Nowiswere Issue 3

NOWISWERE is the word sourced from the sentence ‘now is were’ which stands for the ‘now’ that is currently being marked in ‘singular present tense’ as ‘plural past tense’. That is to say, whenever you say ‘now’ that ‘now’ belongs to a certain past which becomes plural through references and associations to and with other experiences.

Cover commissioned by Young-In Hong © 2008

NOWISWERE is open for submissions.

Impressum: Editors: Veronika Hauer, Fatos Ustek Contributors: Jurga Daubaraite, Mara Ferreri, Veronika Hauer, Jan Lemitz, Marianne Mulvey, Mandla Reuter, Hildegard Spielhofer, Fatos Ustek, and Jonas Zukauskas.

Thanks: Adeena Mey and Marianne Mulvey Layout: Luca Hauer Contact: nowiswere@gmail.com www.nowiswere.blogspot.com

TH Prologue..........................................................................4 Veronika Hauer EF Return upon Return....................................................7 Fatos Ustek TH Pictures.......................................................................10 Mandla Reuter AS Is there sincerity in hollow speech?..................16 Marianne Mulvey CC Suh Yong........................................................................22 Jan Lemitz EF Emptiness in the Post-Communist Condition.........24 Jurga Daubaraite TH Ni Espoir Ni Peur.....................................................26 Hildergard Spielhofer CC Legacy and désaffécte spaces.................................31 Mara Ferreri TH Boer war soldier........................................................34 Jonas Zukauskas

THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image material of four pages, focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future: Is a sub section of THematics, hosting texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires awareness of present, the section will be the gathering of the today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artist Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions, performances, events, happenings...

Image Source: www.jab.de

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Veronika Hauer

Prologue Once my housemate could barely escape from one of the neighbours vandalising in the streets with a golf club outraged by a domestic argument. From my window seat I tend to think I know where these aggressions origin: little space for the individual to remain individual.

‘We went to an opening yesterday night.’

December 11th, 2008.The European headquarter of Bloomberg appears glamorously before the walker wandering down City Road from Old Street tube station. Red, yellow, green lights mark the invisible edges of the building. Entering the reception area, we are blocked by security guards directing us towards the receptionist. After our invitation is checked, our name (well, actually the friend’s name who was truly invited by the company and had passed on his invitation to us) is double-checked with the paper list and the computer until in the end a tasteful blue neon wristband supports our presence in this estate. We neglect the photographs hung in the chilly reception area and immediately trespass the hall to enter the interior of the building. Inside, looking up, the representational exterior facade is mirrored to the architecture’s interior: green lighting accentuates the numerous floors and footbridges that cut into the immense void at the heart of the building.

The centre is entirely empty: a luxurious gesture given that London is significantly expensive when it comes to own and rent space. Touched speechless we lean against the glass banister, thoroughly regarded by security’s eyes in a more sinister than warm atmosphere. Gazing down from the gallery to the ground floor, we spot waitresses circulating among the guests. ‘Food is the only thing I can think of now.’ But to eat, we must take the lift downstairs for stairs are not accessible. Even inside the lift we are not alone, but accompanied by another verbal advise: ‘After you have had a drink you might wish to come back up again!’ With a glass of wine I nervously scan the crowd for a waitress to approximate us close enough to grab food from her ambrosial wooden tray.

My efforts remain unsuccessful.

‘A dissatisfying strategy needs to be adapted to changing circumstances.’ You come up with the idea to search for the ‘source’ of nutrition than to wait to be found by it. You immediately determine where they come from and we position ourselves close enough to the opening in the wall and wait. One by one they trickled out. One at a time.

The source sits in the fold of the bar. Flagged down by our demanding eyes, the waitresses stop, smile in sympathy and feed us. I feel shame in light of this perfect catering: Shame for my hunger and anger about my shame. The sudden recognition of being poor does not derive from the bystanders being richer, wealthier than myself, as everyone seems a bit needy in this atmosphere. More so, it derives from the realisation that I am being fed by a too obviously decent and hence depressingly present hand.

From the dent, kept in a warm elegantly sober greyish stone, I look up again. The offices are lit, as they normally alight the city of London, even after the last employee has left the building. Behind the wardrobe, screens and a white dashboard are being cleaned from pen marks, assumptions and calculations about today’s developments on the stock market.

Three massive screens fill the meeting room behind the bar.

It is an impressive picture that opens up before my tipsy eyes. With the spicy taste of a grilled squid unfolding its aroma in my mouth and a lamb chop in my other hand, a glass of red wine on the table, I watch pale, white haired men commenting on the world’s financial crisis. I watch lips and tongues move, and words being articulated that never reach my comprehension. I am sure the volume to be turned off anyways. Or maybe it isn’t?

Between this source of economic information and myself unfold 6 meters of empty space, a glass front, a dark haired waiter, a bar and 300 empty wineglasses. Ideologically there lay matters of abstraction, engagement and capital between us. In my mouth I squeeze another squid against my front teeth. What does my presence yield for them, I wonder?

I watch closely what these lips try to tell me: In te gri ty you whis per.

Gorgonzola and pear on cracker Lamb chops with basil pesto topping Squid wrapped in bacon, roasted on a spit Courgette-paste on toast, sausage topping Crab pesto and scones Grilled scampi

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Fatos Ustek

Return upon Return* And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did We are living in a new world: A new world that has never existed before. History can no longer repeat itself in grand narratives. It is no longer an activation of social and individual past experiences. We are writing new stories and new histories, establishing brand new grand narratives. The decay is over: the decay that has been announced within post-modernist trend.

We are living in a new world made of new realities. Is it overly exciting or utterly thrilling? Does it provide the new grounds for optimism and hope or does it cause fear and anxiety?

We are living in a new world of new relations, associations, claims, resistances, territories and assumptions. It is a new world, and how brave is it? Did the two major figures of dystopia (Huxley and Orwell) come together in real?

In this new world, what is the formulation of the ‘real’?

The real that has been engraved with the admiration of simulation and simulacra in the 90s, has come back. The tricotomy of its disappearance, its return and its presence came through a sequence of destruction: The Gulf War, 9/11, Iraq War. The Gulf War, as the first one screened on televisions, broadcasted in colour, has formed the ground of the ‘as if’. The patriot missiles meeting rockets upon the sky of darkened cities has been broadcasted all over the news. The audience, who was not living in those regions of conflict and tension, has received these images as if it was watching a computer game: as if someone was playing a basic game on a machine, but not in real. The fact that lives were lost, a civilisation was destroyed, places were demolished, became mere abstraction. As if nothing was actually taking place. As if we were all listening to a sci-fi story from our future descendants. Baudrillard wrote a trilogy of essays to Libération and The Guardian, before, during and after the war.

He said: “The Gulf War will not; is not; did not take place” in three steps.** The essays were not denials of the violence that was taking place, nor rejections of losses; they pointed out another form of reality: a masquerade of the real. A war, for the first time in human civilisation, was being maintained through maps and information gathered from satellites or neighbouring countries. The destructive occupation did not only take over the land but also occupied the social domain. “Life” has been mapped, charted, theorized. What the rockets destroyed were no longer lives but power structures. The actions taken during the war were akin to

Image Source: blog.analogmedium.com

acts taken whilst playing a cardboard game. Furthermore, the information broadcasted through the media was highly reedited and manipulated. Loads of informations were received but they failed to produce knowledge about what was really happening. The distanciation of what was really taking place and what was visually experienced had a relieving effect. The audience of destruction did no longer need to feel, try to understand and learn the reality of things. As Baudrillard points out, the society of production has become an admirer of simulation and seduction of images transmitted through the media. There remains no responsibility of being a social being and caring for the other.

For longer than a decade the praising of simulation and simulacra gave birth to several technological innovations, which defined virtual reality.The theories of fiction simulated, grasped, and anticipated what was happening and what has happened and what else could take place. On the peak of flirting with Tamagotchis and connecting through wires, consuming through mechanical spatialisations, the two planes came crashing into the castles of power in the US. The event that took place on September 11th in New York has revolted the ongoing fantasy of the simulation.What was broadcasted on media channels was not the announcement of Spielberg’s latest sci-fi action movie.

Slavoj Zizek’s series of essays, published in the aftermath of the event analysed what actually happened on 9/11 and welcomed its readers to the desert of the real. Zizek conceptualised what took place in the aesthetics of the political and social domain in the last ten years and reformulated what a plane crash could mean in 9/11’s recent future. Zizek’s reading focuses on several factualities, one of among is: ‘virtual is real.’ Zizek supports his argument on ‘virtual being real’ by the example of Tamagotchis.The virtual pets almost every child owned in the late 90s and looked after not only through feeding them virtually but also through giving love and affection via pressing several buttons. The domain of abstraction has increased its volume by involving sensations rather than only facts and actions. The feeling of the real has shifted through associations of the subject to the object. Hence the materiality of relations became prior to the emotionality of subjectivities. With 9/11 the common

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mourning for the real started. Not only Zizek but also many other writers, theoreticians, artists, activists began to ask for ‘the real’ to come back. Hal Foster announced its return to the domain of arts by his renowned book The Return of the Real, where he analysed and conceptualised repetition as an enactment of questing the real. He refers to simulation and simulacrum in a discreet basis of questioning the potential of repeating the trauma of the real. He projects his arguments on the domain of arts, art practice and the artist as the creator of imagery. Today, we are experiencing a density of documentaries in exhibitions. The return of the real to arts came with the return of documentary practice in art making.The documentaries I mention here, are not of simple information domains but they screen the atrocities of many kinds, of what is really happening in some geography. The return of the documentary shall be related with the position of trauma:The trauma that springs from not being capable to see the whole picture, to get to know what is really happening at the same time the trauma of not taking an active enrolment in the construction of the real. Rather than the fictionalisation of issues, it became/or it is momentarily preferred to receive one-to-one corresponding documentation. This can be the result of craving for information, which can be related to the real, interpreted as the real. 9/11 has not only brought back the mourning for the real but also the trauma of being in the real, which implies an urgency of security and control in Western societies. The regulative mode of laws and policies has been upgraded by authoritarian orders. Restrictions on movement and exchange have started to be received positively rather than as limitations of freedom. A priori acceptances start to cover the skies of civilisations on how to live and what to believe in.

The prejudices and presumptions against the absolute other on the other being an enemy to existing structures have supported another destructive event, the third one in the trilogy: The Iraq War. Besides the main reasons of oil and power, the war is actually a war started off against the cliché Other. Against the unknown and unwanted opponent of Western thought. It is an ongoing war, different to the former two examples. It is a war human kind has not witnessed before: A war on the everyday. A war that does not end. Will not end.

I feel a strong connection between our relation to the real today and a fiction novel by Stephen King. Pet Sematary, also adapted to screens by Mary Lambert, takes place in a small town, with a small cemetery near by. The cemetery is not like any other, but a mysterious one. The soil can revive the dead. It is mostly used for pets, the beloved animals of the household. The story starts with the loss of a cat.

The common wish of bringing her back to life leads the protagonist to go and bury her in that special cemetery. And the cat comes back, for real. A loss is always a loss, small or big. The wonder of the cat coming back convinces a young couple to revive their young son, who had been killed by a

truck. The ones once alive but gone dead come back to life again. But it is here, where the tension starts. Since the ones that come back have slightly changed, and become more aggressive and violent.They have been bewildered.They look the same, but no longer behave the same.

What is real ‘real’? How can we recognize it? It is not at the level of the fact that now you are real and holding this text and reading these words. It is at the level of understanding and reflecting upon what is taking place, right now, in the past and in the future, in the social domain. According to Lacan, the real is a complex set of constructions and the individual positioning does not correspond to but can intersect with it. It is through the processes of perception and evaluation in relation to subjective experiences. But what if the experiences are preset and predefined? How can we then talk about a duality of individuality and society?

What if the ‘everyday’ is mapped and charted? What if everything we see and experience is already pre-defined?

What if we are only living through a set of traumas and we name them real? It is no longer romanticism of a sovereign or evil genius it is the human kind over human kind. The real is here with its objecthood, with its territories of divided societies, movements and relations. Material real has been always here and will always be. What is not like it was before? The way people have related to the society they live in is being defined within the restrictions of ideologies and fanaticisms. We produce subjective truths that fit in the commonality of our living spheres. Our relations to truths have become fetishised. We are heading towards societies with fanatic ideologies. Let this be expressed by the new right in Europe or the rise of conservatism in the Middle East.

Both are fundamentalist ideologies with different objectives.

A togetherness of these two is unimaginable.

The real, which has been engraved in the 90’s is out of where it was, is back in the ‘everyday’. And something is in the air: the real is not how it was before. Something has happened.

Something is happening. We believe that it must be the real that has left, and returned. The worst is that we are more in need of believing in its return rather than to look at how it returned. Something is changing, from the image of the real to the real itself. Something is on the move, let this be the introduction of new concepts to civilisation such as virtuality or let this be the imbalance of sources, for whichever is the case, there is a need of looking at what we produce and what it all means.***

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Image Source: www.best-horror-movies.com

*For this piece, I am borrowing the title from Jean Francois Lyotard, although the content of this piece has no correlation with Lyotard’s text. I have allowed myself to interpret the title as a prologue to ‘real’. **Baudrillard was referring to the play by Jean Giraudoux on Trojan War. ***For this piece, I have chosen the three destructive events because of their relation to the imagery produced in each of theirs aftermath.Visuality has changed significantly in relation to the three events I example.

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Mandla Reuter Pictures

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Marianne Mulvey

Is there sincerity in hollow speech?

Feeling the cliché in contemporary performance.

“Do others go through their lives feeling like a stand-in who hasn’t read the script?”

She asked, standing there in her candy pink prom dress, fumbling with the microphone. I didn’t know it then, but she was quoting someone else. We sat there hushed, expectant, waiting for something funny. But as the speech went on it became horrid, tragic and distinctly awkward due to the palpable nerves at making her voice heard.

In the summer of 2007 I attended the screening of All My Life, 2007 and dance performance The Time of My Life by artist Oriana Fox at the Hatcham Social Club in South London. I have only hazy approximations of the actual event, flashes of funny feelings I experienced. During the film Fox and friends appeared on screen in various outrageous costumes and wigs, performing different retro dances from iconic American movies moving through 60s formation to 80s disco. As she acted out fantasy roles of dancing and being danced with, a smooth American voiceover mused on the nuanced experience of relationships. “What does it mean to always choose and never feel chosen, or visa versa?” she asked as Fox, dazzling in a red bee-hive wig, picked a dance partner from the “ladies’ choice” line up of schmaltzy men vying for her attention. (i) Later in the film Fox and partner performed the scene from Dirty Dancing, where Baby learns how to dance to the tune of Hungry Eyes. Wearing t-shirt tucked tight into bra, miniscule pants and white pumps Fox as Baby struggles to get the moves right until Johnny brushes his hand sensuously down her out-stretched arm to her tiny waist and, after a series of flinches and giggles, she finally begins to feel it. Watching these formulaic replays with wistful enjoyment, I didn’t recognise each reference, but they resonated with something so cemented in my pop cultural imaginary that I knew every last cliché. Embarrassingly enough, I too had wanted to be that girl, making those moves, saying those lines with that cute American accent. Sharing a strange accord with the performer, here were our teenage fantasies resurfacing resplendent and poignant as they had been ten years ago.

When the film screening and live dancing stopped she began reading a monologue, her own voice breathy from exertion and nerves. Moving from the insipid beginning previously quoted, the artist described the agony of growing up feeling surplus to requirements with rhetorical questions and gruesome metaphor: “Where did I get the notion that being me was so horrible?... And when did those abortions and miscarriages begin? Those self-inflicted knitting needles and

coat hangers... by six I was a nervous wreck and by nine I was no longer me and I had already perfected the technique of artful recreation.”(ii) Taking an unexpected turn from the sickly sweet to the darkly sentimental, I was shocked at Fox’s seeming confession; yet it seemed somehow to fit my perception of her, and this display of “artful recreation” before me. Ending with Baby’s last line from Dirty Dancing, “But tonight I’m going to do my kind of dancing with a great partner”, The Time of My Life tune kicked in. Dance partner Sven re-emerged to whirl her once more around the ballroom floor, signifying now a corny acceptance of self, of finding one’s way through the dance of life. In a collective celebration of self-expression the evening ended with everyone joining in: I too self-consciously shuffled to Madonna remembering the burning embarrassment of school discos and half-empty dance floors…

Curiosities At the time I recognised the event as an elaborate cliché from beginning to end, a comical riff on American highschool fantasies of overwrought teenage emotion, yearning for acceptance and love, finally finding the wholeness within to “receive love, and give love.” (iii) The on-screen voiceover, live monologue and dances presented signs of growing pains, signs of burgeoning sexuality, signs of first love.And yet there was a seriousness with which the artist concentrated hard on practiced dance moves, a real vulnerability in her voice as she read to the hushed ballroom. Embarrassing as it seems to imagine oneself tickled by Patrick Swayze and falling in love, the question of whether this was an ironic performance or sincerely meant began to trouble me.

Can the act of spoken and material quotation can be imbibed with a sincerity that retains a pleasurable ambivalence? Caught between laughing and being uniquely touched

by Fox’s work, I analyse the clichés she employs to image her life in video and performance, looking for the potential sincerity in her self-representation and the kind of affective engagement produced. After J.L. Austin’s work on performative utterances and dismissal of theatrical language as devoid of meaning, how might Oriana Fox be queering a traditional notion of sincerity and authenticity, engaging in a flirtatious exchange with her audience that allows possible futures to open up?

Hollow speech Occasionally I slip into a hybrid Californian teen/assertive New Yorker mid-conversation. Most of the time I’d joking, but sometimes I’m able to admit something otherwise difficult to say, couched in a fake American sincerity. Such everyday performances might be termed hollow – but could they offer something else?

The notion of hollow speech I am borrowing from J.L. Austin’s theory of performative and constative utterances. A performative speech act accomplishes an action in the ar-

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ticulation of words, whereas a constative utterance merely states a description of facts as they are.(iv) For Austin the intentions of the speaker uttering a performative must be present and appropriate to the language and context for the performative to take effect: they must be sincere.(v) Austin excludes theatrical language from his doctrine, where words are said but not really meant: “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy”.(vi) It is the peculiarity of hollow speech and gesture, and its always uncertain interpretation, that I investigate here. Despite Austin’s claim that hollow speech acts cannot be taken seriously, I will assume that there is always the possibility of investing a belief in them, both as performer and audience.

How might performing someone else’s words a monologue enact a different kind of sincerity? Can a clichéd gesture be cited with feeling?

Hollowing out sincerity In his book Sincerity and Authenticity Lionel Trilling tracked the history of sincerity through its usage in literature, and significance for the socio-political sphere. Adapted from the Latin meaning “clean, or sound, or pure”, it came to describe persons as virtuous, honest and without pretence.(vii) To re-cite the famous lines that the character Polonius advises Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: This above all: to thine own self be true And it doth follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Being true to oneself is a virtue in itself, but sincerity is also a moral societal good.(viii) We are compelled to behave in a believably honest way, but cannot calculate whether our performance of sincerity will have its desired effect. Sincerity is thus inextricably linked to theatricality: “we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.”(ix) Though sincerity “refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling,”(x) it has become a “hollow sound, and seems almost to negate its meaning,”(xi) denigrated further by an unfortunate relation to theatricality. (xii) Is sincerity itself an over-used sign devoid of any meaning or real intent?

The difficulty in traversing the gap between feeling and avowal can result in an exaggerated and unbelievable rendition of sincerity, in popular culture, high and low art. In art as in literature, the more outrageous the subject of authorial discussion, the more theatrical and spectacular the result: consider Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998 and the ruckus surrounding the exhibition of the artist’s unmade bed with its scattered paraphernalia: used condoms and discarded tights. (xiii) Michel Foucault writes in the History of Sexuality,Volume

1: “Western man has become a confessing animal. Whence a metamorphosis in literature… ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between words, a truth which the very form of confession holds out like a shimmering image.”(xiv) Foucault’s writing on the confession, a reciprocal event of questioning, divulging and consuming resonates with contemporary replications of the scenario where talk-shows and intimate documentaries baring the televised subject’s soul for our nightly entertainment, are so ubiquitous they become banal. It is my hunch that Fox might be performing a version of sincerity that riffs on the banality of confessional culture and hollow sentiment proliferating in the mass media. Mediating her self-representation through clichés and her own a retro-nostalgic lens, Fox’s work turns such banality on its head. If the performance of originality and authenticity are crucial to confessional culture, then replaying a scene from a classic movie denies affirmative biographical access to the “shimmering truth” of another, but opens up a different point of entry to possible truths, arguably more intriguing in their ambiguity.

Narrating an autobiography differently – voicing cliché The disembodied voice narrating visual action plays a central role in Fox’s films. I had assumed it belonged to the artist, but her narrators range from friends, audio borrowed from film and television, and a professional voiceover artist for Play Girl TV. Listening to their oh-so-familiar timbre, I could not help but wonder, were the corny questions and commentary expressing genuine sentiments about the artist’s life? Or did they just epitomise the irony with which we viewers should be watching the films?

Filmed in Marseille where the artist was in residence in 2007, Excess Baggage begins with a voiceover pondering the difficulty of decision-making as Fox devours a box of softcentre chocolates and deliberates what to wear. Complete with the goofy music of a low-budget sitcom, the film presents a predictable image of a young woman in a quandary. (xv) Eventually donning her entire wardrobe, she climbs an endless stretch of stone steps carrying yet more baggage as the voiceover describes a woman weighed down by a man in a relationship. Shedding her clothes layer by layer on reaching the top, free of all her literal and metaphorical baggage, she runs down to the sea sparkling gold and blue in the setting sun. In a climactic moment of pure kitsch Fox bursts out of the water with a beautiful tanned young man whom she resuscitates, while the voiceover shares his vulnerability, signified by the emblematic rescue. Despite all this cliché and thoughtful musing, there is a profound beauty in the moment their sandy faces embrace in the orange light that I remember vividly. When I asked was there something believable, or even universally true in her depiction of relationships, she laughed: “Do I really believe I could run into the Ocean and pull out a guy?”

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Embarrassing moments – performance and denial A little ashamed at my gullibility, I still wondered if the film had anything to do with actuality? “I [never] make anything that was my fantasy, it’s always a quotation… there’s something about removing myself that makes me able to deal with difficult things. It saves me the potential humiliation of revealing my own life story,” she replied.(xvi) However the patchwork of movie scenes, dances, costumes, music and voices that Oriana Fox brings together do not conceal her life-story, rather they reveal her own deep-seated fantasies and desires. Recognising that the narratives we like to tell about ourselves are accumulative, eclectic and always rendered differently, her collage of clichés offers a different reading than the regular autobiography. Speaking of Excess Baggage the artist exclaimed, “When people watch it they see something funny in it, like its hammy or sentimental – but I actually feel that way!” Paradoxically claiming to really feel the kitschy sentiment of the beach scene but having already denied making anything that is her own fantasy, she enacts the dichotomy of confessing feelings and the simultaneous compulsion to deny them. Far from eradicating “potential humiliation” Fox embraces it by placing her own body in a crisis of embarrassment: acting out her deepest desires, albeit as an imaginary character. Highlighting the inherent vulnerability of sincere speech – the potential to have one’s deeper feelings ridiculed – embodying theatrical speech and quoting clichés is perhaps a way of performing the paradox of confession and denial, keeping embarrassment always only at one remove.

Vulnerable speech Not knowing what to make of The Time of My Life, I became aware of my own vulnerability as uncomfortable witness to it. Fox’s agonising reading of the monologue by feminist performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, likening life to an uncomfortable and painful act,(xvii) presented, as I thought, truth testimony as self-conscious performance. The poignancy of hearing her actual voice lent a painful authenticity to the hollow speech, rendering the entire performance queerly believable.

Uncertain whether I was mocking or being mocked, I was strangely caught up in the whole event. Stephen Cohan’s description of Camp is useful here: “Camp, as [Esther] Newton puts it, provides for ‘an engaged irony which… allows one a strong feeling of involvement with a situation or object while simultaneously providing one with a comic appreciation of its contradictions.’”(xviii) Camp appreciation is an ironic position of engagement, “‘the formation of a queer affect; of taking queer pleasure in perceiving if not causing category dissonance.’”(xix) The inability to reconcile these competing feelings of pathos and bathos have recently been theorised in Gavin Butt’s essay How I Died for Kiki and Herb as “quathos”.(xx). Butt describes how watching Camp cabaret duo Kiki and Herb perform their infamous repertoire

of kitsch ballads and darkly comic routine, he found himself quite unexpectedly in tears. After relating the story of her daughter Coco’s death by drowning after falling from a yacht, Kiki began “what I can only describe as a heartfelt rendition of the Stevie Nicks song… casting her eyes over the inky expanse of the darkened Thames, the mood turned elegiac, and I felt myself curiously moved.”(xxi) The fleeting juxtaposition of time, place and perception of real feeling underneath melodramatic expression tips the viewer into a space where a tragic story and its poetic remembrance in kitsch song surfaces into a possible reality, and he cries.

Either we reject these queer professions of sincerity as only ridiculous or ironic, or we allow ourselves to become affected, however fleeting and unpredictable this might be, and see where it might lead…

Uncertain conclusions – flirtation I want to end on a flirtatious note and show how all these mixed feelings might be experienced other than an unsettling, destabilising response to performances of sincerity.

Flirting produces pleasurable and nervous excitement precisely due to the uncertainty of exchange: a tentative offer is made and provisionally accepted, with the possibility of rejection or retraction always hanging in the balance. Unfortunately our normative reliance on predictability and stability often figures flirting pejoratively. As Adam Phillips writes, “flirtation has always been the saboteur of a cherished vocabulary of commitment… it is inevitable that flirtation – the (consciously or unconsciously) calculated production of uncertainty – will be experienced at best as superficial and at worst cruel.”(xxii) Writing circa 1910 sociologist Georg Simmel also described the forms and affects of flirtation, providing some interesting similarities with the uncertain sincerity of Oriana Fox: “the assertion of something that is not really meant, the paradox whose authenticity remains doubtful, the threat that is not seriously intended… the subject of… flirtation leaves tangible reality and enters a vacillating and fluctuating category in which his real being can be included but not clearly grasped.”(xxiii) To enter into flirtation is to enter a state of flux: partners dance on unstable ground where each avowal of feeling is already prefigured on its potential denial. The experience of flirtation is always and only fluctuating, but it touches on another reality, indeed proposes all sorts of potential realities: “flirtation keeps the consequences going. By keeping the future open, it acknowledges something about the future.”(xxiv) Phillips doesn’t elaborate on what this “something” might be, coquettishly allowing it to remain alluring and ungraspable.

The witty re-enactment of the clichéd scene in Dirty Dancing where Baby finally begins to feel the dance, sets in motion

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an indiscernible oscillation between outward movement and inward feeling, flirting outrageously with an audience not knowing what to make of it all. I felt exactly as Simmel describes, “A scale of graduated phenomena [that] leads from the assertion that is really made in complete seriousness, in which only a touch of self-irony is barely perceptible… that leaves us in doubt as to whether the speaker is making a fool of himself or us.”(xxv) Affirmation of feeling is always in close proximity to potential humiliation, leaving us in endless doubt. With one cliché the artist mocks herself, with another she mocks us for lingering on the question of its genuine sentiment, with yet another she appears to express some deep desire.This state of not knowing as a pleasurable and awkward experience is produced by both the flirt and her audience for as long as the performance lasts, and may continue indefinitely.There is something vital about flirtation – it is both life affirming and essential to it – that needs to be kept going. Not being able to explain precisely what was going on, even after asking the artist herself, I can’t conclude this episode with a neat summary. What I have tried to do is to prolong my Campy enjoyment of the queer sincerity in citations of cliché and hollow speech for as long as possible; and now I think I’ll to leave it there, open-ended and in flux. i Oriana Fox, All My Life, 2007 view at www.orianafox.com/video ii Speech by Rachel Rosenthal appears in full on www.orianafox.com/ performance, and in Rachel Rosenthal, edited by Moira Roth, The John Hopkins University Press, Blatimore and London, 1997 iii Oriana Fox, All My Life, 2007 iv J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, second edition, edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà Oxford University Press, 1976, p.5. v Austin, 1976, p. 15-16. Being insincere, saying “I promise” when we have no intention of keeping it is an “abuse of procedure” vi Austin, 1976, p. 22. vii Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, USA, 1971, p. 12-13 viii Trilling, 1971, p. 3 ix Trilling, 1971, p. 10 x Trilling, 1971, p. 2 xi Trilling, 1971, p. 9 xii Jonas Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice University of California Press, 1981 sets out a detailed account of theatre’s fallen condition. xiii “Tracey Emin shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.” www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed. htm xiv Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998, quoted in Rosenbaum, 2007, p1 xv Oriana mentioned that the opening sequence of Excess Baggage has paralleled for some American viewers the TV show Jack Handy Deep Thoughts: “this really cheese-ball but funny show. He has clichéd thoughts, but he thinks of them as really deep…” www. deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com xvi Oriana illustrated how quotation allows self-representation

and removal with a story of fair-well party when she was eleven, where her father interviewed her guests: “He asked me: ‘what do you wanna say to your friends?’ I guess I felt nervous in front of the camera so I got out my year-book and quoted someone. I have this great ability to memorise, so if I’m feeling uncomfortable I’ll just come out with something someone else said.” xvii The speech begins “Do others go through life feeling like a stand-in that hasn’t read the script?”, adapting the suitably hackneyed motif of theatrum mundi, the world as stage. xviii Stephan Cohan, cited in Gavin Butt’s essay How I Died for Kiki and Herb in The Art of Queering Art, ed. Henry Rogers, Article Press, 2007, p.92 xix Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 92 xx Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 93 xxi Butt, Article Press, 2007, p. 86 xxii Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, Faber & Faber, 1994, p. xvii xxiii Georg Simmel, Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, And Love, translated by Guy Oakes,Yale University Press, 1984, p. 138 xxiv Phillips, 1994, p. xxiii xxv Simmel, 1984, p. 138

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Jan Lemitz

SUH YONG

Dunhuang Paintings Lee C Gallery, Seoul May 2008 The Samcheong-Dong neighbourhood is situated in the historical centre of Seoul.The area is limited by the palace wall to the east and its network of small, small alleyways contains the largest density of ancient Korean houses in Seoul. The mixture of culture and commerce attracts large crowds on weekends and it has a modern, somewhat cosmopolitan appearance.

Exhibited in immediate proximity to the bustling urban sprawl outside, Suh Yong’s pictures seem to reflect issues that evolve from an apparent loss of history. His re-enactments of traditional, spatial structures on canvas seem antithetical to the constant processes of uprooting that propel cities across Asia from a horizontal past into a vertical future.

These days Suh Yong is a traveller in space and time, bridging the gap between the rich findings of the past and his own contemporary practice. About to launch into a promising career upon graduation from a Beijing university in oriental painting, Yong took an entirely different turn after visiting Dunhuang, a once significant intersection on the northern silk-road in the Chinese part of the Gobi desert. Dunhuang’s economic significance helped its emergence as one of the most important religious sites in the region. Buddhist pilgrims and monks created mural paintings in hundreds of caves over a period of 1200 years. Until today Dunhuang is a site for research, worship and spiritual practice.

Yong stayed there for seven years, studying and reproducing mural paintings, transferring them into a personal language full of originality. Uncompromised reproductions of an architecture of spirituality, rich in detail, colourful and inexhaustible in the playfulness of their structures. The fine line between replica and original, in other words, the timeline, is the leitmotif of his work.

For Yong, reproduction becomes a way to construct spatial and temporal coherences and successions previously inexistent; its stylistic device recalls natural processes of deterioration. Yong’s means of reproduction remain authentic, for instance he uses original clay from Dunhuang to paint on, a process displaying the porosity of real age. The structures disappear underneath layers of dissolving colours. His own handwriting is preserved from traceless disappearance and complete extinction and connects elements from different eras of the past, resulting in the sustained continuity of the notorious timeline into the presence. The Dunhuang paintings are about vivid continuity, about indispensable knowledge and relatedness with past and tradition. Suh Yong brings back tangible memories and creates material artefacts of a real place that is fictitious in the same time, a place in full blossom and colour in the middle of the desert.

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Jurga Daubaraite

EMPTINESS IN THE POST-COMMUNIST CONDITION* “We live in the ruins of culture”(i) Where are you from? Where is your accent coming from? And then, what could possible outcomes of my answer be? What does one relate my answer to? How am I recognised and how am I not?

Me, London, 2008, have been living here for five years already.

Started with an illegal worker status (in the restaurants), managed to enter the United Kingdom as an art critic, with a press card to be shown at the border, as if I was coming for a few days (with an open date return ticket) to see new shows in the most prominent contemporary art galleries and then go back to return my reviews on the western art scene (I always had a list of current shows there, not having a clue of what they might be; names from the contemporary art scene seemed to be a floating gap in my field of knowledge, I just had to remember them to perform professionally when entering the passport control zone for non-EU citizens, or others). As an eastern European I know what it means standing in the line at the airport and repeating prepared explanation - why do I come to this country. But since the European Union decided to expand its borders in 2004, I have a great feeling of relief and sensation every time when crossing these newly dismantled divisions.

Such a personal geographical leap is needed to recognise the political implications that rest upon the terms and conditions of state for someone brought up in a post-communist country, one that lies on the other side of the perceptional border. Local context here is an important departure point for recognising the current national and cultural (re)-identification processes and new trends. European Union context is nevertheless useful for articulation of recent relations being built within it. Having lived and experienced both sides of the real and imagined European map divisions, I tend to see and name some disturbing processes that mark Europeanization from my personal perspective.

‘Kids, go West’- I encountered my father saying in account for the future. The mode of a runaway, escape, reach, discovery, is related with a dominating feeling in the East of fear and uncertainty of one’s own current state of being, doubled by a relation to the unknown. And here, the West is most commonly used as a point for motivation and referencing. Since the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union those newly formed and reshaped nation-states are lingering on the certain plan to be followed, which includes popularising of the national identity, and ‘going West’ at the same time. It is a decade of bridging East with West in a political representational realm and as well as promoting of the idea that now we can come back to Europe, where our home is.

Arriving at the EU border became a challenging moment of self-questioning. Where am I from? Are the eastern Europeans - Europeans? If so, where are we integrating then?

These are not abstract questions. To demarcate the changes in the map visible processes becomes important first of all because of the certain lack of point of reference from the perspective of the eastern Europeans. After 50 years of being divided from the cultural, social, political course of development taking place in western countries, and being isolated as an unknown part of the map(ii), draws its own conclusions on how is then a post-communist condition lived?

Back then, in my school days, there were still two kinds of history books. One published in the early 80’s and one in the mid 90’s, both were still used as teaching tools and rarely approached critically. It was simply rather complicated within a period of few years since Lithuania became independent to separate ‘grain from chaff’ as a Lithuanian saying goes. Later the Soviet perspective of history had to be withdrawn as rather a fictional view on certain processes and the new one, a rush-rewritten history reader that was taken for real. (iii) What is then the current language of replacing the past?

A concern with the past and with memory has primarily touched upon self-perception and cultural heritage. Just as the alienation of certain history elements started with the destruction of its cultural artefacts (soviet monuments, literature, art), a whole discussion on the relation society has with its history could be traced in its attitudes towards representation.

The soviet mechanisms of erasing the past used in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union undermined any remains of independence, freedom, democracy and democratic movements in the history of all those countries included into the new state of the USSR since 1941.Therefore, it generously created a persistent gap in the self-perception of the post-communist subject. What should replace the voided parts of history, tradition and culture? From what source of legitimacy is the new history reader written? The first years of Lithuanian independence were marked by confusion, collapse of old values and obscurity of the new ones.The Western example’s promise of democracy marked the inescapable processes of the transformation in post-communist society suffering from the self-prevented discursive thinking about soviet past as ours, and acceptance of its consequences. A radical decline of previous two ‘lost’ generations (as sociologists count during 50 years of occupation) played a significant role in constructing a new identity that was imported and imitated. Therefore arrival to the period of transition now could be characterised by a series of imbalances. Welcomed to the European family imitating Europeanism the post soviet subject constantly has to revisit its state of being because of a lack of appropriate categories in the new valid system of meanings. No doubt, this old-new identity construction is fuelled by euphoria of integration into the European Union. How does lost in integration look? Legitimacy

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and recognition of eastern European as ‘not’ being eastern European has the language of mimicking and of silencing its authenticity. The urge to become European is also seen in the favour to drop mildly differentiating geopolitical prefix “eastern” in order to become a more equal member of the community overnight(iv). It deals with issues of memory and forgetting and where that authenticity is. Seeking to establish a recognisable identity one articulates itself as something to be filled with newness, therefore asserting being the same (meaning European) but not quite the same, at the same time. And a reconsidering of the historical processes does not provide the new member of the EU with one answer for the question- where its home is Although official political circumstances are rapidly changing, the obscurity and uncertainty that preoccupied the minds of citizens during the first years of independence in the new eastern European states still marks todays struggles of the post-communist subject. Soviet modes of relating to the state, law, society or other citizens are persistent and point to a certain lack of reason and disbelieve in changes. If communism as a time of erasure and oppression of national culture is now cut off and declared as radical negativity, how does a subject of such historical narrative “rise from ruin, emerge from non-existence”?(v) A regime that was based on utopian ideology produced a subject, commonly named homo (post)-sovieticus: fearful, conformist, unconfident disbeliever that inhabited and later inherited such pejorative attributes. Therefore, the Western democracy promise flown in together with the plan to join the European Union came over as a lid preventing real (or radical) changes in a mentality of the post-communist subject. The very need to get rid of communism, hence the future orientation and promises, the guarantees for true future pertaining the ambiguous ‘after’ characterises a post-communist present.The concept of democracy then is perceived as another rule and accommodated parallel to soviet habits. It is important to pay attention here to the creation of the void: in a way one changes trajectory of reference due to a new destiny, forcefully voiding still present significants of the past.

“Post-communism If I had to select a metaphor for Romania today, then I would choose that great hole in the center of Bucharest. It has been there for months, as wide as the sidewalk and forcing people into dangerous maneuvers.This hole is right in front of a shop window with a tie that costs two average monthly salaries. No one knows who dug the hole, or why and when, nor who will fill it in again and who will be made responsible for it. Nobody complains. We all just look at the ground and watch our step, taking care not to break our necks. It doesn’t matter, the tie is not very cool anyway.”

Dan Perjovschi (vi)

i Political figure’s Vytautas Landzbergis phrase describing the concerns and hopes of Lithuania after gaining the independence. ii Minister of Foreign Affairs of Island on Lithuanian TV interview (2008) said: “We did not know of the existence of Baltic states in the Soviet Union, as they were so tiny.” (The population of Lithuania is 3.5 million, similarly in Latvia and Estonia) iii I personally remember about four different history lesson readers appearing each year from around 1992. iv Edit Andras (2005).“Blind Spot of the New Critical Theory,Notes on the Theory of Self Colonization”, European Influenza. v Rasa Balockaite (2008). “Lithuania in Europe. Europe in Lithuania”.

Eurozine vi Throughout the text I will include not necessary relevant, in a straightforward sense, parts from Dan Perjovschi work Key Words in the New Europe (2005), due to its matter of subject - keywords as ironic illustrations, definitions. Published in The New Europe. Culture of Mixing and Politics of Representation. * Jurga Daubaraite’s text consists of three parts. Part two and three will be published in issue 4 and 5.

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Hildegard Spielhofer NI ESPOIR NI PEUR

NI ESPOIR NI PEUR “N’espoir ne peur” is the original phrase in old french, stitched on a tapestry called “Trois Couronnements” (three coronations) located in the cathedral of St. Etienne in Sens, France. The tapestry was a present of Charles de Bourbon, archbishop of Lyon, in the 15th century.

NEITHER HOPE NOR FEAR Hope and fear is neither a duality nor a polarity. Hope doesn’t suspend fear and hope doesn’t complement fear.

Hope is an illusion, because hope aims at the future. Fear paralyzes the viability (Lebensfähigkeit), for example the fear of death. Living without hope and fear is living right now.

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Mara Ferreri

Legacy and désaffecté spaces: on documenting and acting in contexts of conflictive urban developments Reflections on Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage by Winstan Whitter The notions of cultural legacy and heritage usually denote a transmission of tangible or intangible cultural objects(i) along a chronological line from one generation to another. In this view the value of such “legacy” follows an accretive model, resulting from the accumulation of histories read as constitutive of a present cultural identity. This commonly shared understanding can easily offer an interpretative framework for two recent documentaries by filmmaker Winstan Whitter on the famous music venue “The Four Aces Club” in Dalston: Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage (2008)(ii), recently presented, respectively, at the British Film Institute and at This is Not a Gateway Festival.(iii) The first, shot over a period of more than eight years, followed and documented the many histories of “The Four Aces Club” and of Dalston as an area at large during the so-called Windrush Era, the first large migratory wave of West Indians to Britain. During the research for the Legacy, Whitter’s interests in the space brought him to encounter the lawyer Bill Parry-Davies and Open Dalston(iv), and their campaign to save the building from Hackney Council’s development plans. Their decision to join forces has become the subject of the second documentary, a sequel to the first, although with the remarkably different urge of documenting a struggle in the making.

Opening a brief historical parenthesis, “The Four Aces Club” used to occupy part of a large building conceived at the end of the 19th Century as a circus, the “Dalston Coliseum”.

The place was later to become a Victorian variety theatre, a cinema in the 1920s, subsequently undergoing an incredible variety of functional metamorphoses, hosting several live music venues and clubs, even a car park and a restaurant. In 1966, “The Four Aces Club” was founded by Newton Dunbar and was to remain active, under different guises, until the 1990s.Whitter’s personal involvement with the club brought him to privilege the Four Aces narrative thread, leading him to unravel, visually and aurally, over three decades of activity in the venue.

The film is set to document the importance of the club as an incubator for live West Indian music, soul, reggae and ska, and for dub sound system culture as a vehicle for underground evaluation and transmission of new records coming from abroad, at that time ignored by mainstream radio. The variety of the venue’s musical scene is evoked throughout the film by a choral arrangement of interviews, which at times come to consist solely of rhythmical flow of names of bands, lyrics and live musicians, who attended, performing or were simply loosely connected to it.

From the names of famous reggae singers, such as Desmond

Dekker, to the first generation of British-born West-Indians, the choir of voices reveals a complex combination of music and identity struggles, drawing from the symbols and contents of the Rastafari movement and, later, subjected to the need to come up with its second-generation, “British” version. At the same time, there were also the late 1960s and 1970s marches, the strikes, politics taken to the streets, the struggle for equal rights for black citizens, the problem of housing, and the lyrics would reflect and refract all of this, as stressed by many interviewees in what was perceived as a momentous melding of music and political awareness. And here is where the idea of a legacy begins to appear like the superimposition of a fixed identity over something much more fluid and complex.

Although Whitter’s visual and aural editing might be read as an attempt to compose a seamless collective entity, after watching both films one is left with a strong impression of complex heterogeneity and with a suspicion towards the idea of a coherent cultural legacy constituted by such a disparate assemblage. Asked to describe “The Four Aces Club”, one would probably be driven to recall the incongruous list of trajectories and elements that populated it: live music, fried chicken, sound systems, dub sound, out-of-place decaying 1920s decorations, musical waves, political demonstrations, migratory recursives, the Rastafari movement in London, struggles for identity and an emancipation from it; a workers’ neighbourhood, dancing music, and, of course, people: walking in, talking, dancing, singing, drinking, listening, meeting up, fleeing from the police’s raids... a 30-year-long intensity, with various peaks, intensifications and declines, until it became abandoned.

Trying to make sense of this impression to a francophone friend, I was told that to describe an abandoned space in French, one could employ the adjective dèsaffectè. And in truth these places can be said to become “dis-affected”, turning into spaces of disaffection, as dissatisfaction and withdrawal of support, but also, with a twist, as spaces where affect plays only a negative role, as a force of detachment and of subsidence of intensity. With the decay of “The Four Aces Club”, the function of the building and its importance receded, slowly, until a lawyer and a growing number of concerned inhabitants gathered and projected new desires upon it.

Moving away from the idea of cultural identities and cultural legacy, it could be useful to think about spaces and subjects in terms of what Nigel Thrift calls “geographies of concern”: territories fleetingly defined by lines of movement that carry the interest of “vast numbers of bodies and last for years” or for a few days, passing “in to and out of existence in very short timescales in large or very restricted spaces”(v). Focusing on intensities and concerns, it would become crucial to reverse the common understanding of legacy as something handed down from the past and to concentrate, instead, on the idea of heritage and on the process of inheriting.While a legacy is “left” to the present, a heritage has its origin in the movement of those who inherit – that is,

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Image Source: http://opendalston.blogpress.com

retroactively, from the present toward an allegedly identifiable and bounded “past”.

To return to Save Our Heritage, the wish to preserve the “Dalston Coliseum” became central to the inhabitants’ campaign for better urban developments in Dalston. The possibility to save the building from destruction was turned into the focus of a series of actions against ruthless development plans, proposed by Hackney Council under the push of the construction of new transport infrastructures between the centre of the city and the 2012 Olympic site. (vi) It therefore becomes apparent how the club and the building were, once again, invested with affectivity. Open Dalston and several independent attempts to action, which included squatting part of the building, belong to what could be seen as a new wave of intensification in the relation between local inhabitants and spaces.

Open Dalston is clearly not about preserving a legacy, but about building according to the needs of the inhabitants. As it is clearly stated in its mission: “OPEN’s objects are to promote excellence in the quality of the built environment, the provision of transportation and the provision of amenities, and to ensure that changes to these have proper regard to the needs of residents and businesses and the maintenance of a sustainable residential and business community.”(vii)

And here it can be argued that the affective trajectory of the old theatre and the club has fully shown its incompatibility with a static notion of legacy as the generational transmission of a cultural identity.

The alleged value of this particular space in Dalston cannot be flattened to a vague nostalgia for a black and white photo of a club, nor appealing to a cultural identity. Any attempt to define such a legacy would incur in the limitations of drawing a line of exclusion that cannot represent complex movements of concentration and dispersal of concerns and desires. Beyond the notion of space as a material container of bodies, spaces are not only socially produced, but themselves produce subjectivities, which can be thought of as “lines or fields of concernful[sic] and affective interaction taking place in time”.(viii) Appealing to the preservation of a historic site, a territory of belonging is delineated around it, on the basis of a default assimilation of current inhabitants and present “cultural inheritors”. An affective approach to spaces as geographies of concern, on the contrary, could present a more accurate depiction of the processes at work around collectively produced spaces, without the need to individuate a “cultural identity” to be preserved.

In this sense, both Legacy in the Dust and Save Our Heritage, without attempting to reconstruct a coherent and linear past, succeed in actively engaging with the affective production of subjects and spaces simultaneously. As in the passage from “legacy” to “heritage”, it can be argued that the parabola of the two films taken together eventually comes to acknowledge the contingent and fluid nature of such a production. From the standpoint of an affective theory of subjects and spaces, there should be no need to seek a genealogical legitimisation for the desires of present inhabitants.

The actions and affective intensities stirred by a grass-root movement such as Open Dalston already constitute an event of relational intensification: the only force that should really matter in any attempt to regenerate already existing urban spaces. i For the UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00002 ii See http://thefouracesclub.com/ iii Presented at the British Film Institute on Friday 28th November 2008, see http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/legacy_in_the_dust_janet_kay_and_freetown_live and at This is Not A Gateway Festival on the 25th October 2008, see http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/ iv See http://opendalston.blogspot.com/ v Thrift, Nigel, “I Just Don’t Know What Got Into Me: Where is The Subject?”, Subjectivity, 22, 2008, p. 85. vi See http://opendalston.blogspot.com/ vii Ibid. vii Thrift, ibid.

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Image Source: http://opendalston.blogpress.com

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Jonas Zukauskas Boer war soldier

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The Illustrated London News, 10 November 1900, Illustration showing Colonel (later General) Sir Redvers Henry Buller (1839-1908) (centre, on horse) rescuing Captain D’Arcy during a skirmish with Zulu warriors on Inhlobane Mountain, 1879.

Original Boer war memorial statue, depicting an infantryman in the British Army uniform used in the war between 1899 and 1902 holding a rifle in the advance position, was unveiled by General Sir Redvers Henry Buller in 1905. Statue was stolen November 2006.

In August 2007 Nuneaton and Bedworth borough council announced sculpture commission, to replace it with accurate replica, and announced £50,000 public appeal to fund replacement.

I responded to call for submission by remaking sculpture in smaller scale sketch following the photographs provided by council. Unfortunately I was refused opportunity to undertake the commission; sculptor’s Alan B Herriot’s work was chosen, and was unveiled October 2008, back on original plinth.

My plot was, if given opportunity to undertake this commission, was to research and document conditions under which is possible to remake this monument a hundred years after it was erected. Why local people see it as manifestation of their patriotism, is there any critique towards such reconstruction, is there any change in Nuneaton public opinion towards atrocities of Boer wars.

Emily Hobhouse visited Boer war British concentration camps in 1901, that were unprecedented in history, she discovered that third of camps Boer and African inmates died of starvation and disease mostly women and children.

nowiswere is open for submissions the deadline for the next issue will be the 17th of march 2009 please send your contribution to: nowiswere@gmail.com