Volume 8 Issue 11 · £8 · Spring 2017 · The Gossip Issue
White lies
Isobella wears Dior in Laure Prouvost’s radical vision. When perception trumps reality, what are the politics of gossip?
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Editor’s letter Bring the magazine to life: how to use the Fashion Scan app. Front
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Gossip protocols: systems of dress and means of communication. Information is echoed, mirrored and repeated as rumour travels. Flash Fiction The Situation Room: an excerpt from the novelist and academic John Keene’s forthcoming work, Wound. Radio Tank Mature poets steal: Yohann Koshy is a journalist based in London. José Luis Pescador is an illustrator based in Mexico. Features
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A common ear: Edward Siddons is a journalist and researcher who has written for Newsweek and the Guardian, among others. Globalisation’s crisis: Nesrine Malik is a columnist and political analyst based in London. She grew up in North Africa and the Middle East and writes for the Guardian, among other publications.
Alternative facts: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist and the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (2015), a book about the global passport market. Becky with the good hair: a senior lecturer in contemporary culture at King’s College London, Clare Birchall is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006). Impotent virility: Charles Mudede is a writer, filmmaker and cultural critic who has written for the Stranger, the New York Times, Ctheory and e-flux Journal.
100 Erotic exposure: Jesse Barron has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vice, Bookforum, and other publications. He lives in New York. 106 Witch-hunt: Hannah Black is an artist and writer who lives in Berlin.
The novel in the age of Gawker: a lecturer on the Expository Writing Program at New York University, Geoff Shullenberger is a scholar of Latin American and comparative literature,whose writing has appeared in Dissent, Jacobin, the New Inquiry, among other publications. 126 Based on a true story: Duncan Campbell is a veteran crime writer and author. He was senior correspondent for the Guardian and is the author of We’ll All Be Murdered In Our Beds!. 118
Curated pages
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Something to gossip about: by Christabel Stewart. Juliette Blightman is an artist who lives and works in Berlin.
200 Real estate: photography by Olgaç Bozalp, styling by Bobby Hook 214 The line of beauty: the Armani woman photographed by Sofie Middernacht and Maarten Alexander, with styling by Nobuko Tannawa
Fashion feature
160 The big blue: the brave new world of denim. Featuring: Levi’s, Tortoise Jeans, Blackhorse Lane Ateliers, Hannah Jinkins, Calvin Klein Jeans, Goldsign, Endrime, Rosella May and Faustine Steinmetz. Words by Tamsin Blanchard, photography by Joyce Ng, styling by Ib Kamara. 112
220 A word in your shell-like: photography by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie, styling by Hamish Wirgman
Fashion Chew this over: photography by Joanna McClure, styling by Haidee Findlay-Levin 230 The lives of others: photography by Estelle Hanania, styling by Benoît Béthume 248 Herland: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s new conception for Dior. Laure Prouvost is a Turner Prize-winning artist who makes installations involving video to explore truth and fiction.
144 Revolution revisited: Alessandro Michele’s vision of Gucci. Sarah Dobai is an artist who has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and America. 174 Rite of spring: photography by Joanna Piotrowska, styling by Nobuko Tannawa 190 That cold day in the park: photography by June Canedo, styling by Tess Herbert
265 Talk Kelly Reichardt, Omer Fast, Meredith Etherington-Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Ashish Gupta, Emily Witt, Ezra Rubin, Arne Svenson, Rebecca Toman and Will Rebein. 286 Stockists and Subscriptions Mirror, mirror 288 Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger
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Gossip protocols: systems of dress and means of communication. Information is echoed, mirrored and repeated as rumour travels Gossip-based algorithms mirror the way that information spreads in human social networks, they function like rumours passing from computer to computer. All of Luke’s clothes are by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. He wears glasses by Prada Eyewear. All of Emily’s clothes are by Jil Sander and she wears shoes by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood.
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The concept of gossip communication can be illustrated by the analogy of office workers spreading rumours. All of Emily’s clothes are by Maje. She wears an earring by Repossi.
joseph-fashion.com
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Let’s say that every hour the office workers congregate around the water cooler. Each employee pairs off with another, chosen at random, to share the latest gossip. On this page, Emily wears a hat and jacket by Moncler Gamme Rouge, trousers by Tommy Hilfiger and shoes by Marco de Vincenzo. Opposite, Luke wears a hat by Acne Studios, a shirt by Maison Margiela, trousers by Lanvin and boots by Our Legacy.
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At the start of the day, Luke, whose clothes, shoes and bag are by Balenciaga, starts a new rumour: he says to Emily that he believes that Charlie dyes his moustache.
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At the next meeting, Emily, whose clothes are by Versace, tells Dave, while Luke repeats the idea to Eve.
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After each water-cooler rendezvous, the number of individuals who have heard the rumour roughly doubles (though this does not account for gossiping twice to the same person; perhaps Emily tries to tell the story to Frank, only to find that Frank already heard it from Luke). Emily wears a shirt by MSGM, a belt by Prada and trousers by Tommy Hilfiger. All of Luke’s clothes and his shoes are by MSGM.
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The power of gossip lies in the robust spread of information. Even if Fred had trouble understanding Luke, who is distracted by his top by Raf Simons, he will probably soon run into someone else and can learn the news that way. He wears trousers by Lanvin.
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Computer systems typically implement this type of protocol with a form of random “peer selection”: with a given frequency, each machine picks another machine at random and shares any “hot” rumours. All of Emily’s clothes and her bag are by Marni.
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Gossip has several attractive properties for a computing system: simplicity, speed, robustness, and a lack of central control and bottlenecks. Emily wears a top and trousers by Byblos, a shirt by Equipment and shoes by Marni.
S U P E R M A N A N D A L L R E L AT E D C H A R A C T E R S A N D E L E M E N T S © & ™ D C ( S 1 6 )
F E A R L E S S LY C R E AT I V E
@ I C E B E RG O F F I C I A L
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Fundamentally, gossip protocols function on the basis that reliable communication is not assumed. All of Luke’s clothes and his shoes are by Lanvin. His keyring is by MSGM and he wears his own socks.
redemption.com
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Thus, we should emphasise that gossip protocols represent a departure from “classical” approaches in distributed computing where correctness and reliability were the top priorities and performance (especially speed and responsiveness) was secondary. All of Emily’s clothes are by Forte Forte. She wears an earring by Loewe.
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With the steady growth of the internet, viruses and worms have become increasingly sophisticated in their spreading strategies. Understanding gossip helps us to understand their spread. On this page, all of Luke’s clothes and accessories are by Prada. Opposite, all of Emily’s clothes and her belt are by Céline.
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The Situation Room by John Keene John Keene is an award-winning writer, translator and professor of AfricanAmerican and African studies. He is the author of the novel Annotations (1995) and the poetry collection Seismosis (2006), among other works. In his latest book, Counternarratives (2015), Keene uses stories, clippings, maritime documents and slave narratives to create a bewitching work that conjures the US Civil War, Huckleberry Finn and 17th-century Brazil. For this issue, we are featuring “The Situation Room”, an extract from Keene’s forthcoming work, Wound. “The Situation Room” appears below and across pages 60, 75, 97, 109, 121 and 129. —
To put it simply: gossip protocols – if done well – are simple, fast, cheap and extremely scalable, but they do not always provide a perfect or correct result under all circumstances and in all system models. All of Emily and Luke’s clothes are by Iceberg. Photography: Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie / Styling: Bobby Hook / Hair: Takuya Uchiyama using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Ammy Drammeh using Laura Mercier / Photography assistant: Sam Henry / Styling assistant: Paige Bayley / Models: Emily Jones at Select Model Management and Luke at Wilhelmina London
The chief of staff places the two-page memorandum one inch below and to the right of the glass of cold water, no ice but with lime, just as her boss likes it. She quickly brushes her hand over the pages to ensure that not a single strand of her auburn hair or anyone else’s that might have fallen on them remains. Her cheeks, as they often do when they’re this close to the president’s, gleam like a paper lantern. She is wearing a brand new off-the-rack navy-blue crepe suit which, the president noted affirmatively as soon as he spotted it when he walked in the door 20 minutes ago, resembles his own. “Nice,” he had barked. “Good choice, classy.” She notes his periodic, audible sniffs, perhaps suggesting his attempts to detect the exact formula of freesia and honey rising from her throat. He is not fond, she can discern from his half-frowns, of either fragrance. She will wash it off as soon as she leaves the room. Her thick eyelashes hood her amber eyes. Flash fiction n.1
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Illustration by Stine Deja
Becky with the good hair: gossip is more than idle chitter-chatter. Clare Birchall interrogates its power to disrupt traditional systems of knowledge
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In the wake of the Brexit referendum, when cosmopolitans were stumbling through the newly isolated capital with an unnerving sense of the unheimlich (the uncanny, and, for Freud especially, the un-homely), and the Conservative Party was honing the art of back-stabbing, one of Boris Johnson’s aides accused Michael Gove of being a gossip. The actual words that Ben Wallace, MP, wrote in the Daily Telegraph were, “Michael seems to have an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken, as it all too often seemed to be.” With its connotations of femininity, messiness, secretion, the label “gossipy Gove” was central to his downfall. No greater slur is there to bestow upon a man. Overnight, he shifted from arch Machiavellian, which he may have been able to get away with, to a loose-lipped lush with a taste for gutter talk. More than Gove’s reputation as a gossip, though, I am interested in the reputation of gossip itself. Gossip certainly has a lot of negative connotations to contend with, but how has it also been read as a positive force in society? Rather than resting with this bad-gossip/good-gossip binary, I am going to ask Beyoncé (and her love rival “Becky with the good hair”) to help reposition gossip as no less than a way to open up an ethical encounter with knowledge. First, those negative accounts. How, exactly, did gossip accumulate such unseemly connotations? After all, in terms of etymology, “gossip” began life rather innocently meaning, simply, “God’s sib” – a godparent. By the 18th century, “gossip” was feminised through its use to describe female friends invited to a birth (and so, Dr Johnson in his 1755 dictionary defines a gossip as, “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in”). Then, during the 19th century, the noun is extended to the type of conversation gossips indulge in: idle talk. While “gossip” as idle tittle-tattle emerges relatively late, the practice has a prehistory, and it goes by other names. Tuning into that prehistory reveals a damning account. Gossipy practices get most vilified in various religions. Scriptural injunctions against gossip’s precursors and avatars abound in Christian, Talmudic, rabbinic and Islamic literature. According to The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, for example, the rabbis of classical Judaism in late antiquity actually positioned slander, talebearing and evil talk as worse than the three cardinal sins of murder, immorality and idolatry, and that indulging in lashon ha-ra was seen as akin to denying the existence of God.
The Situation Room by John Keene She plants herself an arm’s length to his side, cradling the folder containing the sheaf of materials from which the staff distilled the memo in front of him, and says, “I’ve made sure that the talking points are at the top of the first page, followed by a précis of the executive summary–” “The what?” He slides his iPhone towards the memorandum so that they are side by side, but not touching. He swipes it on, studies it for a second, homes it off. He does not touch the memo, though he appears to be skimming it. “The précis – summary of the summary.” “An elevator pitch? Could you put it in a sentence and convince? A tweet?” “Uh – yes, I think so, sir. Those are the talking points, yes.” “Good, good. Nice suit. It says, I’m taking this all seriously.” “Thank you, sir. Now, on the second page. You’ll see there’s a runthrough that fills about three short paragraphs. The first is historical, the second presents a summary of current news and commentary–” “They think I’m like not serious. You saw I tweeted out WHOEVER IS PULLING BS LIKE THIS IS GONNA PAY. I mean it. You know I mean it, right?” “Yes, sir. Now–” “This president is not kidding. No one in the administration is. WE WILL DESTROY YOU IF YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME. Like completely.” Flash fiction n.2 Continues on page 75
In Islam, gossip is covered by the term al-Ghibah. One particularly vivid deterrent can be found in Sunan Abu-Dawud, a collection of sayings and deeds
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of the Prophet Muhammad, recorded by Imam Abu Dawud: “The Prophet said: When I was taken up to heaven I passed by people who had nails of copper and were scratching their faces and their breasts. I said: Who are these people, Gabriel? He replied: They are those who were given to back biting and who aspersed people’s honour.” The message from the Koran is that even listening to gossip is risky because on the day of reckoning, Allah will enquire into every act of hearing or seeing in the heart. A good Muslim walks away when the talk turns to gossip. These religious sentiments are echoed in other realms. Consider, for example, the way that the indiscreet lover gets shunned in 12th-century tracts on courtly love. Or the distrust of hearsay in a court of law. One of the most critical disciplines, however, has to be philosophy. Whether it is Aristotle’s megalopsychos (great-souled man) who goes out of his way to avoid being tarnished with gossip’s brush, or Heidegger’s condemnation of Gerede (idle talk) for its indication that the speaker is more interested in the claim made about an object than understanding the essential nature of the object itself, gossip is fashioned as a diversion from the pursuit of truth. Throughout all of these negative accounts lingers a misogynist whiff. The distaste for gossip reflects a more general denigration of the feminine. Gossip, long associated with women, is the chosen mode, in this view, of those with no important role in the world; it pitifully apes the full and purposeful discussions that take place in the “masculine” public sphere. That is why the suggestion that Gove’s informal attempts to gauge and influence the political climate amounted to “gossip” was so damning. But there is another, more positive story about gossip in the ether. With his eye on the psychology of markets, Ralph L. Rosnow claims a special place for gossip, situating it as “small talk with social purposes”. Some sociologists and anthropologists laud gossip for being a bonding and socialising force essential to the healthy functioning of communities. Others praise it for democratising knowledge, seeing in it a way of finding things out when more formal modes of enquiry are closed to us or not up to the job. Patricia Mellencamp suggests that gossip might trash “the long paternity of sacred narrative conventions and Cartesian logic”. Another Patricia (Meyer Spacks, the author of a masterful account of gossip in literature) suggests it provides subordinated
classes with a mode of communication beyond an official public culture from which they are excluded. Feminists discuss and rehabilitate gossip as a form of knowledge exchange beyond patriarchal control. Gossip, here, is a form of resistance and challenge. I have sympathy with negative and positive approaches to gossip but fear they both miss the point. Whether commentators are bemoaning or celebrating gossip’s outsider, disruptive, disreputable status, the opposition between knowledge proper and gossip is kept largely in place. But gossip is not separable from knowledge in this way – it is right there at the beginning. The important thing about gossip is that it is at the heart of cognition, conditioning any history of knowledge or claim to knowledge put forward. Gossip makes the very idea of knowledge thinkable. This is easily explained with reference to the history of knowledge, an account neither unified nor linear and susceptible to moments of splitting off or borrowing. Because textually manifested knowledge can always be cited and quoted (a necessary state if it is to become ratified as knowledge and hold some kind of force), it is subject to misquoting or citing out of context: it is open to “abuse”. Knowledge is always subject to the possibility of “degrading” into “just” gossip, “mere” speculation, or simply illusion, of moving further and further from justified true belief. Rather than the possibility of “degradation” coming after knowledge has been secured, it accompanies knowledge throughout. In fact, knowledge cannot be carried forward without this possibility, because without citation, repetition, borrowing (all of the things that make knowledge vulnerable to becoming further from the truth, and, therefore, more like gossip), knowledge would not count as knowledge. No one would be able to recognise it as knowledge. If gossip conditions knowledge, the openly uncertain status of gossip’s authority and authenticity (it seems to be accepted that it may or may not be true) affects the authority and authenticity of all knowledge. Gossip makes us address the “mystical foundations” of authority (as Kant would have it), problematising our attempts to trace knowledge back to an ultimate source. So we can say that gossip exposes an undecideability at the heart of all knowledge (is it true or false; found or created; sound or crazy; meaningful
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Onto this shifting epistemological and ethical ground, enter Becky with the good hair. At the end of Beyoncé’s track “Sorry” – just one of 12 on the album Lemonade alluding to the infidelities of a man who may or may not be the “real” Jay Z – is the tantalising line: “He only want me when I’m not there/He better call Becky with the good hair.” Social media was awash with gossip about Becky. The virtual finger moved from Rachel Roy to Rita Ora. Alongside this game of naming and shaming, a different form of speculation was also emerging: one that focused on the politics behind the figure of the “Becky” as she might relate to African-American women. Since Sir Mix-a-Lot’s mainstream 1992 hit “Baby Got Back” (which began with a prissy, judgemental Valley Girl saying, “Oh my god, Becky/Look at her butt/It is so big/She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends…/She’s just so… Black”) the name has been used in US black culture to refer to a certain kind of white woman. In light of this, we could infer that Beyoncé’s Becky is white, average, basic. Clearly, Roy, whose father is of Bengali origin, and Ora, whose parents are from Albania, are not, to borrow a phrase from Damon Young of VerySmartBrothas.com, the “Beckiest of Beckys”. Nevertheless, the line from Beyoncé has opened up a conversation about a racialised aesthetic ideal that has historically penalised black womanhood. In fact, the application of the label “Becky” to Roy or Ora would be to accuse them of conforming to white cultural standards and denying their ethnicities. While a limited and all too literal interpretation of Beyoncé’s lyrics might only result in a witch-hunt, all this talk about Becky leads to a culturally and politically more important place. The beauty of speculation and gossip is that we do not, and cannot, know. We do not know if Becky is a real person, or whether Becky is a signifier. We do not know if this line pitches women against each other by blaming “the other woman” instead of the cheating spouse, if it is just one woman’s personal expression
of jealousy, or if it is a statement about the expendability of black female subjectivity in the wider racialised economy. Gossip keeps all possibilities alive. It honours the proliferation of reading and interpretation that means a text, including “Sorry”, is a site of contestation, a machine endlessly generating meanings that are sometimes at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Depending on our political leanings, we might be predisposed to a particular reading of Beyoncé’s Becky reference or Gove’s alleged predilection for gossip. But if we take gossip seriously – the idea that it stages an encounter with the undecideable foundation of knowledge – then we can say that gossip requires a leap into the unknown, a decision. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida claimed that for a decision to be a real decision, it cannot follow a pre-existing path – we cannot rely on our political sympathies, for example, to tell us the way forward. If we did, it would not be a decision, but merely a programmatic unfolding. In answer to the question, “Who is Becky?”, we could say that Becky is gossip: that speculative heart of knowledge. Many an op-ed tells us these are worrying post-truth, anti-expert times. Politicians repeat unfounded claims constantly, whether it is the gossip – sorry, I mean intelligence – that told us Saddam Hussein had WMD to justify an invasion; the Leave campaign’s insistence that the EU costs the UK £350 million a week without mentioning the amount it receives; or Trump’s claim, just one piece of gossip among countless others that littered his presidential campaign, that Obama “is the founder of ISIS” and Hillary Clinton the co-founder. Facebook has been accused of circulating false news stories and creating ideologically fixed, self-affirming knowledge silos that mean we never need encounter an alternative viewpoint, and crucially never need make a real decision. Gossip presented as truth is an abomination: it is the staple of the demagogue. Gossip qua gossip presents us with an undecidability between knowledge and non-knowledge – and presses the question of responsibility upon us. This decision-making about the knowledge we encounter is one possible description of politics. Far from being a waste of time, then, gossip, when we can see it for what it is, stages an important scene of engagement. So thank you Becky-with-the-good-hair and Michael-a-littlethin-on-top. §
Illustration by Stine Deja
or meaningless?). And because it is undecideable, it forces an encounter with the decision, which in certain brands of continental philosophy is ethical in nature. This is important because it means that gossip forces us, every step of the way, to move outside our pre-decided, often political leanings, to encounter knowledge anew.
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Scan the opposite page to watch the trailer of Bully. Go to page 25 to see how.
Larry Clark, Bully (film still), 2001
Impotent virility: evolutionary biology and the role of gossip in Larry Clark’s unsettling film, Bully. By Charles Mudede
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I want to put into your head at this moment the image of a cow. Now, with that cow in place, I want you to read these lines from the novel Bones by the Zimbabwean novelist and poet Chenjerai Hove: “I used to watch cattle chewing lazily under the shade of the musuma trees, chewing as if to show me that I was not able to enjoy what they enjoyed.” What Hove describes in these lovely lines is the cow’s gaudium – a joy specific to each kind of animal. True, the cow is just being cow, and humans can never really know what being a cow is really about. But the human is still an animal, and what it knows for sure (a kind of biological anthropic principle) is: as a human has its most inner humanness, a cow must have its most inner cowness. And as a cow could never fathom the pleasures of being a human, a human could never fully feel and appreciate the depths of a cow’s gaudium, which must be related somehow to its manner of masticating grass, the sturdiness of its four legs, the agility of its ears and its tail that swishes away flies. My point is that we, like the cow, are a particular kind of animal. But this point raises a question: what kind of animal are we? What is it that properly defines us – our deepest joys and sorrows? Philosophers in the West have thought about this for the past 2,000 years, and concluded roughly two things about our kind. One concerns what corresponds precisely with the profession of philosophising – the thinking human, the human of the mind, the self-reflective human. The great psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp believes that the idea of the human as the animal that spends much of its time trying to verify the status and nature of its thoughts has been philosophy’s biggest distraction. The other line of philosophising, however, does lead us towards an answer about our type of animality. It concerns finding ways to reunite the human with the human community. This is Plato’s The Republic, Rousseau’s Du contrat social, Marx’s Das Kapital and, in a sense, Thomas Piketty’s recent masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century (even Adam Smith was a moral philosopher). These philosophers ask: how did humans become so broken? How can we put them back together again? Some of the popular answers: a group of men and women who manage society as guardians; a clear and easily understood contract; the final resolution of all contradictions. Whether you agree with these solutions or not, they all have this in common: they only get us to the waiting room of the answer we are looking for.
To say that a contract is the solution is only to reassemble the human, but not to say what this human is. What have the contract or the guardians made whole again? For the door in the waiting room of philosophy to open, we need to watch the film Bully.
Larry Clark, who is perhaps most famous for directing the controversial teen drama Kids, is not a great artist. His films go out of their way to be ugly. His third feature, Bully, made in 2001, is as ugly as his other films, nine in all. Clark even manages to make the very handsome Michael Pitt, one of Bully’s stars, look as appealing as a mop hanging on a restroom wall. But what concerns us in this article is not the film’s aesthetics, but its plot, which is based on a real story. This is how it goes: there is a kid named Bobby (Nick Stahl); he is mean to his best friend Marty (Brad Renfro); he rapes and beats the girls they date; the teens in this Florida suburb hate his guts; their lives would be better if he did not exist.
One afternoon, one teen, Lisa (Rachel Miner), comes up with an idea: why don’t we just kill him? She shares the idea with another teen girl, who then shares it with others. Soon, there is a lot of conspiratorial chatter happening behind the bully’s back. How shall they do this? Do they need help? Does someone have a gun? Maybe we should poison him? How about beating him with a baseball bat? The murderous talk is intense and loud for the conspirators (it takes up a good 40 minutes of the
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“Larry Clark, who is perhaps most famous for directing the controversial teen drama Kids, is not a great artist. His films go out of their way to be ugly�
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film), but totally silent for the bully. He hears and knows nothing. He thinks everything is just fine. He continues to be mean, and every mean act or word brings him closer and closer to his end.
Michael Pitt’s character, Donny, is the first to stab Bobby. It is night and the teens are at the edge of a swamp. Are there alligators out there? No one knows, no one cares. As Bobby bleeds, a girl runs to the car and covers her ears. The bully’s best friend stabs him next. The bully is totally confused. What is going on? Why did his best friend also plunge a knife into him? Eventually, the life is beaten out of his body. The rest of the movie is not worth describing. What matters to us are these plot elements: the bully, the conspiracy that forms behind his back and how he is (communally) murdered. Why? And how does it connect with the question of human animality? If you want to understand what kind of animal we are, you must know how we became what we are. And an animal is not only made by its environment, but, more importantly, by its own activities and modifications. For example, a beaver makes dams, and these dams have shaped and continue to shape the beaver. This is called niche construction, described by the linguist Derek Bickerton in his book Adam’s Tongue (2009): “Animals themselves modify the environments they live in, and these modified environments, in turn, select for further genetic variations in the animal.” So, to understand what an animal is, you must see how it has shaped the world around it, and how this reshaped world then shapes it. The altered world can be physical, linguistic (the reason for Bickerton’s deep interest in this new field; it is only about 15 years old), or about the relationships between animals and other species. Now, of the many modifications that have made us “all too human”, I think two are the most profound: one, the shift from grooming to gossip, and, two,
the elimination of bullies. Put these together, and you have the ground of our morality, and this morality is to us what dams are to a beaver. A big part of human history has been about repressing strong men. Indeed, bullies have only had it so good for about the past 10,000 years. But before that, and for a period of roughly 225,000 years, they were constantly attacked and brought down with stones and blows. Humans in the modern form (humans like us) really hated this type. If you were stronger than others, and were mean (indeed, mad) enough to use this strength to your advantage, then those you lived with would begin to gossip behind your back and reach the conclusion that life for the community would be better if you were gone or dead.
I have reached the point in this short essay that requires a turn towards, and brief passing through, evolutionary anthropology. There are two great minds in this discipline; one is Robin Dunbar and the other is Christopher Boehm. The former provides a hypothesis in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1996). The latter, particularly in his book Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (2012), provides another (indeed, even a theory in the scientific sense, as the evidence is so strong) for how killing bullies made us the kind of animal we are, the moral animal, and, ergo, the hyper-social mammal. Now, morality means only this: make me equal to you and others like you. This is why killing bullies – almost always men – who wanted to dominate others made us the moral animal. Boem’s hypothesis in Moral Origins goes like this: The killing, wounding, social exclusion and social avoidance of aggressive deviants who do not rein in their predatory tendencies ... influenced earlier human gene pools, affected them so profoundly that uniquely human consciousness was able to evolve.
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And how was this done? “Bad reputations [were] confirmed as community members gossiped privately about the behaviour of others.” And why was this done? “The economic welfare [of a group] is threatened by an unrestrained deviant, and moralistic social control by the entire band becomes decisive and coordinated.” In short, strong men are not the foundation for strong societies. Our power is in our weakness; humans are the weak animal. Before we were modern, and we became modern in east Africa around 250,000 years ago, we were more like chimpanzees (whose males are much faster than human males, our greatest sprinters are common sprinters for chimps) and gorillas (whose males are 200-kilo giants who dwarf their females). Strangely enough, the strength of chimp and gorilla males turns out to be the weakness of their respective species. With chimps, it limits their sociality to groups, and for gorillas their sociality to families. To reach human sociality, which is the most sophisticated mammalian sociality, we had to make ourselves weak (and our children totally useless), and the weaker we became, the greater our dependency on others became. Increases in dependency corresponded with increases in the power of our sociality. Dependency is actually a good thing. By the time we began leaving east Africa in every direction 50,000 years ago, we were possessed of a social morality that was unstoppable. Now why is any of this important? What use is it? Well, we now live in a world ruled by bullies. How did the animal that for thousands upon thousands of years killed bully after bully end up in societies dominated by them? How did we lose our morality? Indeed, humans do not kill bullies anymore, and if we do, we end up like the teens in the movie Bully – in prison. It is also important to note in Bully, like Kids, the teens are immoral in the current sense (drink booze, smoke drugs, fornicate), but the murder they commit is actually consistent with morality in the deeper and original sense. So, how is it that what makes us human (our gaudium, which is a love for equality) is not how we organise our families, businesses and governments? How did the bully become king? Weirdly enough, it was a global climate change that happened 11,000 years ago. The age of the bully appears to have a beginning. It is the end of the Pleistocene, a period of climate chaos
(great variations in weather and global temperatures). What followed this epoch was the Holocene, a long period of climate stability. The period in which our morality was shaped, was the Pleistocene. It is also the period that the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson in their 2005 masterpiece Not By Genes Alone saw human culture and social learning take off, because, “fluctuating environments favour increased behavioural flexibility”, and this is precisely what culture and social learning provided – a fast way to adapt to an unstable world. When the climate stabilised after the last Ice Age, humans had a highly cooperative sociality, a rich gossiping tradition, morality and a complex culture that could adapt to almost any condition. But when we settled down about 8,000 years ago, and larger and larger groups began to form, gossip transitioned from policing bullies to having a political function and bullies became harder and harder to track. This was the opening they needed. They seized it – and have been in power ever since. Let us jump to the 18th century and to one of its leading moral philosophers, Adam Smith. He is now famous for his theory of the invisible hand, which actually only appears once in his very long book The Wealth of Nations, but Wealth has many, many other ideas. Including one that the lovers of the free market will never point to because it concerns how the human social order is upside down. Smith understood that prisons and the police do not protect the weak, rather, they protect the strong from the power of the weak. I will end these thoughts with the key passage from this marvellous work: Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate. §
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Something to gossip about: shared intimacy and friendship in the work of Juliette Blightman, invited by Christabel Stewart
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Dearest Juliette, A few years ago in London, we were lucky enough to be able to work together on an exhibition. It was the embodiment of a circle of friendships, and the objects, paintings and interests that motivated a certain group of artists, coming together. You called it, at least you haven’t changed. We thought about how a work on paper to accompany the show might help put some dinner on the table. We all felt a little uncomfortable with an “edition” in the end, because of the specifics of the gallery context. Is this a souvenir or a fundraiser? Who do we think we are?! The ever-resourceful, not-for-profit White Columns in New York made some of my favourite Xerox editions works with artists. A Scott King book page, which is on a bookshelf upstairs, also framed, remains a favourite. It is now produced as a tea towel, but I know that I would be unable not to use such a practical thing, and it would quickly stain and degrade. But back to our own efforts. Perhaps this was the wrong time and place. These things need confidence! As we have corresponded recently, I have the only framed edition of yours sitting on my kitchen table in 2017, still in its clear wrap. It is lovely, but I don’t know where it belongs (you, a new home, Gregorio, DB?? Evie and Ludo!), but it represents, to me, a valuable and important set of friendships in increasingly uncertain times. You titled it Before the flowers of friendship faded, friendship faded (After Cerith Wyn Evans, After Gertrude Stein, 1931), 2011. A potential misquote of itself, according to Cerith’s research. There is fading in separation, but I love you JB, and I’m proud of you and EBB every day. Let’s “March on Washington” this coming Saturday from wherever we are because everybody matters. Feeling especially nostalgic. Thanks for doing this feature. Your work is always interesting, surprising, funny and kind. Can’t wait to see it in a gallery soon. Good luck in LA! I’ll send you bamboo socks from M&S next year for Xmas if you’re still in the chilly depths of Berlin. I fancy Madeira soon? Cake, city, a new love interest? All love, Christabel xx P.S. Marta Fontolan talking to Isabella Bortolozzi in Flash Art in 2015 identified some of the fiscal anxieties. I’m sure you know the conversation, Juliette, but they talked about “must or dust” rather than boom or bust, and I’d like to end this rambling thank you with her points, “I was more interested in the local, the popular front of friends and fellow thinkers, nothing more. The rise and fall of certain values, the inflation and deflation of the market, from hot to cold, from in to out, this moves according to laws in which I have no interest, and over which no artist can have control, despite certain illusions to the contrary.”
On this page, a personal email from Christabel to Juliette thanking her for her participation in the magazine. Apologies for any factual inaccuracies. Page 133: Day 321, 2016 134: Doris Lessing, excerpt from “Preface” to The Golden Notebook, 1962 136: Day 56, 2015 137: Day 320, 2016 139: Above, Day 111, 2015. Below, From Berghain to the Balearic Islands, 2015 140: A Bird in Hand is Worth Two in the Bush, 2016 143: Girls on Bicycles, 2015 Images courtesy the artist and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin / With thanks to Olga Balema, Evie Bell, Cosima Gadient, Doris Lessing, Lily McMenamy, Kate Sansom and Cool Sex™
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Revolution revisited: Alessandro Michele’s reconceptualisation of Gucci continues to expound a new and insurgent baroque, captured by the heightened realism of Sarah Dobai’s photography Scan the opposite page to watch the story come to life. Go to page 25 to see how.
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The protagonist of Emile Zola’s 1883 novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, is a department store. Zola’s vision of the great temple to consumption captures an early vision of capitalism that, like much of his work, sets out an excoriating manifesto of realism that still resonates today. In Michel Serres’ reading, Zola’s human characters are sucked into the engine of the department store to be themselves “consumed, absorbed and rejected”. The shop, thus, reflects and replaces Zola’s Paris as a whole, which Michel Serres sees as a mythical geography, an archipelagic space of characters circulating as though among the islands of Homer’s Odyssey, driven by forces and powers beyond their control, by fate and the gods. Zola’s realism finds its heirs in the work of Robert Bresson, whose characters find themselves deprived of agency, and in the work of Sarah Dobai, whose subjects barely express their emotions or psychological state. These archipelagic hallucinations of reality are mirrored in Alessandro Michele’s conceptual and aesthetic vision for Gucci. His vision of “ruptures, digs, leaps, cross-references and unpredictable connections” has enabled him to delicately avoid nostalgia, while at the same time drawing on an aesthetic perspective that mines historic modes of dress from the Renaissance to the 1970s. His Gucci offers a return to elegance that is also radical and subversive – even citing the Situationists’ strategy of the dérive as a method to scope a city in an unplanned and instinctive manner. The dérive was developed as a technique to counter the “spectacle” of a rapidly changing Paris. For Guy Debord and the Situationists, the department store was one symbol of the tendency of mass production to turn real life into an endless series of frozen gestures. Much like Michele, Dobai often layers one source over another. In her recent series The Overcoat (which was recently featured at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London) she presented the text of Nikolai Gogol’s novella alongside a body of work shot in Paris and London depicting commercial vitrines. Here, she layers Zola’s realist novel over the historically eclectic Gucci spring/summer 2017 collection. Confronted by the spectacle of desire, consumption and the emotion of contemporary life, Michele’s Gucci offers us luxurious lines of flight. § Thomas Roueché
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Photography and styling: Sarah Dobai / Art direction: Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie / Set design: Simon Godfrey / Prop styling: Rebecca James / Hair: Hiroshi Matsushita using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Megumi Matsuno at Carol Hayes Management using Chanel Coco Codes and Chanel Blue Serum / Photography assistants: Louise Oates and Hannah Burton / Styling assistant: Joanna Gyamera / Models: Brodie Weir at Models 1, Isabella at M+P Models and Lais van Niel at Wilhelmina London The Overcoat (2015) by Sarah Dobai is published by Four Corners Books.
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A word in your shell-like: from earrings to ears, information travels fast. Photography by Sohrab GolsorkhiAinslie, styling by Hamish Wirgman Scan the opposite page to watch the story come to life. Go to page 25 to see how.
Martha, left, wears a dress by Lutz Huelle with a kyanite and diamond pavé ring by Monique Péan. Fern, centre, wears clothes and shoes by Balenciaga, with white-gold, emerald and diamond earrings by Ara Vartanian. Emily, right, wears a dress by Anne Karine Thorbjørnsen, a T-shirt by Sunspel, 18ct gold and agate earrings by Belmacz, and her own nose rings.
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Emily wears a dress by Anne Karine Thorbjørnsen, a T-shirt by Sunspel, shoes by Paul Smith, with 18ct gold and agate earrings, an 18ct gold and diamond bracelet, and 18ct gold, Mediterranean coral, onyx, blue chalcedony and yellow diamond ring by Belmacz. She wears her own nose rings.
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Emily wears blackened white-gold, tsavorite and pink, blue, orange, yellow and purple sapphire round-cut pavĂŠ earrings with a silver-gold and diamond pavĂŠ ring by Boucheron, with her own nose rings. Alexandra wears an 18ct gold bracelet and a gold, white- and rose-gold, brown PVD coated ring by Boucheron.
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Alexandra wears a T-shirt by Sunspel, a skirt by Chloé, shoes by Marques’Almeida, with a necklace and bracelet by Ara Vartanian.
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Alexandra wears a rose-gold necklace and, on her fourth finger, a rose-gold diamond pavĂŠ ring and two gold and rose-gold diamond pavĂŠ rings by Cartier on her little finger. Melanie wears gold and diamond earrings with a gold bracelet and gold, lapis lazuli and diamond ring by Cartier.
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Melanie wears a shirt by Prada with gold and diamond pavĂŠ earrings by Completedworks.
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Melanie wears an 18ct gold bracelet and 18ct gold and diamond ring by Tiffany & Co. Eveline wears an 18ct gold and white ceramic bracelet and ring by Tiffany & Co.
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Eveline wears a dress and belt by Loewe, leggings by Michael Olestad and boots by Paco Rabanne, with a white gold, lapis lazuli, pink sapphire and freshwater-pearl ring by Delfina Delettrez.
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Eveline wears a rose-gold, amethyst and browndiamond ring by Pomellato. Fern wears rose-gold and blue sapphire hoop earrings with a rose-gold and sapphire chain earrings by Pomellato.
Hair: Benjamin David using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Megumi Matsuno at Carol Hayes Management using Chanel Coco Codes and Chanel Blue Serum / Styling assistant: Olga Dritsopoulou / Hair assistant: Matthew Feeney / Models: Alexandra Moncreiffe and Martha Rose Redding at Select Model Management, Emily Viviane at Elite London, Evangeline Ling at Storm Management, Fern Bain Smith at Viva London and Melanie at M+P Models / With thanks to English Heritage for providing the horse, Harvey, from Audley End House and Gardens
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The lives of others: private eyes and the public gaze. Photography by Estelle Hanania, styling by BenoĂŽt BĂŠthume
Aomi wears a coat by Bottega Veneta, a shirt by Vanessa Seward, a body by Nina Ricci, gloves by Georges Morand, boots by Balenciaga and a vintage bow by Chanel. She carries a bag by Moynat.
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On this page, Aomi wears a coat by Jil Sander, a shirt by Redemption, gloves by Georges Morand, tights by Falke, shoes by Jimmy Choo, a bag by Roger Vivier and a vintage bow by Chanel.
Opposite, Kim wears a coat by Maison Margiela over a coat by Bally, a body by Wolford, gloves by Georges Morand, tights by Falke, shoes and a bag by Nina Ricci, with bracelets by Alexandre Vauthier.
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On this page, ChloĂŠ wears a jumper by Prada, a corset by Redemption, gloves by Acne Studios, briefs by Maison Lejaby, with a bag by Roger Vivier.
Opposite, she wears a coat by VĂŠronique Leroy, a jumper by Miu Miu, gloves by Georges Morand and a vintage belt by Chanel.
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An wears a coat and boots by Alexandre Vauthier.
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Aomi wears a coat by Lacoste, gloves by Georges Morand and a vintage bow by Chanel.
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On this page, Dolores wears a jacket and skirt by Vivienne Westwood, a body by Wolford, gloves by Georges Morand, tights by Falke, a necklace by Acne Studios and her own rings.
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On this page, Daniele wears a coat and shoes by Nina Ricci with tights by Falke, while opposite she wears a coat by Nina Ricci and her own ring.
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On this page, Ursula wears a coat by Acne Studios over a coat by Bally, a body by La Perla, gloves by Georges Morand, tights by Falke and shoes by Sergio Rossi.
Opposite, Aomi wears a coat by Miu Miu, gloves by Georges Morand, tights by Falke, with shoes and bag by Nina Ricci, and a vintage bow by Chanel.
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On this page, Juliette wears a coat by CĂŠline, a jumper by Prada, gloves by Georges Morand and shoes by Nina Ricci.
Opposite, Dolores wears a jacket by Vivienne Westwood, a body by Wolford, gloves by Georges Morand and a necklace by Acne Studios with her own glasses and rings.
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Aomi wears a coat by Balenciaga, gloves by Acne Studios and tights by Falke. Hair [for Aomi]: Yuji Okuda at Agence Saint Germain using Bumble and bumble / Make-up: Anthony Preel at Artlist Paris / Styling assistants: Marine Lescieux and Loyc Falque / Models: Aomi Muyock at Monster Management, An Oost, Kim Peers and Dolores Melia at Dominique Models, ChloĂŠ Winkel at Hakim Model Management, Ursula at Jill Model Management, Juliette Merie and Daniele Frazier
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