage’s newest exhibition on show at the South London Gallery, features compositions that are just as complex as Titan’s masterpieces. He grants weight to certain motifs, which reveal themselves only under careful scrutiny. But whereas Titian’s compositions contain visual cues that respond to the trends of his era, Armitage’s pieces do not belong to any tradition. He assembles an eccentric visual language from found materials, scraps and fragments he comes across during his laborious research process. He appropriates the signature style of the masters of art history in order to address problems rooted in racism, discrimination and oppression. But his works do not dissect problems in a direct manner. Looking at them would not allow viewers to gain a factual understanding of the devastating effects colonialism on east African culture. His works do not compare to the Black Art movement of the 1970s, to the work of David Hammons, Lorna Simpson or Glenn Ligon. Armitage’s works are influenced by political developments only implicitly. Instead of representing acts of injustice, they recreate the experience of being forced to witness injustice.

For instance, Exorcism revolves around a Tanzanian ritual, during which female members of the community gather together so that the shamans can purge their souls. The painting depicts stretched-out, inanimate bodies, some left lying on the ground, some carried around by the mighty and powerful-looking shamans. Colourful scarves are thrown away, left behind to float in the wind. The women appear alarmingly passive as if they were entirely unguarded and exposed to the will of the priests. There is nothing jovial or vigorous about the piece, unlike the two sources of inspiration from which Armitage draws from. The arrangement of the motifs, the bodies, the position they take up in the landscape and the perspective from which the whole scene is shown takes after the work of the Impressionist painters. The composition pays homage to Edgar Degas’s Young Spartans Exercising, while the colour scheme borrows from Edouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens. That, however, is where the similarities end. The scenes and subjects in both these masterpieces are brimming with vitality and youth. By contrast, the women in Exorcism are lifeless, grey silhouettes overshadowed by the daunting, dark figures of the shamans. Although it portrays a sacred tradition, it lacks the tone that would convey the importance of such a ceremony.

Hope centres on the Kenyan youth who have been robbed of their past and future by their elders. Since the 1950s, the country’s unemployment rates have ranked as the highest in the world. The former generation exhausted agricultural jobs, leaving the youth with little to no future prospects. The painting shows an immensely fragile, gnarled figure with seemingly shrunken arms, thighs and hands. The boxy, masculine shoulders hold a disproportionately large head adorned with similarly confused features. The broad but thin lips, the crooked nose and the narrow forehead could belong to a person of any gender or age. The body is distorted as if it had been worn out by violence. A bright red, fleshy, slimy, palpitating cord is hanging loosely from under the soft pale pink cloth of the dress covering the lap and the torso of the figure, the cord is tied to the belly of a young donkey. The mutilated figure is the symbol of the Kenyan youth who are burdened with unfulfillable responsibilities. Armitage’s pieces often fetishise suffering and pain but, in this case, the monstrous features, the crooked posture, the wrinkle-ridden face is that which attracts our curiosity, for all the wrong reasons.

Hope takes tendencies present in most of Armitage’s paintings to new extremes. The expected reaction to such a scene of brutality should be one of horror. Instead, the thick, glowing, flawless layers of paint trigger excitement. Armitage is playing an optical trick of sorts. Most of the pieces on show are beautiful and seductive but because the style and the subject choice are so deeply paradoxical, the viewer is pushed into a perplexing position. Either we play along and embody the sadistic voyeur who takes pleasure in witnessing the suffering of others, or we are left with an unending stream of deeply contradictory visual sensations. Every piece appears gorgeous, but underneath lie scenes of immorality and trauma.

The imperfections of the canvas often resemble wounds, marks left behind by acts of aggression, small holes and scabs. Instead of the traditional linen, Armitage uses the bark of the Lubugo tree. The fabric is sienna-orange in colour, flexible and fairly thick. Its imperfections are the result of the long hours of burning, soaking and beating the tree bark until it reaches the desired levels of elasticity. The Lubugo tree bark is most frequently used to cover the dead during burying ceremonies. For Armitage, it functions as the base on to which he can build his eccentric image worlds. The use of the Lubugo tree bark represents Armitage’s approach to painting at large. The painter hijacks the motifs and formulae of traditional art history in order to address how these contributed to and indirectly sustained the problems that prevail in his country of origin, Kenya. Underneath the lavish brushstrokes and rich coats of oil paint lies a rough and crude material, one that leaves creases and folds on the smooth surface of the canvas.

With a style borrowed from masters such as Manet, Degas, Titian and the like, with subjects taken from social media posts, news coverage, pop culture and indigenous African folklore, Armitage has built an oeuvre from incongruous visual languages. The viewer is confronted with a set of seductive, extremely beautiful, stylistically flawless paintings. They do not depict suffering in the way Western audiences may have grown accustomed to and sceptical towards. Our thirst for sensations is overwhelmed. But regardless of the reactions we can muster, there is a price to pay. Even if we go ahead and do feast our eyes on the scenes of horror, the experience will eventually turn into one of bitter remorse. §

https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2018/01/michael-armitage/

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Nostalgia Rebranded

Scott King’s current show Welcome to Saxnot, at Studio Voltaire, London, addresses the persevering illusion of nostalgia. Recent years have seen an increase in the political tendency of yearning for a past that isn’t perturbed by problems such as the housing bubble, staggering rates of unemployment and social alienation. Many would like to go back to a quainter, easy, carefree time, when jobs were easy to secure without competition, when the supermarket had less variety but higher quality products and when the members of the neighbourhood communities knew each other well. King’s exhibition proposes the fulfilment of this wistful dream. His exhibition functions as the promotion for an upcoming project, Britlin’s Saxnot. As the infographics comprising the show propagate, Saxnot will be a place of unadulterated fun and simplicity. Who needs the bamboozling present, when you can fully immerse yourself in the materialisation of an illusory past? This is the question the logic of the show asks.

Britlin’s is King’s own take on the Butlin’s camp, a place synonymous with “holiday” in most British minds throughout the 60s and 70s. It was a popular getaway location, but more importantly, it was a carefully curated, utopian world in its own right. It offered a wide range of entertainment shows and thrills; Wobbly Knee Competitions, Grandmother Beauty Pageants, Darts Championships, Dancing Marathons, and all other kinds of activities that attracted every member of the family. Kids were let free to roam the nearby forests on their own. Nursery patrol teams were organised to alert parents every time they heard a baby crying from inside the lodgings. Everyone paid the same amount of money for the camp. “One week’s pay for one week’s holiday,” held the slogan. Butlin’s camps were drenched with the ideology of egalitarianism. It propagated the ethos of sameness as the basis for compassion and collectivity.

The dozen or so infographics which make up the show can roughly be divided into three sections. Some champion the glory of the days gone by. A set of technicolour photographs depict rosy-cheeked children waving at their parents from a rollercoaster, friends unwinding at the poolside, red-bearded midgets shining their gigantic teeth from a colourful flower bed. There is a menu that lists all the meals available on order: Shrimp Cocktail, Pineapple and Beef Roast, Rhubarb Pie, the sort of things which, back in the 70s, might have been fashionable. Other images celebrate the understated charm of Brutalist architecture in their depiction of council housing estates comprised of same-sized houses with identical rooms within.

With another set of pieces, King attempts to step away from this illusory bubble. A few graphic designs point towards the caveat of this system of thinking. There’s a mirror with the title “I’m Going Back” engraved on its surface. Standing in front of it we are to look at the reflection of ourselves with this world in the background. It’s almost as if the piece would position us as not just participants, but the very vessels that carry this ideological bubble within. This is the first piece that makes us consider our own purpose in this environment, about whether it is a sage idea to undertake this journey at all. Do you really know your neighbour? points towards the freakish paranoia without which no egalitarian community could function. All of a sudden, the idealised, pitch-perfect image that was conveyed by previous pieces attains a new significance: that image could only be maintained insofar as there is a commonly shared other, as long as some form of scaremongering fuels the social structure.

Of course, the people at Butlin’s were fond of the rules and regulations: disobeying them would have led to their expulsion. One Bad Apple taps into the same idea. The image shows a few dozen, perfectly identical, bulbous, shiny green apples. There’s one half bitten on the bottom. This detail provides a great deal of contrast, evoking ideas about how the sameness that is so enjoyed by the visitors of Britlin’s is sustained by a rigorous and regimental process of exclusion. Unlike the postcards on display, the images of the buildings, or the menu leaflet, these latter two works make manifest the shoddy ideological core of the utopian model society.

A set of images push even further the daunting idea that inclusion is always the result of exclusion. Belgian Waffle features a gigantic, rainbow-coloured cross placed over the pages of a multilingual dictionary. The colourful patch covers up all too well the non-English paragraphs. Remember Calais consists of a bunch of black dots heaped on top of each other. Only one line, the one that goes across the middle is rainbow-coloured. All of a sudden, the show turns towards a different problem. From the quaintness and simplicity of a pleasurable life that awaits at Britlin’s, King shifts toward discussing the cost of sustaining the such possibilities. From loving families enjoying a great time, our attention is drawn to the cost at which this fantasy is afforded. By subtly invoking the problems of border control, King aims to criticise the developments that have taken place in much political discourse of recent years.

King alternates rather successfully between providing enthusiastic depictions of the days everyone yearns to return to, and chalking up the problems inherent within such wishful thinking. The highlight of the whole exhibition is the kiosk at the back of the room, a consumerist enterprise where visitors are encouraged to pick and mix their favourite souvenirs and memorabilia from the Britlin’s that has yet to be built, from the imaginary location which we have yet to develop an affinity for, the place we have yet to experience in order to fantasise about returning to it. Britlin’s is the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy that embodies how empty yet misguided the act of fantasising about the past actually is. Eventually, the visitors are let go of after having fulfilled a few questionnaires, application forms and after having been given the guidelines. Hugging a lovely Britlin’s logo sweatshirt, one can’t help but wonder whether the past is that which we remember or that which we wish it to be. §

The text can be accessed here. 

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DMZ

On the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, a South-Korean journal commissioned Park Jongwoo to take pictures of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ). In 2009, he became the very first official photojournalist to enter the no man’s land separating the two nations. Jongwoo was allowed passage only on the condition that a platoon of troops would cover for him from the back and the front at all times. With this arrangement, he took a number of tours to a land wrought by political tensions and where soldiers from opposing sides still guard today.

You would be forgiven, then, for expecting images that portray the fear of an ever-present threat of war. But Jongwoo opted for a different approach; his photographs refrain from forming judgment and providing an overarching narrative. Instead, Jongwoo has created a collection of images that feel practical and informative, though also deeply striking. Now collected in a book, DMZ: Demilitarized Zone of Korea, published by Steidl press in September 2017, they offer new insight into a unique landscape.

The volume is divided into nine sections, each of which depicts a different part of the DMZ and the type of military function it serves as a backdrop to. “Inside the DMZ” captures the photographer’s helicopter journey to his first location. One image depicts a hillside with a couple of bare tree trunks poking through the glowing mist of the early mourning hours. Another feels almost festive as lines of lights rope along the border, twinkling amongst the nighttime-blue sky and hills. Taken on their own – without knowledge of the politically fraught context – the images capture a pristine landscape, touching on the sublime.

From the second chapter onwards, we gain sight of the military, following how they work and revealing their influence on the surroundings. “Reconnaissance” contains no landscape photographs, only claustrophobic shots of soldiers pointing their firearms and rowing through the Ben Hai river. In one picture, Jongwoo’s lense lies on the soft-coloured flesh of the hands and faces of the soldiers, leaving the rest of their uniform-clad bodies to blend into the forest.

The third chapter “Guard Posts” comprises of images of the stocky, utiliatarian lodgings of the soldiers. The guard posts were certainly built to purpose: the simple architecture allows the military men to keep watch of everything that is taking place in their surroundings. The barbed wire, three meter high fences and the small holes in the wall allow them to spot the smallest movement in the enclosed area. In one picture of the medieval-fort-like locations, a dozen of soldiers line up against a fence, their bodies matching the curves of the barbed wire. A man stands near a graffitied orange face with a crude smile. Another shows the dark shadows looming around a shut gate, with the pale orange, sultry landscape in the background. The images take up both pages and there are also no margins, which allows the viewer to become totally immersed in the uncanny sights entirely. Despite the orderliness and brutal precision the soldiers stand for, Jongwoo’s portrayals are strangely humane, raw. The pictures make one wonder about the relationship between these men and the land, whether it’s the men or the sombre meadows who belong more to the DMZ.

Each chapter of the book begins with a map of the location where the photographs were taken. There are also brief introductions to the history the area. For instance, the reader is told that – though civilians are forbidden to enter most areas of the DMZ – the soldiers on duty are obliged to wear civilian police badges in accord with the treaty outlined in the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953. These texts, while short, offer a generous introduction to the type of warfare being deployed on each location, highlighting the kinds of conflict that are regarded standard. Still, there is no overt political signalling in his choice of subjects. Although Jongwoo was accompanying the South-Korean side, his insights are pragmatic. Most are concerned with detailing the woeful troubles resulting from the instalment of landmines (by both sides), which has led to the highest number of atrocities.

The book steps away from the discussions that revolve around the Korean War. Jongwoo extracts the solemn soldiers and the forsaken landscape from the political discourse they are usually synonymous with. The photographs capture the relationship between people and land as it is experienced and the symmetrical, precisely calculated compositions do evince a rigorous, documentarian approach. Still, the images do not fall on either side of the conflict. Rather, they manifest the sacrifices that occur when the tension between the totalitarian regime of North-Korea and the republic of South-Korea is irresolvable.

This text was published by Tank in December 2017. 

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Time and Time Again

In the summer of 1976, North-Asian women employed by the Grunwick film-processing factory went on hunger strike. The issue was not the monotony of manual labour, nor the prolonged working hours. What they were no longer willing to accept was the manager’s racist attitude. Although they fought resiliently over the two-year long strike, they lost. The Grunwick dispute was the first time migrant workers stood up against the British employment system. It was fuelled by racial and gender discrimination, class difference and the discord between labour organisations. In such a fraught situation, these women not only protested against their employer, they forged the means for future action. Today, little trace of this struggle remains.

Time and Time again: Cinenova and Women & the Law Collective is an exhibition that aims to ensure the efforts and stories of women, like those strikers, won’t be forgotten. The show presents three films in the exhibition space of the LUX Moving Image Archive in Waterlow Park. All were provided by Cinenova, a volunteer run feminist film and video distributor and originally made in 1986 by the activist-led community film-making group, the Women and the Law Collective. The films in question tackle a variety of issues. Who Takes The Rap – Immigration focuses directly on the legacy of the Grunwick strike and the oppression migrants faced in the 1970s. Time and Time Again examines the violence faced by women inside the UK prison system, while The Life and Hard Times of Susie P. Winklepicker provides a darkly comic fictional account of one woman's struggle against a dangerous man.

Personal stories, rather than political narratives, rise to the surface, allowing these archival stories to continue to resonate. Avoiding a dry, dogmatic tone these films lay the ground for future conversations, for they offer not a nostalgic look backwards, but act as reminders of issues still ubiquitous today.

Who Takes The Rap – Immigration (1986), directed by Lai Ngan Walsh, is composed of interviews, archival footage and image montages. Four women give account of their experiences with border control. One of them explains how Asian women are forced to undergo virginity tests and vaginal drug searches. Another woman points out that life does not become easier once on the other side. Family relations often suffer. The authorities demand the newly-arrived to provide blood tests and birth certificates that attest to blood ties, only to refuse to acknowledge anything  issued from a foreign state. Those who succeed in settling will be presented with other complications. As the women on the picket lines of the Grunwick Factory state, working in the country does not automatically come with the same rights as that of the average British citizen. These narratives of struggle are overlaid with a rich soundtrack, in which female rappers explore these issues. The film, being structured as montage, gains lucidity through the soundtrack, and its often upbeat and confident tone sets this film apart from documentary, revealing the powerful strength of these marginalised women. The film doesn’t need aesthetic tools to induce shock, the bare facts are enough.

Time and Time Again (1986), directed by Nina Ward, revolves around a different form of societal oppression. The film charts the experiences of four female inmates at the HM Prison Royal Holloway. They give account of their admission, time spent at the facility and their eventual re-assimilation into society. One of the anecdotes reveals how a disabled inmate was forced to strip in the middle of a corridor, another evidences the abuse of minorities by officers. As an inmate points out, sentences are designated to provide the time and space for them to reevaluate their lives. However, most struggle to recover from the prison mentality upon release. For instance, another prisoner recalls how on one occasion she found herself unable to open the door of a car. She adds later on that some women are discharged at 8am only to be readmitted by 3pm. Prison, they agree, bears a marring effect that is not easily overcome, leading to some former prisoners committing petty crimes in order to reenter a system they are more comfortably acquainted with. The often dramatic but always insightful stories shared by the women allow the viewer to envisage what prison life feels like, providing a challenge to narratives circulating in the mainstream media. Instead of criminals, we see people. Their problems are neither extraordinary nor incomprehensible – only the lack of systematic help available to them is staggering. In a change of style and pace, The Life and Hard Times of Susie P. Winklepicker (1986) by Deborah Hall, offers a satirical take on a woman’s conflict with a relentless debt-collector, Bogey. Set among the tired flats, pubs and job centres of 1980s England, the piece is drenched with dark humour. One scene sees the protagonist burst into a manic dance at the local job centre after having been refused benefits. Another follows Bogey's malevolent and violent thoughts expressed in a long twitchy ramble. The tape deals with social security law, relating to the Poor Law during the nineteenth century, through Susie's economic dependence on the male figure. But more pertinent is the broader conflict between the mentality of the upper and the lower classes when Susie, the face of innocence, finds herself in a dispute with Bogey, the embodiment of moral decay. The three films take different approaches in their contextualising of oppressive societal tendencies. Still, their attention to intimate portrayals of individuals is united and allows these stories from the past to illuminate current issues. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of talks, the idea being to spark up new debates about both the history and present situation of migrant worker organisations and women’s rights. Whilst political discourses around Brexit push the question of migrant labour increasingly to the forefront of attention, these films reveal the worrying reality that such issues are far from unique to our current situation. Nonetheless, as those women at Grunwick made a significant first step, perhaps these films hold clues to modes of action for our own times.

This text was published by Tank in December 2017. 

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Fabian Reimann: Space Colonies

In the 1960s, travelling to deep space was little more than a pipe dream. People fantasized about taking short excursions to the Moon, or draining the Martian marshes and moving there permanently. Others concocted a wide range of strategies to be deployed in the event of an alien invasion. There were kindergartens designed to take after spaceships, where children played in rocket-shaped slides and dressed up as space girls or astronauts for Halloween. Space colonisation was not just a passing frenzy or some esoteric subject reserved for those in the know. It was on everybody’s mind, bringing together the members of an entire generation.

Fabian Reimann’s new photography book titled Space Colonies. A Galactic Freeman's Journal, published this year by Spector Books, celebrates this now obsolete trend. The volume is not concerned with artistic or scientific portrayals of space travel. Likewise, there are few political or economic connotations to the depictions. Instead, Space Colonies provides an eccentric collection of images compiled together on an ad-hoc basis, specifically to commemorate the way people thought about deep space travel before it became an actual possibility, before it became real.

Fabian Reimann, Space Colonies, 2017. Published by Spector Books

The book has no chapter titles or page numbers. The readers are left to sift through the vast material, boisterous results of years of research, without much guidance. The accompanying texts are not closely tied to the images, and there are no pre-established weights attributed to one reference over another. The anchors we forge are our own, which is by no means negative. Reimann’s approach is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: the lack of organisation gives way to the emergence of personal whimsies and fancies. We are allocated space to treat the included works subjectively, which further erases a techno-scientific discourse. This is a book in which space travel is not assessed as space travel per se, but in terms of the imprint it carved on the cultural imagination. The shape and body of the text shifts in accord with the interpretation of the reader, as much as space colonisation acquires meaning depending on the specific discourse it is applied to.

Some of the most obscure photos include 1974 depictions of Gerard O’Kneill’s model spaceship, Island One, and Wernher Von Braun’s 1952 space station design. The former is an elongated, tube-like shape assembled from a set of cable bands and with two rectangular propellers on each end. In contrast, Von Braun’s space station is circular. The aerodynamic walls hold a set of cubicle offices on the inside, with one broad bridge in the middle. A few pages on, the reader stumbles across a patchily scanned sheet of paper that turns out to be an official record notifying an UFO encounter in 1954. The adjacent page shows a 1966 photograph of the US Alien Welcome Committee. Neither the model spaceship nor the space station was built. No UFO encounter has yet been proven. These are material histories of a cultural imagination, as opposed to points on the path of technological progress.

The book also has more overtly phantasmagoric elements. These references feel striking because, despite being so outlandish, they were once considered to be achievable. The 1953 film version of The War of The Worlds directed by Byron Haskin and produced by the Disney Studio, David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell On The Earth (1976) make no claims on the real but are visceral imaginative explorations. Space Colonies deftly balances these ever-fluctuating registers, with occasionally astonishing results. Pictures of the 1977 fake landing on Mars are placed alongside the plans for a 1980 project named, “Build Your Own Mars Toy”, which shows an unsophisticated, homespun rendering of a helicopter on a thick patch of grass.

In the accompanying text, Reimann briefly touches upon the political significance of these utopian visions. There’s mention of Gerard O’Kneill’s idea that the economic crisis of the 1970s could be resolved with a move to Mars. We also find hints of speculative concerns, such as how to divide, fairly and equally, the terrains of outer space, and who should be endowed with the responsibility of orchestrating such decisions in the first place. There is brief reference to Dennis Tito, the first space tourist who bought himself a ticket to the moon. There’s a surprisingly scant amount of material addressing today’s sci-fi culture that draws from the likes of technoscience, prometheanism, cyberpunk and theories related to the anthropocene. Occasionally the decisions seem a little random or arbitrary, there is no way, for example, to know why Ridley Scott screengrabs and Alan Bean paintings are chosen for inclusion, while Tim White or Rick Guidice pictures are not. Still, space travel remains the overarching theme, but it is used to embark on wider explorations that broaden – if not disrupt and reconfigure – existing retrofuturist discourses. Space Colonies forms a strange world of its own, one that acts as a compelling and entertaining introduction to the fantasies space travel brings out in all of us.

The text was published by Tank in December, 2017.

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Elusive histories (Speak, Body text)

The concept of subjectivity has been defined and deployed in numerous ways in the field of cultural studies in the course of the 20th century. Although Jacques Lacan does not define it explicitly (his writings are focussed on the processes which construe subjectivity, such as the Oedipal trauma, the jouissance, or the gaze), his work does attest to the notion that the only subjectivity that can be taken into account is quintessentially male. The Oedipal trauma takes place because of the ‘name of the father’/ ‘the phallic object’; the jouissance the subject thereafter is capable of recognising is oriented towards, but not experienced by women; the gaze negates how the subject is yearning to be looked at, for his desires to be reciprocated by the Other. Women, for Lacan, are the creatures who loom around and occasionally peak in through the shut off window; they never gain entrance properly. The problem with this is twofold: inasmuch as psychoanalysis is to be held legitimate (and it is) then it garners for malfunctioning compromises when it comes to considering how women would become subjects, how they could experience desires, how they could cognise their desires as independent from the object of their desires. Furthermore, since the field enjoys prevalence till this day, it inherently reinforces the application of phallic-centrism.

 During the second wave of feminism a range of scholars have articulated the necessity to reconsider Lacan’s theory of subject formation. In Srabat Mater Julia Kristeva argues that a theory of maternality is cast as impossible by the edifice of psychoanalysis. In This Sex Which is Not One Luce Iriguaray considers the vulva as the denominator of female subjectivity. The problem we faced with Lacanian psychoanalysis had been turned upside down by these scholars:  they articulate that male sex need not play a vital role in a theory of subjectivity; but they cannot resolve the initial problem. For both Kristeva and Iriguaray, sex and subjectivity go hand in hand--subjectivity can’t be thought of without the sex one’s was born with. The phallic-centrism we witnessed with Lacan’s work has been pushed aside, but it is hasn’t been rid of completely. Which leads us to the contemporary era: can there be a theory of subjectivity which does not explicitly rely on essentialism?

 Bracha Ettinger’s work may offer some resolutions to this question. Ettinger only takes into account the possibility of the existence of a female subjecthood. For her, all subjects equally possess the same form of femininity—inasmuch as she aims to posit an account in which sex and subjectivity are located on different panes; where subjectivity overshadows and redefines the meaning of sex. As she writes in the Matrixial Borderspace:

          The matrix-figure is an androgynous dimension [...] It is beyond the figural and brooks no opposition. [...] The I’s partner(s) is (are) unknown and the sharability and dispersal of traces are originary, that its irreducible dimension of newness, of what is to come, its forever differing alterity, is derived. (quoting Lacan) “the feminine is that incredible thing in the human by which it is affirmed that the world has a meaning without me.” In the matrixial feminine, however, this alterity does not arise from the absolute Other (as it is for Levinas and Lacan) but from borderlinking with the Other.

 From essentialism we have arrived at the other side of the spectrum: the feminine is a quality attributable to each subject equally. Its formerly articulated specificities having been erased, it becomes the sphere which stands in-between the subject and world; through which the subject becomes compliant with his/her environment. Further on Ettinger adds that:

 Right from the moment in which we may speak about the subject, we might also speak of an enlarged subjectivity. In the Matrix a meeting occurs between the co-emerging I and the unknown non-I. Each one neither assimilates nor rejects the other and their energy consists neither in fusion nor repulsion, but in continual re-adjustment of distances, continual negotiation of separateness and distance within togetherness and proximity. Matrix is a zone of encounter between the most intimate and the most distanced unknown. Its most internal is an outer limit, and the limits themselves are flexible and variable. They are potential or virtual thresholds.

 Ettinger’s account of subjectivity exemplifies a strategy which radically differs from that of Kristeva’s or Iriguaray’s to counter the phallic-centred field of psychoanalysis with. She does not aim to “dismantle the master’s toolbox”, to denounce the edifice of psychoanalysis on the whole, or to voice raucous critique. The artist/theorist takes Lacanian concepts as the matter from which her own account can be assembled with. She thinks through Lacanian concepts, processing and transforming them, and presents them as the elements of her own oeuvre. By reinventing their significance, she aims to formulate an account that simultaneously feeds from and does away with the male-centred perspective the concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis represent.

As Ettinger writes:

 Reworking is also an effacement. Creating the trace is also to erase it; erasing the trace is also to make it appear. The instant of confirmation is the instant of its corrosion. That which arises from me to meet all of this; and that which arises from all of this to meet me.

 Ettinger’s art practice cannot be fully separated from her work as a theorist/psychoanalyst. Her pieces are the conveyors of the theoretical framework; the art and the writings belong to the quintessentially same realm—they are conceived with the same methodology, their understanding requires the same preliminary knowledge without which they would come across as mere enigmas; the key to deciphering them rests in the same set of concepts, notions and logic. The art works attack the position that subjectivity can only be a gendered concept and lived reality through a different medium.

 The task of Ettinger’s art pieces is to embody the possibility of her account of the process of subjectivation. By looking at them, as Griselda Pollock notes for instance, we commit the “Orphic gaze”—that is, our looking is that which forces the scenes brought to life by the paintings to vanish. Our engagement with the paintings, according to Pollock, is not our engagement—as much as the process of becoming a subject, according to Ettinger, is not controlled or even experienced fully by a subject. Our act of spending time in the gallery space, our glance cast with the purpose of tracing meaning is deemed to be held guilty. According to Ettinger’s and Pollock’s reverse logic, what is unconsciously done cannot be held as a deed that has not been done. The choices made out of the awareness that there are no other choices are to be regarded as choices nonetheless. The influence behind one’s actions may be fleeting, but the actions are still being done.

 This charge becomes much less perplexing upon learning the specific topic Ettinger’s paintings engage with. Even though by looking at them the topic might surpass one’s attention, it might remain unnoticed on the whole, it is still there, haunting the pieces. Ettinger chooses sacrificed women; the fallen, the murdered; those who have been rid of, those who have been murdered ruthlessly. Her Eurydice series deals with the legacy of the Holocaust. It conjoins a set of references—the aforementioned Eurydice myth after which the titles take[1]; and paintings that were taken shortly before groups of Jewish women were murdered by their policemen of their village at the warrant issued by the Nazi invasion of Ukraine.

 The series depicts silhouettes, people lacking contour, on the verge of fading into the canvas. At first sight, we can only identify their soft features, the gentle curve of their shoulders. All of them are shown with their heads turned away, their bodies facing a sphere outside of the realm of the painting. Their figure merge into various layers of paint—as if they were overshadowed by the miscoloured blotches and dragged lines, lost in the depths of colour. The pieces pose an enigma to the viewer: in order to understand them, it does not suffice to merely look at the pieces. As a matter of fact, looking at the canvas only obstacles our understanding of what is at stakes at the sight of the paintings.

 The paintings posit the spectator not as a mere witness, but as the traitor who actively maltreats the subjects of the paintings. The spectator/subject engages with a set of unknowns. Her engagement is not determined by her; neither is the effect it bears on the paintings. Rather, the subject unconsciously negates a set of impressions which then affect her, reformulate what she is, grant her a position she unconsciously acknowledges and embodies. Thus, the subject is produced by its present surroundings, by a sequence of transient sensations. The only task left is to take on the role of unacknowledged passivity; to pass through various contexts without having the capacity to act on them or to bear control upon them. As the artist notes:

 Art then grooves the routes of enactment of erotic aerials of the psyche, conducting and transmitting, dispersing and assembling joint gazes and lost figures between different subjects rendered partial through their very participation in a composite trans-subjectivity. (1999a: 89) (Pollock again)

This conception of subjectivity-as-encounter poses the subject as a person entirely subsumed by the course of history, by the ideological environment, by the cultural sphere she is located in. The inertia which she inherits cannot be transcended—she neither evolves nor conforms—her presence merely indicates the effect her environment has born on her. As Ettinger writes further on:

 The artist with-in his/her doctor-and-patient dimension is a withness without event in com-passionate withnessing. The viewer is challenged by the artwork to join this matrixial borderspace. Beyond representation, s/he is carried by an event s/he did not necessarily experience, and through the matrixial web an unexpected transformation and reaction to that event arises. (quote from essay entitled trans-subjective transferential borderspace; pg. 234)

There are a set of issues with this perspective. The most important is that it pulverizes history into a chain of independent, unrelated moments. Thus, history is not that which sustains how individuals can live and act; but that which runs parallel to our living and acting. The subject cannot take responsibility for its elements, she is confined to live through them over and over, unable to reflect on how they feed from and reinforce each other. Claiming an autonomy is exhausted by the trauma of having to face the fact that claiming autonomy is not possible, not for her, not at that time, not at any time. The subject looks and incorporates a random aggregate of that which is available for her to be cognized. The principles whereby she becomes a subject for herself and for her environment are characterized by the radical lack of specification: gender does not constitute the processes of subjectivation; neither does the course of history. Only perception counts—a perception that continuously renews itself; that belongs to the subject inasmuch as it must belong to it, not because it would be telling of the relation between subject and environment.

 Ettinger casts the feminine as the one whose existence is conditioned by abstraction, by the impossibility to be recognised, as one who is to bear the burden of being consistently eradicated, always on the edge of disappearance. The artist chooses the Jewish women murdered by Nazi soldiers to provoke an understanding of femininity which is historically excluded, pushed aside, violated. The artist conceives of a concept of the traumatic event in which the difference between the Oedipal and the cultural legacy of Auschwitz blur into one another. Female suffering is quintessentially traumatic. Yet, and this is my problem: the artist offers no resolutions to differentiate between the scope, the effect, the weight a trauma can pose. She recapitulates trauma in the realm of her oeuvre in order to push the boundaries of feminism. However, she risks the problem of rendering the significance of traumas to be quintessentially the same—to the point where neither trauma nor subjectivity can stand as concepts whose meaning would not be entirely eradicated.

 For Lacan, the trauma is vital for the formation of subjectivity. It affects each individual; it is that which allows for the conception of each individual. The trauma of the Holocaust on the other hand gives us an entirely different kind of trauma: it is that which leads to the eradication of what can be taken as the previous form of subjectivity. It signals a condition whereby each individual is borne to be disengaged from, incapable of fully remaining in touch with, unable of recognising themselves as part of their environment. The trait these processes of becoming a subject share is that they rest on a trauma. However, unlike Ettinger’s work would seem to indicate: the conflict between the two forms of trauma cannot be reconciled by merely treating them on the same terms. Their being somewhat contradictory is precisely that which has posed so many questions to the postmodern era.

 As Ettinger’s work exemplifies, the concept of subjectivity and the role trauma plays in its formation has been defined in numerous ways throughout the past century. One might be tempted to think of this concept as one which can be representative of/ inseparable from the context which allows for its emergence (a universal which is only conditioned by those for whom it appears as universal, to use Hegelian terms). However, this would mistakenly misinterpret the role one’s cultural background, one’s personal, and one’s legacy of history plays in the way perception is shaped. Subjectivity-as-encounter is not possible neither to envisage on utopian terms nor to experience it in the realm of everyday life. Subjectivity signifies a set of thinkable and a set of unthinkable specificities. It can neither be thought of outside of the context from which it emerges, neither “objectively”, in light of the context from which it emerges. Rather, it is the concept which evokes the brighter side of the Hegelian dialectic—insofar as it is thought of by a set of people in a certain context, it must exist.

Ettinger deploys feminism to think of subjectivity as a concept not affected by neither binaries nor by personal / societally inherited histories. In her account, the trauma, which according to the work of Lacan and Levinas the subject must undergo upon meeting another is transformed radically—what was the other before becomes the projection of the subjective vision, what was an endured trauma is turned into an unconscious undertaking. Whether Ettinger’s work is convincing or not depends on how much one is willing to untie the cultural, historical and societal marks it bears: for the superficial onlooker, her work is merely enigmatic. For those with a deeper understanding of psychoanalysis and the postmodern theory of subjectivity, Ettinger’s work can be held as significant for its novel, radically different take (which simultaneously relies on and steps over the boundaries of these edifices).

 Alternative first paragraph:

 Bracha Ettinger’s work aims to discard the linear conception of history. She proffers disjointed narratives—the fragments which cannot be traced back to the unity they were torn away from.

 This leaves the spectator in a clumsy position: 1) because the artist refuses to acknowledge and thereby reinforce the cultural constructs from which her pieces feed off; and 2) she also refuses to enclose the methodology with which the refusal is conducted.

 Ettinger takes the charge issued by the second-wave feminist scholarship against Lacanian psychoanalysis as the point of departure. More precisely, she conceives of a theory of subjectivity which can be located in the terrain first claimed by Luce Iriguaray and Julia Kristeva She acknowledges the claims made against Lacan: she also voices concerns about the inherently male theory of the subject formation; against the Oedipal trauma in which the phallus is assigned a neutralised, male role; against the deflated, barely acknowledged role of the mother, against the widely-shared notion that female subject-formation always already indicates psychosis, an impossibility, an unthinkable concept. However, unlike Kristeva or Iriguaray, Ettinger has no interest in simply conceiving a theory “against Lacan”, in producing an opposition—as that would be a mere negation of the original object; a form of resistance that can only become comprehensible in light of that which it attempts to oppose. Unlike Kristeva or Iriguaray, Ettinger goes further—she attempts to conceive of a space which simoultaneously acknowledges the fundamental mistakes of Lacanian psychoanalysis and claim absolute detachment from it—that is, of conceiving a theory which parasitically feeds off from, and does away with its original object.

 Thus, Ettinger takes a set of Lacanian concepts as the anchors, as that from which her own theory of subject-formation can arise. The Oedipal trauma; the objet a, the gaze and the Thing are the constructs which she positions as the intellectual matter that need be discarded—which she presents as that which only exist in order to cease to exist, to cease to retain to its original meaning. I don’t have the space to go into detail about these concepts therefore: the point to be taken away is as follows: Ettinger forges distance and aims to dissolve the distance she forged in order to give way to a new theory of subjectivity. Thus, I’ve broadly established what Ettinger’s pieces stand against. All well, but what do they attest to?

 [1] According to the Greek mythology, Eurydice is a female character who loses her life twice. Orpheus, her husband, attempts to resuscitate her from the Underworld. He succeeds to set a treatise with Hades—he is given the chance to lead Eurydice back to the world on one condition: that their eyes cannot meet on the way back. Some interpretations of the myth hold that Orpheus began to question whether Eurydice is following him still, whether the sounds her steps make are merely the making of his imagination. Fuelled by grappling fear and uncertainty, he can’t help himself and decides to seek assurance. He casts a quick glance at her, thereby taking her life. Orpheus’s sin is that he expresses his affinity illegitimately.

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this was a conference where I presented a critical reading of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus

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GFA

http://generalfinearts.net/general-fine-arts-volume-2-issue-1

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Are you real?

Leah Schrager’s and Jennifer Chang’s newest project, Body Anxiety explores how femininity is performed online. The project serves as a critique embedded in the system it is issuing itself against, featuring works that focus on the discrepancy between the expectations imposed on women by the media and the modes of expression online interfaces allow them.

According to Matthew Fuller’s theorem in ‘Media Ecologies’, the way we interact with each other on the internet forms and helps to evolve the structure of its interfaces. For instance, users choose the social media websites that suit their ‘personality’ more, but the way they perform themselves will then on contribute to the development of the website itself. We live in symbiosis with technology, but this relation is far from pure or innocent. Albeit the world wide web is praised for its democratic, transparent appeal, it only intensifies the heteronormative mindset of commercial culture.

Take the example of the nude. Depictions of the female body are regarded as inherently sexual, whereas images of the male body appear organic and are to be looked at naturally, able to escape further associations from their viewer. As the Ann Hirsch quote says it on the front page of the online exhibition: “Whenever you put your body online, you are in some way in conversation with porn.” To counter this notion the show offers a platform where the viewer is continuously made aware of the formative power of his/her gaze and behaviour. Body Anxiety serves as a constant reminder of the voyeurism that inherently comes with looking at a screen. It aims to disrupt how we see female bodies.

Most of the works selected focus on the simultaneous articulation and the deconstruction of identity markers. They remind the viewer of the absurdity of social rites that lead to the acquisition of personas or archetypes, such as Saoirse Wall’s video ‘Den Perfekte Saoirse’, in which the artist depicts the act of applying makeup as a pitiful procedure, triggering questions about the limitless perfectionism of the beauty industry. The piece serves as a satiric record of the extent to which an average customer is willing to go in order to achieve an ideal of herself.

Mary Bond, Ann Hirsch and Kate Durbin, artists well-known from the contemporary NYC milieu, focus on the idea of blurring interactions behind the screen with the ones happening in front of it. They purport nudity, self-exposure and the exploitation of the body as a form of resistance. Their pieces attempt to liberate the naked body from erotic associations.

For instance, Durbin’s video ‘HELLO, SELFIE’ documents the performance conducted in the autumn of 2014 under the same name. In it, she re-creates the average tumblr-scroll in real life, instructing a dozen of girls, wearing stickers and uniform of white underwear only, to engage with the passersby on the street. ‘HELLO, SELFIE’ stands for the notion that in real life nudity is seen less as the symbol of pleasure, unlike on the internet.

George Jacotey’s take on the Lana Del Rey song ‘Old Money’ sees the artist and poet putting herself in parallel with the Del Rey’s overbearing femininity. Del Rey has become iconic for her infinite, unsatisfiable longing for absent men and for her admiration for patriotic, typical American brands and imagery. Jacotey’s take is somewhat less intense. Her performance is defined by the absence of gestures. She carries her body cautiously. Her hands are shaking whilst she is covering her chest. She paces down the field of vision of the camera once, but her movement is not about being sexy, much more about the complexity of learning how to be sexy, of how precarious it is to be a gender binary presenting trans person.

Hannah Black’s video titled ‘My bodies’ stands out precisely because it avoids both self-exploitation and addressing the virtual-real divide. The piece begins with a chain of images containing close-ups of the facial features of white men whilst the words ‘My Body’ pasted together from pop songs is chanted in the background. Halfway through the editing style and thus the tone of the piece both change: a poem runs in the subtitles, whilst images of caverns, a colonialist trope for the black female body, are shown in the background. The video speaks of interpellation, providing a sour and sombre image of what it might mean to “be translated into yourself and back”, hoping for a “Manhattan of your next life with no cops and broken hearts.”.

However, the vast amount of works on display does not necessarily equal the vastness of subject spectrum. Most works allude to topics somewhat typical in the contemporary American feminist discourse - issues forming around consumerism, the objectification of women and post-media behaviours appear in almost every piece. They repetitively accentuate the notion that identities are being formulated in accordance with societal categories, roles and brands, appearing almost entirely alien to the individual but fixed in visual languages. They firmly remind the viewer that the self seems to be at loss during the acquisition of a personal, highly subjective, supposedly feminine tone of voice, but somehow the continuous accentuation of these issues also yields to a visible lack of singular cases. The pieces on display resonate with each other without being in a dialogue. Without questioning its own authority, the show as a whole erects a counter-archive of its own, which speak to Western women specifically.