By Shama Khanna

"Imagining the Audience" at Bio Rio, Stockholm, Sweden

With recent debates around post-human, object-oriented and systems based practices which emerged during dOCUMENTA (13) still resonating through conversations in the weeks following the exhibition, the fate of the viewer proved a fertile concern for the two-day seminar ‘Imagining the Audience: Viewing Positions in Curatorial and Artistic Practice’ organized by Mobile Art Production, the Swedish Exhibition Agency, and CuratorLab at Konstfack (as part of which I was there as a curator delegate) at Bio Rio, Stockholm. Notably, the fact that the event was being held in a cinema was an early reminder that one audience had already made way for another.

Phil Collins, ‘This Unfortunate Thing Between Us’, 2011

In their respective presentations, artist Phil Collins and curator Raimundas Malašauskas both spoke about the possibility of closing the critical distance between the viewer and the subject – in Collins’s words, ‘offering the imagined presence of the other … [which is] excised from representation.’ Collins’s projects have taken him to zones of conflict in Lebanon, the West Bank and Northern Ireland, fuelled, he explained, by an emotional relationship with his subjects and a fervent distrust of rational or spectacularized media viewpoints. In a personal letter addressed to and read aloud to the audience, he traced his affinity with the practices of Swedish artists Annika Eriksson and Annika Ström, whom he admired for ‘not alerting people to the fact of the art work […] softening the edges of the art encounter, to become the thing itself.’ In his own work, rather than identifying with his subject, Collins seeks a complete dissolution of the self by entering a ‘double bind of fears and desires’. With fascinating insight, he described how the stage he set up for karaoke in The World Won’t Listen (2005) and the live TV event he initiated in This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (2011) became an affective realm for both participants and viewers to enter where ‘shame is a productive force’.

Marcos Lutyens and Raimunduas Malasauskas, ‘Hypnotic Show’, 2012

Recounting the beginnings of his ‘Hypnotic Show’ (2012), presented in collaboration with artist and hypnotist Marcos Lutyens in the Karlsaue Park at this year’s Documenta, Malašauskas visibly gleamed at the thought that they had come up with the most dematerialized show possible, by creating an exhibition ‘in the brain of the audience’. As he described the participants’ state of ‘paradoxical wakefulness’ I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s prediction that in the future we wouldn’t need complications such as actors (whom he found frustrating), or an auditorium, but cinema could be simulated technologically directly behind our eyes.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, ‘Horizontal’, 2011

In her presentation, film theorist Annika Wik announced how we have already achieved a level of Deleuzian ‘camera consciousness’, enabling cinematic experiences to occur anywhere the viewer is. She suggested how works such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Horizontal (2011), a monumental 6-channel HD projection of a tree on its side, might pull our attention to the limitations of representation within the space of the gallery. By moving from ‘an ocular to a physical experience of film’, viewers became aware of their own seeing, feeling the impulse to lie down to watch the projection.

Paul O’Neill’s ‘Our Day Will Come’

Summarizing the historical context for this inter-subjective affective turn, Paul O’Neill identified three waves in which the modern audience has been conceived: from Marcel Duchamp’s conception of the viewer as the ‘completer of the text’; to the communality implied by the second wave of relational practices and biennials; through to current engagement in ‘messy’, durational and embedded practices which, quoting Maria Lind, ‘depend on agency beyond the known’. Referring to these third wave, co-productive projects which emerged after the New Institutionalism of the 1990s as artists turned from institutional critique towards a dialogical engagement with their audience, O’Neill gave examples such as the ‘Trekoner Art Plan Project’ (2001) curated by Kerstin Bergendal with artists including Nils Norman and Jakob Jakobsen, the Serpentine’s Edgware Road Project, ‘The Centre for Possible Studies’ and his own recent free-school project, ‘Our Day Will Come’ (2011) in Tasmania. Resisting any political interpretation of these curatorial projects, he underlined that where an artist might be recognized as a consultant or educator, ‘the good ones will always leave before their complete instrumentalization’. Suggesting that where socialized processes are necessary for the work to emerge, this disguise detaches, rocket-like, in the subjective production of criticality in the artist and audience member.

Nada Prlja, ‘Peace Wall’, 2012

Joanna Warsza, associate curator of this year’s Berlin Biennale, ‘FORGET FEAR’, which was widely criticized for misjudging its audience, talked energetically about non-conciliatory practices since the Futurists, where artists have identified themselves as committed political subjects creating a rupture amongst their unwitting audience. Speaking about one project from the Biennale, Nada Prlja’s Peace Wall (2012), which literally divided inhabitants of a street in Berlin’s Kreuzberg, demarcating where Prlja had judged the extent of gentrification in the area with a 12-metre-long, five-metre-high barrier. Contrary to the well-meaning tenets of New Institutionalism, Warsza consciously avoided any prior consultation with the community affected by the blockade, beyond receiving permission from the council to install it for the duration of the event. And sure enough the response was immediate: the surface of the wall was quickly taken over by vandalism and even opportunist advertising by a local hotel; followed by attempts to dismantle it; there were daily attacks directed at the artist and curatorial team by the media; and finally a candlelight vigil after it was removed. Warsza explained how despite the fact the work was taken down two weeks earlier than planned, and although it was an exhausting project to manage, she believed that the audience’s self-organization around the work countered the short-term nature of the biennale. She ventured that artists and curators should engage social workers to continue the chain of social responsibility initiated by O’Neill’s ‘third wave’ projects.

Annika Wik’s presentation at ‘Imagining the Audience’ at Bio Rio, Stockholm

In our current technological paradigm, where experience is increasingly autonomous, it is telling that the question of the self is placed centrally within each of these projects: our reactions make up the feedback that informs their development, moving the viewer from their position in the audience to being a witness or the subject of the work. One could say that where institutional critique succeeded in debunking the notion of the white cube, these projects quickly dismiss the presumed neutrality or passivity of the audience member, often citing their participation as a beginning point or crux of the work.

Shama Khanna is a curator and writer based in London. She is the Curator of the Thematic Programme at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany 2013.

By Dan Fox

Perspectives can change fast. My working week on Monday 29 October began answering emails and editing an article for this magazine. The morning was unusual only in that I was working from home, rather than the Frieze New York office on Union Square. I was waiting like everyone else in the city for Hurricane Sandy to arrive later that day. My week ended working as a volunteer unloading and distributing food and water from FEMA trucks in my neighbourbood on the Lower East Side, an area that had been without power since Monday night, when the electricity substation at East 14th Street was flooded during the storm surge – a momentary blue flash in the sky around 8:30pm then blackout.

Between Monday and late Friday evening, with power beginning to be restored to parts of Lower Manhattan, I’ve lived in a city bisected by electricity; the power-haves and the power-have-nots. In upper Manhattan (everywhere north of 38th Street) and inland areas of Brooklyn, it was as if nothing happened. Bars were hopping, and people were shopping. Minor signs that something wasn’t right could be detected: certain uptown hotels locked their doors to anyone who wasn’t a guest but just wanted somewhere to charge up a phone and let relatives know they were OK. Brooklynites sheltered friends who had trekked across the East River bridges in search of hot water and a phone signal. Lower Manhattan might as well have been a different city. Restaurants gave away free food because they couldn’t refrigerate it, and total strangers chatted in the streets, comparing rumours about when the lights might come back on. There was no subway. The zone became a cash economy as no ATMs or credit card machines worked. Some businesses and institutions offered free phone recharging stations, although phone reception was spotty or non-existent south of 18th Street. Fights broke out over payphones. People used fire hydrants to wash clothes. At night the streets were eerily dark, with residents walking around with flashlights, stepping over fallen trees and branches. As the week wore on, food distribution points began to spring up. Hundreds mustered themselves to volunteer and help. The National Guard could be seen on my street. Lack of steam and electricity meant water couldn’t be pumped to upper floors of high-rises and projects, and many vulnerable people were stranded without heat, food, water or access in and out of their homes. The borough of Staten Island, and areas of Brooklyn and Queens such as Red Hook, Breezy Point and Coney Island have been devastated. So too parts of New Jersey, pummelled as the storm hit land. There are fuel shortages, and hospitals in afflicted areas have been struggling to care for patients. At time of writing, the number of deaths from Sandy is reportedly 41 in New York – almost half in Staten Island – and pushing 100 across the northeastern United States, with 67 in the Caribbean.

Our art community has been hit badly by the storm. Many galleries in Chelsea suffered flood damage as the storm surge pushed water from the Hudson River into the streets between 10th and 11th Avenues, flooding street level spaces and basements. Artists have lost work – not just those with work in storage at their galleries in Chelsea, but those whose homes and studios elsewhere were flooded – and gallery buildings and equipment have been wrecked. Many will struggle to get back on their feet. (For an in-depth look at the situation in Chelsea, Linda Yablonksy’s report over at Artforum.com and Jerry Saltz at vulture.com are recommended reading.) The severity of Sandy’s impact on the New York art scene in the long-term remains to be seen but the heartfelt sympathy and thoughts of everyone at Frieze are with all our friends and colleagues who have been affected.

Perspectives and priorities can change fast. You can be fully connected one second, living in the dark the next. Just over an hour ago, whilst writing this, the power returned to my little corner of Manhattan. People in the street clapped and cheered. For some, life returns to normal. For others, it will take longer. For all of us here, storms such as Sandy may become a regular and dangerous fact of life; as the environmentalist Robert Watson once put it, ‘Mother Nature always bats last.’

E.B. White, in his famous 1949 essay ‘Here is New York’ likened the city to ‘a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it.’ And that’s what we have to remember. This is a resilient city. This is New York.

By Charlie Fox

Ingrid Caven watches Fassbinder on television, 'In a Year With 13 Moons' (1978)

1. Rainer Werner Fassbinder knew the magical power of the list, which makes order out of chaos. Five years before his early death at the age of 37, he drew up the monumental ‘List of My Favourites’, documenting his tastes across eight separate ‘top tens’. The categories are commonplace, even if their contents are not, both eclectic and peculiar –  Zeppo Marx, Jean Seberg, Elvis and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975) all make appearances – including ‘The Best Pop Musicians’, ‘The Best Books’ and ‘The Best Films’.  This sort of assiduous inscribing of taste is the activity of the lonely child and adolescent- Fassbinder endured what he called ‘an almost murderous puberty’. Lists are records of obsession, a bedroom art that arranges everything into little kingdoms with shaky hierarchies and sets the stars in private constellations.

I flirted with mimicking Fassbinder in this piece and writing my own top ten about his work, his greatest hits, his best scenes; it’s a list that’s still incomplete. Fassbinder destroying the TV in Fear Eats The Soul (1974); Herr R.’s drunken attempt to toast his boss in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970); the crucifixion scene from the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) … a collection of scenes that would capture the bleak climate of his films, all their loneliness, bad dreams and despair. But I decided, awkwardly, on 13 scenes, instead of 40 fragments (one each for every film he made) or 37 more (the age he was when he died). Thirteen scenes to recall his masterpiece In A Year With Thirteen Moons (1978) about the last five days in the life of a transsexual, concluding with her suicide. The list is an homage and method of praising (which is what all obsessive, idolatrous lists are) that film and its wayward shape. In A Year of Thirteen Moons is a patchwork of nightmare, fairytales, documentary, songs, tragedy, movies, a case study of a damaged mind and a weary body. Maybe I’m mimicking Fassbinder after all.

2. Cut to 1982: Citizen Kane (1941) continues its apparently unending reign atop the Sight & Sound list of the greatest films ever (meanwhile Orson Welles provides narration for a heavy metal record) Francis Ford Coppola bombs with One From The Heart , Michael Jackson releases ‘Thriller’ and on 31 May, Fassbinder dies in his bedroom in Munich of a drug overdose. His appearance on this list tilts it towards some darker territory than it would have otherwise occupied. His bleak European cinema, full of master-slave relationships, casual cruelty and tragic endings shares little with these American movies (‘Thriller’ is, of course, a horror movie set to a disco beat). Only the grim Citizen Kane feels remotely close to anything in Fassbinder’s body of work, although he probably would’ve been more interested in the decline of Susan Alexander, Kane’s wide-eyed second wife, than the last words of the media mogul. Citizen Kane is about how a life unravels and so too are many of the German director’s films. If Fassbinder looks out of place or he disturbs this list, well, good: he was always fiercely, defiantly out of place. He was a gay malcontent with a passion for the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, a self-described ‘romantic anarchist’ with an insatiable appetite for all kinds of excess (food, drugs, alcohol, sex), prone to violence: an ‘unruly beast’. Combine this with his extraordinary work rate and you have the makings of a myth and the arc for some dark hagiography: why did Herr F. Run Amok? But pursuing this would relegate the work to secondary significance, as if it was a curiosity alongside all that excess. But as Gilbert Adair pointed out: ‘Fassbinder was a true believer with an artisanal faith in his chosen medium. He made radical movies.’ And they are what’s really fascinating, even more than Fassbinder himself. In Wim Wenders’ documentary Room 666 (1982) Fassbinder makes a 40-second long appearance in a drab hotel room close to the Cannes Festival. Invited to talk about the future of cinema, he smokes, sighs and mumbles a terse response about the rise of ‘bombastic, sensation-orientated cinema’. Then he stubs out his cigarette and staggers away, radiating disdain. But Fassbinder’s work, too, is seriously committed to the supply of sensation, especially the painful or troubling. Even more, it is acutely aware of the places where sensation has been lost: the capacity for cruelty in his films is limitless.

3. Another anniversary: Vivre Sa Vie (1962) one of Jean-Luc Godard’s chilliest, most austere films is now 50 years old. It consists of 12 tragic scenes from the life of a prostitute played by Anna Karina, concluding with her death. In the third, she goes to the cinema alone, and watches Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1928). What follows is an eerie, complicated evocation of cinematic enchantment and premonition. Watching Maria Falconetti weep as she learns of her fate (a monk, played by Antonin Artaud tells her she is to be burned at the stake), Anna Karina cries, too, wounded by Falconetti’s expressive power, her plight, her grief. Falconetti shakes, dumbstruck, terrified but wondrous, eager to die as a child of God, torn between ecstasy and anguish.

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Fassbinder includes a sly quotation of this famous scene midway through_ In A Year of Thirteen Moons_. Whilst Elvira, the film’s transsexual heroine, sleeps, her friend Zora, a prostitute, is slumped before the TV, flicking from one channel to another. There are snatches of Maurice Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972), a documentary about the barbarities of Pinochet’s regime and an interview with Fassbinder, sourced from an episode of Lebensläufe (Life Stories). She remains transfixed throughout this little interlude of late-night viewing, her face set in a blank scowl. No trace of Anna’s tears. There is another echo of this scene in Veronika Voss (1982), where the screen becomes a scornful mirror, mocking the heroine as it reflects the intensity of her fall from starlet to drug addict. Behind the shuddering Veronika, who can’t bear to watch herself onscreen, sits Fassbinder. His expression, like Zora’s, is an inscrutable mixture of rapt attention and detachment. This is the gaze in all his films. Veronika runs from the cinema, Fassbinder keeps watching.

4. He appeared on Lebensläufe in early 1978. For almost an hour he’s the object of sustained study: cagey throughout, his voice weary, suggesting chronic Weltschmerz. He wrestles with the implications of certain questions and resists them (‘Am I honest? I’m honest to the extent that society allows me to be’), thoughtful, reticent. He smokes constantly, hides his face and occasionally emits a hollow laugh. The room is equally subdued, decorated in a lukewarm palette of muddy earth colors like many of the interiors in his films. Plants loom over him and the corpse of a tree can be glimpsed in the gloom outside through a misted window. He sits at a table with a few select objects to hand: a coffee cup (untouched throughout), his beloved cigarettes and a lavish book with a red, marbled cover. This is Fassbinder in a melancholy mood, which is, after all, especially German from Durer’s engravings to Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and the jaded consumptives in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924). (Melancholia persists: during a week of dreary weather in Berlin over springtime, I found two bars that played The Smiths and nothing else, both run by large men with perishing quiffs). What book it is next to him is never revealed. I wonder if it’s another potential film. It might be Céline’s A Journey To The End of the Night (1932) which he listed as number three of his ‘Ten Best Books’ or maybe, Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (number five) which he adapted into the mammoth TV series two years later, or, the source of his last, phantasmagorical film, Jean Genet’s Querelle (1953). Asked why he made so many films, he jokes, ‘it must be a special kind of mental illness’, a diagnosis that momentarily resounds in the bedroom of his doomed heroine.

5. Fassbinder is obsessive about interiors. He famously declared that ‘I would like to build a house with my films. Some are the cellar, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house.’ Given its size couldn’t we increase the scale of Fassbinder’s work? Not only a house, but a neighborhood, even a country- most strangely and maybe without parallel, a document of a country that no longer exists, West Germany having formally disappeared, of course, a few years after his death. (Another potential, more detached list-piece: an inventory of rooms in Fassbinder’s work: all the bedrooms, bathrooms, cinemas, abattoirs). This quotation touches on the most famous, most mythologized aspect of Fassbinder and his work: the immensity of his output, so many films, so many rooms. The first urge when you learn of all that work is hate him for making so much. What conditions would best unleash this ‘special kind of mental illness’? ‘What’s his secret?’ Hanna Schygulla remembers worrying in I Don’t Just Want You To Love Me (1992), the documentary on Fassbinder released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his death. His manic speed, the supernatural sense of control in all his works and the dirty spectacle of his life make for an unbearably glamorous trio. Like Rimbaud, he lives on as a malicious taunt to all subsequent and future artists. ‘Go mad! You’ll never top this. I’ve beaten you in advance, with my decadence, my intensity, my work.’

6. Speed and quantity of work are not the reasons to celebrate Fassbinder, as if all he produced was just a punkish, snotty kind of provocation, part of a desire to be fast and throwaway. What should be stressed is that Fassbinder’s films are slow, their tempo gentle and carefully measured. There’s no rush, even as everything falls apart. Despite the furious speed with which they were made, they are meditative works of art. Slowness has always been cut out of cinema: everything is sped up. Querelle (1982) is especially, gorgeously slow, a hypnotic reverie of glitter, gold and perfumed smoke, sinister lustre and opiated hallucination. Querelle is one of the great embodiments of cinema as a magic spell, a system of bewitchment that slows time to a sleepwalker’s pace, all regal and unfathomable. Drifting through its dreamlike world you inhabit a space as eerily unthread from the ordinary sense of time as Tarkovsky’s Zone in Stalker (1979). You’re lured deeper and deeper in with every hushed lap of the waves against the ship, every velvety, illicit whisper from the narrator.

You could never dream up a more cartoonish odd couple: Fassbinder the Bear and the Warhol the Friendly Ghost, but there are correspondences between the two, superficially opposed though they might be. As with Fassbinder, it’s easy to represent Warhol’s work in terms of speed and mass, particularly when thinking about his films. It would be easy to say that what happened at the Factory was just endless nights of speed-freak mischief, taking shape as quick as a Polaroid (incidentally one of Warhol’s favourite inventions), pursuing manic productivity at the expense of meaning, but it’s no accident one of his most famous films is Sleep (1963). ‘I really like slow time’, he said, and this is a taste he shared with Fassbinder. It all drags on: nothing happens, spaced-out kids mutter, come and go, sleep stretches out, speech slows down, it alters ever…y…thing. Watching Edie Sedgwick in a screen test wakes the same anxiety as seeing the two-hour torment of Petra Von Kant. How long can this go on for? But ‘slow time’ in films is intoxicating because it’s so fraught with pain. Look at this carefully, you can’t flinch, you can’t hide. Georges Perec described this feeling in his story of ‘slow time’ in A Man Asleep (1968), the sense that ‘you can do nothing, you cannot escape yourself, you cannot escape your own gaze, you will never be able to’.

7. Whenever an artist dies we wonder about their lost or dreamt-of projects that never materialized. Is this necessary with Fassbinder? After all, he did so much. And equally, if they die (relatively) young, their work is scoured for premonitions of their fate. Fassbinder, though, didn’t sense this ending so much as he leapt into its arms. Asked once how he pictured his old age, he responded ‘I don’t expect to experience it’. He died of heart failure brought on by the fatal interaction of sleeping pills and cocaine. Even if it’s ghoulish, ‘fatal interaction’ feels like a slyly suitable term for describing the relationships in his films. They are full of ‘fatal interactions’ between the trusting and demonic, loving and despicable. Think of Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fox and his treacherous friends, or Veronika and her doctor, who supplies her with morphine. These are films about the toxicity of other people.

8. Veronika: You brought me much happiness.
Doctor Katz: No, I sold it to you.

There’s an outline for an unmade project amongst his collected writings titled Cocaine. It’s more a hymn to the powder than anything else, indiscreetly mapping the desired trajectory of his life. ‘The cocaine user will experience this shorter life span significantly more intensely [and] more imaginatively […] The decision in favour of a short but fulfilled life or a short but unaware and on the whole alienated existence will be left entirely up to the audience.’ What Fassbinder favoured is obvious throughout, even as he partially obscures his praise through a layer of feigned medical authority. ‘Cocaine freezes the brain’, he writes, ‘freeing one’s thoughts of anything inessential and thereby liberating the essential, the imagination, concentration, and so on’. Fassbinder enjoyed for cocaine for the same reason as Sigmund Freud, who similarly adored its ability to unleash ‘passionate pleasure and tireless work’. In the projected film ‘everything will appear covered in hoarfrost, glittering ice, whether winter or summer’. His last films maintain this intoxicated gaze, all consist of entrancing, shimmering surfaces. Elsewhere, he appears more pained and dependent. A brief scene from Germany in Autumn (1978) features this grim dialogue between Fassbinder and his lover, Armin Meier, just after Fassbinder has ordered some cocaine over the phone.

Armin: I thought you’d quit.
Fassbinder (quietly): I thought so, too… (suddenly distraught, howling) But I don’t know! I’m depressed, I don’t know how to work anymore! (quiet again) It makes me feel good… it helps… (he weeps)
The film critic Serge Daney settled for a more poetic way of explaining his death. ‘He wore himself out constructing a place to house his dreams’.

9. First death scene: At the end of Fox and His Friends (1974), the title character (played by Fassbinder), a gay carnival worker who has won the lottery and suffered nothing but unhappiness since, takes an overdose of Valium and collapses in an underground train station. As he dies, thieves sweep over his body, steal his watch and then flee. The critical temptation is to read this bleak scene as a haunting example of Fassbinder rehearsing his own death but perhaps, more obliquely, something else is taking place. Fox is a man ‘suicided by society’, just as Artaud wrote in his essay on Vincent Van Gogh (number one on Fassbinder’s list of ‘The Ten Best Books’). He is abandoned and betrayed by everyone around him. Or, another more dreamlike cause: he dies of a broken heart. Loveless and lost, he’s like Elvis in ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, in the end ‘so lonesome I could die’.

Scene from Fox and His Friends (1974)

10. Gus Van Sant offers a slightly more hopeful revision of this scene in My Own Private Idaho (1991). At its end, Mike (a narcoleptic prostitute played by River Phoenix, similarly lovesick and lonely) collapses on a highway, struck by another sleep attack. A car rumbles towards him, two men climb out. They stalk round the prone body (it’s difficult not to think of Phoenix’s fatal overdose two years later), do the ritual checking of pockets, find nothing again, and with a sort of spite familiar from silent films, steal his boots. They jump back in their car and drive away with their pathetic loot. But, look, salvation! Another car stops soon afterwards, another driver climbs out, and gathers up the sleeping Phoenix, gently placing him in the vehicle. A hopeful ending, troubled by a little ambiguity; there is no room for such kindness in Fassbinder’s films… Fassbinder in Hollywood, a fantasy in Technicolour. If he had gone to America, as he long-promised, what would’ve happened, not only to him but to filmmaking, too? Imagine a Fassbinder film with Winona Ryder as a wayward heroine, her husband a vacant sadist played with spooky serenity by Mickey Rourke. Like many of his characters, Fassbinder longed for a (supposedly) better life that never arrived. He died just as the catastrophe of AIDS hit. What films would he have made about the plague years?

Scene from My Own Private Idaho (1991)

11. Second death scene. In A Year of Thirteen Moons: Elvira takes Zora to the slaughterhouse. In a long tracking shot, we watch the systematic killing of livestock. They are stunned, strung up from the ceiling, eviscerated, bled dry and skinned. Precisely because it is done so matter-of-factly, with such detachment, little else in cinema is so horrifying. On the soundtrack, an extract of a monologue from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) read in gasps and shrieks, manic, despairing, like an aria in mid-flight ‘…to lead me to the altar like a sacrificial beast! So, on the final day, they lured from me my poem which was my sole possession…’ The screen is crowded with several lurid carcasses suspended from the ceiling. A nasty echo of Francis Bacon’s voice, boozy, jubilant and warm, comes to me when I watch: ‘How marvelous these extraordinary carcasses are, hanging… hanging from the wall, how amazing their colour was, how beautiful they looked.’ Fassbinder and Bacon make a better couple than him and Warhol. They were two gay men who shared a certain worldly pessimism, a passion for excess and endured equally tempestuous affairs with other men (both had lovers who committed suicide after being spurned). Watching this scene, Bacon’s visceral tableaux are inevitably invoked. His lifelong fascination with carcasses, butchery, or as he simply put it, ‘flesh’, is apparent throughout his work from Painting (1946) and Figure With Meat (1954) to Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey (1980). Just as Bacon translated his grief at the suicide of George Dyer into his ‘Black Triptychs’ (1972-4), here Fassbinder is expressing his agony after the death of Armin Meier. In A Year of Thirteen Moons is Fassbinder’s ‘poem’ in the form of an exorcism, casting himself as the sacrificial beast whose sufferings become a terrible spectacle.

12. Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn (1978) is an equally astonishing expression of anguish. A portrait of the filmmaker as a monster is provided, alongside an elliptical evocation of a country in a state of panic, reeling in the aftermath of the Red Army Faction’s attacks. Fassbinder plays himself as a drug-addicted, paranoid and pathetic creature across 15 minutes of increasing claustrophobia. The rooms in his apartment (all seemingly windowless) purposefully recall cells, like those in which three of the RAF’s members committed suicide. Every scene is a wound: he bullies and attacks Armin, joylessly does lines of coke and rants at his mother. Trapped, his legendary industry lost, he falls, sobbing and distraught, into his lover’s arms. There’s nothing amorous about this embrace, a consoling bear-hug with the faintest trace of rocking to it, as if Fassbinder were a child, being soothed after a nightmare. Strange to think that Fassbinder would outlive the man holding him. Armin committed suicide two months after the film was released, on Fassbinder’s birthday.

13. In an interview not longer after this, Fassbinder likened his film The Third Generation (1979) to a set of ‘fairytales you tell your children so they’re better equipped to live their lives as people buried alive’. Perhaps all his films are about these people, for whom the uplifting endings we’re used to are nowhere to be found.

‘List of My Favorites’ from The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992)

By Dan Fox

Hurricane Sandy is gone, but help is still needed. Communities are still without power, and authorities estimate that thousands are homeless. The following list details charities, grass-roots and volunteer organizations providing relief for storm-damaged areas of New Jersey and New York, especially Staten Island and the Rockaways. The list also provides links to art-related information sources, and non-profit art organizations in the city affected by Sandy and in need of help.

The list is by no means exhaustive and we will endeavour to keep it updated.

RELIEFORGANIZATIONS

Aid for Rockaway
The above link is the Facebook page for a volunteer group providing supplies and direct assistance to the Rockaways.

The Ali Forney Center
The Ali Forney Drop-In Center for homeless LGBTQ youth, located in Chelsea, Manhattan, was destroyed during Sandy. The above link provides information about the centre and how to make donations to help.

American Red Cross
Provides supplies, shelter and assistance to affected areas.

The Bowery Mission
Provides food and shelter to homeless and displaced New Yorkers.

Coalition for the Homeless
Advocacy and direct-service organization helping homeless men, women and children. The above link gives detailed statistics and information about how Hurricane Sandy has affected homeless people in New York.

Food Not Bombs
Food and logistical support. The above link gives information on how to help their post-Sandy relief efforts in the New York and New Jersey areas.

Food Bank for New York City
New York City’s major hunger-relief organization working to end food poverty throughout the five boroughs, looking for donations and volunteers to assist New Yorkers affected by Sandy.

New York Communities for Change
The above link provides a useful list of resources for post-Sandy recovery.

Occupy Sandy Recovery
Coordinated relief effort to help provide volunteers and distribute resources to help neighbourhoods and people affected by Sandy. Members of this coalition are from Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, recovers.org, InterOccupy.org and many individual volunteers.

Red Hook Initiative Hurricane Relief
Information about helping those affected by the storm in the hard-hit Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The above link also provides updates on the current situation with power, heat and water in the Red Hook area.

Renegade Sandy Relief
Direct action volunteer organization providing food and supplies.
Donations to Renegade Sandy Relief can be made here.

Rockaway Relief
Volunteer organization providing help for the Rockaways area.

Rockaway Help
Providing help for the Rockaways.

Staten Island Recovers
Community recovery organization for Staten Island.

Team Rubicon
Military veterans and medical professionals providing rapid response to crisis situations.

Waves for Water
Organization providing clean water internationally to communities in need. Waves for Water have organized a full-fledged relief effort in response to Sandy.

ART-RELATED

Art Dealers Association of America
The ADAA has compiled relief resources for its members and the gallery community including information on the ADAA Relief Fund, federal assistance, insurance and conservation. Click here to access the resources page.

Coney Island USA
Coney Island USA is a non-profit arts organization based in the amusement park area of Coney Island, Brooklyn, dedicated to the history of popular culture in the US. It’s building at 1208 Surf Avenue suffered flood damage during the storm.

The Kitchen
The Kitchen suffered flooding that filled the organization’s theatre and lobby spaces in its Chelsea building, causing severe damage estimated between $400,000 and $500,000.

MoMA Conservation Department
MoMA New York’s emergency guidelines for salvaging water-damaged art.

Pollock Krasner Foundation
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is currently accepting emergency grants for artists, and expediting these applications.

Primary Information
Primary Information’s storage unit at a branch of Manhattan Mini Storage was flooded, destroying a sizeable portion of their inventory. Although now back online, and able to resume limited activities, they are still trying to save as much of their inventory as possible.

Printed Matter
Although Printed Matter’s store on 10th Avenue, New York, has now re-opened, they estimate over 9000 books were destroyed, along with editioned items and equipment. The Printed Matter Archive was also severely damaged.

Smack Mellon
Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, was badly flooded during the storm, causing severe damage to its artist residency studios, media lab, kitchen and wood workshop.

By Vivian Ziherl

Sarah Pierce, 'Campus', 2011/2012, Performance at Stroom Den Haag

Protest chants enter and encompass the body; they insist upon the total presence of persons. Transposing the public ‘space of appearance’ of the street, square or park to an art-space lobby, six performers cleared an area for their demonstration of sorts with the chant; ‘Find a place to stand, step back, and look.’ In three iterations of the piece, performers linked arms and rhythmically pushed their fists into the air, pressing demands that stated their conditions of presence and display. The piece was “Campus” (2011/12) by Sarah Pierce, and it punctuated the first evening of the two-day performance programme ‘I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim’, curated by Capucine Perrot and hosted at Stroom Den Haag as part of the current exhibition ‘Expanded Performance’.

The other three performances on the first evening were each tangents on the form of public speaking as a storytelling act. In The Awaken Dreamer (2012), Léa Lagasse presented a meticulously reconstructed ‘reading wheel’; a device developed in the 16th century by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli. The beautiful wooden contraption of cogs and wheels was a pleasure to behold as its parts rotated against each other. It functioned more or less as a Ferris wheel with carriages designed to hold six books laid open, and is credited as a radically rudimentary precursor to hypertext. In practice, however, the reading of six books, in this case by Vladimir Nabokov, seemed a slight conceit for such an elaborate apparatus. It called to mind the many attempts by artists – from Argentinean pataphysicist Juan Esteban Fassio to Vancouver School artist Rodney Graham – to devise ‘reading machines’ for the texts of Raymond Roussel. These efforts having been propelled by the reticulating tangle of Roussel’s texts themselves.

Lea Lagasse, ‘The Awaken Dreamer’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

The programme overall could well have been subtitled ‘When Art Speaks’, and Cally Spooner embodied this in her lecture performance _I Have Been ill-advised by my Scriptwriter _(2012). She held long posters of black geometric forms aloft while a male performer – was she his sidekick, or was he hers? – lectured at length in a nightmarish mixture of ‘new management’ lingo, chart-hit lyrics and pure art-speak.

Cally Spooner, ‘I have been ill-advised by my scriptwriter’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

Last of the evening, the French duo Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet made for a curious presence together, dressed identically in prim ladies’ suits and seemingly rehearsed in a strange kind of stage-presence. Their introduction to the film _The Wall That Bleeds _(2012) was delivered with such idiosyncratic aplomb that they could fairly be considered speaking art works themselves. The real protagonist here, however, was a yellow curtain; a rich and heavy brocade hung in the space that returned as a murderous presence in the film’s yellow wallpaper. Gesturing to the poetic and paradoxical banality of being under threat by domestic décor, the duo cited Oscar Wilde’s epithet ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death, one of us must die.’

Louise Herve & Chloe Maillet, ‘The Wall That Bleeds (Projection and Voice-Over)’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

It remains a confrontation to be addressed by art verbally. Story and script – and an audience’s expectation of the presence or absence thereof – are much of what holds apart the worlds of theatre and performance art, albeit tenuously. Across the two evenings of ‘I Proclaim…’ it was striking to note the tendency to draw upon genre in presenting art with words: the corporate public-speaker, the public reading and the school-room scenario were all taken as templates. Opening the second evening, Alexandre Singh cast the referential net back to a Homeric oral tradition. Shifting between two overhead projectors, Singh conjured tales from an elaborate series of black and white collages in his Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immodern Romanticism (2009/2012). With calming cadence and a soft-spoken tone, Singh led the audience through an increasingly absurd set of twisting narratives, culminating in a conflation of celebrity confessional culture vis-à-vis small-screen series such as ‘Sex in the City’ and the Catholic tradition of confession vested in, according to the tale, the weight of the pontiff’s mitre.

Alexandre Singh, ‘Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immoderate Romanticism’, 2009/2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

The enunciative register of language, hinted at in the title ‘I Proclaim…’, was most powerfully registered in Nicoline van Harskamp’s Without Title (an Exercise in European English) (2012). The work was gratifyingly immediate, allowing the density and humour of the material to pack its punch. The subject was ‘European English’, a sub-set of the anglo dialects spoken by those who now out-number native English speakers. The form was an adult language-lesson, led automatically by voiceover and with an assisting projection of phonetic spellings.

Nicoline van Harskamp, ‘Without Title (an Exercise in European English)’, 2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

Over the course of the lesson, two actors repeated words such as ‘him’ (pronounced hgim), ‘fish’ (veesh) and ‘healthy’ (hgelsi), repeating after each their rolling, glottal and all-together non-anglo sounds. After a full phonetic alphabet had been established, short and then longer sentences were built up; ‘this is a new challenge,’ for example and, ‘it is always required to have a consensus’. There was something compelling about what was, ostensibly, a rote task. The audience palpably galvanized its attention watching and listening to the phonetic progression, often laughing together heartily. Beyond the humour of mispronunciation, the piece conveyed a bio-politics of language. Part of the compulsion to watch for the audience, was certainly a compulsion to repeat. There was a strong kinaesthetic reaction to mimic the vowel forms silently, even involuntarily so.

The final performance of the programme shifted register again; here the artist took the role of art enthusiast and art historian in Pierre Leguillon’s _Non-Happening, After Ad Reinhardt _(2011/12). The piece commenced with a lecture on the lesser-known slide-performances of the American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. Its text, propelled by fascination and dedication to the subject, recounted Leguillon’s path to uncovering the slides, and his thesis that they permit a re-reading of Reinhardt’s ‘black paintings’, not as an erasure but as a blacking-out of accumulation. Watching the hour-long presentation of 560 slides – drawn from an archive of 10,000 – another image arose; that of an ageing Reinhardt corralling friends, students and family to watch hours of architectural details, ancient statuary, religious icons and abstract painting, all clustered by formal features such as triangles or hands.

Pierre Leguillon, ‘Non-Happening after Ad Reinhardt’, 2011/2012, performance at Stroom Den Haag

Among the rhythmic Warburgian sequence of images, a short segment stood out – a few slides featuring people with protest placards. These images sat apart on many counts; they showed no strong geometry but instead inchoate groupings of bodies. Where as the other images were captured with an objective frontality, these placed the photographer in time and in socio-political place, even in his profession as the placards called for art worker’s demands. These few slides go against the image of post-historicity that is evoked in the remaining slides. It is an accumulated image uncannily reminiscent of the photographic practice of philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, which is currently being presented in exhibitions by Boris Groys. It’s tempting, then, to speculate on the operations in time of the moment of protest, and its insistence of presence. For the programme ‘I Proclaim…’ the residue overall was of the acute proximity of the acts of being seen and being heard.

Vivian Ziherl is a critic and curator from Australia. She is currently Curator at ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

By Ela Bittencourt

Carlos Reygadas, 'Post Tenebrus Lux' (Light after Darkness), 2012

The 14th Rio International Film Festival, the largest in Latin America, chose as its official seat this year a spacious naval warehouse, along a dusty road leading to the international airport, with trucks and buses bustling by nonstop. The warehouse is part of a larger zone whose neglected, empty buildings are slated to be eventually brought back to life by urban developers; as a festival seat, it helped stress Rio de Janeiro’s connection to its port and to Brazil’s colonial past. And while the festival’s huge number of screenings, over 400, didn’t yield too many memorable experiences, with national productions leaning towards conventionality, there were some, and not all foreign.

Leos Carax’s sci-fi Holy Motors was highly anticipated, not the least because the director was present, coming back from a creative hiatus of more than a decade. Unlike his apparently brief appearance and clipped responses in Cannes, he was warmly received in Rio, and even seemed to enjoy himself, by the side of his star, Kylie Minogue. Holy Motors features the protean Mister Oscar, played brilliantly by Denis Lavant, as an idiot savant, a martial arts freak, and a thug who gets knifed by his doppelganger, among others, before he turns out to be an actor, driving from gig to gig in his limousine. Carax suggested in a press conference that his film was a metaphor for the human condition, in which case Oscar might be Everyman, slipping between social masks. His fleeting experiences and wildly shifting moods make getting a grip on acting, or life, look slippery, in Carax’s dizzying mishmash of genres, from sci-fi, art-house and noir to musical melodrama.

No other director matched Carax’s quixotic inventiveness, but Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas (who won Best Director in Cannes) and Korea’s Kim Ki-Duk (winner, Best Direction in Venice) came closest. Reygadas’s Post Tenebrus Lux (Light after Darkness), features a red, hoofed Satyr, inviting a reading of his film as a fantastical moral fable: Forty-something Juan brings his family to the countryside, presumably to cut himself off from civilization’s discontents, but his fixation on porn brings him closer to the local farmers, and exposes how countryside’s misogyny and violence clash with the idyllic vision of pristine pastures. With rich colours and image blurs and distortions, Reygadas’ pastoral is full of lurking portents, even if its tones, from dreamy to deadpan, don’t entirely cohere.

Kim Ki-Duk, ‘Pietá’, 2012

Kim Ki-Duk’s Pietá has been vilified by critics as grossly Oedipal, and its malevolent characters border on cartoonishness.: Lee, hired by a ruthless loan shark to collect exorbitant sums from debtors or to maim them, is stalked by a woman who claims to be his mother. Lee rapes her but then, in a bizarre twist on filial love, develops a conscience, questioning the value of the money he’s extorted. The denouement to Pietá is incongruous, but it has surprising moral gravitas: In Ki-Duk’s dystopia, the poor suffer because of bad luck and ignorance, having taken out loans that they cannot repay; the higher powers do nothing to help them, allowing opportunists to flourish.

Most heartening in Rio was the showing of talent among young South and Central American filmmakers. Of these, Mexican Michel Franco has only made two features and Argentine Maximiliano Schonfeld and Brazilian Kleber Mendoça Filho just one. All three came to Rio with prior honours: Franco’s After Lucia had won the Prix Un Certain Regard in Cannes, Schonfeld’s Germania was a Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente winner, and Filho’s Neighboring Sounds had won the International Federation of Film Critics prize in Rotterdam, and would go on to win in Rio for best feature and best screenplay, in the only competitive section, Première Brasil.

Michel Franco, ‘After Lucia’, 2012

The three films were notable for their interpretative openness. In After Lucia, a father and daughter, Alejandra, move to Mexico City to start a new life. Alejandra has sex with a boy who records it and uploads the clip. Her harassment culminates with her being raped on a school trip. Franco trumps causality: He introduces the death of Alejandra’s mother in a car accident, and shows how grief distances father and daughter, as they adopt brave public faces, but he leaves open the question whether Alejandra’s need to please, and her willingness to tolerate abuse and to withstand insurmountable psychological pain, are in any way connected to her trauma.

Maximiliano Schonfeld, ‘Germania’, 2012

Evil, viewed through a distanced, sociological lens in After Lucia, turns mystical in Schonfeld’s Germania: A German family must leave their farm when their animals fall ill, and neighbors fear a plague, evoking a spectre of sin. Much of the film’s tension lies not in what occurs, but the ambiguity with which it’s captured: The young girl, Brenda, is pregnant; as the stigma around her family tightens, the paternity of her baby remains unclear, casting doubt on Brenda’s closeness to her brother, Miguel, and her father’s untimely death. While the film’s rapturous cinematography, by Soledad Rodrigues, gives it an idyllic look, the mystery hints at a paradise lost.

Miguel Gomes, ‘Tabu’, 2012

Filho’s achievement is best framed by another festival standout: a special programme of Portugal’s contemporary cinema, with guests João Pedro Rodrigues and Teresa Villaverde. I spoke to both about the challenges they face, as Europe’s financial crisis continues and Portugal’s conservative government has dissolved the country’s Ministry of Culture. As if to counteract grim reality, Rodrigues’s retrospective and his The Last Time I Saw Macao, Villaverde’s Swan, and Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, all bore the marks of ambitious and playful auteur cinema. Swan was the most intimate, a portrait of an artist whose growing responsiveness to others awakens her appetite for life; while The Last Time I Saw Macao and Tabu evoked colonial past, albeit through a Nietzschean lens, where history comes back as farce, or pastiche.

João Pedro Rodrigues, ‘The Last Time I Saw Macao’, 2012

The Last Time I Saw Macao particularly is a spoof on colonial imagination: Although shot entirely on location, its China is wildly invented. The unidentified narrator returns to the place of his birth to rescue a friend embroiled with the local mafia. What follows, on the surface, are missed encounters, a kidnapping and a murder. Macau emerges as a character in the film, as a former Portuguese colony and a bustling Asian city. As pastiche, the film alludes to Macao (1952) by Josef von Sternberg, whose exoticism was manufactured in a Hollywood studio. Rodrigues and da Mata evoke the artifice, taking a prosaic element of Chinese culture – a birdcage – and turning it into an objet-clef in an apocalyptic criminal conspiracy, giving it an entirely new, pseudo-occult meaning.

Portugal and Brazil both reflected on colonialism, but in Brazilian films, the notion of the other was internalized. Kleber Mendoça Filho dealt with it most extensively in Neighboring Sounds, capturing a cross-section of social classes on one block in his native Recife, which has undergone rapid real-estate development. The colonial past, a source of power and status for real-estate magnate Francisco and his clan, is also the cause of the great disparity between the have and have-nots, creating an aura of mistrust, isolation and fear. The past persists in modern habits and attitudes, signaled by security services, electric fences, and guard dogs. What resonated with Brazilian audiences was particularly the film’s humour: From residents spying on doormen with candid cameras, to absurdist co-op meetings, Filho has captured his fellow Brazilians’ foibles in ways that can be dark and unsettling, but for the most part sparkle with humanist irony.

Overall, in Prèmiere Brasil, films that borrowed heavily from melodramas and television (particularly Brazilian telenovelas, or soap operas) predominated. Among the ones I saw, Invisible Collection, Eden, Between Valleys, Jonathan’s Forest and Search (or Father’s Chair), all suffered, to varying extent, from forced sentiment, at the cost of character development, editing, and complex storytelling. A missed opportunity, firstly, because Brazilian actors such as João Miguel (best actor in Rio in 2011 and 2005) deserve more complex roles; secondly, because from what I saw during sold-out screenings of ambitious foreign films, at least some Brazilian viewers are hungry for more challenging fare. As Brazil continues to grow and more money flows into the arts, including film, and more foreign filmmakers look to it for partnerships, it seems particularly vital that the local directorial talent also continues to be cultivated.

By Tom von Logue Newth

Leos Carax, 'Holy Motors' (2012)

There are not many poets left in the cinema. Perhaps the poet is always something of a throwback, a reminder of former glories. ‘Now I feel I make films for the dead and you show them to people who are alive’ says director Leos Carax, whose new film Holy Motors (2012) in part laments the passing of the mechanical age. It also evokes the Island of Cinema of which Carax speaks, a place where life is seen through the prism of cinema, but a prism that allows for all possible viewpoints, less to do with filmic reference and harking back, than to do with finding new ways to look at the world and the human condition.

Carax has always stood apart, with his cigarette and sunglasses, as a lone voice seeking the ineffably romantic in cinema. A wave of teenage cinephilia flowed into his first two features – Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvaise sang (Bad Blood, 1986), but their evocations of the New Wave were joyful rather than derivative, the cool look worlds apart from the cool cinéma du look of contemporaries Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix. Les Amants du Pont Neuf (released with the English title ‘Lovers on the Bridge,’ 1991) was as grand a romantic gesture as could be, to Juliette Binoche, to Paris, to love. The personal and artistic torment of Pola X (1999) had it dismissed in some quarters as wonky at best; it now looks like one of the best films of the 1990s.

Leos Carax, ‘Les Amants du Pont Neuf’ (Lovers on the Bridge, 1991)

The boy-meets-girl theme bubbles under even in Pola X, but with Holy Motors Carax takes his eye from the petri dish of a relationship, to cast it as broadly as possible. Gone is the exhilaration of love but, with something of the spirit of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, there is a deep, nostalgic emotion running through the film, which has its own sweetness, encapsulated in the protagonist’s answer to why he continues: ‘pour la beauté du geste.’

Self

The film follows M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) through a series of appointments in which he assumes a different role, from silver-haired businessman to old beggar-woman, and on. Part of the film’s project is a hymn to the actor, who lives so many experiences on our behalf; another part is to recognize that this capability exists in us all, and that the sense of identity is fixed far less than we should assume. It’s the classic Man Without Qualities existential dilemma, and no wonder Oscar takes to the late-night bottle in the back of his stretch limo, desperate for some human contact.

As Carax put it when we met, Holy Motors‘was born from the rage of not being able to make films for so long, so it was imagined very fast and shot very fast, without watching the dailies. It happens in one day, from dawn to moonlight. It gave me the possibility to show in one day a whole range of human experience. Of course there is a game with virtuality in the film, which we know about more and more, because when you talk about reality one of the questions is, can we avoid it? Some people try through fame, or money, or entertainment, or these virtual worlds. What happens if more and more of us try to avoid it more and more? We’ll see.’

‘I’m not a cinephile but people, critics, tend to see my films in terms of cinephilia. The language is cinema, I hope, but I don’t see Holy Motors as a film about cinema. People ask what is it about, and I say I don’t know, because I don’t really understand the word “about”. Is Hitchcock’s The Birds about birds? Films are metaphors, and in this case I tried to invent a science-fiction world because science-fiction is great for that – it’s a metaphor for reality. So hopefully the film is about that, about the structure of reality: can we still face it, do we still want lived experiences, do we still want action? Action means responsibility, and this kind of science-fiction world that was invented for the film, with this strange job where you travel from life to life, I felt it was a good way to show the experience of being alive. He doesn’t have any present. He doesn’t have what people call a life, or at least you wonder if he does, or what is his life. In my mind it’s different movements inside any life, inside many lives, dealing with what we all deal with, which is ageing, dying, loving, losing etc. It’s a strange pitch for a film – what is your film about? It’s about the experience of being alive today.’

‘I started making films quite young, and I stopped making films quite young. I made three films from 20 to 30 years old, and then I couldn’t make films again until I was 38. And then again ten years. So I had a life within cinema, but I can hardly call myself a filmmaker. Probably in this film there is something like a jump, where suddenly I wake up and I’m not 20, I’m not 30 anymore, and this question of who am I becomes important.’

“I changed my name when I was 13 years old. I wasn’t yet interested in cinema at that time. I don’t remember exactly who that boy was at 13 years old, who I was, but I guess I felt the need to reinvent myself. I think every child should be allowed to change his name. You should be allowed to say at 12 or 13, you had your father’s name for a while, or your mother’s name or whatever, now it’s your turn to invent your name and write your life. I have six nephews from aged ten to 25 and sometimes I worry that they don’t see that, that it’s possible to write your life. Of course you can’t write all of it, but you can try. It relates to what I was saying about experience – do we still want experience? I’m not against virtual worlds or connecting through computers or whatever. Connecting is the opposite of fighting, of resisting. All these possibilities that this virtuality offers are wonderful, and I hope I used them in Holy Motors. But as a lifestyle I don’t like it. I’m worried about the fact that young people are maybe not searching for experience so much anymore. Which always existed before: young men wanted to go to war, or take boats. They wanted to reinvent themselves. Whether young people still want that I don’t know.’

Leos Carax, ‘Holy Motors’ (2012)

Cinema

The fact that Holy Motors starts with Carax himself, waking in bed and passing through a magical portal into a cinema auditorium, has naturally enough prompted assumptions that this is a film about cinema. This is true only to the extent that it is about what cinema can show us of ourselves. There are few specific references, save Carax letting his hair down at the end, along with Edith Scob (as Oscar’s driver), as though he had been restraining himself. The film cameras he laments are one part of a change, a shrinking from reality, that the talking limousine makes clear at the end with a call for silence: ‘men don’t want visible machines anymore.’ It is a film not about cinema, but born of cinema. Carax’s Island of Cinema is a place we recognize. It is not a place of reference, or stealing, but a place for looking at ourselves in different ways. Thus the shadows of genre in Holy Motors, and the feel that when the camera swoops up to Kylie Minogue on a balcony, wailing a lament (by Neil Hannon) in the abandoned deco shopping mall that itself figured prominently in Les amants du Pont Neuf, this is some gushing musical in the Demy tradition. But it is not: the song is rather lovely and apt, the moment is perfectly judged, and this is a particularly potent way of conveying the emotion of nostalgia, as she sings ‘who were we?’ The evocation here, as elsewhere, is less referential of cinema of the past than a rather convincing impression that they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

Leos Carax, ‘Holy Motors’ (2012)

‘It’s usual when people talk about my films that they don’t give the desire to people to go and see them because people think, oh it’s a film for specialists, it’s a film for cinephiles. This I mind. I’ve shown the film to 13-year old kids and they get it. They don’t know anything about my cinema, about cinema in general. When I started making films I used references a bit like the New Wave did, to be playful, to be fun, to say I love cinema, I love films, I love film history, but I stopped that after my second film. I felt I had paid my debt to my love for cinema. That’s why I don’t call them references any more. It was nothing very conscious. There were two conscious things. One was that Denis Lavant was going to run on the treadmill and re-enact in a way the scene from my second film, in the virtual world, but it doesn’t change anything if you haven’t seen Mauvaise sang. You still get it. And then at the end of the shoot, I decided to give Edith Scob the mask close to what she had in her earlier film when she was 20 [Les yeux sans visage, Eyes Without a Face, 1960]. I hesitated, but it felt absolutely right, and like a gift to her, because I loved her so much on the shoot and I think she loved the experience of the film. It was like a present, and I felt it went with the film, that she should put a mask on at the end. But it was not to say hello to the Franju. I don’t think in those terms, but of course I’ve read books and I’ve seen things and they appear in my films, for sure.’

Georges Franju, ‘Les yeux sans visage’ (Eyes Without a Face, 1960)

‘It may be strange but I see cinema as more than films. Obviously I loved films, and I’ve seen many films, when I was younger. When I call it an island it’s because it’s a place, a place where you can see these things – life and death – from a different angle. So I’m grateful that I can go back to this island, but I don’t need to see films to love cinema. I’ve never seen my own films again. You have to fight so much. Making a film is one way of trying to stop the fight and trying to look, to see. That’s what I like about cinema.’

‘Sometimes I think I should see more films, especially when I travel, but then I see one or two that discourage me. When I was younger I didn’t mind seeing bad films at all. To see a bad film could be very inspiring to me. Now it’s not the case; it’s depressing. I don’t have the courage of discovering that I used to. Now I watch films because I want to see an actress in a film, or the work of a DP. Last year I saw a film I thought was good – it’s not a great film, but it does try to show something of the superhero discovering his powers – Chronicle (2012). It’s a small film, about three kids who discover they have super powers; a cheap film, for sure, compared to usual superhero films. But when they have the scene in the sky where they fly, it’s not like two shots that costs millions of dollars, it’s a long scene and they fly. It’s nice to see people in the sky flying, simply. I am always surprised when you see that kind of superhero that they don’t use that. He lands and it’s over. Flying is great – if a man can fly, keep him going for 20 minutes flying, go around the clouds. This film has a bit of that simple strength. If someone made a film where someone would fly for an hour and a half, people would go see it.’

‘Movies started with motion, motion pictures. That’s why I showed these images from [Étienne-Jules] Marey, these 19th-century images. It’s the human body – we still love to watch the human body. We love to watch other things, landscapes or things we invented, the cigarettes, the guns, the cars, but basically what we all love is to watch a face, or a human body in motion, running, fucking, exploding. This is what motion capture is. You still need the holy motor of a human body to create it, and in that sense it’s exciting.’

‘My films are not always light, but with each film I’ve felt the need to try to reach joy, through speed, through dance, through music. In this film I tried through the intermission scene with the accordions, because I think joy is important. I don’t know much about happiness but I know I need joy.’

Leos Carax, ‘Holy Motors’ (2012)

Looking for joy

‘Each film has really felt like the first one and the last one. I feel like an imposter in a way because I didn’t study film. I was never on a shoot before I made my first film. The fact is that to make a film you need people, and I’ve had lots of trouble to find people. It’s not so much the money. I don’t think I’ve ever not made a film because of money. It’s always people; whether it’s not finding an actress, a producer, someone I trust, it’s people. The hard thing with cinema is people. The other reason I haven’t made many films, apart from all the problems, is probably that once you make a new film, all the past projects are dead. When I make a new film I have to feel that I’m not the same person as the one who made the film before.’

‘Albert Prévost is the one who made Holy Motors possible. We met on Lovers on the Bridge. Money is very abstract in cinema. You can have, let’s say, $1,000,000, which is nothing to certain producers, and worth a lot to other producers. This man had a kind of genius that I think is pretty rare. It worked for me, but it doesn’t mean it would work with any film-maker. To know how to make a dollar into ten dollars, or when I wanted something, really he understood that that was important for the film, that some money had to go there. And he was able to transmit that to the crew. People trusted him. They knew that he wasn’t spending money behind their backs. When I started making films, I always worked with people who were like crooks, but good crooks. Well, not always good, but the ones I liked were good. To be a producer of a film you have to have a kind of craziness. I think it’s always been true with cinema, and that makes it kind of exciting. The first big producers, in the silent days, were crazy. They were capitalists, they loved money, but they were crazy. If you don’t have that craziness you make bad films, or you make boring films, or you just don’t make films, and I think it’s really that craziness that we miss, it’s rare to find. Cinema from the beginning was something crazy. It’s the only art that’s been invented. Other arts didn’t need to be invented. It’s a miracle it exists.’

Leos Carax, ‘Holy Motors’ (2012)

As one might expect, Carax is a lover of celluloid, but embraces digital technology in Holy Motors both to rejoice in the movement of the human body in the motion capture studio, and to create degenerating, subjective visions of Paris as the Oscar gazes from his womb-like limo.

‘Everything has changed with digital. When I was 20 I met the DP I was to work with for ten years, [Jean-Yves Escoffier] and he became my best friend, like a brother. Then after Lovers on the Bridge we didn’t talk for ten years. He moved to Hollywood and he died out here. After that, working with light, working on celluloid, was not the same for me with other people. That was one thing that helped me go to digital because I felt that if I don’t have that kind of relationship with a DP I might as well shoot digitally.’

‘I have a bad reaction to digital, mainly because it’s been imposed on us, and I hate that. It’s been an issue since the beginning. Cinema was a very powerful invention but obviously this power of cinema – it’s like a holy power – you have to reinvent it all the time. Nobody’s scared of seeing a train coming into a station any more. So every generation has to reinvent cinema, the power of cinema. If you see a man walking in an F.W. Murnau film and the camera is following him, you feel like he is being watched by a god. If a kid does the same shot today and shows it on YouTube, you don’t have this feeling at all. So cinema has to reinvent its power all the time, and that’s what I feel has to be done nowadays more than ever, to reinvent the power of cinema. Because if not it’s lost, it’s not there. People think it’s still there because they’re entertained by cinema still, but truly if it’s not reinvented it’s stale. The power has also been devalued by images – images are not only in cinema today, they’re all over the place. You go in the streets and there are screens all over the place, images all over the place. To reinvent the experience of watching something is getting harder and harder. It always seems strange to me that most films are only references, like a photocopy of each other. Hopefully I’m trying to invent something.’

Holy Motors was greeted at Cannes with surprise, as a new sort of thing, a bolt from the blue. It is a new sort of thing, but it’s also an old sort of thing. The opening specifically evokes Jean Cocteau and a brand of poeticism that is not seen so much any more, perhaps because the idea of a grand aesthetic gesture – aiming for something greater than literal truth – is not so much in fashion these days. It is a unique, personal gesture: one of the finest things about Holy Motors is that it does not feel definitive. Tomorrow will be completely different, as it should be.

By Derek Eland

‘Diary Room’, Patrol Base Kalang, Afghanistan (all images 2011)

When I was first given the chance to become a war artist in Afghanistan it was a question of how to bring a new perspective to the conflict, one which is dominated by the relentless toll of deaths and the hyper-reality of the head-cam video and kill TV.

I wanted to get inside the heads of soldiers in this war zone – what it feels like to be human in this demanding place. I’d been working in the UK on a number of socially engaged art projects creating ‘Diary Rooms’ on location and then re-contextualising the resulting work in galleries. I like the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, particularly his work Are you happy? (1981), and Yoko Ono’s My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004) which I’d come across at art college, and this helped reinforce my thinking.

In a digital age, I decided to collect handwritten accounts there and then at the front line. I didn’t want stories written after the event: I was interested in honest, raw and immediate accounts. I decided to ask everyone I met in on the front line in Afghanistan, Afghans as well as Westerners, to write a postcard about their experiences and thoughts. These stories would be created using three ‘Diary Rooms’ on the front line.

Prior to going out to Afghanistan however I had a series of challenging conversations and meetings with soldiers and officers in units I was due to be embedded with. Some of these people were sceptical about asking soldiers for their stories and nervous about what would be said: would the comments be insidious, destructive and ultimately undermine morale? I too was worried that the soldiers would only write what they thought others wanted them to say or that they would not write anything at all.

On the ground in Afghanistan a few months later things turned out to be quite different to what I’d expected. In theory I would set up three ‘Diary Rooms’ in front line Patrol Bases and engage with the people there and ask them to write their stories. I planned to use coloured postcards as I wanted to introduce some element of choice in the process and also to produce an end result which was visually colourful and a contrast to the dark stories which I expected to emerge.

The reality was that the soldiers, both the Western and Afghan, were dotted around the landscape in small Check Points and remote locations instead of being in one central location. In order to engage with soldiers and get the stories I would need to go to them. On day two in Helmand I left the relatively safe confines of the wire to patrol out to these remote locations. It was at this point that I realized that my insurance policy didn’t cover me anymore.

Irish Guardsman, writing their stories by torchlight, Afghanistan

The second harsh reality was that the three locations chosen for the ‘Diary Rooms’ were selected because they were the most ‘kinetic’. This is military speak for places where ‘contacts’ with the Taliban, shootings and bombings, were most common. In a way this made sense as the soldiers and interpreters I met would have more intense stories to tell. For me personally I felt even more exposed in my ‘press corps blue’ helmet and body armour. Jokingly the soldiers said they were very happy for me to join them on patrol as I stood out much more than they did. On day three I was with a foot patrol which came across an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). It was ‘safely’ detonated with a huge explosion, similar to a device which had killed a soldier from the same unit a few weeks previously.

What this all meant for me though was that I was immediately on the same level as the soldiers – I patrolled with them, slept in these remote places and took the same risks. As an artist and outsider I was immediately on the same level and able to ask soldiers for their stories. Quite often when I turned up in these remote locations they would initially ask where my easel and paints were. They thought it was hilarious when they found that they were helping me by writing their stories on postcards but they quickly engaged with the project and got on with it.

Why then did the soldiers write their stories so readily? I would give them a relatively short time to write them, to ensure they were not too reflective and also because I had only a limited time on the ground in some of these places. I soon realized that the stories were startlingly honest and insightful. They were not things they would tell their families back home because it would worry them too much. Equally, they were things that the soldiers wouldn’t tell each other because they were often highly personal and they might betray weakness. They often referred to two wars, the one involving bombs and bullets and the other ‘going on in a soldiers head when the fighting stops’. They ranged from the remarkable to the mundane, the extraordinary to the everyday.

Postcard written by a Royal Irish Ranger

I worked with paratroopers who were guarding and clearing an empty village of IEDs to enable Afghan families to move back into their homes. These paratroopers described with pride what it was like to help bring normality back to the lives of local families.

Note written by a paratrooper

I was surprised that when soldiers were off duty in these remote places they relaxed by watching war films and things like 24. For them it was a complete immersion, all or nothing, and often soldiers described the worst part of the tour being when they were home in the UK on leave and they heard about a mate who was injured. I was with a Royal Irish unit in a small location which had been involved in shootings and bombings with the Taliban 87 times in three months. As I filmed these soldiers relaxing and chatting about life back in the UK a patrol from the same regiment was attacked a mile or so away. While this attack was being reported live on the radio a soldier was watching Jack Bauer shooting ‘bad guys’ on an episode of 24. Quite surreal.

I was constantly moving in and out of the main Camp Bastion by helicopter as I transited between front line locations. This meant a certain amount of rest but it also meant I constantly had to steel myself to go back to the front line. I kept a personal diary of my time in Afghanistan and looking back at my notes I see that the times in Camp Bastion were the most emotional for me as I reflected and prepared to go back to the front.

What was the end result? The ‘Diary Room’ walls filled up, hundreds of stories were written, mostly on the coloured cards, but sometimes on scraps of paper, cardboard ripped from ration boxes or scribbled on blank medical forms. One soldier took an empty packet of semolina and wrote ‘Yummy’ on the side. A female medic wrote what it was like to treat her first casualties and save their lives, a chef described cooking and distributing Christmas dinner to hundreds of soldiers scattered about the front line, a bomb disposal expert described what it felt like to go to Afghanistan as a battle casualty replacement for someone who had been injured. Some of those who wrote stories went on to be killed and seriously wounded. In these cases the families concerned have given permission for the stories to be exhibited.

Overall the response I got was staggering and included excerpts such as:

‘Your mind clicks into a gear that you never knew you had, and you bark orders like your life depends on it … and GUESSWHAT: IT DOES!’

‘My abiding memory of Afghanistan? … it will be a humble local farmer who one day took me by surprise by asking after my family. ‘You are far from home. You must miss you family very much. We are very grateful.’

‘The young soldier was brought to me following an IED blast…I didn’t need to ask more questions – his eyes told the whole story. As wide as possible and conveying such a sense of bewilderment, uncertainty and terror that I shall never forget them.’

‘I’m going to write about the day to day struggle of being away … what your girlfriend was wearing last time you saw her, what she did, said, what she smelt like, what she will look like and if anything will have changed while you have been away and if you will put up with the changes when you get back … if you are close to someone that is away out here know that you will always be in their minds because there are two wars being fought, one which is publicised and one which goes on in a soldiers head when everything goes quiet….’

Card written by an Irish Guardsman

The Diary Rooms became a focal point for those in the Patrol Bases and for those who passed through. As stories were read, others added their own. An officer wrote about how difficult it was to have a man’s life in his hands. Others wrote in reply about what an honour it was to be led by this officer. Afghan soldiers and civilian interpreters, British and many other nationalities took part and most were happy to put their names to their stories.

What evolved became an enormous collective self-portrait. Their stories. For me the process of the engagement and the documentation of the soldiers was a key part of the project. I continually filmed and photographed the soldiers at work and at rest. When I was in a Patrol Base in the northern part of Helmand we were attacked from a number of insurgent locations one night. I noticed in all these situations where I filmed and photographed the soldiers that they fought with the same intensity with which they wrote.

British paratroopers write their stories, Afghanistan

At the end of the month I revisited each front line location and recorded and carefully removed each card from the ‘Diary Room’ walls. Before leaving Afghanistan each card was read by the military and security cleared but not censored. The names of the injured were blacked out in line with military policy. I then took the hundreds of cards back to the UK strapped inside my jacket. The cards were like treasures and I wasn’t going to let them out of my sight.

The ‘Diary Rooms’ have been re-created as an installation at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth, until March 2013.

Covered with sand and weather stained, the cards are laid out as they were in Afghanistan, supported by photographs and film from the project. The Gallery has been bowled over by the response to the installation, even going as far as providing tissues for visitors. In the gallery space there is also a wall for visitors to write a postcard about their own reaction. Hundreds of these cards have been written to date and the gallery is rapidly running out of space. After March 2013 the exhibition will tour to other galleries in the UK and abroad.

The stories are currently being published in a blog, one story a day for a year.

By Luisa Grigoletto

All images Giorgio Di Noto, 'The Arab Revolt', 2012

Thirty framed sepia-toned Polaroids form a continuous flow on the walls of the tiny Roman photography gallery Senza Titolo. The shots show a catalogue of subjects varying from fighters bracing weapons to streets and minarets overshadowed by the fumes of severe explosions, to individuals and crowds caught in indistinct activities. No labels accompany the display, so it’s hard to identify whether people are celebrating, protesting, marching or otherwise. The images look ambiguously familiar, so similar to scenes we have seen already, yet blatantly unknown.

In a short paper pinned close-by, curator Fabio Severo explains that what we’re looking at are screen shots of images extrapolated from on-line videos of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the multiple uprisings that burst out in North Africa and the Middle East in late 2010 and 2011. The project, by Roman photographer Giorgio di Noto, 22, is called ‘The Arab Revolt’ and, to great controversy, it won Italy’s esteemed Premio Pesaresi Prize for photojournalism.

Giorgio Di Noto, ‘The Arab Revolt’, 2012

After reviewing 68 portfolios, an international jury was split in a four-to-three vote in favour of Di Noto’s work, for its ‘intrinsic capability of displaying photography’s sense of contemporaneity’ and ‘the excellent editing and selection’, concluding that the project, in its ‘homogeneity and coherence’, has used ‘photographic language to the best of its current technological potential’.

Many in the Italian photography establishment raised eyebrows and voices at this decision, arguing that, unlike in traditional photojournalism, Di Noto wasn’t physically present during the uprisings to snap any of these images. Thus, awarding such a project – they say – implies a devaluation of the photographer’s role as witness to history and of photography as a tool to record truth. Criticism lit up the Italian photography blogosphere, ranging from fierce disagreement with the jury’s decision – ‘awarding such a project is a moral defeat’ – to vehement direct attacks on the photographer’s riskless work ethic – ‘this is not modern reportage’, and ‘the only risks he ran were maybe drinking too much coffee and losing sleep’. Although the prize’s rules don’t include any methodology specifications, several lamented how this project dismisses the aesthetic credo of the late Marco Pesaresi, the prize’s namesake, rooted – as his friend and photoeditor Renata Ferri described it – in ‘street photography and the magic of the real’. And of course, there was no shortage of those bemoaning ‘the death of photojournalism’.

Others instead are slow to condemn. Rather, they see the award as a refreshing encouragement to find new ways of working in a challenging field. Arguably photojournalism, like journalism, is undergoing a renovation process – some might call it a crisis – in which new ways of reporting, producing and distributing images have surfaced. The key constituents seem to be new actors on the scene (like citizen photographers), cheap and accessible technology, and social media.

As recently as 2011, the World Press Photo Award proved it was embracing the trend by giving an honourable mention to German artist and photographer Michael Wolf for his work ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ based on Google Street View images. Two years earlier, curators Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan held a seminar at Bard College in New York (followed by a 2010 exhibit in Barcelona) titled ‘Antiphotojournalism’, analyzing how some news photography has moved on un-stereotyped paths from the 1960s to the present day. The duo broadened the original meaning of the name invented by photographer Allan Sekula in 1999, and widely applied it against the clichés of conventional photojournalism, such as beautifully-composed yet dramatically-violent iconic images, predilection and closeness to the major dynamic actions, and faithfulness to the mission of reporting the real truth. While mixing practices, attitudes and intents, it calls for a critical perspective on the images’ meaning and the photographer’s role.

Hence, Di Noto’s stills of low-res, crowd-sourced videos can be seen as a meta-photojournalistic interrogation of the communication system, its language, functioning and methods of representation: the revolts – here indistinguishable from one another – become a pretext for a broader discourse on the way meaning is produced. While the project’s premises reside between reality and virtuality, the use of the manipulated and unstable Polaroid film assigns an objectual and somehow fetishist consistency.
This award doesn’t assess – as one incensed photography journalist remarked – that ‘the only “contemporary” thing you can do with images of historical, social and political events is editing those that already exist’. Instead, it recognizes the validity of Di Noto’s work as a viable option within the realm of narrative photojournalism, as an opening rather than a restriction.

By Jennifer Higgie

Objects by Khaled Jarrar made from concrete dust taken from the Israel West Bank Barrier for 'Disarming Design'

A few weeks ago, I travelled to Ramallah to attend Qalandiya International, the inaugural two-week biennial event that took place across Palestine and in Jerusalem from 1–15 November. The recent tragic events in Gaza and Israel reiterate how important it is to remember that Palestine isn’t just a site of terrible and ongoing conflict; it’s also a region that is extraordinarily rich in culture. Countless individuals and organizations are working hard in the region to promote and encourage non-violent forms of creative conflict resolution, from re-building villages to putting on exhibitions. I cannot stress enough the humour, resilience and lack of self-pity I encountered amongst Palestinians who live with a situation that most would find intolerable. As one Australian artist I travelled with, Tom Nicholson, wrote to me yesterday: ‘It’s shocking what is unfolding, and in some ways remote from all the pleasurable parts of our time there … the extent of the violence now, the sheer number of targets taken out in that tiny strip of land, is difficult to figure in relation to the time we spent in Abwein, that evening spilling out in to the streets of the Old City outside the tile factory … ’.

On 5 November I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, at 3.30am. After being interviewed by Israeli security for about an hour (I got off easy – two women I know were strip-searched while others on the trip were held for hours without explanation) I found my sleepy taxi driver who had been booked to pick me up; he was unfazed by my lateness, used as he is to his passengers taking a while to get through immigration. It was so early in the morning that the new, wide roads were empty and we arrived in the West Bank in about an hour, zooming through a moonlit landscape that reminded me of Australia; dry, lovely, and scattered with hundreds of new buildings and building sites. However, the reality for many people travelling to Ramallah – the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority – is somewhat more complicated: these roads are not accessible to Palestinian ID holders; neither are they allowed to fly into Tel Aviv – the nearest airport to Ramallah – but must travel to Amman in Jordan and enter the West Bank via the Allenby Bridge, a journey that, despite being only 70kms, is dogged by checkpoints and bad roads and can take a whole day. I had only been to the region once before; I was reminded afresh how incredibly closely people live together in this part of the world, and how vast, despite their proximity to each other, the gulf is between their daily lives.

The taxi driver waved to a few soldiers but no-one checked my passport as we passed into the West Bank; if it weren’t for the looming, shockingly Kafka-esque wall – the Israeli West Bank barrier – it would have been easy to assume that all is peaceful. In Ramallah – a lively town of about 25,000 people (which swells to over 100,000 by day) – the streets were quiet and the air was balmy.

The next morning I went to the QI press conference, held at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (it’s named after the Palestinian Christian educator, scholar, poet and Arab Nationalist). It’s a NGO dedicated to the promotion of arts and culture in the region and housed in a lovely, sun-bleached 19th-century building. The sky was blue and the mood was buoyant; photographers and cameramen jostled for space among the journalists who had come together to report, for once, on something positive: a celebration of Palestinian culture.

Seven different organizations (all but one based in the West Bank) collaborated on QI: the A. M. Qattan Foundation ; The House of Culture and Art, Nazareth ; International Art Academy, Palestine ; Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center ; Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem ; Palestinian Art Gallery–Al Hoash ; and Riwaq. Speakers from the various organizations described how the event developed from a desire to join forces and resources and form links across ‘a fragmented geography’ – a geography so fragmented, in fact, that many of the people involved in QI’s various exhibitions, performances and talks in towns and villages across Palestine – from artists and organizers to writers, musicians and teachers – couldn’t attend every event as they lacked the correct permits. Part of ‘Gestures in Time’, for example, is in the Old City of Jerusalem, which despite its proximity to Ramallah, is out of bounds for Palestinians unless they have an address in Israel.

Director of the Al-Ma’Mal Foundation and Qalandiya International, Jack Persekian

QI’s remit is ‘exhibiting contemporary Palestinian and international art, highlighting valuable architectural sites, and includes talks, walks and performances’. As Jack Persekian – Director of the Al-Ma’Mal Foundation and QI – declared, art, especially in this part of the world, is part and parcel of activism – and what constitutes ‘activism’ can take many forms. The title of the show is layered and loaded (to put it mildly): Qalandiya is the Israeli checkpoint that separates the West Bank from Jerusalem; Qalandiya International Airport operated from 1930 until 1967; Qalandiya refugee camp was established in 1949 by Jordan and is still home to over 10,000 people; and Qalandiya village, home to about 1500 people, is now split in two by the Wall. Thus, it’s a word that has become a symbol of the isolation, segregation and dislocation that is integral to everyday life in Palestine.

Later that day, I visited Riwaq, the Centre of Architectural Conservation in Ramallah and spoke to its dynamic director, Khaldun Bshara. He explained how Riwaq had been established ‘to protect, utilize and promote cultural heritage in Palestine.’ The organization is committed to job creation through restoration: so far, they have worked on 65 buildings in 55 of Palestine’s 422 villages and towns, creating in the process 170,000 working days – a remarkable achievement in the West Bank, where unemployment is around 25% (in Gaza, it’s around 45%, one of the highest in the world).

Khaldun spoke of the importance of what he called ‘living values’ – that once people have been trained on the job, they leave with employable skills, disseminate traditional building knowledge and ‘most importantly, revitalize the historic centre of a village and reinstate it as part of daily life.’ He then went on to explain the 50 Villages Project. Following the 2007 publication of ‘Riwaq’s Registry of Historic Buildings’, it was revealed that 50% of the historic buildings in rural areas of the West Bank and Gaza are located in around 50 villages. Riwaq is now focusing on these villages in order to ‘target improvement of services, infrastructure and living conditions of the public, private and surrounding spaces.’ We were to visit one of the villages, Abwein, in a couple of days.

That evening a bus took us to Qalandiya village for the official opening. It was held in the courtyard of a huge, beautiful, 200-year old semi-derelict house, which the village is donating to a charity – possibly an orphanage. The atmosphere was abuzz with excitement; the moon was full and the air warm. Children ran about, and people from the art world mingled with locals and journalists. After a brief introduction to Qalandiya by Riwaq co-director Fida Toumahe, the village elder welcomed us with an impassioned speech about the history of the town; although his words were interrupted with a power cut he continued undaunted, shouting above the crowd to be heard. Fida translated his speech; it concluded: ‘Welcome to our town. It is a town that is old and new and shows our connection to the land. We have been cut off from our natural connection to Jerusalem. We thank you for recognizing its importance.’ He was followed by rousing traditional music and dancers, and then a spectral sound performance by Dirar Kalash over projections of historic footage of Palestine; a show of Khaled Jarrar’s sculptures – which included a football made from concrete chipped from the security wall – and a screening of Nahed Awwad’s documentary Five Minutes from Home (2008), which apparently focuses on ‘the growing isolation of Palestinians in the last decades’ but which I annoyingly managed to miss as I went for a walk around the village.

On the bus ride back to Ramallah I spoke with Jack Persekian and asked him about the decision not to include Israeli artists in the event – when I visited Tel Aviv a couple of years ago, almost every Israeli artist I spoke to was deeply troubled by their country’s relationship with Palestine and was making it the focus of their work. He replied that the decision had been taken in order to make sure the event wouldn’t be misconstrued as a normalizing of relations between Israel and Palestine. Until Palestinians have their rights restored, he explained, he is supportive of the cultural boycott.

The next morning I went to The International Academy of Art in Ramallah to talk about Disarming Design, the brainchild of Khaled Hourani – artist, director of the art school and force behind the brilliant Picasso in Palestine project– and Annelys de Vet (a graphic designer and head of the design department of the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam). (The project is also supported by ICCO– the interchurch organization for development cooperation and UNESCO.)

Majd Abdel Hamid, Hourglass (2012)

The idea behind the initiative is ingenuous and joyful: 40 local artists and craftspeople have been invited to create a collection of useful objects that will be available to buy online from anywhere in the world (Annelys said that they could take a long time to arrive but that, in itself, echoes the Palestinian reality). They stress that ‘every product should somehow reflect upon the current situation so that each design will tell a story’. We were joined by artists Khaled Jarrar and Majd Abdel Hamid, both of whom have made objects for the project from the wall: I was particularly taken with Majd’s hour-glass, which is filled with concrete ground into dust; the passing of time is registered in fits and starts – as Majd explained, laughing, an accurate reflection of daily life in Palestine. Other objects included a shower curtain printed with an image of the Wall (yes, the Wall has infected many an imagination here); jars of local honey; a clock made from concrete chipped off the wall, a basket made from pegs, matchboxes printed with reproductions of Palestinian photographs and so on.

That afternoon we travelled to Jerusalem on the local bus. I hadn’t realized that when I entered Israel and asked my passport not to be stamped – an Israeli stamp can make it difficult to travel in Arab countries – the security official had stamped a separate piece of paper, which was subsequently taken off me as I left the airport. In other words, I had no proof of entry into Israel. At the checkpoint, two Israeli soldiers got on the bus, armed to the teeth. They looked about 18; nervous kids with huge guns, barking commands at everyone. They flicked through my passport, noted its obvious lack, and ordered me off the bus; my friends came with me for support. It was an eerie feeling to be momentarily stranded in the middle of a brutal expanse of concrete, barbed wire and watchtowers. The soldiers were indifferent; a taxi driver helpfully pointed out where we needed to go next – a large metal shed full of claustrophobically narrow cattle grids. As we filed through, a disembodied voice told us where to go. Two more soldiers with guns sat behind thick glass; I explained my situation to them. They looked bored and let me through. I asked for another stamp. They shook their heads.

Qalandiya Checkpoint taken from the bus

Walking through the narrow lanes of the extraordinary old city of Jerusalem was like time travelling; streams of Orthodox Jews raced to the Western Wall, while the Muslim call to prayer filled the air and Christians crowded around the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa; groups of soldiers mingled with the date sellers, rug merchants and hordes of tourists. We finally made it to the opening of ‘Gestures in Time’ curated by Katya Garcia-Anton and Lara Khaldi, which was held in two atmospheric, low-ceilinged ancient hammams at the Centre for Jerusalem Studies at Al Quds University, a stone’s throw from the Temple Mount. After baklava and tea and impassioned speeches about the importance of this exhibition to the region, and how it was an attempt ‘to reconsider how the individual can conceive of having an aesthetic and socially creative life, within and beyond a specific geography’ – along with a big thank you to all of the artists and co-workers who weren’t allowed, or able, to travel to Jerusalem – we crammed into the warren-like rooms to view well-installed work by Rheim Alkadhi, Erick Beltran, Martin Soto Climent, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Subversive Film, Wafa Hourani, and Uriel Orlow. Much of it dealt with the vagaries of memory and dislocation: Beltran, for example, researched underground Ramallah-based newspapers of the 1990s; Hourani’s sculptures and drawing of palmistry suggest that ‘geography is inscribed in our bodies’; Subversive Film’s single-channel video of historic footage questions ideas around the ownership of images; Alkadhi made delicate sculptures from hair and Soto Climent, who works with the ‘secret animism of found objects’ strung loaves of local bread from the ceiling alongside braille versions of Playboy magazine. (He told me that as he was attempting to travel from Paris to Tel Aviv he had had a tough time trying to explain his braille works to Israeli security, who, not au fait with the vagaries of conceptual art, suspected that they were coded messages – which they are, of course, but not the kind that threaten national security – and was forced to miss his plane.)

We then moved onto the staggeringly beautiful location of the Lutheran Church around the corner, where we sat under the stars in the courtyard and listened to a mesmerizing performance by poet (and regular frieze contributor) Quinn Latimer, who read excerpts from Your Poem is the Letter I Write (2012) – a series of poem/letters to people close to her and writers she admires, such as Anne Carson, her brother, Susan Sonntag and Etel Adnan. ‘Language has left them / like a lover / like a mother who has fled them … ’

From the Lutheran Church we walked to The Tile Factory and Al Ma’mal LAB and saw work by Anadiel Ruanne Abou Rahme & Basel Abbas, Amjad Ghannam, Ciprian Muresan, Tom Nicholson, Cornelia Parker, Amer Shomali, Ra’ouf Haj Yehia and Mohammed Al Hawajri. Highlights included Comparative Monument (Palestine) (2012) by Tom Nicholson – posters of photographs of memorials in Melbourne to Australian soldiers who died in Palestine in World War I (he also pasted these on walls around Ramallah); Cornelia Parker’s minimal wall sculpture Bullet Drawing (2012) which she had created from unraveling (if that’s the word) a bullet, and Made in Bethlehem (2012), a fascinating film study of a crown-of-thorns making family business in Bethlehem; and Abou Rahme & Basel Abbas’s gripping video and installation The Incidental Insurgents: A Story in Parts: The Part about the Bandits (2012) which fused three different stories about an anarchist bandit in Paris in the 1910s, a bandit gang involved in a rebellion against the British in Palestine in the 1930s and the artist-as-bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel The Savage Detectives.

Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Palestine), (2012) on wall in Ramallah

After food and revelry in a local restaurant full of people dancing to the Gypsy Kings, we travelled back to Ramallah and went to the great Beit Anneeseh bar, which is owned by curator Yazan Khalili (who co-curated the YAYA, the Young Artist of the Year Award, which we saw the next day) where we sat and drank under the stars far too late into the night.

The next day we travelled for about an hour by bus along narrow, hilly, winding rows to the village of Abwein, the site of one of Riwaq’s conservation projects. Khaldun Bshara was our guide. We passed the impressive buildings of Birzeit University and then Israeli settlements, high on hills and fortified amongst the olive groves; a stark, enormous house, along in a field – the Palestinian Authority guest house – which, Bshara told us, is the focus of much local anger. Apparently when the PA ran out of funds, building on the house mysteriously continued, prompting much talk of corruption and misuse of funds.

The village of Abwein

When we arrived in Abwein – a village over 10 centuries old of about 6,000 people – the outgoing mayor, (an elderly woman with a broad smile) welcomed us; then, a group of local children gave us a tour of the buildings in the old town, their eyes wide with excitement as they regaled us with a mix of local folklore, history and gossip. Artist Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh then did a lecture/performance about living in a Lebanese refugee camp and her feelings about the use of photography there; this was followed by an audio tour, Unmade Film: The Voiceover (2012) (which is part of a larger, still growing, body of work) by Uriel Orlow. It’s a moving account of the 1948 massacre by Jewish Paramilitary groups at the village of Deir Yassin; in 1951 a mental hospital, treating Holocaust survivors (one of whom was Uriel’s aunt) was erected on the site of the tragedy. As I listened to the tour on headphones, I sat on the roof of one of the old houses and looked out across the village to the retreating hills, which were bathed in golden light. The landscape looked peaceful; an old man tended goats. A group of children came up to talk to me; they were proud of their English and fascinated to hear I was from Australia. They bowed, smiled and declared: ‘welcome to our village.’

Children from Abwein giving us a tour of their village with Marie Zolamian

Back in Ramallah that evening we all attended the award ceremony for the YAYA (The Young Artist of the Year, the Hassan Hourani Award, a biennial programme that supports and promotes young Palestinian artists, which opened concurrently at the YMCA in Gaza.) Curated by Yazan Khalili, Mohammad Musallam and Reem Shilleh, the jury – Negar Azimi, Khaled Hourani, Nicola Gray, Rula Halawani and Marco Nereo Rotelli – awarded the prize to Jumana Manna for her video, a meditation on an archival photograph of a party held by Alfred Roch, a wealthy Palestinian who lived in Jaffa in the 1930s.

After another evening at Beit Anneeseh (the unofficial headquarters of the trip) it was time to go home. The taxi driver who picked me up to take me to the airport early the next morning suggested I didn’t mention Ramallah at any security checks. ‘Tell them I picked you up in Jerusalem’ he said. When I asked him why, he shrugged, and looked weary. ‘If you mention Palestine, they’ll make my life hard. They’ll spend hours searching my car.’ He needn’t have worried, though. No-one asked me where I had been.

By Dan Fox

Poster for "A Cathode Ray Séance', designed by Rob Carmichael (2012)

Walking home from dinner in New York’s East Village the other night I heard the approaching throaty drone of a low-flying plane. I didn’t pay it much attention but it was loud enough for me to clock it. On a quiet street just north of my apartment on the Lower East Side, three guys emerged from a building on the east side of the road. They stopped to look up at the sky and I followed their gaze. The plane was passing almost right above us, heading north, parallel to the east river Manhattan shoreline. I suddenly became aware of a flat, triangular, green laser beam sweeping the street from the plane. The beam passed over the trio ahead, then me. This green ray looked like a giant bar-code scanner reading every contour of the street. For a brief second it was like being caught in a bad light show at a 1990s rave. I caught up with the three guys. We all looked at each other, then back up at the sky. The plane and its laser disappeared over some nearby tall buildings in the neighbourhood. ‘What the fuck was that!’ ‘I thought that was you takin’ a photograph!’ ‘Did you see that?’ ‘What the…?’ I continued home. Unlocking the door to my apartment block I heard the plane coming back, flying south. I watched it’s green eye strafe ground just a little further west of where I’d been walking.

Nigel Kneale (c.1955)

The previous day I had been at ‘A Cathode Ray Séance: The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale’, a day long programme of film screenings, talks, readings and performance at NYU’s Michelson Theater, dedicated to the British science fiction and horror writer Nigel Kneale. Still mulling over the ideas raised at the event – rationalism and superstition, science and paranoia, deep pasts collapsing into near futures – I couldn’t have picked a better weekend to be zapped by a mysterious green ray on a near-deserted street at night. Coming just weeks after Hurricane Sandy too, I was getting used to seeing the odd and unsettling in the neighbourhood. Was it the power of suggestion that conjured this mysterious aircraft into existence? Was I losing my mind? I began to feel like Roy Thinnes, the architect who witnesses a UFO landing at the start of the cult 1960s series The Invaders: ‘It began one lost night on a lonely country road looking for a short cut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy…’ I was later to find out the explanation was more terrestrial than beachhead from outer space, but no less full of Knealean foreboding. My mind – as far as I could tell – was intact.

Kneale, who died in 2004, is scarcely a household name. He’s best known as the author of the Quatermass television plays and films (which, when originally screened in the UK in 1953 were watched by a third of all UK TV owners). Yet with his chilling 1954 adaptation for the BBC of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (1948) and screenplays such as The Road (1963), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), The Stone Tape (1972) and Murrain (1975), Kneale evolved a uniquely haunted form of science-fiction, one that fused the white heat of technology and broadcasting with rural occultism, and drove parapsychology headlong into Cold War fear. With their ominous BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtracks and infusions of eldritch dread into the dreary landscapes of post-war Britain, Kneale’s screenplays – inheriting the restrained malevolence of ghost story writer M.R. James – have exerted a strong influence over a number of musicians and writers, not to mention those like myself who were terminally spooked by re-runs of his work, stumbled across as a kid on rainy Saturday afternoons spent in front of the TV. Pink Floyd, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Patrick Keiller, Chris Carter (who originally approached Kneale to write The X-Files) Broadcast, the Ghost Box record label, The League of Gentlemen, China Mieville and Mark Fisher have all cited Kneale as an influence on their work, and in recent years his work has also become a touchstone for hauntology– a strain of critical theory embracing architecture, literature, film, pop music and politics that perhaps hit the height of its popularity a few years ago, but for which there is a lingering fascination.

The Stone Tape (1972)

‘A Cathode Ray Séance’ was organized by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press– celebrants of the weird, wonderful and all that remains resistant to the steamroll blandification of culture – and writer and critic Sukhdev Sandhu. Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture – the umbrella for this event – is one of the best-kept secrets of the New York talks circuit. Started in 2007 with James Brooke-Smith, the Colloquium – a word-of-mouth gathering that has no website or Facebook group with which to advertise itself – has explored channels between global cinema, music and politics, tuning into signals from cultural studies, theory and pop often drowned out by mainstream transmissions. It has included series with titles such as ‘The Speed of Your Hair’ and ‘Auscultations: Sound, Noise, (Nervous Heart)beats’ and addressed topics ranging from punk in Africa and Arthur Russell, through CLR James, Stuart Hall and John Berger to North Korean sci-fi, Pakistani pulp cinema, P.O.W. gardening, the Southall Black Sisters, and Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (2003). Speakers have included Teju Cole, Bilge Ebiri, Mark Fisher, Coco Fusco, Steve Goodman, Chris Petit, Aman Sethi and Lawrence Weschler. (Full disclosure: last year I gave a short talk for the Colloquium about northern soul, at a screening of Tony Palmer’s poignant 1977 documentary Wigan Casino.) As Sandhu put it in his opening remarks for ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’, often these events could be characterized as people in a room looking at each other and thinking ‘what, someone else is into this stuff too?’

The Stone Tape (1972)

This certainly described the genial assortment of writers, artists, film curators, musicians, and sci-fi heads – not to mention a young man dressed in a flowing purple cape – crammed into the stuffy theatre at NYU for ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’. Our first step into the Knealean outer limits began with a screening of The Stone Tape, introduced by Dave Tompkins, music writer and author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach (2011). Balancing the event’s dangerously heavy lean towards British esotericism, Tompkins described the impression made on him by The Stone Tape after watching it as a child growing up in North Carolina. Given his interests in the history of recording technology, his connection to the film made sense. The Stone Tape is the story of a group of scientists working for an electronics corporation, developing new home audio equipment. Their research laboratory is relocated to a large manor house, constructed in the Victorian era around the remains of a far more ancient site. A storage room in the house becomes the epicentre of a number of terrifying spectral encounters with the ghost of a young Victorian maid running up a set of stairs, her disembodied screams repeated mechanically as if on a tape recording. Initially skeptical, the scientists begin observing the phantom phenomena. They find that the room itself is a form of recording device; centuries of trauma embedded into the stone walls and replayed on loop, triggered by the sensitivity – or receptivity – of a visitor to the room. Despite some distractingly large shirt collars and flared trousers, and a lead male character of almost comic sleaziness, The Stone Tape is genuinely unsettling, thanks in no small part to the abrasive and fractured BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack and audio effects. The Stone Tape puts the core engine of suspense in sound rather than what’s on screen. The horror resides in what the scientist’s computers and recording devices cannot register. Yet the texture of 1970s videotape that its filmed on – smudgy ‘ghostings’ and acid-like trails at the edge of the image, anemic colouring – serves also to emphasize a slippage between the scientific and the supernatural; between the probes, dials and sensors of the machine-recorded world and the psychic videotape of the imagination.

Murrain (1975)

Next up was Murrain, a one-hour teleplay, introduced by journalist and filmmaker Bilge Ebiri. Murrain– set in Derbyshire, and shot on deathly pale colour film – concerns a young veterinarian called to a remote village to investigate an unexplained livestock disease on a local pig farm. The farmer and a group of his friends try to convince the vet that the disease has been caused by an elderly woman who lives alone near their property, and who they believe to be a witch. The vet is scornful of their superstition, suspecting instead that the woman is being victimized and is in need of help from welfare services. He visits her home and finds she is living in squalid conditions, unable to look after herself properly as the locals won’t sell her groceries or household supplies out of fear. As he attempts to help her – buying food, calling social services – his belief in science is slowly eroded by the ideas of witchcraft that the locals have planted in his mind; that objects she has touched carry a hex (they blame a jar of berries she gave to one of them as the reason he has developed walking difficulties), that she used her cat as a remote viewing device (until the villagers cut it in two and threw it over her garden wall). Murrain ends ambiguously, with no resolution, no conclusion about the cause of the illnesses or whether the woman possesses any supernatural power. With its tightly composed close-ups of faces, slow pace and spare use of background sound rather than the emotional cues of a music score, Murrian is powerful drama, its atmosphere grim and threatening. There are no special effects, no scenes of paranormal activity. Rather, it is a simple play that argues science and superstition are nothing more than two equal belief systems, and that the modernity represented by the vet’s medical kit, and car, and the industrial quarry he passes on the way to the farm – a new technological scratch into the deeper history of the land – co-exists with trust in older knowledge structures. As in The Stone Tape, the world Kneale creates here is one of material equivalence and relativity; objects have an equal potential to be invested with power; be it a jar of berries, a stone wall, or state-of-the-art computer equipment. It is a world about competing symbolisms, conflicting factions pitting one form of tools to represent the world against another.

A panel discussion followed, chaired by Sandhu, with contributions from Pilkington, Dave Pike, Professor of Literature at American University, Washington D.C., and Will Fowler, Curator for Artists’ Moving Image at the British Film Institute, London (and, with Vic Pratt, responsible for the BFI’s excellent Flipside strand). The conversation compared American with British television culture – how a narrow range of channels in the UK, and how ownership of television spiked around the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation (one year before Kneale’s 1984 and Quatermass), led to his work having a large, and largely captive, audience. Comparisons between Kneale’s work and that of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone series – created roughly contemporaneous with Quatermass, and similarly concerned with science and the paranormal – suggested that resolved, self-contained narratives characterized US approaches to screenwriting, as opposed to open-ended stories such as Kneale’s Murrain or The Stone Tape. The panelists discussed how differing relationships to landscape and history suggested one reason why Kneale’s screenplays had a particular force in Britain that couldn’t be mapped onto the American experience. The relatively compact size yet deep history of the UK has led to a vertical, stacked sense of the past: Modernist housing developments erected next to Victorian terraces. Medieval castles founded on Roman ruins. Nuclear submarines submerged in ancient lochs. (I grew up in an area brimming with Knealean ingredients and a sense of history being something liquid and ever-present. Within easy striking distance of my home town are Neolithic standing stones, an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, Civil War battlefields, a major car factory, and an RAF airbase used during the Cold War by the US military. New Age travelers – prototypes of whom crop up in later Quatermass films – used to throw parties nearby on the occasion of solstices and other pagan festivals.) By contrast, the vast scale of the US results in a more horizontally spread sense of the past – there is space to move, to stretch out; the experience of history here is not always one of extreme period juxtaposition. Arguably, Kneale’s writing is less about hauntings in the paranormal sense, than being haunted by history; by aggregations of belief and technology built over centuries that give ragged, uneven contours to our present landscapes.

‘Baby’ (1976)

‘Baby’ – an unintentionally camp and funny episode from Kneale’s TV series Beasts (1976), in which a couple expecting a child discover the remains of an unidentifiable animal buried in the walls of their country cottage – was prefaced by writer and Bidoun senior editor Michael C. Vazquez reading Joanna Ruocco’s short story ‘Manx Sword Dance To A Tarantella In Zero Gravity’ (2012). Written specifically for The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale– a book produced by Sandhu, beautifully designed by Rob Carmichael and including contributions from Sophia Al-Maria, Bilge Ebiri, Mark
Fisher, Will Fowler, Ken Hollings, Paolo Javier, Roger Luckhurst,
China Mieville, Drew Mulholland, David Pike, Mark Pilkington, Dave Tompkins, Michael Vazquez, and Evan Calder Williams – Ruocco’s almost sculptural sense of language seemed to channel the ghosts of William S. Burroughs and Donald Barthelme into a deliriously surreal narrative about a group of hippies and a mysterious dome erupting from the earth. Kneale grew up on the Isle of Man in the 1920s and ‘30s, hence the Manx reference in Ruocco’s title. This echoed one of the highlights of the panel discussion, in which Pilkington recounted the story of Gef the talking mongoose a still unexplained haunting from the Isle of Man in the 1930s, and which during Kneale’s childhood was a tabloid news sensation.

After screening the Hammer studio version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967), ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’ ended with The Road, a performance by Pilkington, Rose Kallal and Micki Pellerano. Spectral looping film projections gave visual shape to a battery of dramatic, brooding analogue synthesizers and tapes (looking much like the ghost monitoring equipment used by the scientists in The Stone Tape), and a reading of Kneale’s now ‘lost’ TV play The Road (wiped by the BBC to make room for new videotape), about a haunting of the present by the ghosts of a future nuclear apocalypse.

LIDAR survey of World Trade Center site, New York (Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/US Army Joint Precision Strike Demonstration)

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably got a sense of why my UFO encounter the following night felt so apt. The day after the green ray buzzed me, I emailed a few scientifically-minded friends – people I also trusted to not call the men in white coats to come and get me – to ask if they could help explain what I’d seen. My initial theory was that the aircraft was gathering data for Google Maps, to which one friend replied ‘it’s a pretty rum state of affairs when the first thing that comes to mind after being bathed in a mysterious green light by an unidentified flying object is “Google Mapping Project”.’ The most likely explanation is that the plane was making a LIDAR scan of the Manhattan shoreline. LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a form of airborne 3D mapping with a range of applications, from law enforcement to archaeology. As reported by the New York Times, recent LIDAR flights over the city have been used to map wetland and flood-prone areas of New York, information that has now gained a new urgency in the wake of Sandy. So it wasn’t an alien space probe. But it was technology in the service of prophesying possible future trauma, data gathering to map the contours of destruction yet to happen. What could be more Nigel Kneale than that?

By Dan Fox

Poster for "A Cathode Ray Séance', designed by Rob Carmichael (2012)

Walking home from dinner in New York’s East Village the other night I heard the approaching throaty drone of a low-flying plane. I didn’t pay it much attention but it was loud enough for me to clock it. On a quiet street just north of my apartment on the Lower East Side, three guys emerged from a building on the east side of the road. They stopped to look up at the sky and I followed their gaze. The plane was passing almost right above us, heading north, parallel to the east river Manhattan shoreline. I suddenly became aware of a flat, triangular, green laser beam sweeping the street from the plane. The beam passed over the trio ahead, then me. This green ray looked like a giant bar-code scanner reading every contour of the street. For a brief second it was like being caught in a bad light show at a 1990s rave. I caught up with the three guys. We all looked at each other, then back up at the sky. The plane and its laser disappeared over some nearby tall buildings in the neighbourhood. ‘What the fuck was that!’ ‘I thought that was you takin’ a photograph!’ ‘Did you see that?’ ‘What the…?’ I continued home. Unlocking the door to my apartment block I heard the plane coming back, flying south. I watched it’s green eye strafe ground just a little further west of where I’d been walking.

Nigel Kneale (c.1955)

The previous day I had been at ‘A Cathode Ray Séance: The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale’, a day long programme of film screenings, talks, readings and performance at NYU’s Michelson Theater, dedicated to the British science fiction and horror writer Nigel Kneale. Still mulling over the ideas raised at the event – rationalism and superstition, science and paranoia, deep pasts collapsing into near futures – I couldn’t have picked a better weekend to be zapped by a mysterious green ray on a near-deserted street at night. Coming just weeks after Hurricane Sandy too, I was getting used to seeing the odd and unsettling in the neighbourhood. Was it the power of suggestion that conjured this mysterious aircraft into existence? Was I losing my mind? I began to feel like David Vincent, the architect who witnesses a UFO landing at the start of the cult 1960s series The Invaders: ‘It began one lost night on a lonely country road looking for a short cut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy…’ I was later to find out the explanation was more terrestrial than beachhead from outer space, but no less full of Knealean foreboding. My mind – as far as I could tell – was intact.

Kneale, who died in 2004, is scarcely a household name. He’s best known as the author of the Quatermass television plays and films (which, when originally screened in the UK in 1953 were watched by a third of all UK TV owners). Yet with his chilling 1954 adaptation for the BBC of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (1948) and screenplays such as The Road (1963), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), The Stone Tape (1972) and Murrain (1975), Kneale evolved a uniquely haunted form of science-fiction, one that fused the white heat of technology and broadcasting with rural occultism, and drove parapsychology headlong into Cold War fear. With their ominous BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtracks and infusions of eldritch dread into the dreary landscapes of post-war Britain, Kneale’s screenplays – inheriting the restrained malevolence of ghost story writer M.R. James – have exerted a strong influence over a number of musicians and writers, not to mention those like myself who were terminally spooked by re-runs of his work, stumbled across as a kid on rainy Saturday afternoons spent in front of the TV. Pink Floyd, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Patrick Keiller, Chris Carter (who originally approached Kneale to write The X-Files) Broadcast, the Ghost Box record label, The League of Gentlemen, China Mieville and Mark Fisher have all cited Kneale as an influence on their work, and in recent years his work has also become a touchstone for hauntology– a strain of critical theory embracing architecture, literature, film, pop music and politics that perhaps hit the height of its popularity a few years ago, but for which there is a lingering fascination.

The Stone Tape (1972)

‘A Cathode Ray Séance’ was organized by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press– celebrants of the weird, wonderful and all that remains resistant to the steamroll blandification of culture – and writer and critic Sukhdev Sandhu. Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture – the umbrella for this event – is one of the best-kept secrets of the New York talks circuit. Started in 2007 with James Brooke-Smith, the Colloquium – a word-of-mouth gathering that has no website or Facebook group with which to advertise itself – has explored channels between global cinema, music and politics, tuning into signals from cultural studies, theory and pop often drowned out by mainstream transmissions. It has included series with titles such as ‘The Speed of Your Hair’ and ‘Auscultations: Sound, Noise, (Nervous Heart)beats’ and addressed topics ranging from punk in Africa and Arthur Russell, through CLR James, Stuart Hall and John Berger to North Korean sci-fi, Pakistani pulp cinema, P.O.W. gardening, the Southall Black Sisters, and Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (2003). Speakers have included Teju Cole, Bilge Ebiri, Mark Fisher, Coco Fusco, Steve Goodman, Chris Petit, Aman Sethi and Lawrence Weschler. (Full disclosure: last year I gave a short talk for the Colloquium about northern soul, at a screening of Tony Palmer’s poignant 1977 documentary Wigan Casino.) As Sandhu put it in his opening remarks for ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’, often these events could be characterized as people in a room looking at each other and thinking ‘what, someone else is into this stuff too?’

The Stone Tape (1972)

This certainly described the genial assortment of writers, artists, film curators, musicians, and sci-fi heads – not to mention a young man dressed in a flowing purple cape – crammed into the stuffy theatre at NYU for ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’. Our first step into the Knealean outer limits began with a screening of The Stone Tape, introduced by Dave Tompkins, music writer and author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach (2011). Balancing the event’s dangerously heavy lean towards British esotericism, Tompkins described the impression made on him by The Stone Tape after watching it as a child growing up in North Carolina. Given his interests in the history of recording technology, his connection to the film made sense. The Stone Tape is the story of a group of scientists working for an electronics corporation, developing new home audio equipment. Their research laboratory is relocated to a large manor house, constructed in the Victorian era around the remains of a far more ancient site. A storage room in the house becomes the epicentre of a number of terrifying spectral encounters with the ghost of a young Victorian maid, her disembodied screams repeated mechanically as if on a tape recording. Initially skeptical, the scientists begin observing the phantom phenomena. They find that the room itself is a form of recording device; centuries of trauma embedded into the stone walls and replayed on loop, triggered by the sensitivity – or receptivity – of a visitor to the room. Despite some distractingly large shirt collars and flared trousers, and a lead male character of almost comic sleaziness, The Stone Tape is genuinely unsettling, thanks in no small part to the abrasive and fractured BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack and audio effects. The Stone Tape puts the core engine of suspense in sound rather than what’s on screen. The horror resides in what the scientist’s computers and recording devices cannot register. Yet the texture of 1970s videotape that its filmed on – smudgy ‘ghostings’ and acid-like trails at the edge of anemic coloured images – serves also to emphasize a slippage between the scientific and the supernatural; between the probes, dials and sensors of the machine-recorded world and the psychic videotape of the imagination.

Murrain (1975)

Next up was Murrain, a one-hour teleplay, introduced by journalist and filmmaker Bilge Ebiri. Murrain– set in Derbyshire, and shot on deathly pale colour film – concerns a young veterinarian called to a remote village to investigate an unexplained livestock disease on a local pig farm. The farmer and a group of his friends try to convince the vet that the disease has been caused by an elderly woman who lives alone near their property, and who they believe to be a witch. The vet is scornful of their superstition, suspecting instead that the woman is being victimized and is in need of help from welfare services. He visits her home and finds she is living in squalid conditions, unable to look after herself properly as the locals won’t sell her groceries or household supplies out of fear. As he attempts to help her – buying food, calling social services – his belief in science is slowly eroded by the ideas of witchcraft that the locals have planted in his mind; that objects she has touched carry a hex (they blame a jar of berries she gave to one of them as the reason he has developed walking difficulties), that she used her cat as a remote viewing device (until the villagers cut it in two and threw it over her garden wall). Murrain ends ambiguously, with no resolution, no conclusion about the cause of the illnesses or whether the woman possesses any supernatural power. With its tightly composed close-ups of faces, slow pace and spare use of background sound rather than the emotional cues of a music score, Murrian is powerful drama, its atmosphere grim and threatening. There are no special effects, no scenes of paranormal activity. Rather, it is a play that argues science and superstition are nothing more than two equal belief systems, and that the modernity represented by the vet’s medical kit and car, and the industrial quarry he passes on the way to the farm – a new technological scratch into the deeper history of the land – co-exists with trust in older knowledge structures. As in The Stone Tape, the world Kneale creates here is one of material equivalence and relativity; objects have an equal potential to be invested with power; be it a jar of berries, a stone wall, or state-of-the-art computer equipment. It is a world about competing symbolisms, conflicting factions pitting one form of tools to represent the world against another.

A panel discussion followed, chaired by Sandhu, with contributions from Pilkington, Dave Pike, Professor of Literature at American University, Washington D.C., and Will Fowler, Curator for Artists’ Moving Image at the British Film Institute, London (and, with Vic Pratt, responsible for the BFI’s excellent Flipside strand). The conversation compared American with British television culture – how a narrow range of channels in the UK, and ownership of television spiking around the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation (one year before Kneale’s 1984 and Quatermass), led to his work having a large, and largely captive, audience. Comparisons between Kneale’s work and that of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone series – created roughly contemporaneous with Quatermass, and similarly concerned with science and the paranormal – suggested that resolved, self-contained narratives characterized US approaches to screenwriting, as opposed to open-ended stories such as Kneale’s Murrain or The Stone Tape. The panelists discussed how differing relationships to landscape and history suggested one reason why Kneale’s screenplays had a particular force in Britain that couldn’t be mapped onto the American experience. The relatively compact size yet deep history of the UK has led to a vertical, stacked sense of the past: Modernist housing developments erected next to Victorian terraces. Medieval castles founded on Roman ruins. Nuclear submarines submerged in ancient lochs. (I grew up in an area brimming with Knealean ingredients and a sense of history being something liquid and ever-present. Within easy striking distance of my home town are Neolithic standing stones, an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, Civil War battlefields, a major car factory, and an RAF airbase used during the Cold War by the US military. New Age travelers – prototypes of whom crop up in later Quatermass films – used to throw parties nearby on the occasion of solstices and other pagan festivals.) By contrast, the vast scale of the US results in a more horizontally spread sense of the past – there is space to move, to stretch out; the experience of history here is not always one of extreme period juxtaposition. Arguably, Kneale’s writing is less about hauntings in the paranormal sense, than being haunted by history; by aggregations of belief and technology built over centuries that give ragged, uneven contours to our present landscapes.

‘Baby’ (1976)

‘Baby’ – an unintentionally camp and funny episode from Kneale’s TV series Beasts (1976), in which a couple expecting a child discover the remains of an unidentifiable animal buried in the walls of their country cottage – was prefaced by writer and Bidoun senior editor Michael C. Vazquez reading Joanna Ruocco’s short story ‘Manx Sword Dance To A Tarantella In Zero Gravity’ (2012). Written specifically for The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale– a book produced by Sandhu, beautifully designed by Rob Carmichael and including contributions from Sophia Al-Maria, Bilge Ebiri, Mark
Fisher, Will Fowler, Ken Hollings, Paolo Javier, Roger Luckhurst,
China Mieville, Drew Mulholland, David Pike, Mark Pilkington, Dave Tompkins, Michael Vazquez, and Evan Calder Williams – Ruocco’s almost sculptural sense of language seemed to channel the ghosts of William S. Burroughs and Donald Barthelme into a deliriously surreal narrative about a group of hippies and a mysterious dome erupting from the earth. Kneale grew up on the Isle of Man in the 1920s and ‘30s, hence the Manx reference in Ruocco’s title. This echoed one of the highlights of the panel discussion, in which Pilkington recounted the story of Gef the talking mongoose a still unexplained haunting from the Isle of Man in the 1930s, and which during Kneale’s childhood was a tabloid news sensation.

After screening the Hammer studio version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967), ‘A Cathode Ray Séance’ ended with The Road, a performance by Pilkington, Rose Kallal and Micki Pellerano. Spectral looping film projections gave visual shape to a battery of dramatic, brooding analogue synthesizers and tapes (looking much like the ghost monitoring equipment used by the scientists in The Stone Tape), and a reading of Kneale’s now ‘lost’ TV play The Road (wiped by the BBC to make room for new videotape), about a haunting of the present by the ghosts of a future nuclear apocalypse.

LIDAR survey of World Trade Center site, New York (Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/US Army Joint Precision Strike Demonstration)

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably got a sense of why my UFO encounter the following night felt so apt. The day after the green ray buzzed me, I emailed a few scientifically-minded friends – people I also trusted to not call the men in white coats to come and get me – to ask if they could help explain what I’d seen. My initial theory was that the aircraft was gathering data for Google Maps, to which one friend replied ‘it’s a pretty rum state of affairs when the first thing that comes to mind after being bathed in a mysterious green light by an unidentified flying object is “Google Mapping Project”.’ The most likely explanation is that the plane was making a LIDAR scan of the Manhattan shoreline. LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a form of airborne 3D mapping with a range of applications, from law enforcement to archaeology. As reported by the New York Times, recent LIDAR flights over the city have been used to map wetland and flood-prone areas of New York, information that has now gained a new urgency in the wake of Sandy. So it wasn’t an alien space probe. But it was technology in the service of prophesying possible future trauma, data gathering to map the contours of destruction yet to happen. What could be more Nigel Kneale than that?

By Hermione Hoby

In the summer of 2001, William Basinski found a Tupperware box of tape loops that he’d made almost a decade earlier. As he set about transferring them to CD, the American composer realized that the tapes themselves were disintegrating, their iron oxide particles turning to dust, leaving moments of silence in the new recording as they did so. As Basinski wrote at the time: ‘When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.’

This physically decaying music formed The Disintegration Loops, a preternaturally mesmeric series of pieces which, completed shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center, became freighted with even more emotional resonance. As Ronen Givony, founder of the Wordless Music Series writes, ‘it seems fitting that the most appropriate and convincing memorial to date is also a work that was technically finished well before 9/11. Perhaps this is because only a piece of art made in oblique or indirect response to a tragedy could conceivably represent that tragedy, by means of metaphor and symbol, and thereby give language to the unspeakable.’

Now, The Disintegration Loops have been re-released as a nine-LP box set (which also includes five CDs, a DVD and a book), including a live recording of an orchestrated version of the first loop, scored by composer Maxim Moston. Basinski talked about their reissue from his home in Los Angeles.

Does it still seem moving and miraculous to you, the way this music came about?
It really does. A little while ago the doorbell rang and there’s a truck with my shipment of the box set and good lord those are some big boxes. I just opened up my one copy and was listening to it on LP when you called. It’s just really something what happened in that studio that day – amazing what happens when you show up for work sometimes. It blew my mind while it was happening, and then after it happened, just to have the profoundly moving realization that this was like lives being redeemed – that the whole life and death of each of these melodies was remembered and recorded. And it was such a struggle back then – I’d worked for many, many years and no one knew who I was and I didn’t think anyone ever would know – the fact that I survived and managed to live long enough to have the work known and loved, that was just something I never thought would happen. It was a long time coming.

You finished work on The Disintegration Loops just before 9/11. What was it like listening to them that day?
My friend had just come back from Holland and was banging on my door at 9 o clock, saying a plane had hit. And I was lying in bed going ‘ugh’ because I was going to get up and apply for a job at the World Trade Center, Creative Time had an administrative assistant position there and I was desperately needing work. I thought the banging on the door was my super[intendant], giving me notice. But it was my friend, babbling, ‘The Word Trade Center’s on fire!’ so I ran back to my bedroom, pulled back the curtains, and we could see the Twin Towers, these two gaping holes and smoke going off to the east. The sky was crystal blue, you couldn’t even see a heat signature in front of the World Trade Center like you usually could. Everyone was up there, all of the roofs over Brooklyn, and we all just stood there with our mouths dropped open.

The LP box set includes an orchestral version of the first loop. How did it come to be scored?
Oh this is just another level, it’s a dream come true for me to have the work go into the orchestral repertoire. Max [Moston] is a dear friend of mine and has an incredible ear and is a really elegant orchestrator. It was just so interesting to see how he chose to do it. How the conductor made it work. There’s a lot of tricks. I never finished university – I ended up quitting to go play with tape loops so I could never do what Max did, because it’s so much besides the particular kind of ear training you have to have – there are physical limits to not only what ranges instruments can play, but what can physically be done. For example, he has the trombones carrying the lead theme and it sounds very simple because it’s just the same thing, with slight variations, over and over again, but that takes its toll on your lips, so he has it doubled – just little things like that.

Was there any part of you anxious that the music might lose some of its power when played by instruments?
No, not really, I was just thrilled that it was getting done because I knew I could never do it – and to see how he did it is just as fascinating to me as to hear it happen organically in the studio. To have just all acoustic instruments, all people, living creatures, playing instruments, to do this piece, is just a whole other loop in the chain for this evolving thing.

Another act of preservation?
Yeah!

Do you feel as though what you do has more to do with contemporary art practice than music?
Yeah, that’s something that people your end of the telephone line like to talk about! [laughs] I am an artist and my medium is music – sound. I don’t call myself a sound artist but certainly because of the nature of what happened with this particular piece, the art critics and the critical world definitely was very interested. And you know it’s been described mostly in visual terms, I guess because it’s so cinematic. I think it creates pictures for people because of the organic nature of the way it unfolds, so there’s a lot of visual resonance that is stirred in people, individually. And also, it’s kind of hard to describe simply in musical terms. After The Disintegration Loops happened I was calling all my friends saying get over here, you won’t believe what happened, and my friend Howard Schwarzberg came over and he said, in this great Coney Island accent: ‘Billy! You’ve done it! This is it!’

What did he mean?
He meant deconstruction – all this stuff that people in the art world have been dealing with for 30 years, stuff that he studied and knew about and which I didn’t really at the time, because I didn’t have that kind of education – he meant, ‘You’ve done it, the critics are really going to jump all over this.’

And they did.
And they did!

Have you been aware of your influence on younger musicians?
Oh it’s really amazing, it kind of blows my mind. It’s like a whole generation of people who are about the age of my early works – they’re all about 25 to 30 years old, so I had to wait for them to be old enough to have ears for it, in a way.

You’ve talked about how you wrote Vivian and Ondine as a sort of spell to induce your niece’s birth (and how it worked). There’s a wonderful uncanniness to that, and of course, a much more sombre uncanniness to the timing of The Disintegration Loops in terms of them seeming so fittingly elegiac. Are you susceptible to the notion of music having some kind of greater, mysterious power?
Well I think music does. It resonates, you know? – it just goes on forever, and I think certain kinds of music can change the resonant frequencies. It’s the only way I can battle all the horror and chaos and sickness in the world, so I just try to do what I’m told.

And who’s telling you?
[laughs] It just comes in through the antennae, the tin hats.

By Cristina Ricupero

Mi-Kyung Lee, 'Fence', 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul, South Korea

This autumn was definitely high season in South Korea, as everything seemed to be happening at the same time. As incredible as it might seem, the country hosted four biennials concurrently: the 9th edition of the renowned Gwangju Biennale; the Busan Biennale, curated this year by Roger M. Buergel; the 3rd Daegu Photo Biennale; and the 7th Mediacity Seoul. This frenetic synergy was further intensified by two exhibitions of artist prizes: the prestigious Hermès Foundation Missulsang Prize, and the brand new Korea Artist Prize, co-organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the SBS Foundation.

Also this year, the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul is celebrating what would have been the artist’s 80th birthday with several events, including a major exhibition, ‘Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback’, with a focus on cybernetics. The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art hosted the fourth edition of its regular exhibition ‘Arspectrum’, which is dedicated to young talents. The cutting-edge gallery PLATEAU, in another part of Seoul, featured a solo show by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Similarly, Artsonje Center, Kukje Gallery and other commercial galleries all seemed to be showing their ‘best of’.

It was actually very hard to keep track of everything during my short visit to Seoul this September. I briefly wondered why the four biennials had been scheduled to take place in the same year, at the same time. But the reason was obvious: to obtain maximum visibility from international curators and art critics who are all the more willing to make the long trip to Korea if they could embark on something like a ‘cultural tour’.

I was invited to Seoul by the Hermès Foundation to be part of the jury for the Missulsang Prize, which is considered the equivalent of the Turner Prize. I was rather surprised to find out that there was another prize exhibition taking place at the same time. With the Hermès Prize already well known for promoting some of Korea’s most interesting talents – including Koo Jeong-A, Sanghee Song and Do Ho Suh, among others – how, I wondered, would the inaugural Korea Artist Prize find its own distinctive role? I soon found out that the Korea Artist Prize had chosen to showcase well-established, mid-career artists, whereas Hermès pursued its reputation for supporting and introducing emerging artists to the art world.

Minouk Lim, ‘The Possibility of the Half’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

My visit to the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea to see the Korea Artist Prize exhibition was quite a journey. The museum is located on the outskirts of Seoul in the middle of a gigantic park next to a theme park. I was informed that this strange location was the idea of one of Korea’s former dictators, who decided in the 1980s that this was the perfect setting for a museum of contemporary art. The exhibition compensated the trip. Set-up as four solo shows – by prize nominees Gimhongsok, Kyungwon Moon & Joonho Jeon, Minouk Lim, and Yeesookyung – it gives an interesting panorama of the Korean art scene. The prize’s main sponsor is SBS, one of Korea’s major TV channels, and this was definitely visible in the overall presentation. Along with the exposure afforded the artists by the central space, a special TV programme was broadcast on national television as part of the benefits of being one of the nominees.

Gimhongsok, ‘People Objective-Wrong Interpretations’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

In Yeesookyung’s portion of the show, ‘Constellation Gemini’, she revisited Korean traditional art in a series of works brought together through the artist’s idea of symmetry. A thousand fragments of broken porcelain were presented under bright neon lights, becoming fetishized objects. Perfectly symmetrical, amusing simulations of religious paintings hung on the walls and two videos showed documentation of a traditional Korean dance, Kyobangchoom, which was performed by twins during the opening. The same but different, the self and the other – the overall tone of Yeesookyung’s installation was highly metaphorical.

Gimhongsok’s People Objective-Wrong Interpretations (2012) also dealt with the idea of ‘same but slightly different’, only here the tone was less poetic. Gimhongsok confronted the audience with three almost identical rooms – ‘Room of Labour’, ‘Room of Metaphor’, and ‘Room of Manners’ – catching the viewer in a slightly disturbing game. What really activated the work was the presence of a performer disguised as a docent, who delivered different narratives on the same works in each room according to three keywords: labour, metaphor and manner. These anecdotes raised questions about the consensus around the art world, revealing its interwoven network of social, economic and cultural systems.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, ‘Voice of Metanoia-Two Perspectives’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

The artist duo Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho seem to prefer a more retro-futuristic kind of institutional critique. Their installation _Voice of Metanoia – Two Perspectives _(2012) was a highly designed and seductive environment. On a light blue wall next to moving mirrored panels on the floor, they showed posters from previous biennials and other exhibitions, with all the information removed, leaving just colours and shapes. An accompanying video related the adventures of a detective sent from the future with a mission: to investigate the role of art in society and unravel the obscure mysteries of our current artistic values and discourses. What a mission! Earlier this month it was announced that this installation was awarded the prize.

Less interested in science fiction and more focused on social realities, Minouk Lim revisited the site of the television studio, perhaps as a direct response to the context of this particular art prize. Entering what looks like a darkened TV studio, we discover that the surface of the table inside it has been burnt. Two large screens presented black and white TV footage of two funerals: one of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the other of former South Korean President Park Chung-hee. By blowing up and slowing down the speed of these images, Lim heightened the already highly emotionally charged footage, creating something like a huge theatrical stage. This work, _The Possibility of the Half _(2012), talks about a country divided in two that comes together through the images of the sobbing masses. As the official media often manipulate images in order to support the power structures in place, the artist doesn’t hesitate and goes a step further, by over-dramatizing archival TV footage that is already highly emotional.

Although it also presented the work of Korean artists nominated by an international jury, the exhibition at the Hermès Foundation of the nominees for the Missulsang prize felt very different. Instead of separate solos shows, it functioned like a group show, as the works of each of the three nominees – Donghee Koo, Mi-Kyung Lee and Jackson Hong – mixed together incredibly well. In a certain sense, this is not surprising as two of the nominees have a special interest in art and design and the third artist decided to work with the space of the foundation.

Jackson Hong, ‘Mass Production’, 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul

Originally trained as a designer, Hong likes to push the borders of art and design to extremes. In Mass Production (2012) he proposed a sort of memorial to what seems to be an obsolete kind of production. He filled the main gallery with colourful, curious objects on pedestals – atypical deformed machines or hybrids of machines with human/animal figures, whose scale has been altered, so they looked either too big or too small. On an adjacent wall, he hung 50 patent diagrams he randomly selected while researching the words ‘redemption’ and ‘punishment’. Neither art nor design, the question seems to be who is punishing who. Not so far away, the viewer was confronted with three other pieces that also didn’t quite seem to fit, by his fellow nominee, Donghee Koo. Then the viewer came up against a giant square fence that literally blocked your passage. Logically named Fence (2012), Mikyung Lee’s work referred to fences built around construction sites and their potential for imagination. Curious to see what’s inside this beautifully designed minimalist sculpture, I stepped on the small circular pedestals to look inside just to discover there is nothing to see. Does too much expectation produce a void?

At the entrance I noticed a shiny black corridor inside which I overheard irritating sounds of mosquitoes buzzing mixed with the barely perceptible hum of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter, which lent this installation by Donghee Koo its title. At the centre of the labyrinthine corridor, I found a miniature screen presenting images I could hardly decipher. Viewing these small blurry images was like looking out of a window to see some kind of action in a neighbour’s apartment. But who is looking at whom? I was suddenly confronted with my own voyeurism. Donghee Koo likes to propose unsolved riddles for the audience to unravel.

Seeing this work, I remembered the pieces I had seen earlier in the main gallery and returned there. One is a curious sculptural object hanging from the ceiling made of an accumulation of spiral shaped mosquito-repellents with a multicoloured parasol on top. The other is a black tire used as a swing. The most intriguing was a square glass plate on the floor where all sorts of small objects (the artist’s memorabilia) were placed, including miniature photos of a hippie community that could be the Manson Family. Everything suddenly interconnected. This complex ensemble of works won the Hermès prize.

Donghee Koo, ‘Helter Skelter’, 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul

Heavy traffic makes a visit to the Nam June Paik Art Centre, situated on the outskirts of Seoul, also an adventure, but worth the trip. Nam June Paik’s multidisciplinary visionary outlook serves as a guideline for its series of temporary exhibitions, which confront his works with works by other artists both past and present. This is also the structure of the special exhibition Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback, created in celebration of Paik’s 80th birthday. The show was curated not as a classical retrospective of the artist’s life’s work but a more focused presentation related to his vision. Named after a phrase coined by the artist himself, the exhibition mainly focused on his special interest in cybernetics and his idea that man, machine and nature would actually come together without destroying each other.

Nam June Paik, ‘One Candle’, 1989. Installation view, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul*

By Cristina Ricupero

Mi-Kyung Lee, 'Fence', 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul, South Korea

This autumn was definitely high season in South Korea, as everything seemed to be happening at the same time. As incredible as it might seem, the country hosted four biennials concurrently: the 9th edition of the renowned Gwangju Biennale; the Busan Biennale, curated this year by Roger M. Buergel; the 3rd Daegu Photo Biennale; and the 7th Mediacity Seoul. This frenetic synergy was further intensified by two exhibitions of artist prizes: the prestigious Hermès Foundation Missulsang Prize, and the brand new Korea Artist Prize, co-organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the SBS Foundation.

Also this year, the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul is celebrating what would have been the artist’s 80th birthday with several events, including a major exhibition, ‘Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback’, with a focus on cybernetics. The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art hosted the fourth edition of its regular exhibition ‘Arspectrum’, which is dedicated to young talents. The cutting-edge gallery PLATEAU, in another part of Seoul, featured a solo show by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Similarly, Artsonje Center, Kukje Gallery and other commercial galleries all seemed to be showing their ‘best of’.

It was actually very hard to keep track of everything during my short visit to Seoul this September. I briefly wondered why the four biennials had been scheduled to take place in the same year, at the same time. But the reason was obvious: to obtain maximum visibility from international curators and art critics who are all the more willing to make the long trip to Korea if they could embark on something like a ‘cultural tour’.

I was invited to Seoul by the Hermès Foundation to be part of the jury for the Missulsang Prize, which is considered the equivalent of the Turner Prize. I was rather surprised to find out that there was another prize exhibition taking place at the same time. With the Hermès Prize already well known for promoting some of Korea’s most interesting talents – including Koo Jeong-A, Sanghee Song and Do Ho Suh, among others – how, I wondered, would the inaugural Korea Artist Prize find its own distinctive role? I soon found out that the Korea Artist Prize had chosen to showcase well-established, mid-career artists, whereas Hermès pursued its reputation for supporting and introducing emerging artists to the art world.

Minouk Lim, ‘The Possibility of the Half’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

My visit to the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea to see the Korea Artist Prize exhibition was quite a journey. The museum is located on the outskirts of Seoul in the middle of a gigantic park next to a theme park. I was informed that this strange location was the idea of one of Korea’s former dictators, who decided in the 1980s that this was the perfect setting for a museum of contemporary art. The exhibition compensated the trip. Set-up as four solo shows – by prize nominees Gimhongsok, Kyungwon Moon & Joonho Jeon, Minouk Lim, and Yeesookyung – it gives an interesting panorama of the Korean art scene. The prize’s main sponsor is SBS, one of Korea’s major TV channels, and this was definitely visible in the overall presentation. Along with the exposure afforded the artists by the central space, a special TV programme was broadcast on national television as part of the benefits of being one of the nominees.

Gimhongsok, ‘People Objective-Wrong Interpretations’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

In Yeesookyung’s portion of the show, ‘Constellation Gemini’, she revisited Korean traditional art in a series of works brought together through the artist’s idea of symmetry. A thousand fragments of broken porcelain were presented under bright neon lights, becoming fetishized objects. Perfectly symmetrical, amusing simulations of religious paintings hung on the walls and two videos showed documentation of a traditional Korean dance, Kyobangchoom, which was performed by twins during the opening. The same but different, the self and the other – the overall tone of Yeesookyung’s installation was highly metaphorical.

Gimhongsok’s People Objective-Wrong Interpretations (2012) also dealt with the idea of ‘same but slightly different’, only here the tone was less poetic. Gimhongsok confronted the audience with three almost identical rooms – ‘Room of Labour’, ‘Room of Metaphor’, and ‘Room of Manners’ – catching the viewer in a slightly disturbing game. What really activated the work was the presence of a performer disguised as a docent, who delivered different narratives on the same works in each room according to three keywords: labour, metaphor and manner. These anecdotes raised questions about the consensus around the art world, revealing its interwoven network of social, economic and cultural systems.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, ‘Voice of Metanoia-Two Perspectives’, 2012. Installation view, Korea Artist Prize exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

The artist duo Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho seem to prefer a more retro-futuristic kind of institutional critique. Their installation _Voice of Metanoia – Two Perspectives _(2012) was a highly designed and seductive environment. On a light blue wall next to moving mirrored panels on the floor, they showed posters from previous biennials and other exhibitions, with all the information removed, leaving just colours and shapes. An accompanying video related the adventures of a detective sent from the future with a mission: to investigate the role of art in society and unravel the obscure mysteries of our current artistic values and discourses. What a mission! Earlier this month it was announced that this installation was awarded the prize.

Less interested in science fiction and more focused on social realities, Minouk Lim revisited the site of the television studio, perhaps as a direct response to the context of this particular art prize. Entering what looks like a darkened TV studio, we discover that the surface of the table inside it has been burnt. Two large screens presented black and white TV footage of two funerals: one of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the other of former South Korean President Park Chung-hee. By blowing up and slowing down the speed of these images, Lim heightened the already highly emotionally charged footage, creating something like a huge theatrical stage. This work, _The Possibility of the Half _(2012), talks about a country divided in two that comes together through the images of the sobbing masses. As the official media often manipulate images in order to support the power structures in place, the artist doesn’t hesitate and goes a step further, by over-dramatizing archival TV footage that is already highly emotional.

Although it also presented the work of Korean artists nominated by an international jury, the exhibition at the Hermès Foundation of the nominees for the Missulsang prize felt very different. Instead of separate solos shows, it functioned like a group show, as the works of each of the three nominees – Donghee Koo, Mi-Kyung Lee and Jackson Hong – mixed together incredibly well. In a certain sense, this is not surprising as two of the nominees have a special interest in art and design and the third artist decided to work with the space of the foundation.

Jackson Hong, ‘Mass Production’, 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul

Originally trained as a designer, Hong likes to push the borders of art and design to extremes. In Mass Production (2012) he proposed a sort of memorial to what seems to be an obsolete kind of production. He filled the main gallery with colourful, curious objects on pedestals – atypical deformed machines or hybrids of machines with human/animal figures, whose scale has been altered, so they looked either too big or too small. On an adjacent wall, he hung 50 patent diagrams he randomly selected while researching the words ‘redemption’ and ‘punishment’. Neither art nor design, the question seems to be who is punishing who. Not so far away, the viewer was confronted with three other pieces that also didn’t quite seem to fit, by his fellow nominee, Donghee Koo. Then the viewer came up against a giant square fence that literally blocked your passage. Logically named Fence (2012), Mikyung Lee’s work referred to fences built around construction sites and their potential for imagination. Curious to see what’s inside this beautifully designed minimalist sculpture, I stepped on the small circular pedestals to look inside just to discover there is nothing to see. Does too much expectation produce a void?

At the entrance I noticed a shiny black corridor inside which I overheard irritating sounds of mosquitoes buzzing mixed with the barely perceptible hum of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter, which lent this installation by Donghee Koo its title. At the centre of the labyrinthine corridor, I found a miniature screen presenting images I could hardly decipher. Viewing these small blurry images was like looking out of a window to see some kind of action in a neighbour’s apartment. But who is looking at whom? I was suddenly confronted with my own voyeurism. Donghee Koo likes to propose unsolved riddles for the audience to unravel.

Seeing this work, I remembered the pieces I had seen earlier in the main gallery and returned there. One is a curious sculptural object hanging from the ceiling made of an accumulation of spiral shaped mosquito-repellents with a multicoloured parasol on top. The other is a black tire used as a swing. The most intriguing was a square glass plate on the floor where all sorts of small objects (the artist’s memorabilia) were placed, including miniature photos of a hippie community that could be the Manson Family. Everything suddenly interconnected. This complex ensemble of works won the Hermès prize.

Donghee Koo, ‘Helter Skelter’, 2012. Installation view of the Missulsang Prize exhibition at the Atelier Hermes, Seoul

Heavy traffic makes a visit to the Nam June Paik Art Centre, situated on the outskirts of Seoul, also an adventure, but worth the trip. Nam June Paik’s multidisciplinary visionary outlook serves as a guideline for its series of temporary exhibitions, which confront his works with works by other artists both past and present. This is also the structure of the special exhibition Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback, created in celebration of Paik’s 80th birthday. The show was curated not as a classical retrospective of the artist’s life’s work but a more focused presentation related to his vision. Named after a phrase coined by the artist himself, the exhibition mainly focused on his special interest in cybernetics and his idea that man, machine and nature would actually come together without destroying each other.

Nam June Paik, ‘One Candle’, 1989. Installation view, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul*

It was a pleasure to see seminal works such as Paik’s TV Garden (1974–2002), in which monitors placed in an internal garden broadcast hopping images of dance and music fusing ecology with technology, or One Candle (1989) in which Paik manages to create a big spectacle of flickering coloured images that invade the whole space out of one lit candle, turning reality into virtuality. Other favourites came from his video sculptures from the 1980s, the ‘robot’ series, for which he gave old television sets new life through amusing titles such as Descartes, Hippocrates, Schubert or Bob Hope. The show continuously reminded me of Paik’s enormous creativity and capacity to anticipate the future.

In the last few years, the public interest in contemporary art in Korea has been increasing, reaching mainstream media exposure to the point where the star protagonist of a popular soap was, for better or for worse, a curator! As we approach the country’s presidential elections this December, there is a certain fear that public funds for the arts could be largely reduced if Geun-hye Park, the daughter of the former authoritarian president, wins. But I hope this vibrant scene will keep up its pace.

By

Oscar Niemeyer in front of his Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro

1907 is the year before Adolf Loos wrote Ornament & Crime, two years before Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, and 17 years before Malevich published the Suprematist Manifesto. In 1907, Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe the great architect’s long life, which ended on Wednesday 5 December 2012 in a Rio Hospital, could be described as being dedicated to – by way of a persuasive counter-model – unravelling that strange entanglement between modernist avant-garde and masculinist anxiety. Loos, Marinetti and Malevich all in different ways expressed their desire for purity in terms that went hand in hand with contempt for women and the ‘primitive’. In Oscar Niemeyer architectural world, purity suddenly became based on embracing rather than rejecting conviviality, femininity, tropicality.

In May this year, I for the first time (thanks to an invitation by ABACT and SP-Arte) had the opportunity to visit three of Niemeyer’s most important buildings: the Pampulha casino and Saint Francis of Assissi church in Belo Horizonte (both conceived in 1940 and completed in 1943), and the Copan Building in Saõ Paulo (constructed 1957–66). The Pampulha complex (which includes three more buildings: a restaurant with dance hall, a yacht club, and a golf club) was Niemeyer’s first major ‘solo’ commission, at the age of 33. The mayor of Belo Horizonte whom had entrusted him with this ambitious task, Juscelino Kubitschek, became Brazil’s president from 1956 until 1961, a man under whose reign the capital of Brazília was constructed, largely led by architects Lúcio Costa and Niemeyer, with the latter’s landmark government and cultur buildings.

After having worked with Le Corbusier in 1935 on the groundbreaking modernist design of the Ministry of Health and Education skyscraper in Rio (along with other architects including Costa), Niemeyer’s Pampulha casino marks his departure from the rigid geometric rules of the Swiss master architect. At first, upon approaching and entering the building from the street, it’s still in line with Corbusier’s villa architecture of the 1910s to ‘30s: the horizontal rectangular, geometrically reduced structure, the elegantly slender columns, the walk-up ramps, the panoramic framed vistas onto the landscape (in the case of Pampulha, onto an artificial lake around which the commissioned buildings are located). But once inside, you start to recognize flamboyant aspects: the solid silvery steel cover of the columns and railings, and one wall being entirely covered by mirror glass – after all, this was conceived to be used as a casino, a place for pleasure and vanity (today it’s the Museu de Arte de Pampulha, which at the time of my visit had an interesting show on of fragile, subtle interventions working with drying mud, transparent tubes or old photographs, by Peruvian, Belo-Horizonte-based artist Nydia Negromonte).

Venturing further into the building, flamboyance becomes even more present and playful once you enter the circular part of the building. There you find a kidney-shaped stage, in front of that a milk-glass-tiled dance floor, surrounded by a semi-circular panorama window overlooking the lake. On the ground floor beneath, it turns out that the kidney-shaped stage is actually an elevator, which allowed for the casino band to be moved down automatically while playing.

Down on the ground floor they would play behind glass, while people could look up to the milk-glass and see the shimmering shadows of dancers moving across it. And, as the legend goes, Niemeyer thought most of this up during one single, long night in a hotel. In any case, he managed to conciliate geometrical reductivism with organic curves, and functionality with friskiness. Even with a church.

Just as the self-confessed atheist and communist would infuse the idea of a casino with a sense of measured, anti-dogmatic playfulness, his design for the Saint Francis of Assissi church is as daring as it is modest (the local Archbishop didn’t like it, and called it ‘the devil’s bomb-shelter’; I’m sure Niemeyer was pleased).

You can almost see him having jotted down the initial design of the undulating curve that forms its concrete roof late that night, slightly tipsy, freehand with a fountain pen. Erich Mendelsohn had famously conceived the daringly curved forms of the Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Germany, in 1917, as a freehand sketch on a small piece of paper, while a soldier in the trenches of World War I. While the Einsteinturm had eventually to be built with bricks and stucco, ‘faking’ self-supporting curved structures, the steel-concrete technique Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to use was eventually ready for Niemeyer. The curves were predating a lot of later designs of concrete shell roof structures.

The church is delicate and small; the Copan in Saõ Paulo is huge, majestic. It’s 140 metres, 38 floors high, and its combined floor area is apparently the largest of any residential building in the world. The building’s sinuous lamella façade reflects the elegance and beauty of Brazil, but its social history also reflects a country torn between prosperity and obscene poverty, nihilist ruthlessness and optimist communality. Built for modern urbanites, it slid into disaster during the 1980s when it became ruled by drug dealers and pimps – at points even the police didn’t dare go in anymore. Since the 1990s, it has gradually been refurbished and revived under the header of turning rental into private owned space. The issues of gentrification implied by that are obvious, but in any case the Brazilian artist Claudia Medeiros Cardoso, whom I had met at SP-Arte – through her former teacher at the art academy in Bremen, Germany, the painter Norbert Schwontkowsky – had bought together with her husband and son a flat on the 24th floor, about ten years ago, for a sum that wouldn’t get you much in Bremen, let alone Saõ Paulo. So here was a rare opportunity, thanks to Claudia, to see how a family actually lives in this kind of place. The views, of course, were breath-taking up there: the endless cityscape of Sao Paulo gleaming in sunset light.

Again, the concrete, tile-covered lamellas directly outside the windows – circa a metre or so wide – are a good example of how Niemeyer combined function and friskiness: in the summer when the sun is high the lamellas provide shadow, in the winter when the sun is low they let it in; yet at the same time they provide a playful cinematic effect, framing the vista as if you were watching a cinemascope film. The layout of the flat felt comfortable and unobtrusive, while details offered surprises: next to the kitchen is a kind of veranda-type space with a concrete grid wall reminiscent of an oriental patio – warm wind comes in through the holes, making you realize that while the grid wall suggests a domestic ground floor outside, you’re actually still up on the 24th floor. Amazing.

When I was in Brazil in May, Rodrigo Moura (curator at Inhotim) told me that Niemeyer had been to hospital, and that people were concerned about his well-being. At over a hundred, smoking cigars and still making designs, people surely wanted him to live forever. Through his legacy, he does.

By Jörg Heiser

Oscar Niemeyer in front of his Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro

1907 is the year before Adolf Loos wrote Ornament & Crime, two years before Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, and 17 years before Malevich published the Suprematist Manifesto. In 1907, Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe the great architect’s long life, which ended on Wednesday 5 December 2012 in a Rio Hospital, could be described as being dedicated to – by way of a persuasive counter-model – unravelling that strange entanglement between modernist avant-garde and masculinist anxiety. Loos, Marinetti and Malevich all in different ways expressed their desire for purity in terms that went hand in hand with contempt for women and the ‘primitive’. In Oscar Niemeyer architectural world, purity suddenly became based on embracing rather than rejecting conviviality, femininity, tropicality.

In May this year, I for the first time (thanks to an invitation by ABACT and SP-Arte) had the opportunity to visit three of Niemeyer’s most important buildings: the Pampulha casino and Saint Francis of Assissi church in Belo Horizonte (both conceived in 1940 and completed in 1943), and the Copan Building in Saõ Paulo (constructed 1957–66). The Pampulha complex (which includes three more buildings: a restaurant with dance hall, a yacht club, and a golf club) was Niemeyer’s first major ‘solo’ commission, at the age of 33. The mayor of Belo Horizonte whom had entrusted him with this ambitious task, Juscelino Kubitschek, became Brazil’s president from 1956 until 1961, a man under whose reign the capital of Brazília was constructed, largely led by architects Lúcio Costa and Niemeyer, with the latter’s landmark government and cultur buildings.

After having worked with Le Corbusier in 1935 on the groundbreaking modernist design of the Ministry of Health and Education skyscraper in Rio (along with other architects including Costa), Niemeyer’s Pampulha casino marks his departure from the rigid geometric rules of the Swiss master architect. At first, upon approaching and entering the building from the street, it’s still in line with Corbusier’s villa architecture of the 1910s to ‘30s: the horizontal rectangular, geometrically reduced structure, the elegantly slender columns, the walk-up ramps, the panoramic framed vistas onto the landscape (in the case of Pampulha, onto an artificial lake around which the commissioned buildings are located). But once inside, you start to recognize flamboyant aspects: the solid silvery steel cover of the columns and railings, and one wall being entirely covered by mirror glass – after all, this was conceived to be used as a casino, a place for pleasure and vanity (today it’s the Museu de Arte de Pampulha, which at the time of my visit had an interesting show on of fragile, subtle interventions working with drying mud, transparent tubes or old photographs, by Peruvian, Belo-Horizonte-based artist Nydia Negromonte).

Venturing further into the building, flamboyance becomes even more present and playful once you enter the circular part of the building. There you find a kidney-shaped stage, in front of that a milk-glass-tiled dance floor, surrounded by a semi-circular panorama window overlooking the lake. On the ground floor beneath, it turns out that the kidney-shaped stage is actually an elevator, which allowed for the casino band to be moved down automatically while playing.

Down on the ground floor they would play behind glass, while people could look up to the milk-glass and see the shimmering shadows of dancers moving across it. And, as the legend goes, Niemeyer thought most of this up during one single, long night in a hotel. In any case, he managed to conciliate geometrical reductivism with organic curves, and functionality with friskiness. Even with a church.

Just as the self-confessed atheist and communist would infuse the idea of a casino with a sense of measured, anti-dogmatic playfulness, his design for the Saint Francis of Assissi church is as daring as it is modest (the local Archbishop didn’t like it, and called it ‘the devil’s bomb-shelter’; I’m sure Niemeyer was pleased).

You can almost see him having jotted down the initial design of the undulating curve that forms its concrete roof late that night, slightly tipsy, freehand with a fountain pen. Erich Mendelsohn had famously conceived the daringly curved forms of the Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Germany, in 1917, as a freehand sketch on a small piece of paper, while a soldier in the trenches of World War I. While the Einsteinturm had eventually to be built with bricks and stucco, ‘faking’ self-supporting curved structures, the steel-concrete technique Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to use was eventually ready for Niemeyer. The curves were predating a lot of later designs of concrete shell roof structures.

The church is delicate and small; the Copan in Saõ Paulo is huge, majestic. It’s 140 metres, 38 floors high, and its combined floor area is apparently the largest of any residential building in the world. The building’s sinuous lamella façade reflects the elegance and beauty of Brazil, but its social history also reflects a country torn between prosperity and obscene poverty, nihilist ruthlessness and optimist communality. Built for modern urbanites, it slid into disaster during the 1980s when it became ruled by drug dealers and pimps – at points even the police didn’t dare go in anymore. Since the 1990s, it has gradually been refurbished and revived under the header of turning rental into private owned space. The issues of gentrification implied by that are obvious, but in any case the Brazilian artist Claudia Medeiros Cardoso, whom I had met at SP-Arte – through her former teacher at the art academy in Bremen, Germany, the painter Norbert Schwontkowsky – had bought together with her husband and son a flat on the 24th floor, about ten years ago, for a sum that wouldn’t get you much in Bremen, let alone Saõ Paulo. So here was a rare opportunity, thanks to Claudia, to see how a family actually lives in this kind of place. The views, of course, were breath-taking up there: the endless cityscape of Sao Paulo gleaming in sunset light.

Again, the concrete, tile-covered lamellas directly outside the windows – circa a metre or so wide – are a good example of how Niemeyer combined function and friskiness: in the summer when the sun is high the lamellas provide shadow, in the winter when the sun is low they let it in; yet at the same time they provide a playful cinematic effect, framing the vista as if you were watching a cinemascope film. The layout of the flat felt comfortable and unobtrusive, while details offered surprises: next to the kitchen is a kind of veranda-type space with a concrete grid wall reminiscent of an oriental patio – warm wind comes in through the holes, making you realize that while the grid wall suggests a domestic ground floor outside, you’re actually still up on the 24th floor. Amazing.

When I was in Brazil in May, Rodrigo Moura (curator at Inhotim) told me that Niemeyer had been to hospital, and that people were concerned about his well-being. At over a hundred, smoking cigars and still making designs, people surely wanted him to live forever. Through his legacy, he does.

By Harriet Thorpe

The World Biennale Forum No. 1 in Gwangju, South Korea

This October, the World Biennial Forum No.1, titled ‘Shifting Gravity’ and co-directed by Hou Hanru and Ute Meta Bauer, took place in Gwangju, South Korea. The forum was initiated with the purpose of providing a discursive platform for the international biennial community and a space for networking and exchanging common practices while celebrating global diversity. The three-day conference at the Kim Dae-Jung Convention Center succeeded in establishing an international group of leading biennials, selecting important agendas and of course exchanging diplomatic niceties. Case studies were punctuated by keynote speeches between which questions comparing biennial structures, development and futures were approached, posed and pointed, yet never quite fully addressed. The status of biennials has changed strategically over the past 10 years; their structure has become fluid and their subjects broadened, which is perhaps why the definition of ‘biennial’ was never quite reached in plain language at this forum.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wang Hui and Nikos Papastergiadis at the World Biennale Forum No. 1

The site of the forum was relevant as Gwangju hosts one of Asia’s oldest biennials and is also as a city of political significance in South Korea. Not only was this year’s 9th Gwangju Biennial, ‘ROUNDTABLE’, noted for its political focus, but biennials globally are also taking an increasingly political point of view toward contemporary art. During the forum, Nikos Papastergiadis of the University of Melbourne spoke refreshingly of ‘cosmopolitan aesthetics’ in art. He explored how ‘culture’ is becoming a buzzword for governments, used to troubleshoot problems where other mediums of control are ineffective – a problem-solving device rather than a creative force. Aesthetics, meanwhile, have weakened in priority for curators working in a competitive political art scene. According to Papastergiadis, perhaps art in its simplest terms – shape, medium, and colour – needs to be re-understood.

Case Study – Korea at the WBF No. 1

The ‘Case Studies’ of emerging biennials were the most applicable to addressing the future of the form. It was here, within these alternative biennial structures, that funding was addressed in its most transparent and creative forms. In Shahidul Alam’s inspiring introduction of Chobi Mela, the Bangladeshi photo biennial, he described finance through the simple terms of ‘being resourceful’ and the way restrictions can force one to become truly creative. Through donations, exchange, trade and barter from local people to organizations, patrons make a personal investment in the arts and can really take ownership of the biennial. When donations are taken, funders sign a zero control contract making sure no aspects of politics are involved with the money. The Emergency Biennial of Grozny, Chechnya, introduced by founder and independent curator Evelyne Jouanno is ‘rooted in reality’ and although it is a biennial it cannot rely only on funding every two years, like the large government funded biennial machines in Venice, Sao Paulo and Istanbul. These limitations require a greater sense of belief, creativity and determination from organizers who face political limitations.

World Biennale Forum No. 1, Gwangju, South Korea

A highlight of the conference was Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Moon Kyung-won and Jeon Joon-ho, an artistic duo whose video work El Fin del Mundo (2012) was featured at dOCUMENTA (13) and the Gwangju Biennial this year. Their broad approach to contemporary art today combines interdisciplinary aspects from fashion, set design and sound into a short narrative film, which explores Utopia and apocalypse, drawing from sources from history and the future. This piece questioned the definitions of contemporary art within these biennials and evaluated to what extent biennials are becoming integrated into mainstream culture: Is this because curators are selecting work more appealing to the general public or is the general public becoming more interested in attending these biennials, regardless of curators’ intentions?

Discussion session at the WBF No. 1

Over the course of the three-day forum, important debates arose yet never quite reached a climax. But first times are never perfect and, as the guest of honour René Block quipped, ‘No.1 must mean No.2.’ The World Biennial Forum No.1 shows promise in developing a necessary discourse for biennials relevant to their distinct needs: their physical existence as temporary structures; their organization, involving communication with a vast international pool of individuals; and their intentions, particularly in relation to the social aims of the cities in which they are based. These concerns vary in many ways from that of museums, galleries and art fairs, which is why addressing the biennial as a separate entity is an essential achievement of the World Biennial Forum, important to the continuing success, existence and expansion of these events in the art world.

By Ellen Mara De Wachter

Octagon Court performing as part of 'The Universal', 2012 by Berry Patten. Espace Arlaud, Lausanne. Photo by Nelly Rodriguez

On a Sunday evening in December, in a snowy Swiss pine grove, a gathering of festival-goers squeezed into ‘Salutations – Study for a Swiss Sculpture’ (2012), a 4-metre-tall silver pyramid created by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski. The occasion was an impromptu finissage for Les Urbaines, a three-day festival in Lausanne. Now in its 16th year, the event was an eclectic and occasionally incongruous mix of around 40 projects in the disciplines of theatre, music and visual art, hosted by venues across the small city on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, ‘Salutations – Study for a Swiss Sculpture’, 2012. Installation view, Jardin de l’Arsenic, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo by Jennifer Lewandowski

The visual art component of this year’s festival – specifically the strand made up of artists from London – was its most coherent offering. Works made especially for the festival context highlighted some of its bureaucratic problems, while others, like Salutations, engaged with the physical and social experience of festivals, a format which may prove to be an increasingly popular platform for contemporary art in light of widespread funding cuts and pressure on artists to be ever more resourceful with time and money.

LePDF.ch (2012) by the Peckham-based collective Lucky PDF was an installation borne out of strife. The project began as a collaboration with Fred, a Lausanne-based tobacco start-up. If ever there were an enterprise that cried out for pungent critique, this was it. Lucky PDF invited artists to design packaging for the brand, with a view to selling limited-edition cigarette packets on the open market. The festival’s organizers, however, baulked at the idea of using public funds to enable an artistic partnership with such a controversial product and they vetoed the project. This knee-jerk censorship exposed something of the hollowness of the festival’s ‘commitment to emerging and experimental art forms’, as vaunted by director Patrick de Rahm. On the whole, its live programmes erred on the side of caution, and the event suffered from extreme shifts in tone among some of its elements, suggesting a lack of overall vision.

Nevertheless, a brush with censorship did not deter Lucky PDF from engaging with the economy of corporate arts sponsorship. They opened themselves up once again to the compromises that come with product endorsements. Festival organizers set them up with their next partner, Migros, which owns supermarkets, banks, bookshops, petrol stations and also funds the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich. Migros is the country’s largest retailing company and its biggest employer. And conveniently for Les Urbaines’ organizers, its shops sell neither cigarettes nor alcohol.

Lucky PDF, ‘LePDF.ch’, 2012. Installation view, Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne. Photo by Ellen Mara De Wachter

LePDF.ch consisted of the Migros logo festooned around a former bus station ticketing office, with an array of posters featuring quotes by and life-size cardboard cut-outs of artists in the collection of the Migros Museum, alongside a spinning hologram of household products, all arranged to resemble point-of-sale displays used in supermarkets. Lucky PDF asked the artists to choose their favourite product from the supermarket’s catalogue, bringing together Migros’s retail and art collecting branches, so we learn that Cory Arcangel likes the CD labels and Shana Moulton the strawberry yoghurt, an essential prop in her performances.

When I asked the members of Lucky PDF about the ethical implications of getting involved with a company that has such a monopoly, they were positive about the experience, valuing the relationship itself as a constituent of the work. LePDF.ch exists in a kind of virtual state relative to Migros given the theoretical possibility that the company might pick up the artwork as an endorsement of its activities and thus complete a cycle that began when Migros originally agreed to lend their name to the project. This kind of happy partnership is typical of a new mode of corporate critique, a kind of ‘collabo-critique’, which is light years away from the biting institutional critique of the 1990s. Lucky PDF’s work might be judged toothless when compared to an incisive practice such as Hans Haacke’s, an artist who has repeatedly attacked arts sponsorship by the tobacco industry.

Les Urbaines, Lausanne. Photo by Nelly Rodriguez

Beyond the financial entanglements of Les Urbaines, the projects included dealt with the experience of short-lived gatherings and the communities that grow out of them. Bringing a typically British cultural export to Lausanne, Berry Patten’s The Universal (2012) was a personal tribute to Blur’s 2009 reunion gig on the Pyramid Stage, the main venue at the Glastonbury festival. Patten’s work included a video collage of the gig, made up of YouTube footage and clips shot by friends and family. It was projected amid homemade tepees and billboards depicting kitsch views of Glastonbury Tor. The whole thing came alive during an opening night performance by the musical duo Octagon Court, who re-enacted Blur’s song Tender, down to the telltale signs of the fraught relationship between frontman Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon. A mystical icon and place of pilgrimage, the pyramid was a recurring theme in an eccentric festival that nevertheless might benefit from a re-assessment of its raison d’être and approach to risk and experimentation.

Ellen Mara De Wachter

By Jonathan P Watts

Inevitably, some critic or other, whether writing about Venice’s art or architecture biennales, ‘reveals’ the enterprise’s imperial trappings. Among reading I took for the journey to this year’s Architecture Biennale was the September–October 1990 edition of artscribe. For weeks I had meant to read an interview it contained with Derek Jarman but, coincidently, the issue also featured a review of that year’s Biennale by Jan Avgikos titled ‘The Dangers of Tourism’. What had I let myself in for?

‘Even though we may know better,’ the article begins, ‘prestige exhibitions hold us hostage.’ Hostage? ‘They tempt us to believe that they uphold impartial principles of selection and that their claims as barometers of artistic merit and development are trustworthy […] the Venice Biennale holds a dubious title as the premiere example of the prestige exhibition. Its structures are antiquated; its convictions are hampered by conventionalism.’ Napoleon’s cultural booty displayed in the Louvre Grande Galerie in 1802 and the Exposition Universelle of 1855, both touchstones in exhibitions history, variously presented indigenous objects as trophies, ill-fitted them into established European aesthetic categories, or used them to affirm the sophistication of Western cultural production and colonial progress. This, reckons Avgikos, is Venice’s common ancestry. She recounts this now-familiar story because it allows her to pose the article’s most fascinating question: How can it survive its own history? Or, more precisely, how can the Venice Biennale lay its Modernist aspirations to rest and survive that history in light of ‘recent geopolitical transformations that signal the cessation of the cold war and a new post-colonial phase of global expansion’?

One of the irritating qualities of Avgikos’s article is the way it posits immunity for the critic, audience and media from perpetuating the problem, lying ultimate responsibility for dubious deeds at the foot of the Biennale’s board. Yet, Avgikos’s question makes her essay a fascinating snapshot, in dialogue with landmark exhibitions such as Jean-Hubert Martin and Mark Francis’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ or the Third Havana Biennial (both 1989), of an increasingly globalized world in which relations to centre and periphery were changing dramatically.

Arriving at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture I neither felt in danger, nor as if I were being held hostage (perhaps I thought I knew better?). I made Avgikos’s question my own: Had the Venice Biennale survived its own history? This seemed remarkably prescient as I mooched around its venues. Since the avant-coureur International Art Exhibition in 1895, the Giardini has come to be the site of 29 national pavilions, latterly activated by art, then architecture in alternate years with the launch of the first International Architecture Exhibition, directed by Paolo Portoghesi, in 1980. It is a curious accumulation. These pavilions – occasionally activated architecture – please by their miniature scale; many, such as the white planes of Gerrit Rietveld’s Dutch Pavilion, or Carlo Scarpa’s rough concrete box (for Venezuela), looked iconic the day the builds completed in 1953 and ’54 respectively.

At the Central Pavilion, Diener & Diener, a firm with offices in Switzerland and Germany, presented Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico’s study of Giardini as part of their installation ‘Common Pavilions’. Approximately 60 rich, flat monochromatic photographs in clip-frames were stacked on the floor and shelves flanking the gallery’s lengths. Accompanying these, available as podcasts, were specially commissioned essays by architects, historians of art and architecture, artists and philosophers on the identity of the model village architecture that has accumulated in the Giardini. Great Britain’s pavilion, originally constructed by chief engineer of the Comune of Venice Enrico Trevisana in 1887 as a Café-Restaurant, later acquired and updated by Edwin Alfred Rickards for the British in 1909, stands regally in the elevated southeast corner of the park, flanked by the French and the German Pavilions. An afterthought, Canada, is at its heel. A sweeping gravel path leads to the steps up to the verandah. ‘Perhaps it was this that appealed to the cultural “wallahs” of the Empire who said, “OK, it’s a deal” when offered this former tea-house,’ speculates Sir Peter Cook, founder of Archigram, in his essay for Diener & Diener’s installation. ‘Perhaps,’ Sir Peter continues in my ear, now mooching with me up the gravel path, ‘it resonated in the same manner as some hill-station up from Bombay, its verandah doing nicely for a gin and tonic away from the chattering foreigners.’

The verandah is, in some respect, an architectural premise of ‘Common Ground’, the theme of British architect David Chipperfield’s Biennale this year. Unlike the bounded space of the building’s interior, the verandah has no enclosing or excluding walls, making it in contrast an expression of common ground. Then again, if the pavilion really was some hill-station in Bombay, locals would be spotted from this panoptic vantage and apprehended. Common ground – readily a proxy for ‘the public’ at this year’s Biennale – is politically, culturally and historically complex. In his book Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Robert Venturi – harbinger of Postmodernism – sees in the porch or verandah an expression and measure of generational development of architectural form. European colonists took their European architecture off to their colonies and adapted it to their needs – including adding shaded porches. ‘Yes,’ I think in response to Sir Peter, ‘but isn’t it fascinating that the British Pavilion is an Italian build, subsequently adapted by a Brit to look like British architecture after it had passed through the colonies?’ Cook, in his podcast, does admit it looks rather ‘fusty’ and I am reminded of the distinction Venturi makes between American architecture’s development and Europe’s: ‘Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a public square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television.’ Isn’t the verandah one of many things Britain’s colonial decline has resigned? Here, in the protected Giardini model village, the permanence of architecture is inimical to forgetting; overt generational development is denied.

The British Pavilion at this year’s Biennale hosted the exhibition ‘Venice Takeaway: Ideas to Change British Architecture’, curated by Vanessa Norwood and Vicky Richardson. Norwood and Richardson proceeded to ‘take the temperature of the British architectural profession’ by holding an open competition, inviting proposals from around the UK; beginning at the Architectural Association in London, a roadshow to present the brief dropped in at Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Successful applicants were to be ‘explorers’, trained in expedition planning by the Royal Geographical Society before journeying out into ‘unchartered territory in search of fresh ideas’. Ten teams of architects, writers and researchers – 24 in total – visited projects across the globe that might offer polemical solutions to problems facing the UK. For example, writer and editor Elias Redstone met with architects from Buenos Aires who for some time have been constructing apartment buildings with funding from eventual buyers; Darryl Chen of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today took guidance from devolved power structures in Chinese villages to imaginatively explore the limits of the Localism Act (the so-called Big Society) in Great Britain; Liam Ross and Tolulope Onabolu investigated the far reaching effects of regulations and standards in British architecture, taking Edinburgh and the former British colony of Lagos (where Onabolu has a practice) as test cases, before carrying out their own health and safety assessment of Rickards’ pavilion. For ‘Venice Takeaway’, the central gallery of the Pavilion was designated the ‘Research Emporium’; the outlying interconnecting rooms, linked by the bright conservatory, hosted the ‘Takeaway’. ‘The show was divided into two sections that were very much intended to create different atmospheres,’ Norwood told me. In the research emporium, designed by Melanie Crolla and Leigh Radford of Born Design, thick information is presented in a pseudo-itinerant way. A travel log lists tools used. An OS map grid crisscrosses raw ply display boards. ‘The takeaway elements of each proposal,’ Norwood explained, ‘as well as acting as provocations, are warm, witty and beautiful.’

Even before the participants of ‘Venice Takeaway’ were announced, the British Council received criticism for allegedly launching a neo-colonial project. There I was thinking how that the project activated and updated Britain’s old Bombay hill-station and aspects of its colonial history in a fascinating, polemical way. London-based cultural organization This is not a Gateway compiled a survey of responses, denouncing the opportunity to be a British Council explorer as retrograde and problematic. ‘Empire redux,’ one anonymous commentator wrote. ‘A whitewash, shockingly unreflective, un-ironic, a colonial hangover, neo-imperialist endorsement, out of touch – period, Anglo-centric… incredibly anachronistic’ – the list goes on. Certainly the language in play is provocative: at worst it ironizes a history of rapacious accumulation. The question is whether ironizing the pavilion’s history is an effective way, other than knocking the thing down, to demolish and rebuild it symbolically, as a way for it to survive its history? But ‘Venice Takeaway’ is about much more than just language. Who believes Great Britain still rules the waves? Or, to put it differently, who believes our architecture still needs verandahs? Realizing Great Britain is to some extent captive to its history of Empire – Empire, a narrative inscribed in the Giardini – Richardson and Norwood incorporated it, and in doing so initiated a conversation about not only the self-image of the nation, but the architecture of the nation. If the pavilion makes a statement about how we see ourselves what does it say? Overwhelmingly, that our inability to find innovative solutions to the most basic domestic issues is endemic. The reasons for this are complex and various, in no small part a consequence of the economic hubris of the past 20 years. ‘Venice Takeaway’ proceeds in a spirit of celebratory internationalism: ten teams engage in symmetrical relationships and learn from their hosts.

In their projects both Ross and Onabolu and the London-based practice dRMM made productive critical elisions, relevant to the theme of common ground, between the ethics of exploration and research. Asked about the relationship in their own practice, Ross and Onabolu respond sceptically: ‘Neither of us has ever called ourselves “explorers” before, or since.’ For Onabolu, the fieldwork carried out for their project offered him an opportunity to consider the possibility of an anthropology purged of exotica. dRMM undertook their project in a spirit of amused reflexiveness (research, they write, is about ‘being inspired by peers and stealing from thieves’). Acknowledging a common lineage with Elizabeth I’s ‘legitimized pirate’ Francis Drake, the ‘treasure’ they sought was Dutch design knowledge of floating houses in Ijburg, a small floating community in the east of Amsterdam. In the spirit of adventure, dRMM incorporated the journey itself into their research, arriving at Amsterdam on Easyjet EZY8871 on the 10th April, returning to London eight days later, after a period of ‘going local’ in a six-metre rescue boat. The trio managed to get as far as Zeebruge before abandoning ship for a more conventional combination of bus, train and ferry back to London. While the attempt may have failed, the gesture at least seemed a rich allegory on embedded forms of knowledge and the productive virtues of failure in research. But that is not all: the go-fast boat is a poignant symbol of piracy – we can imagine the crew smuggling intellectual goods across that physical boundary dividing the British Isles from the continent.

At the 2010 Biennale, Richardson worked with muf architecture/art to produce ‘Villa Frankenstein’, which included The Stadium of Close Looking, a 1:10 scale-model section of a stadium for the London Olympics. Unsurprisingly, Richardson was mindful in co-curating ‘Venice Takeaway’ during the Olympic year: ‘The Olympics has created a real sense of a hugely international community in London – I love that, and I love that British architecture is massively international. So many studios that we call British are architects who have come to study in London and ended up staying to establish practices. Our profession is much more diverse and rich for that. Often people think that unless you’re showing projects by British architects you are not being self-confident. I think it is the opposite. Our ability to learn and keep an open mind is our strength.’ Translation, the cornerstone of diversity, emerges as the central ethical act of ‘Venice Takeaway’. How well do these polemical proposals translate from their specific contingencies and contours of local context to be applied in the UK? Not everything in the ‘Takeaway’ translated in a predictable and routine way. Returning from his journey to Buenos Aires, Redstone admitted uncertainty as to how the apartment building scheme could be implemented in the British context. His solution is to continue to raise awareness of the approach to architects and planners, initiating a conversation between those in Argentina and the UK. Not all, but most, of the ten participants in ‘Venice Takeaway’ emerge from their explorations with pragmatic purposeful outcomes. In February, the show will travel to the RIBA galleries in London – the first time a Biennale exhibition has had such an afterlife. Norwood and Richardson will look afresh at the display design, not simply because the physical space of the gallery is different, but also because the aim for participants to provide sustainable solutions is being played out right now. RIBA will reveal the afterlife of projects put in motion for ‘Venice Takeaway’. Here, I wonder how much attention critics will pay to its apparently neo-colonial project, or whether, as I suspect, it is in fact the Venice Biennale itself that is kept hostage.