By Nina Power
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Marta Popivoda, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (Serbia / France / Germany 2013, 62 min)
2014 was a year of identifying and attempting to protect, politically and artistically, rapidly eroding ways of being in public. As the last remnants of the welfare state are gleefully dismantled by those whose only, yet seemingly infinite, source of pleasure appears to come from a grotesque combination of wanton cruelty and profit, I spent the year with a recurring phrase stuck in my head on a loop: ‘there is no more public space, only public order’.
Exhibitions, films and performances that dealt with the destruction of a certain image of the public took on a new urgency. To this end, Tate Modern’s May event Spatial Confessions (On the Question of Instituting the Public)* organised by Bojana Cvejić took on the task of identifying the historical and performative construction of the public through talks and performances that reflected on protest, the gallery as a ‘public’ (or often otherwise) space and gave particular weight (particularly in the screening of Marta Popivoda’s film Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved our Collective Body) to Yugoslavia’s socialist imaginary of the collective subject, and the subsequent dismantling of this subject into a situation of post-communist ethno-nationalist and asset-stripped realities. At this event I spoke with Claire Bishop about the possibilities of the art gallery as a ‘public’ space and whether it would be possible or desirable to think of galleries such as the Tate Modern as sites capable of being occupied, or as sites of future uprisings.
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This discussion for me found a curious and joyful echo in the protest held later in the year in solidarity with those angered by the death of Eric Garner and the lack of indictment for the officers who killed him – a familiar story everywhere. Unlike protests held at the usual sites of power – the heavily policed and guarded American Embassy, Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square, outside Downing Street – the organisers of the event, London Black Revolutionaries, chose to have a die-in inside Westfield shopping mall in West London: many of the US protests had taken place in similar venues. This proved an extremely successful and interesting strategy, drawing shoppers and shop workers into a protest that was already young and buoyant. Unlike J.G. Ballard’s vision in his final 2006 novel, Kingdom Come, of shopping malls like Bluewater and Westfield as sites of a potential EDL-esque, sports-based English fascism, this was the exact opposite: an anti-fascist, anti-police action mainly carried out by people of colour that disrupted the ‘normal’ running of things, that pointed out that the securitised, consumerist ‘reality’ was a fragile, if well-protected veneer, that could tremble and collapse at any moment. My favourite moment: in the middle of the march, a white couple sat at a café outlet eating salad, desperately trying to pretend that nothing was going on as chants of ‘black lives matter!’ and ‘no justice, no peace’ shattered to break theirs.
The Metamodernism event in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk in September was suitably eclectic, with Shia LaBeouf running a marathon outside as Francis Fukuyama gave the audience a potted neo-con history of the world. I spoke about the year 2008 with Cally Spooner and others, playing on the multiple meanings of ‘crash’ (financial, personal, material), though 2014 feels more like the wheels are coming off and that the real, final crash has not yet really happened.
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Hito Steyerl, still from ‘Liquidity Inc.’ (2014). Courtesy the artist.
It was an honour to speak about similar themes with Hito Steyerl as part of her ICA show in March, and she remains for me one of the only artists able to get a handle on the myriad financial, ideological and material realities of contemporary existence.
Come Worry with Us! OFFICIALTRAILER from Catbird Productions on Vimeo.
Other things I enjoyed, in between everything else, Helene Klodawsky’s on the road film about Thee Silver Mt. Zion Come Worry With Us, writing by Hannah Black, Linda Stupart and Jesse Darling, arguing about anger and justice on Resonance FM with Jacqueline Rose, Lightbearing Forms: The Retrospective of Vojin Bakić at the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and indeed, I enjoyed everything about Sarajevo), Laura Oldfield Ford’s Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Brian Dillon’s Ruin Lust at Tate Britain. I listened a lot to Burial’s Rival Dealer e.p., Julia Holter, Marina Rosenfeld (and enjoyed her performance of ROYGBIV&B (Version for South London) at the South London Gallery in June), Laurel Halo, Fatima Al Qadiri, Swans and Berangere Maximin.
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Beatriz Preciado
I read all the volumes of the Karl Ove Knausgård autobiography that’ve been translated so far, delighted by its compulsive banality (refuting André Breton), and I spent a long time thinking about Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie and Pornotopia. I read David Cronenberg’s first novel, Consumed, which I found hilarious (‘so Marx. The guy who forced your French guy to murder and eat his wife’), and I thought way, way too much about revenge.
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