Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician. He is the author of Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016) and Limbo (2018), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and co-director of Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020).
I imagine Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Inception (2010), is already being turned into a pop philosophy book. Perhaps it will be part of the same series as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004). Inception ’s plot involves a team of corporate espionage operatives, led by Leonardo DiCaprio, who use dream-sharing technology in order to travel through the subconscious mind of the heir to a powerful business empire, played by Cillian Murphy. Their mission is to plant in his imagination the idea that he must break up his dead father’s monopoly. Set across multiple levels of the dream world, it is material ripe for introductory psychoanalysis seminars, themed group exhibitions and good old-fashioned late-night stoned conversation.
Perhaps the most clear message Inception offers is one about the market value of ideas. It is set in a world in which anything from the smooth running of the global economy to whether DiCaprio will be allowed to go back home again hangs upon a thought inside someone’s head, a world in which everything comes down to business. The anonymous steel-and-glass architectural backdrops against which much of the film takes place – the Modernism of banks and finance headquarters – are readily identifiable symbols of corporate power. (At one point in the film, DiCaprio’s character even expresses a preference for such buildings over the sweet clapboard house of his wife’s childhood home.) By the same token, the ridiculous amount of jet-setting the characters do – Tokyo, Paris, Mombasa, Sydney, Los Angeles – has, in contemporary cinema, come to represent the reach and power of extra-legal organizations. (‘Need to visit Beijing, Cairo and Washington in just 24 hours without the hassle of visas? Want to collect air miles fast? Join the CIA!’) In terms of the reach of DiCaprio’s fictional organization, Nolan’s film makes no moral apologies for business interests dictating the necessary means. DiCaprio’s team are mercenaries in suits, and although they are illegally jail-breaking Murphy’s mind ostensibly in order to prevent him from having a monopoly on energy supplies, it is also so that the wheels of capital can be kept greased for DiCaprio’s client (Ken Watanabe). Money dictates legal exception. And If all the metaphysics and neo-liberal amorality are not enough to chew on, there’s the film’s dubious attitude towards women. Inception features only two female characters, both flatly sketched: the young and brainy Ariadne (Ellen Page), who builds dream labyrinths for men to lose themselves in (Ariadne… mazes…geddit?), and the passionate but irrational and unpredictable ghost of DiCaprio’s wife, who is called Mal – a pun I’m sure isn’t lost on French speakers. The world, Inception seems to suggest, is for rational men.
In literary science fiction terms, Inception is at the JG Ballard/William S. Burroughs/Philip K. Dick end of the spectrum. It is the sci-fi of everyday reality tweaked and warped – of psychological breakdown and pharmaco-bio-technology – rather than the Isaac Asimov/Arthur C. Clarke/Frank Herbert school of space travel, epic galactic wars and alien civilizations. Plot-wise, Inception borrows tricks from action thrillers such as the ‘Bourne’ films (2002–7) – preposterous inter-continental itineraries, hints at shadowy governmental and corporate interests – and grafts these onto pop-metaphysical ideas in key with reality-bending films such as ‘The Matrix’ trilogy (1999–2003), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and Nolan’s 2002 film Memento. (For the first ten minutes of Inception, you could, at a stretch, also argue that Nolan nods to the history of avant-garde film, as the opening narrative is boldly fractured and non-linear for a big production aimed at the summer box offices.) However, for a movie set across three levels of dream reality – where, theoretically, anything is possible – it’s notable how familiar its visual palette is.
Don’t get me wrong: despite a few howlers straight out of Freud-for-Beginners – such as DiCaprio’s dream-world elevator which no one must take down to the basement – Nolan engineers some impressive set pieces, many of which are all the more remarkable for using analogue special effects and live action stunts instead of CGI. I don’t mean to suggest, either, that seeing cities fold in on themselves or freight trains ramming their way through city streets at high speed are everyday sights for me (though granted, they may be for some of you). Rather, it is Nolan’s terms of expression that are banal and familiar, his syntax instantly recognizable from film and advertising.
One of the ways in which Inception shows its audience that they are watching a dream is by the use of different action speeds. This is achieved by extensive use of ultra high-speed photography: DiCaprio falling backwards into a bath so slowly we can see exactly how his body displaces individual drops of water; windows and grocery carts exploding in a Paris street, each piece of debris arcing slowly across the screen whilst DiCaprio and co-star Paige sit perfectly still outside a café. These often flow into what are known as ‘speed-ramped’ shots, where the action suddenly and quickly accelerates for a few seconds before returning back to normal or slow motion. All this time-stretching is supposed to look strange and dreamlike, suggesting jarring temporal shifts, yet it’s just an all too familiar styling from cinema, music videos and advertising of the past ten years.
Inception also uses clearly signposted shifts in scale in order to underline a sense of the spectacular. A common sequence is one in which a close-up on a character gradually moves outwards to an extreme wide shot that reveals a building or location of epic size. This device, of scaling up from human proportions to the monumental, is used in Inception most notably towards the end, where Nolan reveals to the audience the horrifyingly uniform but vast metropolis DiCaprio dreamt up with his dead wife: a city that just looks like one depressingly big financial district. Musical crescendos are key to signaling these shifts in scale: in the case of Inception its Hans Zimmer’s reduction of Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ (1960) to a hectoring and relentlessly climactic Wagnerian sludge that underscores them.
Although Inception tends to shy away from colour-grading the film using particular hues – the washed-out blueish-green tones that give a classy feel to adverts for high-performance cars or premium Belgian lagers – it still makes use of heightened colouring: soft, warm, underlit beige to denote expensive, luxe interiors, or an over-exposed, sunny brightness to signal happy memories of home and family. According to the film’s director of photography, Wally Pfister, in an interview he and Nolan gave for the American Society of Cinematographers magazine: ‘We wanted to have the colour palette change quite a bit when we go from one location to another […] You immediately know where you are, even if we cut to a tighter shot or to something that is slightly out of context’. For a film about dreams, even dream environments artificially synthesized by precocious architecture students called Ariadne, that’s the problem: you immediately know where you are.
In the same interview, Nolan explains that ‘The underlying idea is that dreams feel real while we’re in them, which is actually a line from the film […] That was important to the photography and to every aspect of the film. We didn’t want to have dream sequences with any superfluous surrealism. We didn’t want them to have any less validity than what is specified as being the real world. So we took the approach of trying to make them feel real.’ It’s certainly to Nolan’s credit that he didn’t pack Inception with flying pink elephants or melting watches. In fact, I’d agree with him that his imagery cleaves close to a reality, but the problem is that it’s the reality of familiar high-end cinematic styles, of established visual conventions made with commonly used industry tools.
Inceptionsucceeds at the box office partly because it’s a straightforward action flick that speaks to us in a visual language that we are accustomed to. Of course, not every film that deals with dreamlike narratives has to be some kind of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) but Inception ’s intricate plot occludes its visual banality: it’s like someone talking to you in English but trying to convince you they are speaking ancient Latin. Although Inception shares none of the fuzzy warmth of whimsical magic-realist-lite advertising, the film nevertheless speaks in a similarly mediated language: a language that describes our world as one that is able to spin on a coin of creative fantasy at any moment – the big-budget fantasies of an advertising executive or Hollywood movie director. There is none of the weirdness, creepiness, intimacy, fun, eroticism, bewilderment or plain neurosis that really fuel dreams. Ironically, the film’s visual style looks just like one which might be used to sell fast cars or luxury hotels to the sort of big business types the film depicts. Inception is science fiction, business class.
For the second instalment of our rolling coverage of the 6th Berlin Biennial , I took a look at the work exhibited at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Mitte, north of the larger Oranienplatz venue (covered yesterday by Jörg Heiser).
Featuring the work of just seven artists, KW feels strangely empty rather than spacious. (Quite literally so in the case of one floor, which has been left empty and painted a dazzling white – though starting to get a bit grubby with footprints – as a curatorial ‘gesture’.) The usual entrance to the galleries is blocked off, and viewers have to enter through the basement, from which they emerge in the large ground-floor gallery to find the work of Petrit Halilaj, the youngest artist exhibiting in the show. An impressive wooden structure fills the gallery – the wooden lagging used by the artist to build a house for himself and his family in Prishtina, fixed together here to give a schematic impression of a dwelling. Scattered across the floor is dirt and a few broken, sorry-looking breezeblocks. Amongst these wander hens, who seem mostly unfazed by the gallery visitors, occasionally cooing or giving a loud squawk. Just upstairs from this are more works by Halilaj, who has, by far the lion’s share of the venue space: we see delicate drawings, a sculpture of a giant nest in which lies a beautiful vitrine (a bizarre juxtaposition that makes me think of what James Lee Byars work might look like if it came into the possession of Bigfoot), and a number of other sculptures constructed from lowly detritus or found materials.
Petrit Halilaj, The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, 2010
Halilaj’s work promises a contrast at KW from the rather heavy politics that could be found at Oranienplatz, yet this is not to be, as the title of one of his works (actually, my favourite title from the biennial so far) suggests: They Are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens (2009). With each floor of the venue comes work that steps closer and closer back to the tone set over at Oranienplatz and the works shown there concerned with, say, protest, the Middle East crisis or the plight of immigrants in Europe; works which, in places, seem to actually fetishize the marginalized in society rather than represent them – falling into a category of artwork that can be found at biennials the world over, a kind of soft left political art that could be described as a kind of ‘failed journalism’ (a term I’ve borrowed here from an observation made by the artist Josephine Pryde in an interview from 2004).
Shannon Ebner, Distressed Holy, 2007
Works by Ion Grigorescu (a photograph, psychoanalytic diaries about sleep and a video depicting a naked man trying to sleep in an anonymous room), Olga Chernysheva (whose drawings ‘Russian Museum’, 2003, meld the faces of people looking at paintings depicting Russian peasant life with the compositions themselves) and Shannon Ebner shared the same gallery space upstairs from Halilaj, and thankfully avoided the ‘failed journalism’ trap. Grigorescu’s and Chernysheva’s works have a certain political charge to them – the vulnerability of the body, or the economic or class structures hinted at in Chernysheva’s drawings – but the personal and subjective touch of both artists kept the work just about on the right side of subtle. Chernysheva’s small group of drawings looked like a measly selection next to the large number of works by Ebner. A treat to see, these range from photographs such as Ampersand (2009) and Erratum cum Laude (2009) to the film Between Words Pause (2010) and wallpaper declaring a ‘Wallpaper Bankruptcy Sale’ (_Wallpaper Bankruptcy Sale [For E.M.]_, 2010): a dance between language, landscape and photography. Also on the same floor is Frozen War (2001), a video by John Smith, whose outstanding early work, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), is being shown over on Dresdener Strasse. Frozen War is far more diaristic and less artfully constructed than The Girl Chewing Gum ; it simply depicts a television in a hotel room that Smith is staying in. The news is on, and it is the day after bombing began in Afghanistan: oddly, the picture is frozen at 1:41am on a talking head giving, presumably, their opinion on the then new conflict. It shares with all Smith’s work a droll and deadpan humour, whilst managing to also convey the anxiety of an individual whose government has just declared war on another country. At the end of the video, Smith turns his camera on one of those stool-like bits of furniture found in hotel rooms for resting suitcases on top: ‘What a fucking useless bit of furniture…’ he states – a nice bit of bathos deflating the pathos of his war worries. What with the recent solo retrospective of his work curated by graduating students on the Royal College of Art’s curating course, it’s great to see Smith finally getting the recognition he deserves.
At the top of the KW building were photographs by Mohamed Bourouissa and a twin-screen video by Mark Boulos. Bourouissa’s series ‘Périphéries’ (2005–9) is set amongst the (presumably Parisian) banlieues, mixing documentary methods and highly staged narratives with the area’s mainly black and Middle Eastern local inhabitants. In La République, for instance, he restaged Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). His ideas have a certain appeal, but to my eyes they are undermined by the execution: the rather ‘soft’ quality of the printing, and non-altogether engaging framing and composition. I feel they could do with being far punchier – they look somewhat tentative. Boulos’ film, All that is Solid Melts into Air (2008, pictured at the top of this post), features one screen depicting traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the other a rather disturbing trip the artist took up the Niger Delta to visit members of the Movement for the Empancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a guerilla group who are protesting against the oil drilling that has polluted their fishing grounds. In this juxtaposition of two groups with wildly different perspectives on the use and trade of crude oil, it has a certain topical currency given the deep water BP have found themselves in with the Deepwater spill, though it’s not exactly subtle. Whether or not that bluntness is a positive or a negative, I’m undecided – the inequalities of the world, after all, aren’t exactly subtle themselves – but it’s interesting to compare Boulos’ film with that of Renzo Martens over at Oranienplatz. I’ve written at length on Martens’ film here, so I won’t go over that territory again, suffice to say that on balance I prefer Boulos’ approach.
As director Apichatpong Weerasethakul takes the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives it seems like an apt moment to mention a recent spat that has had certain film critics lobbing handfuls of organic flapjack at each other across the auditoriums of their local art-house uniplexes.
This critical storm-in-a-teacup began with the April edition of the UK film magazine Sight and Sound, when editor Nick James took issue with the ‘critical orthodoxy’ of what is called by some ‘Slow Cinema’. It’s a term that has been applied the work of directors such as Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Carlos Reygadas, Aleksandr Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang, and, of course, Weerasethakul; a form of cinema which critic Jonathan Romney has described as a ‘varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years […] a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality’.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010
With the cab driver-esque ‘now, don’t get me wrong or nuffink…’ caveat that he admires and enjoys ‘a good many’ films of this kind, James goes on to wonder whether such films ‘are easy to remember and discuss in detail because the details are so few.’ He writes: ‘the bargain the newer variety of slow films seem to impose on the viewer is simple: it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece.’ James makes the argument that in the case of films such as Semi Kaplanoglu’s Honey (which won the Golden Bear in Berlin this year), ‘there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine.’ He contends that ‘such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects’ and tails off with a somewhat non-committal ‘sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not.’
James’ editorial has particularly upset Harry Tuttle [1], who runs the blog Unspoken Cinema. Tuttle prefers the working term ‘Contemporary Contemplative Cinema’ (CCC) to ‘Slow Cinema’, and outlines what he considers its salient features to be here and here. In short, he identifies the trademarks to be ‘plotlessness’, ‘wordlessness’, ‘slowness’ and ‘alienation’.
Tuttle is a fervent fan and vociferous defender of this cinematic aesthetic. ‘Typical. Misunderstanding CCC. Looking down on art cinema’ begins his heated rebuttle of James – the first of many, as he gamely takes on other writers who also picked up on the Sight and Sound editorial (notably, Steven Shaviro and Vadim Rizov). He lambasts James’ use of the term ‘Slow Cinema’ since it ‘is a mischaracterisation that induces contempt and caricature. Limiting this cinema to “slowness” is reductive and superficial. This is precisely because unhappy viewers remain on the surface of these films that they are unable to obtain any substance from them. [sic]’ Tuttle hits back at James’ assertion that ‘details are few in these films’: ‘“Details are few” says he! It’s not because you can hardly fill a half-page with plot points and characters arc [sic], or because the list of notable features appearing on the screen is short, that there isn’t anything else there to see. Critics need to learn how to name (and list) things that are not obvious, to learn to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness, to learn to understand the depth and complexity in the intervals between the apparent (nominal) details.’ At one point Tuttle argues that ‘It’s like dismissing Kasimir Malevich or Yves Klein because there isn’t enough [sic] “details” on the canvas… sometimes Art is not about WHAT is represented, but about what is NOT represented, or an abstract reflection on the effect of representational minimalism’. ‘I thought critics assimilated this breakthrough of non-figurative art long time ago!’ he scalds. Tuttle sees James’ editorial as a betrayal: ‘Real film critics giving up on art … Who is going to defend real culture then?’ he asks, ignoring the question here of who gets to say what ‘real culture’ is.
Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break, 2008
If we’re talking about that which is not represented, Tuttle’s spat with James, Rizov, Shaviro et al is an interesting one partly because of another area of filmmaking that the row itself ignores. Ideas of duration, non-representation, anti-narrative, and such like, have been in circulation in film and video art and shown in galleries and museums since at least the 1960s. Much as I admire Tuttle’s spirited engagement with his favoured genre of contemporary cinema, nowhere on his timeline of CCC/Slow Cinema is there anything that represents, for instance, the achievements of Structural cinema. This is curious, for if ‘plotlessness’, ‘wordlessness’, ‘slowness’ and ‘alienation’ are what he is trying to chronicle, where are Andy Warhol’s Empire, from 1964, or Michael Snow’s 1967 film Wavelength for example? Nor is there any acknowledgement of how these multiple strands of experimental cinema history have fed into the work of artists today. Here are a few examples off the top of my head. Take Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (2008), a lengthy, single-take tracking shot of workers at lunch in an ironworks. Lunch Break has been screened at a number of film festivals, but has not sprung from the ‘default international style’ (as Shaviro puts it, or as Tuttle prefers, an ‘unorganized transnational aesthetic convergence’) of CCC/Slow Cinema but has developed by and large with the support of art galleries and institutions rather than conventional sources of ‘art film’ funding and circuits of distribution. Or look at the films of Tacita Dean: unabashedly langorous and ‘contemplative’, and exhibited widely across the world, though, for whatever reasons, relatively unfamiliar on the repertory ‘art house’ cinema circuit. And how about Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster’ cycle (1994–2002), which is currently enjoying a high-profile re-run at the IFC cinema in New York? The ‘Cremaster’ films are extremely long, extremely slow and feature next to no dialogue whatsoever, but, whether you like their dense symbolism or not, you could hardly say they lack details, unless you consider vintage cars destroying the lobby of the Chrysler building and a Victorian satyr burrowing under the Isle of Man to be minor visual asides. Barney, Dean and Lockhart have all been making work since the early- to mid-1990s; far longer than the ten years Romney puts on CCC/Slow Cinema.
Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009
The CCC/Slow Cinema disagreement reveals an interesting myopia, one that is exacerbated by the differing modes of cinema distribution and art exhibitions, and the beaten paths along which film critics and art critics ply their trades. It suggests a state of affairs in which you might be familiar with Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Jacques Rivette’s 12 hour-long Out 1 (1971), but for some reason can’t accommodate the different contexts they come from in the same stream of critical discussion. James’ fear of being called a philistine, of admitting that a film that falls into the CCC/Slow Cinema genre is boring, suggests that he’s new to ideas of duration or silence in filmmaking – something I find pretty hard to believe. (This cuts both ways: I’ve lost count of the number of artist’s films [2] I’ve seen that have been lauded for their high quality production values and the fact they use – gasp! – actors and scripts, as if no one had ever done this before.) It reminds me of anxieties one hears people voicing about contemporary art: the fear – instilled in them for whatever reasons of education, background or personal insecurity – that if they say they don’t like something, they’ll be thought of as culturally ignorant. The flipside of this is, of course, the fear of being branded pretentious.
In The Guardian newspaper’s coverage of the CCC/Slow Cinema dispute, Danny Leigh asks ‘is it OK to be a film philistine?’ Framing the discussion along this axis of philistinism and pretension is frustratingly unhelpful, as it keeps discussion mired in very basic terms of class and taste, and elitism versus populism, pushing into the background any other possible forms of analysis of why you think the way a director has put images and sound together is engaging or not. It foregrounds insecurity; the critic or viewer’s anxieties over what other people will think of them and their opinion. Yet Tuttle’s approach doesn’t help either. It interesting to note how at least two of his definitions of CCC/Slow Cinema are formed in opposition to conventional formulations of cinema – ‘plotlessness’ as opposed to plot, ‘wordlessness’ as opposed to dialogue. Why not ‘silence’ rather than ‘wordlessness’ – that is to say, why not foreground what does exist rather than what it lacks? The danger with binaries formulated around the absence of something is that, just like the philistine/pretentious axis, they can hobble the terms of discussion. In this case such absence pits these CCC/Slow Cinema films against a normative model of filmmaking, namely ‘Hollywood’, and all that word is conventionally taken to represent in terms of money, power and cultural hegemony. This can be disempowering in that not only does it slow the development of a critical vocabulary specific to the films in question, but it also situates the discussion within just the same basic elitist-versus-populist framework as philistinism and pretentiousness. (The reductive term ‘Slow Cinema’ does something similar in that the word ‘slow’ implies that it exists in a kind of ideological opposition to a ‘normal’ or ‘fast’ speed of cinema – an effect emphasized by its echoes of ‘slow food’ and that movement’s focus on localism and anti-big business – although the solemn mouthful ‘Contemporary Contemplative Cinema’ is hardly preferable.)
‘Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not’: banal though James’ statement may be, I don’t think his admission that he finds certain aspects of CCC/Slow Cinema to be frustrating is that troubling. What can be inferred from his editorial is that a certain approach to filmmaking has its mannerist practitioners; I can’t quite see how one might leap from that to the conviction that Sight and Sound will from now on be giving over their pages exclusively to Clash of the Titans and the Iron Man franchise. The idea that if you criticize some of these CCC/Slow Cinema films you must therefore be craving all-action blockbuster movies is a little like saying just because you don’t like pasta you must therefore love dim sum; personally, I love both, but I wouldn’t want to eat either every day of the week.
2 In conversation the other night, a friend made an observation about the use of the prefix ‘artists’’ – as in ‘artists’ film’, ‘artists’ book’, ‘artists’ band’ or ‘artists’ cupcake recipe’. He pointed out that it acts either as a label denoting exemplary status – ‘this thing is special and doesn’t follow the usual rules of whatever genre it is working in’ – or an excuse – ‘this thing is actually pretty shonky and uninteresting apart from the fact an artist made it, but that’s OK because it doesn’t follow the usual rules of whatever genre it is working in, and because the artist must surely have intended it to be this way, you should accept it.’
Tate – hardly a stranger to controversy – has this week come under attack from two artist groups, their criticisms centered around Tate Modern’s tenth anniversary celebration No Soul for Sale, which was held over the weekend of 14–16 May.
Making A Living, an anonymous organisation describing itself as ‘a discussion group of arts professionals currently active across the UK’, issued an open letter to the Tate challenging the museum’s treatment of artists during the ‘No Soul for Sale’ event.
The group write: ‘It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?’
Arguing that ‘it is complacent for Tate to believe that their position is comparable to ground level arts activity’ and that it is ‘disingenuous’ for the museum to claim that this ‘spirit of reciprocal generosity’ is ‘somehow altruistic or philanthropic’, Making A Living go on to accuse Tate of not having paid artists ‘for some exhibitions, workshops and events, including last year’s Tate Triennial’, although no specific details are given in the letter.
They end their letter by calling on Tate ‘to make public its policy in regard to artists’ fees’.
A group calling itself Liberate Tate have also confronted the museum, distributing a communiqué during the anniversary weekend calling for the Tate to drop its sponsorship agreement with BP, whom they say are ‘creating the largest oil painting in the world’ following the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In their communiqué Liberate Tate argue that ‘every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade’. Josephine Buoys, a spokesperson for the group quoted in a press release publicizing Liberate Tate’s activities, says that ‘Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool progressive art’. The group state that ‘In March 2010, Tate Modern ran an eco-symposium, Rising to the Climate Change Challenge: Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World on the same day that Tate Britain was celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP Saturdays’. Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the symposium called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship be dropped by 2012’. Liberate Tate call on the museum ‘to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies.’
Liberate Tate’s communiqué can be read in full here and Making A Living’s open letter can be found here
It’s now 44 days (and counting) since I visited the opening of Marina Abramović’s major retrospective, ‘The Artist is Present’, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That’s also 44 days (and counting) since Abramović embarked on her longest ever durational piece, a new work also entitled The Artist is Present, in which the artist sits in silence at a table in the museum’s huge atrium gallery, and members of the public are invited to sit on the chair opposite her to share in silent contemplation of each other. Visiting the exhibition again this week prompted a few thoughts.
1. ‘The Artist is Present’: yup, she certainly is. There she is on posters in the subway, on the wall-size portrait photograph of her at the exhibition entrance, on the covers of the piles of catalogues in the museum shop, in the portraits of her in the final room of the exhibition and, of course, in the works themselves. Her image is everywhere you turn in this show. This is not an exhibition about the body, or performance, or re-performance, or whatever – though it is, of course, about these things too – but about the life and career of a 63-year-old artist born in the former Yugoslavia, her relationship and work with the artist Ulay, and the subsequent development of her work after they parted ways. Abramović herself has said that her body is the subject, object and medium of her work. This is exhibition-making as autobiography.
2. All those images of Abramović make me think that she is as much an artist who uses performance to create images, as she is a performance artist. Some of those documentary photographs of her are so iconic (with all the religious resonances of that word – see point number 5), that the fact of the performance can seem almost secondary. I’m thinking here about a piece such as Rest Energy (1980), in which she and Ulay hold a bow and arrow in tension, the arrow pointing at Abramović’s chest. It’s less of a record of a performance than a striking and carefully constructed image, one both instantaneously grasped (you don’t need to study it for more than a second to work out what’s going on) and laden with symbolism.
3. This sense of pictorial composition is strongly emphasized by staging in ‘The Artist is Present’. At least four of the re-performed works are presented in the exhibition like images: the 1977 piece Relation in Time, in which the performers sit back to back, their long hair tied together in a knot; Point of Contact (1980), where the performers hold their fingertips as close as they can without touching whilst maintaining eye contact; Nude with Skeleton (2002–5), in which a naked performer lies underneath a human skeleton, and Luminosity, a piece Abramovic originally performed in 1997, hanging naked on the wall whilst maintaining a cruciform pose. At MoMA these re-performed works are presented with dramatic spotlighting, like venerated Old Master paintings. Relation in Time and Point of Contact are presented in the ‘frame’ of a specially built temporary wall/box – Relation in Time is watched through a rectangular window and Point of Contact re-performed beneath a kind of mini proscenium arch.
4. Bodies are mostly symmetrical forms, but the world they inhabit isn’t. Abramović’s presentation of her body is notably classical: in pictorializing it, in her staging, she privileges symmetry, a strong central image, and formal balance. In ‘The Artist is Present’, for instance, the table and chairs are placed centrally in a large demarcated square area of the atrium. Four strong lamps at each corner of the square illuminate the piece. The colour of her dress (there are three dresses apparently: red, dark blue and white) against the grey of the gallery floor and the beige of the wooden furniture, serves to keep the viewer’s eye centered on Abramović.
5. These formal layouts, and the content of some of the works themselves, speak of ritual and highly stylized types of interaction. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since it seems to me like religious affect. Of course, you can extrapolate religious or spiritual themes from her interest in the limits of consciousness as perceived through the body when it is pushed to extreme limits through pain or duration. So too her interest in the singularity of the self in relation to another individual or to a group. But I can’t help thinking of flagellantism and various extreme penitent Catholic orders when I see some of Abramović’s work, which for me gives it an uncomfortably pious aspect. This sense of piousness is an effect of the solemn register in which the work exists, its demonstrative gravitas. (This register admits little levity, which seems sad to me, since our bodies and how people interact can be pretty funny – a key part of being human.) There’s also a studied austerity in the work, a kind of quasi-monastic aesthetic: the simple wooden table and chairs in The Artist is Present, for instance, or the hard wooden block that the performer lies on in Nude with Skeleton. It makes me think that this is art made by someone who at some level still believes in the sacred aura of the secular white cube art space.
6. I wonder to what extent, on some subconscious level, the ritualistic atmospherics account for the kinds of reactions people have had to participating in The Artist is Present?
7. Speaking of all things formal, what of the long ball gown Abramovic is wearing for The Artist is Present? Or the crisp white shirts and black suits worn by the people re-performing Relation in Time and Point of Contact? The similarity of these clothes to those worn by Abramović and Ulay in the original performances fixes the pieces to a particular moment in time, which makes ‘re-performing’ these works more like historical re-enactment than re-performance in the present. There’s also something awfully old-fashioned about the formal clothing, like classical musicians dressing in smart evening wear for a concert. You might say it gives the work a sense of occasion, though would it make that much difference if they were done in jeans and a T-shirt?
8. Why are the naked performers all of such similar slim, good-looking and well-toned body types? Do you have to share a similar physique to the young Abramović and Ulay in order to perform the works? Is there an age limit? Are they re-performing the works or are they just avatars? Are the rotund, the beanpole-thin, the ugly, the old or the awkwardly shaped not representative of the human body too? Do they not also experience pain, endurance, fear, danger and states of meditative exaltation?
9. The power of Abramović’s performances from the 1970s and early ‘80s to some extent lies in the specific circumstances and intensity of her relationship with Ulay. You can recreate the work, but not the relationship.
10. Abramović’s exhibition opened around the same time as another much-talked-about performance-based show in New York closed: Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal’s exhibition included the piece This is Progress, which involved a continuous conversation from the bottom to the top of the museum’s famous spiral ramp. It began with a child who asks the visitor for their definition of progress. As you walked up the ramp, the child handed you over to a teenager, who continued the conversation, then you moved to a thirty-something, and finally someone in late middle-age. I saw the show and ‘did’ the piece three times. Repeat experiences made me think that Sehgal’s piece was like an artificial intelligence software programme: something that had the appearance of exchange, of conversation, of dialogue, but which when repeatedly engaged with revealed itself to be built around certain fixed rules of engagement. It couldn’t refer to itself, for instance; the performers wouldn’t answer questions about the piece of work. You could ‘reset’ the piece by going back to the beginning, and try having a different conversation each time, but the effect was remarkably similar even down to having the same conversation if you happened to end up with the same performer more than once. Abramović’s method of communicating with her audience is to sit in silence with them. Sehgal’s method is to engage his in multiple simultaneous conversations. In both instances, the conversation is one that exists in and creates a public spectacle. But what, really, is the conversation about?
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