12 M.O.L. 3 – THE BUSINESS OF EMOTION Ashraf Jamal Column

M.O.L 3 THE BUSINESS OF EMOTION – LONDON By Ashraf Jamal

At the Tate Modern book-shop I came across a volume with the intriguing title, Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism. Designed for the distracted reader it was stuffed with pictures and graphs and interviews, but Francesco Garutti’s introduction, ‘The Happiness Plan’, was worth the read. In fact, Garutti, like a skilled optometrist, adjusted the lens I needed to look at art in London.

What immediately struck me was Garutti’s criticism of the lifestyle magazine, Monocle, ‘an influential tool’ that ‘sells the luxury of pursuing luxury – through consumption rather than ethics – as the means of being happy’. Garutti’s catchy phrase for this nefarious enterprise is emotional capitalism. I couldn’t look at the shrine to Rothko’s paintings – focused through a dim light – without asking the question: How are our emotions staged and plotted? And what role, more generally, do museums and galleries occupy in a world ground down by hate and in desperate need of a consoling balm? For art, it seemed, was no longer a matter of personal encounter but a collective ritual devoted, fundamentally, to the recovery of some lost joy. The pleasure these shrines to art were designed to ensure is akin to a drug. The soft lighting in the Rothko room summoned a latent quiet in our otherwise disorienting and busy lives.

During my short stay in London the notion of ‘emotional capitalism’ assumed centre-stage in my frontal lobe, invaded my unconscious, as well as every cell of my body. Art, I realised, trafficked in the business of emotion. This has always been the case. Whether one is looking at Giotto or Rothko, at religious or secular art, what matters is how the drug manages us.

And if Garutti is deeply sceptical of Monocle’s objective, it is because he sees in this lifestyle magazine – and here we can include the entire industry – a calculated decision to administer taste as a by-product of an elective want. We desire what makes us feel good, but fail to consider the fact that in today’s postsecular world – fuelled by a new market-driven psychographic complex – in which the apex of longing and fulfilment centres on spirituality and well-being.

Why, one wonders, should this complex, this alchemical drug, prove to be the elixir of our age? Why should the equation of spirituality and wellbeing prove our decisive and greatest need? The immediate answer is obvious: Ours is an ugly and brutalised age in which incommensurable differences have assumed dominance and resulted in the bankruptcy of conversation and mutual understanding. We no longer understand each other. Our friendships and professional and familial allegiances are compromised. Why? Because hate defines the current ethos. Because the ideal of democracy – a recent 18 th century confection – is on the verge of extinction. In its place we have the collective virus of our age – populism, tribalism, nationalism, protectionism, isolationism, fascism – in short, a monomaniacal desire to quarantine ourselves and to re-order what, from an extremist point of view, is conceived as a disordered world. BREXIT is the obvious trope for this desire to exit-and-right the world. And it is against this toxic tendency that the art world has chosen to do battle. Its museums and galleries are, in principle, democratic fora. What they, ideally, seek, is to connect us rather than divide us. And what better place to achieve this than through the emotions, a zone policed, which can be recalibrated, opened up, and become more generous.

“We have the collective virus of our age – populism, tribalism, nationalism, protectionism, isolationism, fascism – in short, a monomaniacal desire to quarantine ourselves and to re-order what, from an extremist point of view, is conceived as a disordered world.”

Above and Left: Olafur Eliasson’s solo show at the Tate Modern – In Real Life.

This is certainly the governing principle behind Olafur Eliasson’s solo show at the Tate Modern – In Real Life. What the Danish-Icelandic artist wants us to feel – and this is a touchy-feely exhibition – is our connectedness. Against isolation – and the toxicity of a programmatic Isolationism – he believes that we can best understand ourselves by understanding each other. Empathy is the core drive, which is why his products are less about things than they are about the immersive power of things and our relation to them. The transactions he generates are inter-subjective. His works are engineered to be immersive. In this regard they assume the role of a secular religion – a religion for atheists – in which spirituality and well-being assume a central place.

As to just how well Eliasson’s wellness machine in fact is, is disputable. While I was drawn repeatedly to his ‘Blind Passageway’, lining up to re-enter a corridor in which the seeing eye is confounded, one’s need to touch invisible walls paramount, I was nevertheless reminded not only of the fallibility of my self-possession, but also of the gimmickry intrinsic to the work’s conception. Here, I thought, in this admittedly

wondrous piece of illusion, their lay the ageold trickery one associates with the fairground and the ghost-train. That the art world should unabashedly traffic in this deception is not surprising. We are dealing, after all, with the business of emotion, in which it is precisely trickery of such a nature that affirms our desperate need to enter a drama that mirrors our acute sense of loss and purposelessness. To Eliasson’s credit, his immersive art proved restorative, for despite the illusion upon which it is built, it nevertheless triggered core needs in our desperate hour.

In short, Eliasson’s grand solo show – In Real Life – attests to the need in all of us for some imagined and deferred Reality which, at every turn, is being stolen from us. As to whether his show is in fact the best testament to the Real is debatable. I, however, refuse to be churlish on God’s day and am prepared to accede to the enormity of the personal and collective pleasure which his show generates. As to its sustainability – as an idea, as a feeling – I remain doubtful. Which is why, as a counter to Eliasson’s confection – which I finally read as little more than an opiate for the masses – I

Above and opposite page: Anthony Gormley’s solo show at The Royal Academy

“Gormley gives us that which we most urgently seek – our Truth”

now turn to Antony Gormley’s solo show at The Royal Academy which, in truth, proved to be my most profound encounter in London. Here I found no gimmickry, here no self-satisfied conviction of goodwill, no advertorial trickery that convinces one of a given virtue. Unlike the Eliasson show, the promo for which possesses the cool insouciance of an advertorial or some idealised company policy, Gormley’s text conveys a truth that thrives beyond the intentional or ideal.

Body-centric - the human body is everywhere in Gormley’s work – his sculptures are situational and experiential, for he too is providing us with an immersive event. The difference however is crucial, for Gormley’s expressions – and our intersection with those expressions – is pure. The ‘body as a “place”’, is his core fixation, ‘a place of experience, emotion, consciousness, memory and imagination’. We are invited ‘to rediscover this interior realm, the space we each inhabit, through a series of encounters that heighten our attention to our bodies and our surroundings’. The sentiment is age-old, but also urgently current. For what are we if not our beleaguered bodies in search for some

grace, some peace, in a rancorous and divisive world? If Eliasson gives us the arcade and the fairground – admittedly more rarefied and elegant – then Gormley gives us that which we most urgently seek – our Truth. The impact of the entire experience is minimalistic, stark, and yet, in its rudimentary elegance, we are taken, overcome, bodied forth.

There are very few artists, today, who understand the longing of the physical for the metaphysical. If we enter the Gormley show in tatters we emerge transubstantiated. For his is an elegiac art. An art, conceived upon a fallen earth, that has the power to generate a profound state of grace. That Gormley does so with zero manipulation is astonishing. This is because he is not invested in the business of emotion, but in the power of art to heal. This distinction is critical. For as I’ve noted at the outset, emotional capital is the new order for a new day. A day – this day – obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, some joy in an abraded and ruinous time, which, mistakenly, we imagine ourselves able to attain simply by purchasing or interfacing with the object-asexperience which we so desperately desire.

Grayson Perry, Yoga Mat

Grayson Perry’s exhibition, Super Rich Interior Decoration, glaringly epitomises this complex of consumption and happiness. For the exhibition – running till December 20 at Victoria Miro – Perry produced a yoga mat for 95 pounds. This relatively affordable and sly product is directed towards our increasingly hysterical craving for spirituality and wellness, a fall-out of our bankrupted neo-liberal ideals, thrust as we now are before the brutal spectre of global fascism. Perry of course is a wit and an optimist, not one to bemoan our damnation, not matter how acutely he recognises it. His yoga mat sports an arse, presumably his own, scored with the tag ‘my spiritual side’ together with a galaxy of star signs. Literally, the signage is tongue-in-cheek. But like the exhibition’s title, it broaches a bigger question: The inevitability of commodification.

For Perry, however, if everything has become commodified it does not follow that the corruption built into it is wholly bad. Whether this is indeed the case is debatable. As for the bespoke yoga mat – conspicuously on sale in a dealership that courts the superrich with their glam interiors – it is both a wry commentary on the corruption of ideals and an acknowledgement that corruption is inevitable. ‘We are now in a post-materialist consumerist world where what we actually buy now is status around our virtue’. What virtue one wonders?

How do we account for our grotesque excesses, or the ‘self-satisfied placebo effect’ derived from consumerism?

‘Our new emotionalised economy offers a market of possibilities in which the dream of selfinvention has become a defining feature of what the neo-liberal condition offers the individual’, Garutti declares. However, the question persists: How fit for purpose is neo-liberalism today? Two LED’s at the Victoria station exposed the contradiction which afflicts all of us – those in the West, and the Rest. GET READY FOR BREXIT, the one sign stammered, while the other, championing duo-lingualism, advocated the need to learn Dutch. It could have been Mandarin, or Portuguese. But what was starkly in evidence was a war between parochialism and internationalism, hate and empathy.

It was in this unresolved and tense moment that I found myself in London’s art world, seemingly immune to the ugliness both within its sanctified confines and everywhere abroad. Art is supposed to speak the truth and not be compromised by opinion. Ideally, at any rate. In this regard, Gormley’s solo show – simply titled Antony Gormley – proved a masterclass in a time as unscrupulous, as misguided, as dangerous as ours.