By Matthew De Abaitua

Living in the Future, Issue Two

Living in the Future is a small magazine of essays, fiction, speculations and poetry, exploring science fiction ideas and the ‘science fiction-like phenomena’ emerging in the contemporary world. What are these emerging ‘science fiction-like’ phenomena? Not space exploration, aliens or time travel. Rather, Living in the Future examines the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the actualities of human interaction with computer algorithms, bio-technology and the cultural dominance of the network. It is, then, part of art’s evolving response to what we can call network culture.

In 2008 or thereabouts, the future changed. The long boom ended in banking collapse, and the consequent austerity policies will define the economic conditions of a generation. At the same time, the sudden mainstream adoption of social media shifted cultural primacy toward new behaviours and forms of digital technology. The internet had been the cutting edge of 20 years prior, of course, but it was only with the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones that digital stopped being thought of as a separate realm; instead, it became an all-pervasive structure and surface: a new mundanity, of sorts. Science fiction offers iconic forms and stories for artists seeking to navigate these new expectations of the future.

Magazines have a rich history of engaging with sci-fi. The term ‘science fiction’ originated with a magazine – Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. A more recent influence on Living in the Future is New Worlds, which under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, in the second half of the 1960s, synthesized science fiction with the avant garde. The new worlds it described were psychedelic and experimental inner spaces – this was the period in which J G Ballard was advocating the then-obscure novels of William S Burroughs as a link between science fiction and modernism. It was a time of possibility when it seemed as if science fiction would slip the bonds of genre and become accepted as a culturally progressive form.

Living in the Future calls for similar rapprochement between the art world and the subculture of the science fiction magazine. Co-edited by Rebecca Bligh and James Hedges, the first issue is about the ‘New You’, the idea that the unfolding future is changing what it means to be human. The second issue concerns the end of the world and the abiding longing for an apocalypse. Issue three is imminent.

The magazine is a hybrid between art writing and ‘inner space’ science fiction – the branch of sci-fi concerned with consciousness, the body and the psychopathy of the future mind – themes identified with writers such as Ballard and Grant Morrison (the coolly intoned provocations of the former’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) are a strong influence here).

Ballard began his career as a science fiction writer but had moved away from that description by the end of his life, for expedient reasons of the marketplace. Science fiction may dominate cinema and gaming but is ghettoized in its printed form. Some writers prefer the term speculative fiction, although that name is also contested, merely a tactic to get around the snobbery against the genre.

The writing in Living in the Future is more significant in its relation to the texts of the art world than genre. The magazine embraces the strange and deranged aspects of science fiction which stand apart from the reasoned, cognitive tradition associated with the writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, with their engineer stories and defiantly flat characterization. Stanislaw Lem, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Solaris (1961), accused authors such as Ballard of ‘giving up the programmatic rationalism of science fiction in favour of the irrational… to try to bring about the conversion of science fiction to the creed of normal literature.’ In other words, irrationality can be accepted into high art, whereas stories founded on reason remain in the realm of the low-brow. Science fiction needs both its rationalism and its dream fiction, works that fuse the will to strangeness with the generative hypotheses of empiricism.

Living In the Future draws its contributors from junior academia and young artists such as Cécile B Evans and Yuri Pattison. Evans’s story is ‘a script for a video message from a bot named AGNES that has overheard that the end is near.’ The text has a skittering attention span, leaping from pop culture refrain to melancholic undertow. In the same edition of the magazine, artist Aimee Heinemann’s phrase echoes this modish tone – ‘Because, like, after all, ‘Cartesian dualism is so 2000’’.

The first issue carries an interview with artist Ed Fornieles, about Los Angeles, that long horizon where the shimmer of marketing meets the sunset of art, where boutique advertising agencies blend into corporate cults. ‘LA is about streaming on floating concrete,’ he says, an evocative Ballardian observation.

Fornieles’s work stages the infiltration of science fiction ideas into the corporate world. Of course, they are already there: Apple’s in-store presence includes the enormous black monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The haptic interface of the smartphone, in which the user waves a magic finger to open various apps uses the gestural language of magic to mediate between consumer desire and the technological shaping and fulfilment of that desire. The intermingling of the corporate realm with the mystical or occult comes into pre-millennial science fiction via Morrison’s graphic novel The Invisibles (1994-2000). Like all great science fiction, The Invisibles asked ‘what if’ – in its case, what if all the 1990s conspiracies were true. In a recent frieze interview, artist Ed Atkins talked to me about Morrison’s influence on his avatar monologues. Not least amongst these influences is Morrison’s theory that branding-is-magick memorably showcased during a speech to disinfo.com, given while coming up on ecstasy. Philip K Dick is the originator of this strain of science fiction: pop culture, corporate cant and arcane knowledge – particularly the Gnostics with their refrain of ‘as above, so below’ – synthesized under the associative influence of drugs and paranoia.

The interconnectivity of countercultures is a subject discernible throughout both editions of Living in the Future. And once you start connecting the dots, it’s hard to know when to stop. A touch of apophenia: pattern-spotting in the random flux. In James Hedges’s introductory essay to the second issue, ‘A Short History of the Apocalypse’, he has a run in with bearded paranoid preppers (the American subculture of people actively preparing for the collapse of civilization) and anti-government survivalists. These are familiar figures from ’90s counterculture, from the Unabomber manifesto to David Koresh’s doomed Branch Davidian cult, and it is heartening to see that 15 years of exposure to the network has not made this tendency any saner. In network culture, the madness of distraction is a feature, not a bug: in Heinemann’s phrase – a nice pun on browsers and acid – ‘I never drop below seven tabs’.

It is hard to tell stories when you are embedded in the network. Consistency can seem archaic. Likewise coherence. Some of the writing in Living in the Future abandons coherence in a way that doesn’t interest me. Yes, the peculiar insinuations of spam bots can emulate Burroughsian cut-and-paste, and – yes – it can be difficult to discern where algorithmically-generated spam ends and Mark E Smith begins, but, still, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way. Science fiction has never let high style get in the way of a good idea.

In issue two, horror writer Quentin S Crisp deploys a pleasingly antiquated essay style to explore antinatalism: the idea that having a child is worse than committing a murder because murder is the curtailing of a life that would have ended anyway; having a child creates a death that would never have been. It’s a wonderfully exploratory essay that exposes the hypocrisy of atheist parents who deny life has meaning while inflicting it upon their children. Their materialist atheism asserts the primacy of the now. But their children are the future and, even worse, they will have to live in it.

By Matthew De Abaitua

Living in the Future, Issue Two

Living in the Future is a small magazine of essays, fiction, speculations and poetry, exploring science fiction ideas and the ‘science fiction-like phenomena’ emerging in the contemporary world. What are these emerging ‘science fiction-like’ phenomena? Not space exploration, aliens or time travel. Rather, Living in the Future examines the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the actualities of human interaction with computer algorithms, bio-technology and the cultural dominance of the network. It is, then, part of art’s evolving response to what we can call network culture.

In 2008 or thereabouts, the future changed. The long boom ended in banking collapse, and the consequent austerity policies will define the economic conditions of a generation. At the same time, the sudden mainstream adoption of social media shifted cultural primacy toward new behaviours and forms of digital technology. The previous 20 years had been dominated by the internet, of course, but it was only with the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones that digital stopped being thought of as a separate realm; instead, it became an all-pervasive structure and surface: a new mundanity, of sorts. Science fiction offers iconic forms and stories for artists seeking to navigate these new expectations of the future.

Magazines have a rich history of engaging with sci-fi. The term ‘science fiction’ originated with a magazine – Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. A more recent influence on Living in the Future is New Worlds, which under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, in the second half of the 1960s, synthesized science fiction with the avant garde. The new worlds it described were psychedelic and experimental inner spaces – this was the period in which J G Ballard was advocating the then-obscure novels of William S Burroughs as a link between science fiction and modernism. It was a time of possibility when it seemed as if science fiction would slip the bonds of genre and become accepted as a culturally progressive form.

Living in the Future calls for similar rapprochement between the art world and the subculture of the science fiction magazine. Co-edited by Rebecca Bligh and James Hedges, the first issue is about the ‘New You’, the idea that the unfolding future is changing what it means to be human. The second issue concerns the end of the world and the abiding longing for an apocalypse. Issue three is imminent.

The magazine is a hybrid between art writing and ‘inner space’ science fiction – the branch of sci-fi concerned with consciousness, the body and the psychopathy of the future mind – themes identified with writers such as Ballard and Grant Morrison (the coolly intoned provocations of the former’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) are a strong influence here).

Ballard began his career as a science fiction writer but had moved away from that description by the end of his life, for expedient reasons of the marketplace. Science fiction may dominate cinema and gaming but is ghettoized in its printed form. Some writers prefer the term speculative fiction, although that name is also contested, merely a tactic to get around the snobbery against the genre.

The writing in Living in the Future is more significant in its relation to the texts of the art world than genre. The magazine embraces the strange and deranged aspects of science fiction which stand apart from the reasoned, cognitive tradition associated with the writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, with their engineer stories and defiantly flat characterization. Stanislaw Lem, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Solaris (1961), accused authors such as Ballard of ‘giving up the programmatic rationalism of science fiction in favour of the irrational… to try to bring about the conversion of science fiction to the creed of normal literature.’ In other words, irrationality can be accepted into high art, whereas stories founded on reason remain in the realm of the low-brow. Science fiction needs both its rationalism and its dream fiction, works that fuse the will to strangeness with the generative hypotheses of empiricism.

Living In the Future draws its contributors from junior academia and young artists such as Cécile B Evans and Yuri Pattison. Evans’s story is ‘a script for a video message from a bot named AGNES that has overheard that the end is near.’ The text has a skittering attention span, leaping from pop culture refrain to melancholic undertow. In the same edition of the magazine, artist Aimee Heinemann’s phrase echoes this modish tone – ‘Because, like, after all, ‘Cartesian dualism is so 2000’’.

The first issue carries an interview with artist Ed Fornieles, about Los Angeles, that long horizon where the shimmer of marketing meets the sunset of art, where boutique advertising agencies blend into corporate cults. ‘LA is about streaming on floating concrete,’ he says, an evocative Ballardian observation.

Fornieles’s work stages the infiltration of science fiction ideas into the corporate world. Of course, they are already there: Apple’s in-store presence includes the enormous black monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The haptic interface of the smartphone, in which the user waves a magic finger to open various apps uses the gestural language of magic to mediate between consumer desire and the technological shaping and fulfilment of that desire. The intermingling of the corporate realm with the mystical or occult comes into pre-millennial science fiction via Morrison’s graphic novel The Invisibles (1994-2000). Like all great science fiction, The Invisibles asked ‘what if’ – in its case, what if all the 1990s conspiracies were true. In a recent frieze interview, artist Ed Atkins talked to me about Morrison’s influence on his avatar monologues. Not least amongst these influences is Morrison’s theory that branding-is-magick memorably showcased during a speech to disinfo.com, given while coming up on ecstasy. Philip K Dick is the originator of this strain of science fiction: pop culture, corporate cant and arcane knowledge – particularly the Gnostics with their refrain of ‘as above, so below’ – synthesized under the associative influence of drugs and paranoia.

The interconnectivity of countercultures is a subject discernible throughout both editions of Living in the Future. And once you start connecting the dots, it’s hard to know when to stop. A touch of apophenia: pattern-spotting in the random flux. In James Hedges’s introductory essay to the second issue, ‘A Short History of the Apocalypse’, he has a run in with bearded paranoid preppers (the American subculture of people actively preparing for the collapse of civilization) and anti-government survivalists. These are familiar figures from ’90s counterculture, from the Unabomber manifesto to David Koresh’s doomed Branch Davidian cult, and it is heartening to see that 15 years of exposure to the network has not made this tendency any saner. In network culture, the madness of distraction is a feature, not a bug: in Heinemann’s phrase – a nice pun on browsers and acid – ‘I never drop below seven tabs’.

It is hard to tell stories when you are embedded in the network. Consistency can seem archaic. Likewise coherence. Some of the writing in Living in the Future abandons coherence in a way that doesn’t interest me. Yes, the peculiar insinuations of spam bots can emulate Burroughsian cut-and-paste, and – yes – it can be difficult to discern where algorithmically-generated spam ends and Mark E Smith begins, but, still, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way. Science fiction has never let high style get in the way of a good idea.

In issue two, horror writer Quentin S Crisp deploys a pleasingly antiquated essay style to explore antinatalism: the idea that having a child is worse than committing a murder because murder is the curtailing of a life that would have ended anyway; having a child creates a death that would never have been. It’s a wonderfully exploratory essay that exposes the hypocrisy of atheist parents who deny life has meaning while inflicting it upon their children. Their materialist atheism asserts the primacy of the now. But their children are the future and, even worse, they will have to live in it.

By Travis Jeppesen

Gary Indiana, Cookie as My Ex Boyfriend, 1980, photographic print

Joy and madness are not polar opposites, or if they are, then they at least reside on the same pole, and what is most interesting, perhaps, is the pole itself: the thing that unites them and ensures the permanency of their connection. Cookie Mueller wasn’t mad in the desperate, unhappy sense with which we might typically associate the term – hers was more an intensity of spirit that brought her attention and worshipful stares wherever she carried it, a creature of hilarity and endless inventiveness. While she first made her mark as an actress in John Waters’ early films – she had sex with a chicken in Pink Flamingos (1972) and portrayed the shit-kickin’ criminal Conchetta in Female Trouble (1974) – this was but one fraction of the overall equation, as a new book, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller (2014), makes clear. Chloé Griffin has synthesized a detail-rich biographical tapestry woven of the voices that knew Mueller best, simultaneously rendering an oral history of a vital, misunderstood period in late 20th century art.

Griffin’s book eschews chronology, jumping episodically back and forth in time, beginning in the mid-1960s – which is where, one surmises, the story really begins. Throughout the book, Mueller’s closest friends affirm how important the ’60s were in shaping her sensibility. Early on, she engineered a much-copied personal style that Waters characterized as the ‘trashy Baltimore hippie-girl look’, which she brought to the shores of Provincetown, Massachusetts, a summer resort for artists, queers, and ragtag bohemians, in the late ’60s. That is where she spent the first half of the subsequent decade, hanging out with fellow luminaries from Waters’ Dreamland studio, alongside passersby like Beat poet Gregory Corso. It is also where she conceived her son, Max, and met the counterpart of her longest romantic relationship, Sharon Niesp.

Mueller was fueled by equal parts spontaneity and ambition; she was both party girl and serious artist. It was her desire to do more with her life than just hang out – which was about all there was to do in Provincetown – that compelled her to move to New York in 1976. In a city scene that was fueled by competitive rivalries and bitchiness, Mueller quickly came to stand out a rare example of someone who could be both a diva and a sweetheart. When she arrived at a bar, nightclub, or party, then that venue became the place to be.

Downtown New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s was a site where art, nightlife and punk rock converged. It was a remarkably fertile creative period, when people who wanted to live what Penny Arcade calls ‘an artistic lifestyle’ could do so without having to worry too much about how to pay the rent. It was also a time when heroin was used as a recreational drug. Mueller supported herself throughout the ’80s by supplying various powders to the downtown set from her apartment.

In New York, Mueller began to focus more on her writing. While she was perhaps best known for the tongue-in-cheek advice column ‘Ask Dr. Mueller’ she wrote throughout the ’80s for the East Village Eye, Mueller also emerged as one of the more prominent chroniclers of the East Village art scene. She was an art writer– as distinguished from an art critic; she viewed writing about art as an open-ended literary art form, rather than the communication of expert judgment. Her ‘Art and About’ column, penned for the earliest incarnation of Details magazine, was respected among her artist and writer peers for being completely free of the theory-inflected jargon which had become increasingly common in critical writing at that time. Instead, Mueller relied on her wealth of experience – in life, on the streets, as a mother, as a woman, as an outsider – as her primary tool of engagement with works of art. Hers is the prose of the rugged outsider – unafraid of embracing narrative and meta-narrative: ‘Looking at any one of these paintings,’ Mueller wrote in her article on Duncan Hannah, ‘I find myself playing out the scenario, writing the corresponding story in my head. I know these tales, I know what the weather feels like the day of the painting. I know the characters and what they’re doing there, where they’re going and what they’re thinking. The plot is here in the present, but the future and the story resolution is anybody’s guess.’ Her recourse to narrative and feeling put Mueller in league with the poets of the New York School writing art criticism in the ’60s, such as James Schuyler. They rejected the idea that writing from the artist’s vantage point – quite often these poet-critics were close friends with the artists they were writing about – somehow disqualified its validity. Mueller helped open up the field to a wider array of possible approaches to writing about art.

For Mueller the divide between art and life never really existed. Her fiction (which has been collected in a handful of volumes, including Semiotext(e)’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990)) was much like her critical work; both gave voice to her lived experience of a glamour that has little to do with the superficial understanding of the term you find in fashion magazines, and more to do with an exaggerated yet unconcerned way of being-in-the-world. Glamour in her work means a hedonistic, yet mindful, pursuit of pleasure and an unwitting openness to courting danger along the way. As Mueller said of herself, ‘I’m not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.’

It is this glamour, this wildness, that impelled so many of the stories that make up the fabric of Mueller’s life, as collected in Griffin’s book: a life of the ever resourceful bricolagiste, accustomed to solving dilemmas on the spot. These include the time she visited West Berlin for the Berlin International Film Festival and was ditched in her hotel by director Amos Poe with an exorbitantly large phone bill; in an effort to escape, she inadvertently wound up climbing over the Berlin Wall. Once upon a time, as her friend Linda Ogiersen recounts in the book, Mueller, confronted with bare cupboards and a throng of unplanned guests, served canapés smeared with dog food (all she had at home) in a resourceful effort to maintain her reputation as a good hostess.

Mueller lived fast, raised a child, wrote some great stuff, and became the toast of New York – she accomplished a lot in a short period. In the late ’80s, the pace of life began to slow as the AIDS crisis meant that the denizens of downtown scene were more likely to see each other at a funeral than a nightclub. Like a lot of talented people in the ’80s, Mueller ran out of time. AIDS was a likelihood for some, an inevitability for many others; by 1986, when she married her husband, artist Vittorio Scarpati, both knew they had already separately contracted HIV. We cannot emphasize enough what has been lost, and must continually wonder what the present might look like had so many of the most brilliant individuals of the late 20th century not been taken away at the moment of their blossoming. Cookie Mueller, who gave ‘living in the moment’ a new energy and momentum, was certainly one of them. Now that Griffin has re-ignited her star, one can only hope that others will follow suit and bring Mueller’s unfairly neglected writings back into print.

Chloé Griffin, ed., Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, BBooks Verlag, 2014

By Dan Kidner

Benjamin Crotty, Fort Buchanan, 2014

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), now in its 44th year, colonizes its host city in the same way that many art biennials do, forming a kind of temporary heterotopia. For a week at the end of January an international community of, for the most part, like-minded individuals, descend on Rotterdam and constitute a city within a city; one with its own transport network in the form of shuttle buses between venues; its own currency – the café of the de Doelen, the concert hall that serves as the festival’s centre only accepts payment via delegate cards – and even its own daily paper, The Daily Tiger.

At this year’s festival heterotopia would have made an apposite over-arching theme. Many of the more memorable films across the numerous programmes explored the kinds of spaces written about, famously, by Michel Foucault in his 1967 paper Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan (all films 2014) is set on a French military base; James Benning’s new film, premiering at the festival, natural history was shot back of house at the Natural History Museum of Vienna; Lav Diaz’s Storm Children: Book One explores what Foucault classified as a ‘crisis heterotopia’ – a world created by adolescents in the aftermath of a catastrophe; and J.P. Sniadecki’s documentary The Iron Ministry, captures Chinese society mirrored inside the carriages of a slow, Communist-era, train ferrying passengers – some with their worldly possessions, some with their live stock – across China.

Thankfully though it was not my job to bring together the disparate range of films shown at IFFR under one catch-all title. That was attempted, valiantly, by festival directors Rutger Wolfson and Janneke Staarink, who proposed, in their foreword to the festival’s catalogue, to focus on ‘the here and now’. Within this there were other, more focused strands with titles such as ‘What the F?!, Really? Really’, and ‘Everyday Propaganda’, which surveyed the influence of contemporary feminism on filmmakers, the legacy of Surrealism, and contemporary and historical forms of political filmmaking. There were also two competition strands (for short films and first or second feature), and various standalone programmes and retrospectives.

Screening in the Bright Future strand Benjamin Crotty’s smart yet bewildering fiction feature Fort Buchanan follows the fortunes of a number of military spouses whose days are spent idly relaxing in the French countryside. The film’s odd tone – driven by performances that veer from woozy ironic detachment to high melodrama and back again – is in part a consequence of the novel conceptual conceit used to generate the script. The director compiled transcripts from US television dramas and sitcoms and assigned discrete scenes a keyword. Drawing from this cache he grabbed dialogue with which to tell his unlikely story of a gay military couple, their adopted daughter, and the military wives that stand in as a kind of idealized extended family. The setting, structure and moral dilemmas are also borrowed from – or at least inspired by – the films of the French new wave, particularly those of Eric Rohmer. Imagine Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) directed by Spike Jonze, and you’d be half way there.

In Storm Children: Book One Diaz patiently tracks groups of children as they scour the city streets and docks of Tacloban, in the Eastern region of the Philippines, months after it was decimated by super typhoon Yolanda in 2013. Diaz’s two and half hour documentary begins with shots of the children playing in the flood waters that wash through the city, a sequence made sombre only by the knowledge that over 6,000 people lost their lives in the storm. Play quickly turns to industry as the children begin gleaning anything from the destroyed cityscape that might be exchangeable or useful. For most of the film Diaz’s camera simply watches; it is only in the last third of the film that the director almost absentmindedly begins asking questions about the catastrophe of a couple children he has been filming, soliciting matter-of-fact yet devastating stories of destruction and loss. Play resumes at the end of the film as the children are shown diving from wrecked ships into the water strewn with detritus. Without taking any emotional shortcuts Diaz’s film takes it time, and as with many of his films, whether fiction or documentary, manages to be both fiercely political and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Many of the short film programmes failed to hold together, sometimes because of the dearth of interesting work, but often because of the incongruity of the selected films – some intended to be screened in the cinema, others the gallery. For this reason some films failed to hit home immediately but gnawed at me over the course of the festival, their aesthetic questions only later finding purchase. One such film was Rachel Rose’s A Minute Ago, which visually intermeshed amateur video footage of an unexpected and violent hailstorm on a Russian beach, with the rotoscoped image of architect Philip Johnson leading a virtual tour of his Glasshouse. It is possible that A Minute Ago is best suited to a gallery, but other artists’ films, especially three recently shown at commercial galleries in London, were not only at home in the darkness of the cinema auditorium but revealed extra layers and resonances. Beatrice Gibson’s F for Fibonnaci, James Richards’ Raking Light and winner of a Tiger Award for short film, Ben Rivers’ Things all made the successful transition.

One programme that did cohere well, and made sense of the grouping, was The Dragon is the Frame (named after a 2014 film by Mary Helena Clark, included in the programme) and comprised interesting films by, among others, Tamara Henderson, Luke Fowler and Pablo Pijnappel. Fowler was represented by the quietly insistent and critical Depositions, which attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 1970s and ’80s. Depositions repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, and is film about difference and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.

The crisis heterotopia that the late experimental filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson built and inhabited was in her own apartment, and later her mother’s house. Confined in these spaces she moved and tested her capacity to understand the world, coming to terms with and ultimately limiting the effect of her debilitating mental illness. Three films from her most famous work, Five Year Diary (1981–97), were shown at Rotterdam, selected and introduced by director of LUX, Ben Cook. Robertson would present her diary films at marathon screenings, sometimes lasting hours, and would provide live commentary to films already layered with in-camera commentary and further narration added in post-production. Obsessing over her meals, taking out the rubbish and composting, Robertson builds a world and a narrative, which enable her to cope with the tragedies in her life, such as the death of her three-year-old niece. In the last film of the three sensitively selected by Cook, Robertson mourns her niece, and ponders the adequacy of the world she has constructed, complete with feline company, to cope with the world as it actually is. Defiantly but sorrowfully she intones, ‘a cat is not quite a child’.

By Morgan Quaintance

Members of the ‘San Francisco Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination’ protest outside the Oakland Tribute building, 4 September, 1964. Photographer unknown.

At a number of recent public talks in London exploring aspects of the past, present and future of feminist discourse and action, a recurring question has been asked from the floor.1 Tentative and anxious not to cause offence, a male audience member has, on each occasion, asked his own variation on a single theme: how can I – that is, how can men – contribute to feminism?

Although the heyday of radical separatist feminism is behind us, there was something else in the air exerting an inhibitory pressure on cautious males, keen to contribute without restaging the oppressive interpersonal dynamics of patriarchy. It was the same boundary that might cause a white audience member at an anti-racism meeting to feel unqualified to comment on black issues; and it exists between heterosexuals and homosexuals, the able-bodied and the disabled, the middle class and the working class, and all other such simplified and commonly evoked societal dichotomies. Rather than an actual physical barrier or law it is an idea that acts as this invisible obstacle, the idea, which is often misunderstood, is called intersectionality.

A way of thinking crystallized by African American critical race and law theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, in her cogent, evocative and seminal essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989), intersectionality can be broadly defined as the belief that certain complex subject positions exist at the intersection between different identity markers (race, gender, sexuality) and that specific combinations of these markers (trans Israeli, white male, black lesbian etc.) lead to unique and particular socio-cultural, economic and juridical experiences. Intersectionality is about recognizing this difference and, according to journalist Laurie Penny, understanding that ‘you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice-versa’.2

But, in the participatory and reductive comment culture age of Web 2.0, an incarnation of intersectionality, misunderstood and badly defined by partial, third-hand misreadings, is increasingly misused as an aide to online pedantry. It is an effect that is steadily trickling offline and into public forums and its catchphrase is ‘check your privilege’, a command for whomever is speaking to examine their own subject position before speaking for others. At such times solidarity seems a utopic dream, but it wasn’t always so. The Civil Rights era of the 1960s – though its egalitarianism was, of course, imperfect – saw diverse groups working towards a common goal to secure equal rights for all. Recent attention to this period in contemporary art and cinema suggests a renewed desire to look into this important chapter of the recent past for answers to the divisions of the present and possible future. Perhaps history offers a way to exhume the memory of cross-cultural fraternity and enable the conditions for solidarity today.

‘Civil Rights’ at Void Gallery, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Installation view of Black Panther documentation and images, a private collection loaned to Void by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In the closing months of 2014, Void Gallery in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland, staged ‘Civil Rights: We Have it in Our Power to Begin the World Over Again’. It was an ambitious group exhibition examining the mutual influence of coeval Civil Rights movements during the 1960s in the US (characterized by pushes for an end to segregation and racial discrimination) and Northern Ireland (characterized by pushes for an end to the marginalization, disenfranchisement and destitution of Catholics). Conceived and co-curated by Void director Maolíosa Boyle and London-based painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the show sought to highlight the seldom told story of the two countries’ shared histories by presenting artists’ responses to it. Their initial desire was to include work by Irish and black American artists but, due to what they perceived as a scarcity of Northern Irish artists covering the period, the duo instead focused on the work of artists across the Atlantic.3 In contrast to their Northern Irish counterparts, successive generations of African American contemporary artists have returned to the images, iconographies and key events of the Civil Rights movement in their work. Across pieces by heavy hitters such as Ellen Gallagher, Glen Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker, different aspects of the Civil Rights movement – boycotts, protests, revolutionary Black Power movements, antebellum history – were filtered through a collection of text-based works (Ligon and Adam Pendleton), portraiture (Marshall and Simpson) animation (Walker), sculpture and an archival collection of Black Panther newspapers (loaned by New York-based artist Rashid Johnson).

Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2008, 16mm film still. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, Istanbul/London.

Although not formally represented, the spirit of one figure pervaded the entire project: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. Described by Brian Dooley, author of Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (1998), as ‘the best known civil rights activist in Northern Ireland [and the] key figure in relations with black America’ , Devlin McAliskey’s energy, vitality and preternatural abilities as a public speaker were widely respected on both national and international stages.4 She rose quickly through the ranks of the student-organized People’s Democracy party (PD) – a group that, Dooley writes, consciously modeled itself ‘on the US student-based civil rights organization the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)’5 – and in 1969 she was elected to parliament in Westminster. Over two early trips to the US – in 1969 and ’71, as a representative of the Irish Civil Rights movement – she visited Angela Davies in jail and became firm friends with members of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The two sides came together in recognition of their similar struggles and a desire to aid and support each other’s cause. It was a desire backed by action. In 1969 when Devlin McAliskey was given the keys to New York City by its mayor, in a gesture of solidarity she handed them over (via fellow PD member Eamon McCann) to the Black Panthers through their representative Robert Bay.

The organizers and speakers at ‘Black Panthers – Spirit of ’68 Derry’, 4 November, 2008. Left to Right: Eileen Webster, Eamonn McCann, Gabrielle Tierney, Emory Douglas, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Billy “X” Jennings. Photograph courtesy: George Row.

But this relationship of collaboration and influence between Northern Ireland and black America goes back much further than the 1960s. In the 19th century, Irish politician Daniel O’Connell and African American writer, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass lobbied in support of each – for the abolition of slavery in the US and Catholic Emancipation in pre-partition Ireland. Both men frequently drew evocative parity between their conditions in strident letters and public speeches: ‘may my right hand forget its cunning […] if to save Ireland, even Ireland, I forget the negro one single hour!’6 wrote O’Connell, while Douglass declared himself ‘an out and out Home Ruler for Ireland’.7 The 19th-century Irish Catholic experience not only echoed that of black Americans, it also had historical parallels with the plight of African nations colonized by the British. Noel Ignatiev writing in How the Irish Became White (1995) states that in Ireland, ‘the transfer of the land from native cultivators to foreign conquerors took place on as large a scale as in any African colony’.8 British imperialism didn’t stop at the pillage of land – it also extended to the debasing practice of human zoos.9 And, of course, there was the famous exclusionary mantra stuck up in countless British bay windows in the post- WWII era: ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’.

Despite confluences such as the above, official accounts and popular narratives tend to depict the Civil Rights movement shorn of its many collaborative forms, histories and sympathetic coeval uprisings – within the US itself, these included the Chicano movement, the American Indian movement, the Latino civil rights movement, gay rights and feminism. It is continually cast as a discrete black phenomenon, a rousing, church driven and male dominated tale of successful access to the heteronormative American Dream. The same fate befalls Selma (2015), the partial biopic of Martin Luther King Jr, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring British actor David Oyelowo (in a confidently executed turn as King). Framed by activities leading up to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, it offers a sentimental, sepia-tinted view of a complex phase in America’s history. Essentially the depiction of one man’s godly struggle with his fate as the leader of an oppressed people, Selma is less an in depth, naturalistic biopic than a showreel composite of Oyelowo as King, worrying about marching, delivering rousing speeches, evading confessions of adultery and generally acting in a vacuum. Supporting characters fall into one-dimensional archetypes (racist Southern lawman, paranoid housewife, earnest protestors, gum chewing cops on horseback), while the film’s direction has an odd made-for-TV feel, an effect heightened by DuVernay’s penchant for overusing emotionally manipulative commercial techniques – highly stylized riot scenes overlaid with spiritually uplifting, melismatic music for example. Twenty-five years ago such an approach would have been timely, innovative even. Today it seems a dated, surface retelling of a story we know by heart.

Selma styles itself as a pertinent reminder of the US’s racist past, carrying valuable lessons for its present and future. However the message of conformity and conservatism that it conveys is at odds with the contemporary US’s disorienting and irrational world of metropolitan racism – including integration anxiety, geographic segregation, police brutality etc. – exacerbated by the socio-economic effects of government policies and civic procedures directly influenced by theories of neoliberal capitalism. The crucial central failing of Selma’s simplistic and conventional depiction of the Civil Rights era, in which contemporary revolutionary factions (the BPP and others) are marginalized in favour of messages uncritical of America’s capitalist disciplinary regimes, is that it seeks to resurrect the emancipatory spirit of the time without its one crucial ideological example: solidarity. Perhaps the lesson here is that the culture industry is the culture industry, even when it is an African American production. Fortunately, a counterpoint to this reductive style of Hollywood dramatization can be found in films such as St Clair Bourne’s The Black and the Green (1983), a documentary in which six African American civil rights activists visit Belfast in the wake of the hunger strikes of IRA prisoners and the deaths of Bobby Sands and nine other men. In it the delegation spend time in the Maze Prison, meet with relatives of the dead strikers and talk with Republicans about reaffirming the links between black America and Northern Ireland. This instance of post-Civil Rights support and interaction was not isolated: according to Dooley, ‘young Republicans in nationalist Coalisland painted “justice for Rodney King” on the town’s walls’ after the African American construction worker was beaten in 1991 by Los Angeles County police officers (a videotape of the incident was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial)10; on Gerry Adams’s visit to the US in 1994 he met with Rosa Parks and late last year the Derry Journal reported that ‘an impassioned gathering attended a vigil for Michael Brown’s family and the people of Ferguson, Missouri at Free Derry wall on November 30. Key speakers were Bloody Sunday family member, Kate Nash and veteran Civil Rights campaigner Eamon McCann’.11

https://vimeo.com/29081887

But to return to Crenshaw’s theory, ‘intersectionality’ has now become a key term in ongoing Western debates centred on establishing a more egalitarian society capable of recognizing the complex compound identities her text posits, and others that have been described since. But when it is invoked by angry online commentators to enforce contrition (as was the case in the Twitter furore following Penny’s Spectator article, ‘Why patriarchy fears the scissors – for women short hair is a political statement’) an important element of Crenshaw’s thinking – the possibility that compound marginal subject positions might also be able to speak for the other identities with which they intersect – is overlooked.12 Instead of solidarity, such partial readings encourage factionalism and the erosion of political commonalities.

‘Die in’ protest at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, 3 December, 2014. Photograph courtesy: Andrees Latif / Reuters

In spite of this, recent actions and movements within the US, including Occupy and the nationwide ‘die-in’ protests for Eric Garner last December, are indications of a growing sense of solidarity, in which diverse communities are unifying in order to combat increasing economic disparity, climate change denial, oppressive government policies, and to put an end to police brutality and institutional racism. This is all vital activity while governments, corporations and individuals propel the forward march of neoliberal capitalism and elements of the Western mainstream mediascape seemingly aim to divide and influence communities using fear as a propaganda tool. In the UK capital, grass roots organizations like the London Black Revolutionaries and Brick Lane Debates have adopted multi-issue approaches to activism and discussion respectively, while Tariq Ali has identified a burgeoning movement of European socialism that includes links between the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.13 It is as a contribution to this climate that ‘Civil Rights: We Have it in Our Power to Begin the World Over Again’ was important. Boyle and Yiadom Boakye’s project indicated how exhibition making can play a key role in supporting this new spirit of solidarity, by using curatorial work to show the power of political alliances and to uncover shared pasts. While the culture industry steamrollers history and its complexities to give us normalized narratives that subtly reinforce community divisions, and while, in the sphere of contemporary art, large-scale biennials can often seem too vast for coherent messages, relatively small-scale group exhibitions can function as powerful and legible conduits for progressive ideas. They can – through the presentation of works that explicitly reference, or else gesture more obliquely towards, forgotten socio-political histories – use the archive to galvanize and, yes, activate the spectator. In the final analysis, this is not just important for exhibitions, it is also important for the world.

1. Being Visible: Feminism Art and the Internet, London: ICA, 10 January, 2014; Feminism Then and Now, London School of Economics, 21 January 2014; No Man’s Land Symposium, London: Hood at Limewharf, 20 September 2014; We Should All Be Feminists, London: Brick Lane Debates at the Rag Factory, 20 November 2014

2. Laurie Penny, ‘Louise Mensch, take a lesson on privilege from the internet’, The Guardian, 31 May, 2013, last visited 26 February, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/31/louise-mensch-privilege-internet

3. A more accurate assessment might be that artworks by Irish artists covering this period (there are many) were unavailable, or else too metaphysical (Willie Doherty, Duncan Campbell) to fit with the direct, iconographic style of Ligon et al.

4. Brian Dooley, Black and Green (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p.50.

5. ibid, p.52.

6. Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995), p.7.

7. Dooley, p.16.

8. Ignatiev, p.35.

9. At the 1908 Franco-British exhibition in London’s White City, three native exhibits were presented, a Senegalese village, an Indian village, and a mythical Irish village named Ballymaclinton.

10. Dooley, p.122.

11. Greg Sharkey, ‘American Civil Rights campaigner to be main speaker at Bloody Sunday rally’, The Derry Journal, 23 January, 2015, last visited 26 February, 2015, http://www.derryjournal.com/news/american-civil-rights-campaigner-to-be-main-speaker-at-bloody-sunday-rally-1-6540455

12. In Crenshaw’s examination of ‘Moore V Hughes Helicopters, Inc.’ – the second of three Title VII legal case studies she draws on in Demarginalizing the Intersection– she uses the example of black female workers to highlight that the law’s ‘refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged [black and female] class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged [either black or female, but not both] defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy.’ The inference is that if this state of affairs were reversed and intersectionality observed, it would allow for the creation of a compound subject position capable of speaking for and representing the interest of both white women and black men.

13. Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre, (London: Verso, 2015), p.18 & 83.

By Kristin M. Jones

Kathleen Collins, 'Losing Ground' (1982)

As Kathleen Collins’s witty and piercing drama Losing Ground (1982) begins, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a young philosophy professor, is concluding a class on Existentialism. Afterward a male student approaches to tell her he has read a book on Jean Genet she recommended. She enthusiastically praises its analysis of being an outsider, saying it ‘applies as much to race as it does to homosexuality.’ The conversation ends abruptly after he says, ‘You’re terrific, so alive and terrific,’ adding, ‘Your husband appreciates you?’ Later, after a similar incident, Sara wonders, ‘What is this thing they’ve all got about my having a husband?’

With humour and mystery, Losing Ground follows this magnetic young black intellectual as she faces daunting external and internal boundaries. Collins, who was a civil rights activist, playwright, fiction writer and professor as well as a film director, made Losing Ground at a time when black female characters like Sara weren’t found on movie screens. Although it came to be considered a landmark film, Losing Ground was given only one screening in New York City, at the Museum of Modern Art, and was never picked up for theatrical distribution. In 1988 Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 46.

Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)

A masterpiece of independent cinema was thus nearly lost, but decades later Collins’s daughter, Nina, tracked down the original negatives for her mother’s films and created new digital masters. Losing Ground is now being given a theatrical release by Milestone Film. It premiered at the recent series ‘Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986’ at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, where it is screening in an extended run through February 26.

Collins’s interest in cinema was first triggered by a course at the Sorbonne, Paris, on French literature and cinema while she was a graduate student. After returning to the U.S. she became a film editor, taught at City College in New York, and wrote plays and short stories. When her student Ronald K. Gray – who would be the cinematographer on both her films – encouraged her to direct films, she chose to base her first film on material from which she had some emotional distance, adapting the 50-minute short The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) from episodes in The Cruz Chronicle (1989), a novel about three young Puerto Rican men and their father’s ghost, by her friend Henry H. Roth.

With Losing Ground Collins was ready to direct from her own original material. Sara is researching ecstatic experience, but struggles to encounter it herself. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), a painter who has filled their New York loft with lush abstractions, learns that a painting has just been acquired for a museum’s permanent collection. He decides that they should celebrate by summering upstate, in a verdant area with a largely Puerto Rican community. After being there, he says, ‘I feel lightheaded, like I’ve been walking around in a dream.’

Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)

Filled with luminous cinematography and careful framing, Losing Ground often has a rapt quality. It takes on an even greater radiance after Sara and Victor move to their summer rental, but after a brief idyll cracks resurface in their relationship. Victor, who is increasingly interested in painting from life – he has always included narrative references in his under-paintings and itches to abandon the purity of abstraction – revels in the landscape and in a young local woman, Celia (Maritza Rivera). Sara finds the house beautiful but must order books from New York or drive back into the city, and Victor’s philandering is inseparable from his rapturous appreciation of the light and space. She determinedly follows a separate path: writing, visiting a psychic and a church, and encountering Duke (Duane Jones), an actor and former theology student, while working in the library.

When her student George (Gary Bolling) convinces her to play a jealous lover in his short film, which tells a story through dance, the stage is set for a profound shift in consciousness. The film-within-a-film, which George calls ‘an archetypal interpretation of the Frankie and Johnny myth’– it reimagines the story of a fatal love triangle that inspired an American popular song as well as films and plays – is shot on a windswept plaza, and Sara’s co-star is none other than Duke, whom she first glimpses from a distance, apparition-like in his cape and fedora. During a take in which the camera tracks beside them as they walk behind a scrim of greenery, Duke asks Sara about the purpose of the scene. ‘Something to do with the relationship between the characters, the space, the light,’ she says.

Kathleen Collins, ‘Losing Ground’ (1982)

Collins directed Losing Ground with clarity and grace, all of her cinematic choices helping to convey Sara’s internal journey. Collins admired Eric Rohmer’s films, especially his Ma nuit chez Maud (My night at Maud’s, 1969) and The Marquise of O (1976), and Losing Ground shares a similar sense of quiet revelation. ‘I’m trying to find a cinematic language with real literary merit,’ she remarked in a 1980 interview, ‘A style that doesn’t ignore what words mean, and may, in fact, end up being very wordy.’ The cast contributes a great deal to the power of Losing Ground. Many of these artists had or have had fascinating careers. Gunn, who died in 1989, wrote plays and novels and directed films including Ganja and Hess (1973), his groundbreaking horror story – which Spike Lee has just remade as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus– and Personal Problems (1980), from a script by Ishmael Reed. Jones, who died in 1988, starred in Ganja and Hess and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968); he was a professor and theatre director as well as an actor. Scott is a playwright and theatre director as well as a remarkable actor, and Billie Allen (who plays Sara’s mother, Leila) began her Broadway career dancing for Jerome Robbins and has had a rich career as an actor, activist and theatre director.

Scott’s performance is especially memorable in electrifying moments when we see Sara immersed in her research. During a sometimes hilariously frank conversation Sara has with Leila, an actress, about life with Victor and her yearning to lose control, Leila recalls how she used to enter a trance when she performed. Sara replies, ‘The only thing I’ve known like that is sometimes when I’m writing a paper, my mind suddenly takes this tremendous leap into a new interpretation of the material, and I know I’m right! I know I can prove it! My head just starts dancing like crazy.’ How many films can make that feeling so palpable?

By Zoe Pilger

Bar in Madrid. All photographs: the author

At 2am in a sherry bar in Madrid, we are talking about La Cabina (The Telephone Box), a 30-minute political horror film, made by Antonio Mercero in 1972, three years before the death of General Franco and the end of his 36-year dictatorship.

In the film, a bourgeois businessman, played José Luis López Vázquez, stops in a deserted square in Madrid on his way to work. The morning is hot and dry. He enters a telephone box to make a call. The door shuts behind him. It won’t open again.

As the man’s panic rises, children gather round the box and ridicule him through the glass walls. His shame becomes a public spectacle; men try and fail to get the door open. They too are emasculated. Women pull up chairs and knit while they watch. A mirror is held up so the man can see his own humiliation. Ultimately his fellow citizens do nothing. His is a glass cage with no exit.

The emergency services are called, but they submit to a higher, anonymous authority, who turns up at the square and removes the box with the man still inside it. There are close-ups of his frantic, sweating face as he travels, trapped on top of a truck, through an eerily still Madrid. He is subject to both total visibility and total control. He is never seen again.

Many critics have understood the film as an allegory of the oppression of the Franco regime. It conveys a sense of hallucinatory terror and powerlessness. Twenty-four years later, in 1998, the same actor starred in a TV ad for Retevisión, one of the telecommunications companies that challenged the dominance of the state-owned Telefónica during the right-wing Partido Popular’s (PP) drive towards neoliberal privatisation in the ’90s.

In the ad, Vazquez is once again trapped inside a telephone box, this time in the middle of a deserted moor. When he tries the door, however, it opens. He walks into freedom. The message is cynical, seeming to equate state ownership with Francoism and therefore privatisation with freedom.

Now the PP is once again in power; at the end of last year, a law was passed that prohibits protest outside parliament buildings. Spain has suffered a harsh recession; demonstrations in La Puerta del Sol in 2011 were a precedent to the global Occupy Movement, but also questioned the value of a democracy that was seemingly superimposed on the old system of fascism in the ’70s, when the PP was formed by one of Franco’s most prominent cabinet ministers. Due to the 1977 Amnesty Law, no crimes committed during the Franco era can be brought to trial; this has been defended under the bogus notion of silence in the service of peace, but rejected by the UN. The law is still enforced.

Indeed, the bar where we are drinking sherry and talking about La Cabina is La Venencia, which was frequented by Republicans during the Civil War in the late 1930s. Then, a ban on photography protected its patrons from Fascist spies; now the ban protects them from tourist blogs on the Hemingway trail. He drank here, as well as along the Calle de Victoria, a street of bullfighters’ bars, where we wandered earlier in the evening and passed a powerful piece of graffiti art: a matador in typically camp-machismo yellow and pink costume swipes his flag in the face of an angry black bull. Over this image of old Spain, a black A for Anarchy has been spray-painted.

Madrid is a place for drinking. I love the old bars with their sweltering trays of Ensalada Rusa on the counters, bright blue tiles, and gaudy fruit machines, which bring to mind the scene at the end of Bigas Luna’s 1992 film Jamón Jamón (Ham, Ham) when Silvia (Penélope Cruz) enters a bar somewhere in the Zaragozan desert, her white dress stuck to her skin, made see-through by the rain. Raul (Javier Barden) is playing on a fruit machine; he hoists her against it. Not wishing to avoid the obvious metaphor, all the images of fruit align; coins pour down.

The film is a celebration of sex and food. I love the legs of Jamón Ibérico that hang pornographically in shop windows all over Madrid. Jamón Ibérico is distinguished by its pata negra– black hoof. To be called la pata negra is apparently a chat-up line in Spain, which doesn’t translate well into English. ‘You are the black hoof’ sounds like an accusation of demonic possession.

My favourite artworks in Madrid are Goya’s 14 ‘Black Paintings’ (1819–23) in the Prado, which he originally painted straight onto the walls of his Deaf Man’s Villa on the outskirts of the city. Saturn Devouring His Son and Women Laughing remain thrillingly grotesque after many visits. The purpose of this visit, however, was to see five lesser-known museums, which are often overlooked in favour of the Prado and the Reina Sofia.

El Museo Cerralbo is the converted house of the Marquis de Cerralbo. It is grotesque in its own way – a Huysmans-esque celebration of obscene wealth. There is a male space for cigar-smoking and post-dinner political chat and a female space of floor to ceiling mirrors, ‘natural’ feminine narcissism and vacuity rendered in interior design. While the men contemplated the world, the women contemplated themselves. In El Museo Lázaro Galdiano, another art collector’s house converted into a museum, my favourite work was a 16th century golden bust of a female saint, her eyes downcast, her expression mystical and weird. A circular mirror is embedded in her chest, reflecting the viewer back to herself. This somehow implicates the viewer in the saint’s piety. Inside her, talismans were hidden.

We also visited El Museo de Romanticismo (The Museum of Romanticism) and saw Satire on Romantic Suicide (1839) by Leonardo Alenza. The painting shows a man with a wild beard in the process of throwing himself off a rocky precipice while simultaneously stabbing himself with a dagger. In the distance, someone is hanging from a tree. Due to the Peninsular War and slow industrialization, Romanticism came late to Spain; the painting is a late parody of the cult of suicide established 65 years previously by the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Notable works in El Museo de Artes Decorativas (The Museum of Decorative Arts) were the dolls’ houses in which the dolls are all dressed up as nuns. They were exhibited in Spanish homes as proof of the purity of the women who lived there. We also visited El Museo Sorolla, the former home of the Valencian artist, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923). I don’t like his sentimental scenes of women and children wandering on beaches, but there is a quality in the portraits of his wife. Her face has a certain light. Spain does darkness best, however.

In a 1933 lecture given in Buenos Aires, the Andalucían poet, playwright, and theatre director Gabriel Garcia Lorca quoted his friend, the flamenco singer Manuel Torre: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ The concept of duende has no direct translation in English; it is an ecstatic and painful loss of self that occurs in flamenco and other arts. Lorca explained: ‘Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya… paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks.’

Perhaps the most moving work that I saw on this trip was the statue of Lorca in Plaza de Santa Ana. He holds a dove, the bird of peace. The historical divisions in Spanish society are revealed by the fact that people on the left still tie a red handkerchief around his neck, and people on the right still take it off. Lorca was shot in 1936 by the Fascists during the Civil War and his body has never been found. His poetry collection, Poet in New York (1930), written when he was a 31-year-old student at Columbia University, missing his native country, is one of my favourite books. ‘Blind Panorama of New York’ includes the lines: ‘I have often lost myself / To find the burn that keeps everything awake’.

It seems Madrid is always awake. On a Saturday night in winter, all generations are out in La Puerta del Sol. The famous Tío Pepe sign has just been returned to its rightful place overlooking the square after being temporarily dislodged by Apple, which brought its old building. Called el luminoso due to its neon lights, the ad for the country’s best-selling sherry had survived the Civil War and the dictatorship. Its garish glow is reassuring.

Nearly a quarter of the labour force is currently unemployed in Spain. At the end of last year, a bankrupt businessman staged his own protest by driving his car straight into the glass façade of the PP headquarters in Madrid. The despair and absurdity of this act recall in spirit Mercero’s everyman, trapped in a telephone box for all eternity.

By Zoe Pilger

Bar in Madrid. All photographs: the author

At 2am in a sherry bar in Madrid, we are talking about La Cabina (The Telephone Box), a 30-minute political horror film, made by Antonio Mercero in 1972, three years before the death of General Franco and the end of his 36-year dictatorship.

In the film, a bourgeois businessman, played José Luis López Vázquez, stops in a deserted square in Madrid on his way to work. The morning is hot and dry. He enters a telephone box to make a call. The door shuts behind him. It won’t open again.

As the man’s panic rises, children gather round the box and ridicule him through the glass walls. His shame becomes a public spectacle; men try and fail to get the door open. They too are emasculated. Women pull up chairs and knit while they watch. A mirror is held up so the man can see his own humiliation. Ultimately his fellow citizens do nothing. His is a glass cage with no exit.

The emergency services are called, but they submit to a higher, anonymous authority, who turns up at the square and removes the box with the man still inside it. There are close-ups of his frantic, sweating face as he travels, trapped on top of a truck, through an eerily still Madrid. He is subject to both total visibility and total control. He is never seen again.

Many critics have understood the film as an allegory of the oppression of the Franco regime. It conveys a sense of hallucinatory terror and powerlessness. Twenty-four years later, in 1998, the same actor starred in a TV ad for Retevisión, one of the telecommunications companies that challenged the dominance of the state-owned Telefónica during the right-wing Partido Popular’s (PP) drive towards neoliberal privatisation in the ’90s.

In the ad, Vazquez is once again trapped inside a telephone box, this time in the middle of a deserted moor. When he tries the door, however, it opens. He walks into freedom. The message is cynical, seeming to equate state ownership with Francoism and therefore privatisation with freedom.

Now the PP is once again in power; at the end of last year, a law was passed that prohibits protest outside parliament buildings. Spain has suffered a harsh recession; demonstrations in La Puerta del Sol in 2011 were a precedent to the global Occupy Movement, but also questioned the value of a democracy that was seemingly superimposed on the old system of fascism in the ’70s, when the PP was formed by one of Franco’s most prominent cabinet ministers. Due to the 1977 Amnesty Law, no crimes committed during the Franco era can be brought to trial; this has been defended under the bogus notion of silence in the service of peace, but rejected by the UN. The law is still enforced.

Indeed, the bar where we are drinking sherry and talking about La Cabina is La Venencia, which was frequented by Republicans during the Civil War in the late 1930s. Then, a ban on photography protected its patrons from Fascist spies; now the ban protects them from tourist blogs on the Hemingway trail. He drank here, as well as along the Calle de Victoria, a street of bullfighters’ bars, where we wandered earlier in the evening and passed a powerful piece of graffiti art: a matador in typically camp-machismo yellow and pink costume swipes his flag in the face of an angry black bull. Over this image of old Spain, a black A for Anarchy has been spray-painted.

Madrid is a place for drinking. I love the old bars with their sweltering trays of Ensalada Rusa on the counters, bright blue tiles, and gaudy fruit machines, which bring to mind the scene at the end of Bigas Luna’s 1992 film Jamón Jamón (Ham, Ham) when Silvia (Penélope Cruz) enters a bar somewhere in the Zaragozan desert, her white dress stuck to her skin, made see-through by the rain. Raul (Javier Barden) is playing on a fruit machine; he hoists her against it. Not wishing to avoid the obvious metaphor, all the images of fruit align; coins pour down.

The film is a celebration of sex and food. I love the legs of Jamón Ibérico that hang pornographically in shop windows all over Madrid. Jamón Ibérico is distinguished by its pata negra– black hoof. To be called la pata negra is apparently a chat-up line in Spain, which doesn’t translate well into English. ‘You are the black hoof’ sounds like an accusation of demonic possession.

My favourite artworks in Madrid are Goya’s 14 ‘Black Paintings’ (1819–23) in the Prado, which he originally painted straight onto the walls of his Deaf Man’s Villa on the outskirts of the city. Saturn Devouring His Son and Women Laughing remain thrillingly grotesque after many visits. The purpose of this visit, however, was to see five lesser-known museums, which are often overlooked in favour of the Prado and the Reina Sofia.

El Museo Cerralbo is the converted house of the Marquis de Cerralbo. It is grotesque in its own way – a Huysmans-esque celebration of obscene wealth. There is a male space for cigar-smoking and post-dinner political chat and a female space of floor to ceiling mirrors, ‘natural’ feminine narcissism and vacuity rendered in interior design. While the men contemplated the world, the women contemplated themselves. In El Museo Lázaro Galdiano, another art collector’s house converted into a museum, my favourite work was a 16th century golden bust of a female saint, her eyes downcast, her expression mystical and weird. A circular mirror is embedded in her chest, reflecting the viewer back to herself. This somehow implicates the viewer in the saint’s piety. Inside her, talismans were hidden.

We also visited El Museo de Romanticismo (The Museum of Romanticism) and saw Satire on Romantic Suicide (1839) by Leonardo Alenza. The painting shows a man with a wild beard in the process of throwing himself off a rocky precipice while simultaneously stabbing himself with a dagger. In the distance, someone is hanging from a tree. Due to the Peninsular War and slow industrialization, Romanticism came late to Spain; the painting is a late parody of the cult of suicide established 65 years previously by the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Notable works in El Museo de Artes Decorativas (The Museum of Decorative Arts) were the dolls’ houses in which the dolls are all dressed up as nuns. They were exhibited in Spanish homes as proof of the purity of the women who lived there. We also visited El Museo Sorolla, the former home of the Valencian artist, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923). I don’t like his sentimental scenes of women and children wandering on beaches, but there is a quality in the portraits of his wife. Her face has a certain light. Spain does darkness best, however.

In a 1933 lecture given in Buenos Aires, the Andalucían poet, playwright, and theatre director Federico García Lorca quoted his friend, the flamenco singer Manuel Torre: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ The concept of duende has no direct translation in English; it is an ecstatic and painful loss of self that occurs in flamenco and other arts. Lorca explained: ‘Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya… paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks.’

Perhaps the most moving work that I saw on this trip was the statue of Lorca in Plaza de Santa Ana. He holds a dove, the bird of peace. The historical divisions in Spanish society are revealed by the fact that people on the left still tie a red handkerchief around his neck, and people on the right still take it off. Lorca was shot in 1936 by the Fascists during the Civil War and his body has never been found. His poetry collection, Poet in New York (1930), written when he was a 31-year-old student at Columbia University, missing his native country, is one of my favourite books. ‘Blind Panorama of New York’ includes the lines: ‘I have often lost myself / To find the burn that keeps everything awake’.

It seems Madrid is always awake. On a Saturday night in winter, all generations are out in La Puerta del Sol. The famous Tío Pepe sign has just been returned to its rightful place overlooking the square after being temporarily dislodged by Apple, which brought its old building. Called el luminoso due to its neon lights, the ad for the country’s best-selling sherry had survived the Civil War and the dictatorship. Its garish glow is reassuring.

Nearly a quarter of the labour force is currently unemployed in Spain. At the end of last year, a bankrupt businessman staged his own protest by driving his car straight into the glass façade of the PP headquarters in Madrid. The despair and absurdity of this act recall in spirit Mercero’s everyman, trapped in a telephone box for all eternity.

By Barbara Casavecchia

A Constructed World performing 'Man Has Named All the Animals' at Villa Groce, Genoa.

The collaborative project A Constructed World at Genoa’s Villa Croce Museum

It all started in Milan, in July 2014, with a puzzling performance titled Speaking Eels at the Battaglia Art Foundry. A Constructed World – a collaborative project started in 1993 by Australian artists Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva – played along with two young performers dressed and made up in blue, an artist (Simeone Crispino, from duo Vedovamazzei), a writer (Michele Robecchi) and a musician (Steve Piccolo, a founding member of The Lounge Lizards), armed with makeshift percussion instruments, and electric guitars with their bodies partly sawn off. The songs lamented the global decimation of the eel species, forced to endure the tyranny of humans, while a bronze eel and a pole, casted on site for the occasion, were displayed to the audience (a reference to the biblical story of Moses attaching a bronze serpent fixed to a pole, so anyone bitten by a snake looking at it would be healed).

A Constructed World, Fire Works Room, Villa Croce, Genoa. Photo Nuvola Ravera. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

It was not announced that the same eel would be the protagonist of ‘A Dangerous Critical Present’, ACW’s recently closed exhibition at Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art – a white Neoclassical villa overlooking the docks and harbour of Genoa. What exactly started and ended in Genoa, though, is rather difficult to pin down. ACW’s practice, based on video, installation, painting, series of happenings and live events incorporating, they write, ‘speech, conversation, not-knowing, live eels, music, dancing and absences as their media’, is not least about resisting the idea of organisation. Over the last years, their practice took the form of the group research and performance collective Speech And What Archive, made up of artists, curators, art historians, philosophers and occasional guests (most of them Paris-based, like Lowe and Riva themselves). Their output embraces the participation of random audience members as well as of experts of various disciplines, each one characterised by a specific language, while it opposes the notion of art as an area of ‘education’ instead of open experience.

A Constructed World, Explaining contemporary art to live eels, installation view. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

And if it’s sometimes difficult to follow the plot of ACW’s creations, it’s easy to be seduced by their music, poems, jokes, costumes and DIY‘special effects’ – a breath of fresh Dada air, with fair amounts of laughter and conviviality thrown in, while knocking down the fourth wall. Michele Robecchi, who recently added a new chapter to his collaborations with the artists in the form of an essay, writes: ‘Curator Sébastien Pluot, one of the ACW’s oldest associates, has succinctly but poignantly described this all-embracing concept with the words “A Constructed World – you have to have been in it”.’

The exhibition was busy with people. Opened in December with a live arts evening, with jam sessions of blues and jazz music, slam poetry and readings, it was then used as a classroom, set and rehearsal space for the museum’s MaXter Program for young artists, where Lowe and Riva acted as tutors. Subsequently, it included a series of encounters, a crowded Christmas party, and a closing event with more music and songs, including an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s 1979 song ‘Man Gave Name to All the Animals’, while philosopher Fabien Vallos explained the exhibition’s title to the bronze eel as ‘the experience of the absence of guarantees’, at the intersection of crisis, criticism and modernity. In the meantime, ‘A Dangerous Critical Present’ expanded also online as a website where the documentation on the show is interspersed with random piles of images, videos, feeds and comments circulated via social networks and uploaded by visitors, so that it exceeds the format and limits of the standard catalogue.

A Constructed World, a detail of Explaining contemporary art to live eels. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

Ilaria Bonacossa, Villa Croce’s director, who curated the show with Anna Lovecchio (they both performed in the live events), labels ACW as ‘post-Fluxus’. The duo’s choice to use blue as signature colour, which in the exhibition keeps reappearing in different shades and media, as a sort of visual soundtrack that eases navigation, brings up obvious associations with fluxes and fluidity.
‘A Dangerous Critical Present’ assembled works from the last fifteen years, without ever following a retrospective or chronological order. The works were distributed in six installations, one for each room, each with a title corresponding to one of the modes of operation of ACW. It reminded me of a memory palace, where each of the objects in a room is just a tool to memorize and recall a fragment of life from the past.

A Constructed World, a detail of the Paintings and Paper Works room. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

The first installment, ‘Fire Works’, conjured up a series of videos and small sculptures whose lowest common denominator was destruction by fire. In the video Le Feu Scrupuleux (2008), for instance, the protagonist (played by Lowe) first succumbs to the materialistic pleasures of Michel Millot’s L’ecole des filles (The School for Girls, 1655), the first erotic novel ever published in France, then repents and turns its pages into ashes – as a matter of fact, the book was seized as unbound sheets at the printer and publicly burned in Paris. The second room, ‘Explaining contemporary art to live eels’ – a parody of Beuys’ mystical 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, on the ineffability of art – is titled after an ongoing project by ACW, started in 2003, which asks art experts to perform their dialectical discursive skills in front of an audience of speechless eels. Originally, it involved live specimens of Anguilla Anguilla, released back into water after the lessons. Since the numbers of these mysterious catadromous fish (living in fresh water but spawning in the sea), swimming for 6,000 km kilometres from the European shores to the Sargasso Sea, dramatically dropped by over 90%, the now endangered species has been replaced by simulacra. Mouth open in front of a microphone dangling from the ceiling, they swim in a sea of blue plastic lining, while a collection of paraphernalia from previous performances coats the walls. Next door, in ‘Atheism & Luck’, a series of cheap plastic white and blue praying carpets with the word ‘athéisme’ woven into them are paired with a chandelier adorned with lucky charms, suggesting a temporary suspension of disbelief. A personal favourite was the ‘Pre-emptive Drawings’ room, where beautiful blue watercolour sketches on paper revealed the careful planning of several past and future performances of ACW, their construction of a disciplined frame for improvisation to take place.

A Constructed World, Le Feu Scrupuleux, 2008. Video still. Courtesy ACW.

The issue of translation – from sketchbook to reality, English to French and back again, from real time to archive, from cognoscenti to amateurs – is recurring now and again in ACW’s world. Recently, their drawings have been included as illustrations in the book Une traduction d’une langue à une autre (A translation from one language to another, Les Press du Réel, 2014), edited by Sébastien Pluot and Yann Sérandour. The paintings of the following ‘Paper Room’, entirely covered by a collage of photos, drawings, notes (my pick was ‘Michel Foucault is a Fatherfucker’), song lyrics, a blue Chroma key screen, attempt a visual translation of the performative experience of the Speech And What Archive, with exhibitions and actions in Australia, France, Sweden, UK. The final room, ‘Crématistique’ (Chrematistics, from the Aristotelian definition of the art of getting rich), offered what an exhibition is usually expected to display: a painting, two sculptures on a plinth, a large video projection. Nonetheless, the painting (Nature Dance, 2013) offers a ludicrous choreography of ass-faced figures; the surface of Amphorae (2013), two fake Greek vases, was covered in blue dots, to obscure the ‘obscenity’ of the porn website imagery attached to them, and the video The Parable of the Talents (2013), shot on the Aeolian island of Filicudi off the coast of Sicily, and interpreted by actors in impromptu ‘classical’ outfits, presents the parable of talents appearing in the Gospel of Matthew as a glorification of profit-making, and hence as the archetype of the rampant capitalism of our times. ACW’s exhibitions often take place in fairly small, peripheral spaces with no abundance of means, while central, rich, hyper-sponsored institutions often play it safe, to multiply viewers, tickets and numbers. I think this says a thing or two about our ‘Dangerous Critical Present’.

By Max Liu

Ben Lerner, 2014. Photograph: Matt Lerner

Ben Lerner is the author of two critically acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. Like its forerunner Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the author’s latest novel 10:04 (2014) – described in its own pages as ‘neither fiction nor non-fiction’ – is narrated by an unnamed writer whose biographical details closely echo Lerner’s own. Set during an unseasonably warm winter in New York, with the city having recently been threatened by one hurricane and due to be beset by another, 10:04 describes how the protagonist – recently diagnosed with a heart condition and working on his second novel – wanders the city with his best friend, looking at art, discussing the past and the future, and contemplating whether they should try to conceive a child together. Expanding the conventional novel format to embrace short fiction, poetry, art criticism, autobiography and photographs, 10:04 is an original and extremely funny book that also encourages the reader to consider the political implications of social and economic inequality. I met with Lerner in London recently to discuss laughter, Walt Whitman and why ‘art has to offer something other than stylized despair’.

MAXLIU: 10:04 captures a world of uncertainty but it’s a very enjoyable read. Was it your aim to create a hospitable environment for your reader?

BENLERNER: I did, although I wanted to balance the way that a novel can both be absorbing and can acknowledge that it’s a construct. I wouldn’t want, and probably wouldn’t be able, to write a novel that makes you forget you’re reading. I’m interested in eliciting the reader’s participation in the construction of the book.

ML: In 2012, I saw you read from Leaving the Atocha Station. Your delivery was so deadpan that it left me wondering whether or not you consciously try to be funny in your writing.

BL:Leaving the Atocha Station I thought of as comic. Literature often depends on the strategic disappointment of expectation. Sometimes, the effect of that is humorous; at other times, it’s unnerving: I consider it crucial to the composition of a novel. Laughter is physical; it involves the body of the reader in the book in a way that other responses don’t. It’s a tonal antidote to the many reasons for despair offered up in contemporary novels.

ML:*At one point, the narrator of 10:04 says: ‘Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.’ Was it important for this character to be a more sympathetic figure than Adam, the young poet of your first novel?

BL: Both my novels are concerned with what counts as an authentic experience, but I think of Adam as a kid who can’t see other people through the fog of his own concerns. He lies to everyone but the reader. He’s attempting to achieve authenticity via ruthless, literary interrogation of his own inauthenticity. Some people think he’s worse than an axe murderer but I have a fondness for the honesty with which he criticises himself. He’s also involved in a very old form of the interrogation of poetry. Poetry is, in some sense, impossible but some poems fail better than others and keep you in touch with the abstract possibilities of language. I wanted 10:04 to examine how you can inhabit all the contradictions of your position in a way that isn’t about dissimulation; it wants to describe the move away from irony to sincerity.

ML:How did you start writing 10:04?

BL: First, I wrote the poem that’s excerpted in the book, then I wrote the short story that’s in there. I had an idea about writing a novel about a guy who fabricates his own archive. I wrote a long letter in the voice of the poet Robert Creeley, after which I started writing criticism about the Salvage Art Institute (an American organization that appropriates damaged works which have been declared a total loss and removed forever from the art market). Eventually, having already written several of the novel’s components, I realized that I was intuiting a frame for a work of fiction. Now, weirdly, I can’t always remember which parts of it are true and which are fiction.

ML: So, unlike the narrator, you didn’t receive an advance for an unwritten novel?

BL: No, I wrote the book then gave it to a publisher. The reason it happens the other way round in 10:04 is because I wanted the narrator to get the advance so it could be spent on his friend’s fertility treatment. The book is about maternity and the second person, the ‘you’ that the narrator addresses. I wanted to mix different kinds of futures.

ML: The narrator goes to Marfa, Texas, to write his novel but works on a poem instead, declaring that he’s ‘working on the wrong thing’. How do you balance writing poetry and fiction?

BL: I always have to claim not to be doing something in order to do it. Marfa was the one residency I’ve been on. I thought I’d be stuck there and have a nervous breakdown but it ended up being great. You don’t always write what you set out to write, so writing can be a form of displacement.

ML: Do you discuss your ideas with others while you’re working?

BL: Before I can write a book, I’ve got to project it into existence. Wittgenstein talks about language ‘going on’. For me, composition is about that sense of going on. I’ll think: ‘OK, I’ve got this one poem but what would it mean to go on?’ There’s the fiction that the fiction is and there’s the fiction I tell about the book in order to be able to write it.

ML: Walt Whitman, who’s invoked frequently in 10:04, wrote for a future ‘you’ and, throughout your book, the narrator also addresses a ‘you’. Who is he talking to?

BL: I was thinking about the Whitmanic ‘you’ – not in terms of the future, rather in terms of the contemporary readership. 10:04 isn’t for everyone – no serious work is – but I imagined the book as a fairly inclusive conversation.

ML: The narrator believes ‘bad forms of collectivity’ – such as the co-op he joins in gentrified Brooklyn – can ‘stand as a figure of its possibility’. Is 10:04 an optimistic book?

BL: It’s optimistic in as much as the novel insists that spaces for the imagination and the imagination of collectivism are absolutely necessary. Reading can make you feel alive to political possibilities so that, even if literature can’t actualize them, it can still keep those parts of us vitalized. Capitalism is a bad image of collectivity. Our problem isn’t that we’re disconnected, it’s that we’re interconnected in really fucked up ways. We’re hugely implicated in each other’s fates yet wealth and social power are concentrated in the hands of the very few. Literature has to look at the glimmers of possibility in even the most corrupt forms of interconnectedness to find ways of organizing society more fairly.

ML: The narrator admires a couple who are ‘always working and never working’. Does that describe your life?

BL: Yes. In Whitman, and further back, there’s the idea that art is work, but not work as defined by the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, Whitman is doing the most important work imaginable. On the other hand, he’s just loafing. That’s the way artists get talked about and also the way protestors are discussed. When the Occupy movement was taking place in New York, some people thought the protestors were a bunch of ne’er-do-wells while others saw them as tireless revolutionary agitators. Art, like protest, is embarrassing for the economy because we don’t know where it falls in the labour/leisure divide.

ML: Why do so many of the young men encountered by the narrator of 10:04 seem lost?

BL: The narrator is trying to figure out what it means to provide care. Will he be the father to Alex’s child or will he merely donate his sperm? What does it mean for him to be a teacher? People tell the narrator their stories and he listens, whereas Adam, in my first novel, couldn’t see past himself. It’s about care as a way of emptying yourself out so that you can become a vehicle for other people’s stories.

ML: The artist Christian Marclay’s video installation The Clock (2010) features in 10:04. Several authors, including Geoff Dyer and Zadie Smith, have written about The Clock. What is it about this work that attracts novelists?

BL: Well, narrative is a search for a meaningful organization of time and The Clock toys with the border between narrative and non-narrative, in that it borrows from narrative film but also acts as a clock. Film and fiction are time-based arts and any work that mixes real and fictional time raises questions about narrative which must be of interest to novelists.

ML: Fiction and reality overlap in this book. Do you think that the imagined, or misremembered, can sometimes be as formative as so-called real events?

BL: Totally. It’s the same in art and in life. I’m interested in the way the fictional has real effects. As a poet, I also ask myself how silence informs words. How is silence felt? How is negative space activated in a poem? So, in both my fiction and my poetry, I’m exploring the ways in which an absence can be felt as a presence.

ML: You coin a lovely phrase – ‘the intimacy of the parallel gaze’ – to describe the narrator visiting galleries with Alex. Is 10:04 exploring shared ways of seeing?

BL: One of the things I love about art, and which makes it socially necessary, is that we look together. When I observe a painting, I see what I’m seeing as well as a whole history of seeing. I feel briefly coeval with all the people who have looked at the painting. The reader of 10:04 is looking with the characters at images in the book. Viewing is rich with social possibilities and frustrations.

ML: The narrator calls America ‘the empire of drones’. Do you feel distinct responsibilities as an American writer?

BL: Yes. I don’t think I have a choice but to feel responsible. The novel has to deal with the fact that American-style capitalism has remade a lot of the world in its image and destroyed a lot of the world in the attempt. On a formal level, though, my novels are influenced by European writers and many of the novelists who matter most to me aren’t American.

ML: Who are they?

BL: I learned a lot about dialogue from Virginia Woolf, even though my writing doesn’t sound at all like hers. W.G. Sebald made me feel that writing prose was possible because he shows how pattern – more than plot – can structure a certain constellation of historical material. A lot of my ideas about Leaving the Atocha Station came out of thinking about the European anti-hero tradition of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson, two contemporary influences, are interesting as writers who move between the genres of poetry and fiction.

ML: Will your two novels form part of a trilogy?

BL: I don’t know whether they will or whether that’s something I’m just telling myself. At the moment, I’m writing a long monograph about the hatred of poetry, which is related to the novels – why poetry is always denounced and defended. I’ve got half a manuscript of poems. But I don’t see a book beyond those projects.

By Prajna Desai

Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015

Early in February, while organizing content for the exhibition display of the Dharavi Food Project which I curated for The Dharavi Biennale 2015, I found termites in my flat. A powdery tunnel had surfaced on the wall behind stacks of books, which had mutely succumbed to legions of hungry critters. One casualty was a copy of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601). Opening a random page led me to Act 1, Scene 3, where Andrew Aguecheek’s famous declamation about beef was intact: ‘… but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe it does harm to my wit.’ In the play, Aguecheek is a pompous arse given to making blunt admissions about his foibles. But that’s not why the line grabbed me. Despite the separation of civilizations and centuries, they reminded me that the Dharavi Food Project had begun with a similar admission about meat and wit, by a woman who was every bit as clever and rational as Aguecheek was silly and reckless.

2 June 2014: Orientation day. A group of women had assembled to discuss with me what the Dharavi Food Project entailed. Personal preferences about eating and cooking were revealed in quick outbursts after shy silences. One attendee claimed not to eat chicken because she thought it to be an indecisive bird. Eating it was bound to make her stupid, she said. When prodded, she confessed that it was taste of chicken she didn’t like. Not eating it had nothing to do with a link between its character and her wit. As it happened, the woman didn’t return. But her account haunted me, for its curious conjunction of gustatory preference and myth-making, and eventually inspired the title of the book based on the food project: The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women (May 2014).

Before the book, The Dharavi Food Project was a process-based workshop that involved live demonstrations of cooking. Its cohort includes 20 or so collaborative projects commissioned by The Dharavi Biennale, Mumbai, to explore the umbrella theme of ‘health’. Artists, writers, curators, musicians and environmental professionals, from India and abroad, were invited to collaborate with Dharavi residents towards developing artworks that were relevant to the area’s multiple health concerns. This two-year odyssey of collaborative workshops has recently been realised in an exhibition called Alley Galli Biennale (15 February – 7 March, 2015), currently on view across three exhibition venues and multiple event sites in Dharavi.

Dharavi is a megaslum: a 535-acre settlement in central Mumbai, inhabited by people hailing from all corners of India. Ten times more densely populated than the rest of Mumbai, Dharavi is estimated to be home to at least half a million souls. Long ago it was a small, marshy fishing village, and in the 19th century, the site of an innocuous British fort. Soon, migrant-run tanneries spawning working-class enclaves for dock workers and other industrial labour created a slum. As colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) industrialized, Dharavi became a garbage dump for industrial waste and commercial industries that were deemed too dangerous to remain in the city’s gentrified areas to the south. Its population of refugees, squatters, migrants and people with no secure land rights, along with some slightly better off working class and entrepreneurial populations, now occupy run-on single tenement houses, makeshift hutments, and a few new high-rises. Collectively they all suffer and thrive in what is probably the most polluted micro-climate in Mumbai. This is the setting of The Dharavi Biennale, 2015.

The Mumbai-based non-profit organization Society for Nutrition, Education & Health Action (SNEHA) is the logistical engine behind the initiative. It addresses public health issues relating to women and children in Dharavi’s informal settlements and employs a network of community officers and experts without whom local participation might well have been impossible, despite generous funding by The Wellcome Trust, UK. The bulk of the commissions, including the Dharavi Food Project, were workshopped inside a building called Colour Box located on 90 Feet Road in Dharavi’s potters’ enclave known as Kumbharwada. This flagship venue – which was previously a potter’s studio, kiln, shop and home – is also a synecdoche for what the initiative hopes to achieve. As ground zero, it has witnessed the eruption of dozens of pages of comic book narratives, ecstatic sculptural transformations of ingots containing recycled plastic, a panoramic sound and light staging of alcoholism and marital health through mechanized puppets, and a colossal map worked in quilted appliqué plotting the sites of domestic violence in Dharavi’s homes. Regardless of how grave the subject matter, the organizers were clear that aesthetic discourse must prevail over sloganeering.

So the event is not about educating Dharavi’s residents about health? The query is justified, given that SNEHA and The Wellcome Trust gain are more associated with health than art. They might as well scream incomprehensible messages through a megaphone on the streets, say SNEHA’s Dr Nayreen Daruwalla and UCL Professor Dave Osrin, the Co-Directors of The Dharavi Biennale, who have jointly conceptualized and produced the event. To them, artworks produced collaboratively with Dharavi residents – that might reflect epiphanies about health – is what the initiative is about.

The Dharavi Food Project took place across 13 sessions in June and September 2014. Eight homemakers from various communities across Dharavi prepared 40 dishes in live demonstrations designed to teach, share and showcase everyday cooking to an audience of their peers. While discursively exploring nutrition, tradition and chemistry, these sessions also pressed junctures between the multiple culinary habits that distinguish but also separate Dharavi’s polyglot world – Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bihari, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, and Hindi. This was their first time, the women confessed, they had actively examined something that is second nature to them. The company of women from other communities was like being at a symposium of culinary experts. In discussing their cooking, recipes, ingredients and method, the women also conversed about what food means in their personal lives. Despite being routinely characterized by authorial effacement and a sense of gender-defined duty, cooking is also a way to express themselves, they said.

There was a consensus of opinion. Fashioning a stage through cooking outside the home offered the women an audience for their art, which, like air, is usually invisible. Once cooked a meal is eaten, and once eaten its multiple meanings disappear, until the next meal is cooked and also eaten. But being cast into new roles as performers encouraged the cooks to move fluidly between the personas of cook, epicure and gourmand. Some identified this as being in direct ideological opposition to the invisibility of women’s labour and its undermined aesthetic value.

The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women certainly celebrates the women who headline the food project. But it also explores what cooking means beyond making a meal. At various points, the project felt like an experiment, because it was also instrumentalizing food practices by everyday cooks to revisit definitions and perceptions of aesthetic labour. I was interested in the outcome of an overlap. Could a language that parallels art-historical thinking applied to the practice of household cooking reinvigorate the notion of aesthetic value and aesthetic labour? When conceived, however, the project seemed altogether different. I went in expecting to document Dharavi’s ethno-culinary traditions but ended up writing about displays of gastronomic prowess which create spaces of intellectual and physical pleasure that as much as they channel female desire and well-being also configure the hunger for art.

By Charlie Fox

Each Friday we invite a writer or artist to create a playlist for our YouTube channel. This week’s selection is chosen by regular Frieze contributor Charlie Fox.

To see further playlists selected by artists and writers including Laura Aldridge, Sophia Al Maria and Mohammed Bourouissa go to the Frieze YouTube channel.

By Xaviera Simmons

Each Friday we ask an artist or writer to create a playlist for the Frieze YouTube channel. This week’s contributor is the artist Xaviera Simmons. Simmons will be participating in this year’s Frieze Sounds in New York.

By Xaviera Simmons

Each Friday we ask an artist or writer to create a playlist for the Frieze YouTube channel. This week’s contributor is the artist Xaviera Simmons. Simmons will be participating in this year’s Frieze Sounds in New York.

By Xaviera Simmons

Each Friday we ask an artist or writer to create a playlist for the Frieze YouTube channel. This week’s contributor is the artist Xaviera Simmons. Simmons will be participating in this year’s Frieze Sounds in New York.

By Agata Pyzik

Daisies, 1966, film still

Some artists become associated only with one work, the interest in which often doesn’t lead to further exploration of their output. This has been the case with the Czech film director Vera Chytilová and her astonishing film Daisies (1966), which now has an international reputation as a cult feminist and Marxist film. There’s no doubt Chytilová’s deeply subversive work profoundly engaged with the intricacies of socialism, but unlike some of her contemporaries, it’s hardly limited to it. Daisies can be viewed as a critical conversation about the possibilities of politics, socialism, labour, feminism, love, sex and the relationship between genders within the conditions of socialism. What’s more, her work generally can be understood as a precocious critique of both capitalist consumerism and authoritarianism, especially now her little-known and fascinating body of work post-1966 can be properly seen., thanks to the recent retrospective at the BFI in London, and the mainstream DVD release in March of two of her films, namely the psychedelic Fruit of Paradise (1970) and the post-communist black comedy Traps (1998). Both will help to situate the-often confusing curio Daisies in a wider context.

So, how was it possible to make such a flamboyant and experimental work within the supposedly bleak and controlled conditions of state socialism? First of all, Chytilová and her contemporaries were a product of the 1960s – possibly the freest decade in the era of Soviet communism, thanks to Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ and the end of Stalinist repression, which had been especially brutal in Czechoslovakia. Literature, art and music all flourished, and a new generation graduated from film schools, such as the Film and TV Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. However, female directors were rare. The artistic eruption of the ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ (which evolved after the French and Polish ‘waves’ of the 1950s) reflected new forms to both realism and surrealism, but in a way that differed greatly from the war-obsessed morality tales of Polish cinema. Czech film was in turn joyous and funny and responded to the absurdities of the system in distinctively bittersweet ways. Chytilová created a critical, leftist cinema comparable to that of Jean-Luc Godard, but the questioning of consumerism extended to a questioning of the male gaze in the cinematic presentation of women, who never resembled Godard’s sexy beauties.

Chytilová’s first two films, Ceiling (1961) and her first feature About Something Else (1963), maintained a controlled, monochrome documentary realism in the manner of early Milos Forman. Yet she broke with it in one radical feature: almost all of Chytilová’s films focus on women and their role in 1960s society before the ‘sexual revolution’, their limited career options and their submission to men and the possible alternatives. These roles are explored both in an experimental and realistic manner. About Something Else is about two women, the famous gymnast, Eva Bosakova, and the fictional bored housewife, Vera. The film jumps from one story to the other; Eva’s exhausting routine intersperses with Vera’s boring tasks in a typical petit-bourgeois arrangement with her indifferent husband and young son. Documentary-style fragments of street realism and gymnastic training mix with long takes of housework; even the sex scenes between Vera and her lover are interspersed with Eva’s exercises, to stress the connection between two women and their different ‘performances’. In the end, the consumerist aspirations of Vera, who jilts her lover as soon as her husband (who cheats on her, too) buys a car are juxtaposed with Eva’s self-efficiency and discipline: she finally wins the world championship. Yet the juxtaposition of the two women isn’t a morality tale: the film suggests, rather, that our society doesn’t offer equal opportunities for women who want to combine career and motherhood. Despite her sporting success, Eva is often lonely and misunderstood; caught in a dead-end marriage; Vera has little room to manoeuvre beyond her petty consumer aspirations. The film deploys various ‘alienation effects’, such as incongruous leaps between soundtrack and image, disrupting linear perception, which was exploited to the utmost degree in Daisies.

Despite its striking originality, Daisies didn’t emerge from a vacuum, but was influenced not only by Czechoslovakian artists (such as the surrealist animations of Jan Svankmajer) but Andy Warhol’s pop art – Chytilová and her cinematographer husband, Jaroslav Kučera, travelled to New York in 1968 and visited the Factory, as they were interested in his experimental film. Chytilová employed disruptive techniques, such as collage, photomontage, animation and heightened colour (Kučera admitted that the abrupt colour/black and white contrasts were partly the result of trying out various lenses). The fast edits and surprising juxtapositions, as well as the contrasting, ‘alienating’ use of music, sound and surrealist dialogue, evoke the work of pre-war figures, such as Sergei Eisenstein or Bertholt Brecht’s collaborations with composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill.

Daisies was directly inspired by Brecht and Weill’s ‘sung ballet’ Seven Deadly Sins (1933), in which the two sides of one girl – good and evil – described as Anna I and Anna II, go through the seven sinful stages. Daisies is conceived in a similar way, with two teenage girls (called Maria I and Maria II only in the script, as in the film they are called multiple names) escaping their mundane lives on a rampant spree, destroying everything they touch in episodes of pure jouissance. They pick up men and cheat them into a free dinner (in an unfulfilled exchange for their charms); they disrupt a nightclub cabaret with slapstick ragtime, and seduce and abandon men. But most of all they constantly eat, consume and, in equal measure, waste and destroy food. Food in Daisies is always arranged in artistic patterns, and evokes the bodies and lives of women. The girls explore the world by cutting, splashing and burning. They turn their room into a place of fantasy. They go everywhere uninvited, but only when they arrive at an abandoned banquet (with the luxurious food no doubt supplied for Party officials) and embark on a final food and destruction orgy, are they punished. In the final scene they try to mend the wasted food and plates, to be only crushed by a gigantic chandelier.

Daisies is as fast-paced as a slapstick comedy, and the ‘acting’ technique of the two actors recalls marionettes, dolls and the exaggerated movements of Charlie Chaplin. Chytilová uses the avant-garde methods of de-familiarization to create a parable effect. Zdenek Liska’s music contributes to the alienation, providing parodies of war marches as if from a broken wound-up music box. The film was very much a group effort, especially through the input of scriptwriter-director Pavel Juracek and the scriptwriter, set designer and director Ester Krumbachová, whose flat apparently looked exactly like the girls’ constantly changing room, like a dadaist collage from a glossy women’s magazine.

What were the censors supposed to do with such a film? In 1966, the authorities considered it an insult to the hardworking socialist man, and Daisies was held back from release for a year, then shown during the brief attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ under the Czech leader, Alexander Dubček. After the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968 and Chytilová was banned from film-making, the director wrote a letter to General Secretary, Gustav Husak, explaining how her film wasn’t actually aimed at the undermining of the socialist state, but at anti-capitalist critique and the male chauvinism of film circles. Certainly, initially Daisies was intended as a much more straightforward condemnation of the girls’ mindless consumerism (and in general, the indifference of 1960s youths to politics) and trying to conform to vacuous ideals of beauty. But, in the process, the film became more sympathetic towards them, equipping them with potential tools of defence – their capacity for destruction. The objectification of women is confirmed by the constant doubting by the girls themselves about whether they really exist, something that is confirmed to them only when men see them. Ultimately, whether anything really exists is questioned, as consumerism turns everything into a spectacle.

The slogan that runs over the film’s ending declares that ‘the film is dedicated to all those who cried only about trifle’, alludes to the waste of food, and confirms that Chytilová directed her critique of consumerism at both socialist and capitalist societies, where wastefulness happens daily – and within capitalism is even encouraged – while official morality presents itself as austere. Far greater destruction is suggested by the documentary footage of devastated cities in World War II that bookend the film. Perhaps this was intended to recall the tragic waste and losses of the war in the times of socialist and capitalist amnesia alike.

August 1968 brought an end to Dubcek’s reforms, with ‘normalisation’ imposed by a Soviet-imposed government. Chytilová replied to the crisis with her most bizarre film, Fruit of Paradise (1970). A bold examination of relationships between the sexes, Fruit slows down Daisies’ exuberance and pace for the sake of more oneiric kind of surrealism. The film is ruled by the conventions of a dream, where people appear and things happen with few causal relations. After an introduction in the Garden of Eden, ‘Eve’ and her husband stay in an abandoned spa, which is next to a lake and stony beaches, surrounded by dramatic cliffs. She falls in love with another convalescent, and the three begin a curious game. They’re surrounded by an equally mysterious group of men and women, and the location shifts between the paradisiacal garden and desolate landscapes. The curious, commedia dell’arte acting, choral, dreamy music and psychedelic images make for an intriguing, if confusing, film.

After ‘normalisation’ Chytilová was forced out of work, but refused to emigrate; she was unable to make another film until 1976. The Apple Game was banned from the Berlin Film Festival by the Czech authorities intervention, despite the aforementioned letter to Husak. Her comeback was Panel Story from 1979, which was a commercial hit in Czechoslovakia – an epic, if highly stylized, take on the gigantic socialist prefabricated housing projects. The film is a monumental, mosaic construction à l Balzac, following multiple characters and their expectations, wishes and intrigues, set amongst the half-built infrastructure of the permanent provisional condition of an ‘unfinished socialist revolution’. Chytilová would find work as scarce in the capitalist 1990s as in as the ‘normalisation’ 1970s, but returned in 1998 with Traps, a black comedy focusing on rape and women’s revenge.

In Traps, the main protagonist, Lenka, is kidnapped and raped by two powerful men, including a local MP. As a vet specialising in castrating pigs, she manages to punish her rapists accordingly, who remain shockingly guiltless and now seek their revenge. Chytilová transforms what sounds like a horror story on paper into a dark comedy, critiquing the petty careerism and sexism in the newly capitalist Czech Republic: even Lenka’s boyfriend betrays her. Lenka manages to fulfil her revenge fantasy, but is punished in the end, as nobody believes her claims and she’s placed in a mental institution. Amongst the shallowness of newly regained freedom the last person anyone wants to listen to is a woman claiming her rights. In Traps, Chytilová confirmed that capitalism didn’t blunt her sharp social critique one iota. Even if her last films didn’t match her early innovations, Chytilová remained one of Europe’s most nonconformist, feminist filmmakers, capable of rare complexity. With her death last year at the age of 85, cinema lost one of its most unique and defiant voices.

Traps is available now on DVD, and Fruit of Paradise will be available from 13th April 2015, both from Second Run DVD.

By Lucas Blalock

Each Friday we ask an artist or writer to create a playlist for the Frieze YouTube channel. This week’s contributor is the artist Lucas Blalock. Blalock’s photograph ‘Connie’ appears on the cover of our April issue. Read more about his work in Brian Sholis’s article ‘The Retouch’.

‘Frank Stella’, 1972, documentary

By Mike Watson

Tuula Närhinen, Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–2014), videostill

Just one day into a recent seven day trip to Finland it was evident that my usual line of inquiry in relation to state cultural provision and its alternatives was not particularly relevant.

In Italy, where I have resided since 2008, a void left by failing state and municipal support has been filled by a strong nationwide movement of occupation widely known as the Bene Comune movement (‘Common Good’), seizing public institutions in danger of being privatized or abandoned such as Rome’s Teatro Valle. Such a model, which has gained worldwide attention for its emphasis on the common (i.e. neither state nor private) ownership of cultural institutions and the public sphere could perhaps be effectively applied elsewhere. In the UK, for example, where the coalition government has applied a slash and burn policy across social sectors, aside from student tuition fee protests, a Bene Comune type movement seems conspicuously absent, not least in the art context. In Finland, arts provision seems generous, if not luxurious in comparison – with working grants of six months to five years available to artists. That said, with a view to Finland’s upcoming general election on 19 April 2015, arts funding could be one of the casualties.

I started my research trip with a visit to the city of Oulu in northern Finland, hosted by the Finnish Cultural Foundation as an international curator for their Pohjavirta (‘Undercurrent’) project, which will fund eight outdoor works across the region of Northern Ostrobothnia (where Oulu is located), to be completed by Summer 2015. In the five days in which I stayed in Oulu I undertook studio and on-site visits with artists Eeva Kaisa Jakkila and Jussi Valtakari, Rita Porkka, Tero Mäkelä and Johanna Riepula, Jouna Karsi, and Joonas Mikola, covering a distance of 650 km.
Over that time I quickly came to see the Finnish artists I encountered as being deeply committed both to ‘nature’ and to a strong sense of community. Perhaps the work most emblematic of this tendency is that planned by husband and wife partnership Eeva Kaisa Jakkila and Jussi Valtakari as part of the Pohjavirta project. The artist duo envisage constructing a wooden bridge to reconnect a small island to the town of Taivalkoski, allowing its inhabitants to take advantage of rural wilderness largely unshaped by human hands. Whilst the public work, which will be finished by July 2015, could be seen as an instance in which the artist supplements the role of the state or council in town planning, this would not be possible if the local and national authorities in Finland were not so open to arts projects. The Finish Cultural Foundation is a private entity largely sponsored by bequeathments and other donations, yet it operates within a wider social context favorable to artistic activity.

Eeva Kaisa Jakkila, Talvi Valoa (Winter Light), 2013, watercolour

Indeed, one might ask what there could be to rally against in a country which enjoys the benefits of an education system which is the envy of the world, and where water quality, air quality, levels of employment and pay are better than in the average OECD country? The answer, it seems, is that in a country that still has a model of social welfare which others either never had or are becoming nostalgic for, the primary motivating political cause would appear to be ecology. In fact, astoundingly, in the five days I spent in the Northern Ostrobothnia region and the following three spent in Helsinki, ecological issues were cited by every single artist and arts professional with whom I spoke as a primary concern. This is more significant if one considers that the Pohjavirta project – in which the final eight projects were selected from over 100 submissions by four curators – has no specific intrinsic focus on ecology. In a country with a huge functioning state, the way in which a consideration of macro level politics and the role of the state is virtually leapfrogged in favour of a consideration of humankind’s relation with the great outdoors is impressive. However, it remains to be understood whether it isn’t precisely the state’s own role in the perceived deterioration of the relationship between nature and the individual human that needs to be taken into account.

The exhibition ‘Checkpoint Leonardo’ at OMA– Oulu’s Museum of Art – examined the relation between art and science. The fifteen artists involved focused upon physical, chemical, audio and biological phenomena and psychology. Works of note included Antti Tenetz’s Tracing (2014), a two screen video installation presenting research in which the artist used drones, underwater cameras and other means of surveillance to follow the paths of trout and wolves in Northern Finland; and Tuula Närhinen’s Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–14), a video installation with accompanying sculptures made of plastic refuse. In the video we see plastic debris take on an almost animate form as it ebbs and flows with the sea’s current, underlining what appears to be a central fear for Finnish artists: in an increasingly digitalized society there is a risk of nature becoming engulfed by manmade clutter – the detritus of industrial production – while the chatter of informational data comes to predominate people’s minds. Finland, with its sparse population (it has a population density of18 people per km² as opposed to 212 per km² in the UK) and relatively unspoiled environment has, again, everything to lose. When a century’s old balance between humankind and nature begins to falter, perhaps it is the government which needs to put capitalist production in check.

Tuula Närhinen Baltic Sea Plastique (2013–2014), videostill

With Finland’s economy having endured a number of blows in the last seven years it is liable that austerity – effectively having become a byword for the slashing of public expenditure – will be a key electoral issue, although overtures will certainly be made by the principle parties to the Green lobby. In 2014 the Green Party departed from Alexander Stubbs’s coalition government following opposition to plans to build a Nuclear power station in the municipality of Pyhäjoki. This followed the departure of the Left Alliance following opposition to welfare cuts and left the coalition government with 102 seats, one more than they need to command a majority.

With the Green and pro-Welfare lobbies perhaps being crucial to the outcome of the coming election, the voices of Finnish cultural practitioners may become relevant, even though there seems to be a relative lack of directly political statements as they are put forth in, say, Italy or Greece. This is due to firstly their preoccupation with ecology, brining visibility to issues which could affect an election outcome, and secondly because arts expenditure is often the first thing to be cut by an administration practicing ‘austerity’. It is in this light that The Finnish Arts Policy Summit was organized in November 2014, in Helsinki, bringing together 520 people.

Organized by Israeli artist Dana Yahalomi, the Baltic Circle and Checkpoint Helsinki (a new arts commissioning body in Helsinki) the conference invited current and prospective cultural policy makers to pitch their vision of Finland’s future cultural policy. Amongst the things that emerged was a strong desire to appeal to private money via, for example, tax relief for art purchasers – one sign of what could turn out to be a general neo-liberal turn in cultural funding policy. In the background of this debate looms a discussion about the projected Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki. The project – proposed by the Guggenheim Solomon R. Foundation – was rejected by the Helsinki city board in 2012, partly due to high cost and lack of public transparency. Following this, a new proposal has resulted, in 2013, in an open architectural competition, in response to a space set aside by the municipality at Eteläsatama, the southern harbour area which is a short walk from Helsinki’s central railway station and immediately visible when arriving by sea.

one of the six short-listed, anonymised architectural proposals for Guggenheim Helsinki

A shortlist of six proposals has been selected by an international jury chaired by Mark Wigley, the winner of which will be announced in June (at the current stage, though the six finalists have been named, their respective projects are kept anonymous). The private project is liable to enjoy state funding (around one million euros per year according to recent estimates), though it may arguably also generate considerable tax revenue and profit, whilst helping to place Helsinki firmly on the international art map. ‘The Next Helsinki’ is a competing competition critical of the Guggenheim plan, attempting to offer – to quote from the initiative’s website– alternatives ‘to the trends of luxury branding, mono-culturization, top-down decision-making processes and privatization of common goods’, again with an international jury chaired by Michael Sorkin, whom will announce competition results on 20 April.

Whatever the outcome of these competitions, and of the upcoming general election, it is clear that there is much at stake as one of the world’s most generous arts funding models is set to undergo changes.

By Agata Pyzik

Daisies, 1966, film still

Some artists become associated only with one work, the interest in which often doesn’t lead to further exploration of their output. This has been the case with the Czech film director Vera Chytilová and her astonishing film Daisies (1966), which now has an international reputation as a cult feminist and Marxist film. There’s no doubt Chytilová’s deeply subversive work profoundly engaged with the intricacies of socialism, but unlike some of her contemporaries, it’s hardly limited to it. Daisies can be viewed as a critical conversation about the possibilities of politics, socialism, labour, feminism, love, sex and the relationship between genders within the conditions of socialism. What’s more, her work generally can be understood as a precocious critique of both capitalist consumerism and authoritarianism, especially now her little-known and fascinating body of work post-1966 can be properly seen., thanks to the recent retrospective at the BFI in London, and the mainstream DVD release in March of two of her films, namely the psychedelic Fruit of Paradise (1970) and the post-communist black comedy Traps (1998). Both will help to situate the-often confusing curio Daisies in a wider context.

So, how was it possible to make such a flamboyant and experimental work within the supposedly bleak and controlled conditions of state socialism? First of all, Chytilová and her contemporaries were a product of the 1960s – possibly the freest decade in the era of Soviet communism, thanks to Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ and the end of Stalinist repression, which had been especially brutal in Czechoslovakia. Literature, art and music all flourished, and a new generation graduated from film schools, such as the Film and TV Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. However, female directors were rare. The artistic eruption of the ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ (which evolved after the French and Polish ‘waves’ of the 1950s) reflected new forms to both realism and surrealism, but in a way that differed greatly from the war-obsessed morality tales of Polish cinema. Czech film was in turn joyous and funny and responded to the absurdities of the system in distinctively bittersweet ways. Chytilová created a critical, leftist cinema comparable to that of Jean-Luc Godard, but the questioning of consumerism extended to a questioning of the male gaze in the cinematic presentation of women, who never resembled Godard’s sexy beauties.

Chytilová’s first two films, Ceiling (1961) and her first feature About Something Else (1963), maintained a controlled, monochrome documentary realism in the manner of early Milos Forman. Yet she broke with it in one radical feature: almost all of Chytilová’s films focus on women and their role in 1960s society before the ‘sexual revolution’, their limited career options and their submission to men and the possible alternatives. These roles are explored both in an experimental and realistic manner. About Something Else is about two women, the famous gymnast, Eva Bosakova, and the fictional bored housewife, Vera. The film jumps from one story to the other; Eva’s exhausting routine intersperses with Vera’s boring tasks in a typical petit-bourgeois arrangement with her indifferent husband and young son. Documentary-style fragments of street realism and gymnastic training mix with long takes of housework; even the sex scenes between Vera and her lover are interspersed with Eva’s exercises, to stress the connection between two women and their different ‘performances’. In the end, the consumerist aspirations of Vera, who jilts her lover as soon as her husband (who cheats on her, too) buys a car are juxtaposed with Eva’s self-efficiency and discipline: she finally wins the world championship. Yet the juxtaposition of the two women isn’t a morality tale: the film suggests, rather, that our society doesn’t offer equal opportunities for women who want to combine career and motherhood. Despite her sporting success, Eva is often lonely and misunderstood; caught in a dead-end marriage; Vera has little room to manoeuvre beyond her petty consumer aspirations. The film deploys various ‘alienation effects’, such as incongruous leaps between soundtrack and image, disrupting linear perception, which was exploited to the utmost degree in Daisies.

Despite its striking originality, Daisies didn’t emerge from a vacuum, but was influenced not only by Czechoslovakian artists (such as the surrealist animations of Jan Svankmajer) but Andy Warhol’s pop art – Chytilová and her cinematographer husband, Jaroslav Kučera, travelled to New York in 1968 and visited the Factory, as they were interested in his experimental film. Chytilová employed disruptive techniques, such as collage, photomontage, animation and heightened colour (Kučera admitted that the abrupt colour/black and white contrasts were partly the result of trying out various lenses). The fast edits and surprising juxtapositions, as well as the contrasting, ‘alienating’ use of music, sound and surrealist dialogue, evoke the work of pre-war figures, such as Sergei Eisenstein or Bertholt Brecht’s collaborations with composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill.

Daisies was directly inspired by Brecht and Weill’s ‘sung ballet’ Seven Deadly Sins (1933), in which the two sides of one girl – good and evil – described as Anna I and Anna II, go through the seven sinful stages. Daisies is conceived in a similar way, with two teenage girls (called Maria I and Maria II only in the script, as in the film they are called multiple names) escaping their mundane lives on a rampant spree, destroying everything they touch in episodes of pure jouissance. They pick up men and cheat them into a free dinner (in an unfulfilled exchange for their charms); they disrupt a nightclub cabaret with slapstick ragtime, and seduce and abandon men. But most of all they constantly eat, consume and, in equal measure, waste and destroy food. Food in Daisies is always arranged in artistic patterns, and evokes the bodies and lives of women. The girls explore the world by cutting, splashing and burning. They turn their room into a place of fantasy. They go everywhere uninvited, but only when they arrive at an abandoned banquet (with the luxurious food no doubt supplied for Party officials) and embark on a final food and destruction orgy, are they punished. In the final scene they try to mend the wasted food and plates, to be only crushed by a gigantic chandelier.

Daisies is as fast-paced as a slapstick comedy, and the ‘acting’ technique of the two actors recalls marionettes, dolls and the exaggerated movements of Charlie Chaplin. Chytilová uses the avant-garde methods of de-familiarization to create a parable effect. Zdenek Liska’s music contributes to the alienation, providing parodies of war marches as if from a broken wound-up music box. The film was very much a group effort, especially through the input of scriptwriter-director Pavel Juracek and the scriptwriter, set designer and director Ester Krumbachová, whose flat apparently looked exactly like the girls’ constantly changing room, like a dadaist collage from a glossy women’s magazine.

What were the censors supposed to do with such a film? In 1966, the authorities considered it an insult to the hardworking socialist man, and Daisies was held back from release for a year, then shown during the brief attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ under the Czech leader, Alexander Dubček. After the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968 and Chytilová was banned from film-making, the director wrote a letter to General Secretary, Gustav Husak, explaining how her film wasn’t actually aimed at the undermining of the socialist state, but at anti-capitalist critique and the male chauvinism of film circles. Certainly, initially Daisies was intended as a much more straightforward condemnation of the girls’ mindless consumerism (and in general, the indifference of 1960s youths to politics) and trying to conform to vacuous ideals of beauty. But, in the process, the film became more sympathetic towards them, equipping them with potential tools of defence – their capacity for destruction. The objectification of women is confirmed by the constant doubting by the girls themselves about whether they really exist, something that is confirmed to them only when men see them. Ultimately, whether anything really exists is questioned, as consumerism turns everything into a spectacle.

The slogan that runs over the film’s ending declares that ‘the film is dedicated to all those who cried only about trifle’, alludes to the waste of food, and confirms that Chytilová directed her critique of consumerism at both socialist and capitalist societies, where wastefulness happens daily – and within capitalism is even encouraged – while official morality presents itself as austere. Far greater destruction is suggested by the documentary footage of devastated cities in World War II that bookend the film. Perhaps this was intended to recall the tragic waste and losses of the war in the times of socialist and capitalist amnesia alike.

August 1968 brought an end to Dubcek’s reforms, with ‘normalisation’ imposed by a Soviet-imposed government. Chytilová replied to the crisis with her most bizarre film, Fruit of Paradise (1970). A bold examination of relationships between the sexes, Fruit slows down Daisies’ exuberance and pace for the sake of more oneiric kind of surrealism. The film is ruled by the conventions of a dream, where people appear and things happen with few causal relations. After an introduction in the Garden of Eden, ‘Eve’ and her husband stay in an abandoned spa, which is next to a lake and stony beaches, surrounded by dramatic cliffs. She falls in love with another convalescent, and the three begin a curious game. They’re surrounded by an equally mysterious group of men and women, and the location shifts between the paradisiacal garden and desolate landscapes. The curious, commedia dell’arte acting, choral, dreamy music and psychedelic images make for an intriguing, if confusing, film.

After ‘normalisation’ Chytilová was forced out of work, but refused to emigrate; she was unable to make another film until 1976. The Apple Game was banned from the Berlin Film Festival by the Czech authorities intervention, despite the aforementioned letter to Husak. Her comeback was Panel Story from 1979, which was a commercial hit in Czechoslovakia – an epic, if highly stylized, take on the gigantic socialist prefabricated housing projects. The film is a monumental, mosaic construction à l Balzac, following multiple characters and their expectations, wishes and intrigues, set amongst the half-built infrastructure of the permanent provisional condition of an ‘unfinished socialist revolution’. Chytilová would find work as scarce in the capitalist 1990s as in as the ‘normalisation’ 1970s, but returned in 1998 with Traps, a black comedy focusing on rape and women’s revenge.

In Traps, the main protagonist, Lenka, is kidnapped and raped by two powerful men, including a local MP. As a vet specialising in castrating pigs, she manages to punish her rapists accordingly, who remain shockingly guiltless and now seek their revenge. Chytilová transforms what sounds like a horror story on paper into a dark comedy, critiquing the petty careerism and sexism in the newly capitalist Czech Republic: even Lenka’s boyfriend betrays her. Lenka manages to fulfil her revenge fantasy, but is punished in the end, as nobody believes her claims and she’s placed in a mental institution. Amongst the shallowness of newly regained freedom the last person anyone wants to listen to is a woman claiming her rights. In Traps, Chytilová confirmed that capitalism didn’t blunt her sharp social critique one iota. Even if her last films didn’t match her early innovations, Chytilová remained one of Europe’s most nonconformist, feminist filmmakers, capable of rare complexity. With her death last year at the age of 85, cinema lost one of its most unique and defiant voices.

Traps is available now on DVD, and Fruit of Paradise will be available from 13th April 2015, both from Second Run DVD.

By Ela Bittencourt

Marielle Heller, 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' (2014)

The 44th edition of New Directors/New Films festival (ND/NF) – co-presented by the Film Society at Lincoln Center and MoMA – did not shy away from crowd pleasers. Among them, the viewers could choose from Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1928) transported to Mongolia, a lush adventure set in the Jordanian desert, a teenager’s sexual quest in the 1970s California, and a vision of Russia’s social and economic doomsday that echoed the 2015 Oscar-nominated foreign-language film, Leviathan.

Darhad Erdenibulag and Emyr ap Richard’s K (2015) was close enough to the original, with just the right touch of local flourish, to please ardent Kafka lovers, while proving a worthy follow-up to a similarly austere and formalist earlier adaptation by Michael Haneke (The Castle, 1997). Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2014) channeled teenage lust, lightening it up with brief inserted animations, and indulged in a close point-of-view of its droopy-faced under-age female protagonist, prompting Rajendra Roy, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art where the film opened the ND/NF festival, to note that the era of movies made by men had passed. Meanwhile, Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb (2014) compressed the complex geopolitical landscape of the Ottoman Empire (as also depicted in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) into a microcosm, in which a young Bedouin boy avenges his brother’s senseless murder at the hands of feuding tribes. Finally, both Yuriy Bykov’s The Fool (2014) and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (2014) used contemporary Russia and post-Soviet Ukraine as backdrops for grim social dystopias, in which love and acts of compassionate solidarity are brutally stamped out.

Naji Abu Nowar, ‘Theeb’, 2014

But it was the less definable films that ultimately confirmed the festival’s ambition to highlight the world’s boldest young film talents. Most of the films in this grouping were highly discursive and open-ended. They felt so full of life – of minute entanglements, fleeting revelations of the Joycean kind – that they produced an almost unbearable sensory richness. Unbearable, because like much of our age, these films percolate with subterranean disquietude, introducing the troubling question of how one is to live amidst so much violence, particularly at a young age. Among these, Bas Devos’s Violet (2014) gently traces the stages of alienation of a teenage boy, Jesse, who witnesses a fatal stabbing of a friend in a shopping mall. Stunned and helpless, Jesse must find his way back to the familiar comforts of biking with friends, and into the embrace of his supportive parents. Devos stresses the primacy of sensory experience – the rich colours and the sensuous textures of Nicolas Karakatsanis’s cinematography, matched with small but decisive gestures, amplify the scant dialogue in a story that painfully demonstrates how we might become estranged from our own lives. Devos conveys poignantly the pains of affirming one’s identity at a young age, after a shock that disrupts the very sense of one’s personhood.

Virgil Vernier, ‘Mercuriales’, (2014)

One of my favorite films at the ND/NF this year, Virgil Vernier’s Mercuriales (2014), is a metaphysical, bloodless, vampiric tale, perfectly suited to our soulless capitalist age. Here the violence is more covert, suggested by two glass towers located in a Paris suburb, the eponymous Mercuriales, which evoke 9/11 and the threat of global terrorism while also serving as temples to vacuous consumerism. It is a sight that Vernier gazed upon growing up, and his film is full of images that are uncannily familiar, casual and comforting as only childhood memories can be, but also threatening, as in children’s macabre fairy tales. The towers is where two young receptionists, Moldovan Lisa (Ana Neborac) and French Joane (Philippine Stindel) meet. The two become instant soul sisters, though their bond is illusory, as relationships formed in youth can be; a fortuitous meeting that dissolves at a season’s end. When Lisa quits her job, the two women spend most of their time babysitting, visiting a sex club, or wandering about the city-maze of ugly, misshaped apartment complexes. They go on a brief retreat to Joane family’s country house. But Joane, always the restless type, escapes the idyll into casual sex, leaving Lisa brooding in the empty house.

For all of its coherent storyline, Mercuriales is predominantly a collage. Vernier inserts television footage of riots (glimpsed at a diner where Lisa is sitting), but also photographs of burning cars and buildings, while a female voice intones in the voiceover, ‘All this is but a nightmare.’ There is then the sense of being suspended somewhere between reality and dreaming, heightened by Lisa’s spiritual bent (her evocations of spirits, her conversations with an owl, which may be read as a ghost of Lisa’s disappeared cousin). Mercuriales is particularly evocative in capturing Parisian suburbs, the surveillance, people, and the marred landscapes of urban desolation, which in Lisa’s eyes are novel and foreign, but also woven into her own country’s macabre folk beliefs and violent past. Vernier does a splendid job of recasting Paris as a place of new, confused cultural and geographical markers, reimagining his city through the eyes of his estranged protagonists. This effect is heightened by Jordane Chouzenoux’s striking 16mm cinematography, and by James Ferraro’s eerie electronic score. And since this is a story about women, preoccupied with female stereotypes, it at times hinted at Vera Chytilova fearsome Daisies (1966), though in a postmodern fashion where games are more somber, or even sinister, rather than camp.

Nadav Lapid, ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’, (2014)

Another stellar filmmaker, Nadav Lapid, showcases his uncompromising, assured storytelling in The Kindergarten Teacher (2014). Nira, a beautiful kindergarten teacher with stoic features and a sullen fieriness, meets a five-year-old prodigy, Yoav. Yoav delivers fluid lines of poetry while pacing the kindergarten courtyard in a trance, usually after he declares, ‘I have a poem.’ It is a state of daydreaming, alarming and messianic. Yoav’s past is fraught with sadness – his parents are separated and his profligate, successful restaurateur-father lies to the boy that his mother is dead. Yet in many ways, Yoav is just a shy, ordinary boy. Still, his poetry won’t go away, and neither does Nira’s increasing obstinacy that Yoav must be nurtured against all odds, his precocious lyrics scrupulously recorded and published. It isn’t long before Nira has Yoav call her to jot down his lines, visits the boy’s uncle, an unconvinced and frustrated literary man himself, and then the boy’s father, who refuses to support her endeavors. By the time we are introduced to Nira’s own children – a son who, much to Nira’s regret, stays on in the military, and a teenage daughter – they are faint echoes of her newly found passion, proving that poetry has been delegated to an agonizing death, in an age that favours money and force over glorious, deliberate thought. Add to this the fact that Nira is herself a fledgling poet, and even passes off Yoav’s poetry as her own in a poetry workshop, testing it out on her colleagues and gaining the affections of an intrigued teacher, and a somewhat disquieting picture emerges of a woman whose conviction can be icy-cold, and who cannot be read merely as a devotee. In the film’s apex, it is left to Yoav, who has now been carried away from his new school, to save himself from greatness, or perhaps just from the mad, maddening chokehold of Nira’s misplaced passions.

Zia Anger, ‘I Remember Nothing’, (2015)

Two of the most ambitious films I saw this year at ND/NF were shorts, both world premieres. Zia Anger’s I Remember Nothing (2015) possesses a frightening Lynchian fluidity. It tells a story of Joan, a college softball player, who leaves class early for practice. Split into chapters titled after stages of an epileptic seizure, the film dares the audience to lose itself in its nightmarish twists. We see Joan metamorphose, wearing the same uniform but played by different actresses in each chapter. We follow her gaze as she ogles a female bystander at the field, and has an absurdist encounter with the woman and her boyfriend. When Joan suddenly loses consciousness, the dreams are revealed as a medical condition. Yet Joan’s slippery identities and latent sexual passions linger, without needing to be explained. I Remember Nothing is beautifully controlled, and its cerebral allure and the frankness with which it delves into a woman’s psyche bring to mind the films of Joanna Hogg, who was a revelation at the 51st New York Film Festival.

Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red (2014), a winner of the Han Nefkens/BACC Asian Contemporary Art Award, takes place on the peripheries of unspecified public events. The Chinese artist may be at a peace rally, a celebration or, at another time, at the scene of a violent clash with the police. He films spectators sleeping on the steps of government buildings, spreading mats and tents, dancing or meditating. He captures their rapturous faces in the afterglow of a stadium’s neon lights, while at other times he depicts them in most prosaic moments. But throughout, the restrictive setup and the amplified ambient sound create a nearly apocalyptic aura, imbuing small gestures with uncanny grandeur. Indefinable, Blue and Red is heartbreaking in its evocation of the shutout masses, against a giant dome pulsing with light. Other times, a sense of togetherness, of participation possible even on the fringes, fills this work with an otherworldly calm.