Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 5

N o. 5 December 2 0 1 8

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A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Stephanie Bailey | Gökcen Demirkazik | Zoe de Luca | Jacob Dreyer | Tarek El-Ariss Paul Gladston | Lyn Howarth-Gladston | Lee Weng Choy | Nat Muller | Basak Senova | Yao Souchou

Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber • 7 March – 10 June 2019 • Curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons. In three unique exhibitions, Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) explores the possibilities and purpose of producing art when news is fed by a monopoly of sources, history is increasingly fictionalised, when ideas of ‘society’ are invariably displaced, and when borders and beliefs are dictated by cultural, social and political systems. SB14 is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

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A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Editor Alan Cruickshank Publisher DIVAN JOURNAL | University of NSW Art & Design Design Alan Cruickshank ISSN 2207-1563 © Copyright 2018 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, the authors and artists.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney.

Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com Post: University of NSW Art & Design Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 Australia The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN JOURNAL or the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney. divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages. divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader art historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia), greater Asia, and Asia-Pacific regions.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Writer and art, culture, and urban planning critic THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands/Australia Fellow, Leiden Asia Centre, Leiden University; Principal Fellow (Honorary), School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation; Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka Artistic Director, Bellas Artes Projects, Manila FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/The Netherlands Curator and writer, Istanbul/Amsterdam PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Manila BLAIR FRENCH Australia Director Curatorial & Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia/Singapore Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia The Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London CHARLES MEREWETHER Georgia Curator of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent Bandjalung curator, writer and art critic NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Cover: Qiu Zhijie, Map of Technological Ethics (detail), 2018 APT9 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Image courtesy the artist and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

ROBIN PECKHAM China Director, TANK Shanghai, Shanghai TAN BOON HUI USA Director, Asia Society Museum New York PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing

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MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman

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CONTENTS

17 Parergon

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

20 A World Affair: Biennials, Art Fairs and The 1851 Great Exhibition

90 We Don’t Really Need This/ BELL Invites

34 The Beachcombers

100 色即是空 空即是色 Re-Enchanting The World

STEPHANIE BAILEY

TAREK EL-ARISS

ZOE DE LUCA

JACOB DREYER

44 Stones Turned: Digging Into The Past, Digging Into The Present

110 The Art of Disappearance SOUCHOU YAO

NAT MULLER

54 We Can’t Even Call Them ‘Dead’: On Köken Ergun’s Heroes

120 Beyond Dialogue: Interpreting Recent Performances by Xiao Lu

GÖKCAN DEMIRKAZIK

L Y N N E H O W A R T H - G L A D S T O N/ PAUL GLADSTON

80 Administering Time: The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste

130 On The Intersections of Terror and Performance

BASAK SENOVA

LEE WENG CHOY

138

IMAGE NOTATIONS

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ART DUBAI, MADINAT JUMEIRAH MARCH 20-21, 2019

“SCHOOL IS A FACTORY?” What should education prioritise in the coming decade? How should humans be taught in the age of accelerated mechanisation? Will higher education escape the ghetto of elitism? And will we need humans to teach humans anymore, anyway?

Bringing together artists, curators, novelists, futurists, architects and technologists, Global Art Forum 2019 tests the urgent challenges and opportunities facing education today, and tomorrow.

Artist Josef Albers with his class at Black Mountain College, shot for Life magazine © Photo by Genevieve Naylor / Corbis via Getty Images

16th Istanbul Biennial 14 September – 10 November 2019

13MM

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE FREE ENTRY

TAI KWUN

EXHIBITIONS

10 HOLLYWOOD ROAD,

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

CENTRAL, HONG KONG

SUMMER INSTITUTE

www.taikwun.hk

ARTISTS’ BOOK LIBRARY

13MM

13MM

M.F. Husain: Art and the Nation MARCH 5 THROUGH AUGUST 4, 2019

Reza Aramesh: 12 noon, Monday 5 August, 1963 Asia Society Museum 725 Park Ave. (at 70th St.) New York City AsiaSociety.org/NY

MARCH 5 THROUGH JUNE 9, 2019 M.F. Husain. Lightning (detail). 1975. Oil on canvas. Twelve panels, overall: H. 3 m. x W. 18 m.

Private collection. Courtesy of the collector.

new perspective. new plymouth. new zealand.

Jacqueline Elley Luxoplasts 2018 Maureen Lander Flat-Pack Whakapapa 2017. Collection of the artist Len Lye Zebra 1965, reconstruction 2009. Len Lye Foundation Collection

42 Queen Street New Plymouth Aotearoa New Zealand

govettbrewster.com

Open seven days: 10 am – 5 pm Closed Christmas Day

MATTHEW DAY, KEIR CHOREOGRAPHIC AWARD, 2014, CARRIAGEWORKS. IMAGE: GREGORY LORENZUTTI

Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue

肖鲁: 语嘿 19 JAN – 24 MAR 2019 181-187 HAY ST HAYMARKET SYDNEY

4a.com.au Xiao Lu, One, performance, 5 September 2015, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Photograph by Lin Qijian, courtesy Xiao Lu.

Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China.

Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephanie Bailey is London-based Senior Editor of Ibraaz, a contributing editor for Art Papers and LEAP, Editor-at-Large Ocula.com, and a member of the Naked Punch Editorial Committee. She also writes regularly for Artforum International, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and is the curator of the Conversations and Salon Program, Art Basel in Hong Kong, where she was born and raised.

Gökcan Demirkazik is a Beirutbased writer; received his BA in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard College in 2014 with a focus on modern and contemporary art; undertook various curatorial and editorial roles at Alt Art Space (Istanbul), and SALT (Istanbul and Ankara), a non-profit research institution. During his time at SALT, he organized Slavs and Tatars: Mouth to Mouth (SALT Galata) and worked on a comprehensive exhibition of Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar’s work, Continuity Error (SALT Beyoğlu). In July 2018, Demirkazık completed the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program as a Writer-in-Residence; his writing has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, Art Unlimited, Even, Frieze and m-est.org.

Zoe de Luca is a PhD Candidate, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; her doctoral research focuses on the exhibition culture of largescale biennials, and the circulation of critical artistic knowledge and Indigenous networks through global art worlds; previously worked as artist liaison, Milani Gallery, and researcher in museum governance and international art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, both Brisbane. She maintains an independent writing practice, publishing art criticism in Canadian and Australian venues; is co-editor with Ellie Buttrose, of Richard Bell’s Embassy: Interviews with Collaborators (forthcoming).

Jacob Dreyer is a writer and editor based in Shanghai; having been educated at the University of London and New York University, he is employed by Palgrave as the senior editor for politics and economics in East Asia. He’s recently written for the New York Times and Modern Weekly 周末画报 and has been interviewed about Chinese urbanism for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Tarek El-Ariss is Associate Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, USA; author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2018), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018).

Paul Gladston is the Judith Neilson Chair in Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney; previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory and Director of the Centre for Contemporary EastAsian Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham; has written extensively on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for numerous journals and magazines including Modern China Studies, Culture and Dialogue, Yishu, Leap, Art Review, Contemporary Art and Investment, Artworld, Wink, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet and Eyeline; Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect, 2014-16).

Lynne Howarth-Gladston is an artist, curator and independent scholar with a PhD in critical theory from the University of Nottingham; was lead curator of the exhibition New China/New Art Contemporary Video from Shanghai and Hangzhou, which was staged at the University of Nottingham’s Djanogly Gallery (2015); also an expert contributor to the BBC4 documentary, Kew’s Forgotten Queen: The Life of Marianne North (2016).

Lee Weng Choy is an independent art critic and consultant based in Kuala Lumpur; he does project work with various arts organisations, including Ilham Gallery and A+ Works of Art, both Kuala Lumpur, the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and National Gallery Singapore. His essays, which discuss contemporary art and culture in Southeast Asia and Singapore, have appeared in such journals and anthologies as: Afterall, Art & Intimate Publics: Art in the AsiaPacific (Routledge); Broadsheet; Forum On Contemporary Art & Society; Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (Cornell); Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT); and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Blackwell).

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Nat Muller is an Amsterdam-based independent curator and writer; her main interests are the politics of representation, contemporary art from the Middle East, and food; has taught at universities and academies in the Netherlands and the Middle East and has curated exhibitions and screening programs internationally.

Recent exhibitions include Spectral Imprints for the Abraaj Group Art Prize, Art Dubai 2012; This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam & American University of Beirut Gallery 2014-15; Pattern Recognition, A.M. Qattan 2016 Young Artist of the Year Award, Qalandiya International, Ramallah and Mosaic Rooms, London; editor of Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s monograph (Schilt Publishing, 2015) and Nancy Atakan’s monograph Passing On (Kehrer Verlag, 2016).

Basak Senova is a Vienna-based curator and designer; has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995; has lectured in various universities in Turkey; curator, Pavilion of Turkey, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); co-curator, UNCOVERED (Cyprus) and the 2nd Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground (Bosnia and Herzegovina); Art Gallery Chair of SIGGRAPH 2014, Vancouver; curator of Helsinki Photography Biennial and The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (both 2014); Pavilion of Republic of Macedonia, 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Lines of Passage (in medias res), Lesvos (2016) and The Discord, Jerusalem (2017). Since the beginning of 2017, she has been working on a long-term researchbased art project CrossSections in Vienna, Helsinki, and Stockholm.

Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer based in Sydney and Port Dickson, Malaysia.

His work deals with the anthropology of Chinese diaspora, and the relation between aesthetics and social and political theory. His most recent book is The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (2016); some of his previous books are Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (2015), Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2006) and House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia (2001).

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

Parergon Over thirty years ago I discovered Southeast Asia, for an equatorial Christmas and New Year. Prior to this I had been traversing the expected Australian traveller destinations—Great Britain, Europe and North America. After my first visit to Singapore in 1988, I returned to live there in 1990. Numerous colleagues, and others, declared this bizarre, not only in Singapore but elsewhere. Why would you want to live there? In 1986 I had been asked would I travel to Southeast Asia, to which I replied, why would I want to do that?

In 1990 I stayed with a Eurasian family in a post-war, airless walkup-HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment in Lloyd Road, close to the shopping nirvana of Orchard Road, around the corner from the nation’s founding-father Prime Minister Harry Lee Kuan Yew’s Oxley Road house at one end, guarded around the clock by ever-watchful Gurkhas, and at the other, the historic Killiney Road Kopitiam founded by Ah-gong in 1919, staffed by (at the youngest) octagenerian Cantonese daily astonished at the audacity of this gweilo sauntering in for kopi and kaya toast. The family’s absent father had served as the head of Singapore's post-independence Civil Service, during which time, as Minister for the Interior, he assisted in setting up the Singapore Army and the intelligence unit. My next door neighbour was an emerging Chinese fashion photographer, whose future wife was a model and rising pop star (friends for the duration of my stay and since, and sufferers of my photography).

My time in Singapore, living as an artist, was bookended by attending the Australian and Turkish governments’ 75th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign as a member of the International Press Corps, Australian Media Serial No. 016 (a poor impersonation of Dennis Hopper with a necklace of half a dozen cameras), and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, at which ‘Singapore International’ all but shut down (then, at my third and last interview for a senior position with Singapore’s premier advertising agency). Every two weeks I presented myself, amongst an assemblage of regionals as the only gweilo (or, if you like, ang moh), at the Immigration Department waiting-room for an extension of my two-week visa (four, if asked felicitously). Questioned each time at the unyielding gahmen window how I might financially support myself I held up in one hand my passport and the other a newly minted credit card. Can!

After Nassim Road, of mostly embassies and consulates; Lloyd Road; River Valley Road, here living solo, brazen at the time, reinventing an empty apartment into a studio, the kitchen and laundry into a darkroom, the soundtrack: Ryuichi Sakamoto (‘Chinsagu No Hana’, ‘Forbidden Colours’), Lou Reed and John Cale (‘Songs for Dreller’); and after Broadrick Road, Katong, towards Changi Airport, like all of Singapore the area historically resonant, viz. the Second World War, with another extended Eurasian family, where I read under a tree in the front garden British journalist Dennis Bloodworth’s 1987 encyclopedia if not bible, of post-war Southeast Asian history, culture and politics, An Eye for the Dragon, I stayed in Yong Siak Street, Tiong Bahru, a sedate 1920s art deco housing estate constructed by the British colonial authority’s Singapore Improvement Trust for the provision of mass public housing. To the natives at the corner koptiam I was the gweilo staying with the Malayali/Iban family across the road—the entrepreneur husband, the son of a soldier of the INA, the Indian National Army led by Chandra Bose, that rebelled against the British and sided

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with the Japanese after the Fall of Singapore in February 1942, ending badly for all; and the wife, an offspring of headhunting tribes from the mountains of western Borneo. After some weeks of making a social mark through my morning ritual of drinking kopi and reading The Straits Times (despite Singapore’s well-known post-independence censorious relationship with print media, then and now, there was something to read in it those days) I was asked by one of the chicken-rice hawkers for an explanation as to my community membership: “what you do lah?” The reply of artist was deemed just as absurd as my living with them in their suburban oasis—to which he replied, “You no work ah!”

The notion of being a photographic artist wasn’t volunteered.

Singapore in 1990 was slightly less than that envisioned by Paul Theroux in his 1973 book St. Jack, an acerbic obituary of the last seedy gasps of colonialism and early days of independence, when traditional life was being rapidly supplanted by the nation-state’s striving for, amongst other desires, squeeky-clean, ordered modernity (subsequently made into a clandestinely-produced film with a faux script in 1978, by Hollywood new wave director Peter Bogdanovich). But it was substance for William Gibson’s (Wired magazine) soon-to-be caustic and infamous 1993 essay, ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’, asserting amongst other sins that the city-state was authorative, sterile and cultureless, absent of any sense of creativity, authenticity, history and underground culture: the book, the essay and the film sustaining longterm gahmen enmity and suppression. Nor was it (quite) yet the hegemonic nation-state of effective rule articulated by Yao Souchou in his books House of Glass: Culture, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia (2001), and Singapore: The State & the Culture of Excess (2006). And it had not yet sustained its global city transformation through the Renaissance City Plan whereby the gahmen strategically envisioned the promotion of arts and culture to establish Singapore as a global arts city conducive to creative, knowledge-based industries and talent, and to strengthen national identity by nurturing an appreciation of shared heritage. But it was certainly a work in progress, a twenty-four hour building-site (it still is) in a ceaseless marathon transforming an uncongenial past into a perpetual modernization of ever-accumulating monuments of glass and steel, erasing its old world of colonial shophouses and five-foot ways (sheltered walkways), godowns (warehouses), black-and-whites (colonial bungalows), Singlish (a fusion of English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil) and anything else that represented antimodernity. Some of that old world consciousness remained though—open-mouthed gawking at my street photography in overt Chinese-only turf, the apogee of which on one occasion saw an arched gob of sputum splattering at my feet in a sunny, dusty Chinatown marketplace, projected by an old man with, apparently, a long memory; and my Tiong Bahru family restraining me from living in an open second floor shophouse flat in Chinatown’s infamous Keong Saik Road, fearful at the prospect that I would be diced and stir-fried in one of the secret society-run restaurants amongst the many upstairs brothels, for the simple transgression of my ang mo presence. Apparently, unlike the rest of the city-state, and contra Gibson, this red-light district had plenty of underground culture.

Within this mise en scene—its citizens constantly focused by Harry LKY’s sustained lecturing (hectoring), that “Life is a marathon, without a finish line”, that they should work towards longterm national outcomes rather than sprint to short-term personal goals (widely acknowledged as the five Cs: car, cash, credit card, condo[minium] and concubine)—Singapore was seemingly artless, cultureless. But this was not quite so—the Goethe Institute was one of a few exhibition venues (here, Jimmy Ong, and an exhibition of forgotten Turkish art) complementing persevering colonial cultural assertions through the British Council and Alliance Francaise (here, showing English film director Derek Jarmyn’s 1983 rumination on art, sexuality and identity, Caravaggio—assuredly subversive l

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given that a group of adults were sitting in the dark being entertained by violence, murder and homosexuality, all illegal of course); the occasional empty shop in Orchard Road office towers presenting traditional ink landscapes; Empress Place next to the Singapore River, being a jumble of Chinese furniture shops and an exhibition venue of sorts (here, a performance by Tang Da Wu, an installation by Chandrasekeran; perhaps Goh Ee Choo and Tang Mun Kit); the current National Museum, the original structure reopened after restoration (a Borobudur-like sculpture, again by Chandrasekeran, perhaps also Salleh Japar); LaSalle College of the Arts, founded in 1984 by Joseph McNally (here, surprise at students still in their studios at 6pm on a Friday instead of drinking or playing in a rock band at the union bar); the kampung-sited Artists Village at Sembawang (founded in 1988 by Tang Da Wu, with Vincent Leow and others); The Substation, launched about the time of my exit by influential dramatist and arts activist Kuo Pao Kun; the Singapore Arts Festival (instigated in 1977), and my first sighting of the internationally renowned Japanese butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku, plus a public performance (four years before being banned by the gahmen) by Tang Da Wu and Vincent Leow in Raffles Place, both wearing shirts and ties sans trousers, standing in plastic rubbish bins reading aloud articles from The Straits Times, a metaphor apparently for Singapore’s office culture; and the unassailable, ubiquitous ex-Berkeley University, cricket-loving sage and cultural provocateur Thiagaraja Kanaga Sabapathy, ostensibly the local, if not regional, lone rider historian/ academic/educator/curator/writer (still), who mentored my unschooled assertions and quandaries about whatever it was I thought I was doing as an artist in his country, combined with an invitation to talk to his students at the National University of Singapore about, me, photography, Western art? (and who at a later date, given my affinity with all things the region proposed that I must have been born Chinese in another life). Amanda Heng, Zai Kuning, Lee Wen, Simryn Gill, the 5th Passage and others were soon on the horizon.

At the beginning of this cultural odyssey I undertook my first journey post-Gallipoli to Istanbul, then closer to the sombre, grainy, monotone photography of Ara Güler, the ‘Eye of Istanbul’ (1928-2018) and Orhan Pamuk’s evocative Istanbul–Memories and the City (2005), than its contemporary Erdoğan/AKP condition. This artless venture bisected Istanbul’s first Biennial in 1989, and Vasif Kortun’s Production of Cultural Difference in 1992, his theme synchronously apropos to the 75th Anniversary Commemoration’s precarious oscillations of decorum and goodwill. Then, the historic site of Gallipoli was ‘sacred turf‘ to the antipodeans (only), the indigenes still viewed speciously with historical animus. The Istanbul university students who acted as translators did not know their own history (at all, so I became their educator and guide for the duration) and challenged our impertinence, as did others; their national demeanour now having sustained a paradigmatic shift, the expressions of which are manifest in Köken Ergun’s film Heroes/Şehitler, evaluated in this edition. As to Turkey’s art and culture nearly three decades later, I refer the reader to the first issue of this journal as a starting point, of Erman Ata Uncu’s text, ‘The Grey Zone: Censorship Disguised’.

Singapore has developed, especially since the mid-2000s, an infrastructural platform that has set a benchmark for its emulators, such as Hong Kong (a close adherent), Shanghai, and further west, as corporate-state/cultural-tourism mimeos, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I proposed just over a decade ago that its ambition to create such a dynamic would become, for its art historical and contemporary cultural distinction, an assured regional, if not global, lighthouse. Immersed in the region—living in and through extended research visitations over thirty years, a history of experienced time—has deeply informed this chronicler and partner, of a phenomenal generational evolution and the lead challenger for culture’s hearts and minds in the greater Asia-Pacific neighborhood.

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A World Affair: Biennials, Art Fairs and The 1851 Great Exhibition

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Why not simply posit modernity as the new historical situation, modernization as the process whereby we get there, and modernism as a reaction to that situation and that process alike, a reaction that can be aesthetic and philosophico-ideological, just as it can be negative as well as positive?

Fredric Jameson1 This essay was developed out of texts published in Art Papers in 2013 and LEAP in 2015, with this current version presented, albeit in rougher form, at the 10th Global Art Forum in Dubai in March 2017, and a re-edited version appearing in issue 13 of The Exhibist in September 2017. Parts have been quoted in recent symposia, where I have been invited to respond to questions surrounding the politics of art through my practice as an artist, writer, editor and curator; work that is tied to an ongoing study of the so-called art world—by which I mean the art fair-biennial-museum-gallery industrial complex—as an agent operating within its field.

The purpose of this particular edit—presented with necessary corrections, expansions and reshuffles—is to introduce this study from an embodied position based on years of observation in the field, which has enabled me to further refine the text as I have travelled deeper into the art world’s centre. At its heart, this essay and all the versions that have come before it, represents an ongoing and real-time attempt at understanding the contemporary art world as a world-making space, while fully participating in its processes. Two central ideas run through the writing, and my position in general. The first is Fred Inglis’ assertion that the study of culture is the study of power.2 The second is a conception of the art world as a rhizomatic agora in the classic sense: a place not only defined by economic exchange, but by the production, trade and negotiation of knowledge, culture and power, as mediated by the historical processes that are embedded into its world-making apparatuses.

To explain the rationale behind this pursuit, I must begin from the start. I was born in Hong Kong the year before the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, which ensured the city’s return to China in 1997 after the island was ceded to Britain in 1842 as a result of the First Opium War, a conflict that expressed the British Empire’s thirst for Chinese markets, followed by the leasing of the New Territories for 99 years in 1898. On paper, I am half-British and half-Chinese: a child of empire, and a hybrid product of a violent history in which trade and imperialism form a central plotline.

This condition was the subject of an issue of LEAP magazine that I guest edited in 2016, which considered art after identity politics in the twenty-first century, when cultural hybridity, contradiction and historical complexity have come to define people on personal and collective levels—a complexity that, as curators Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq noted, the art world is not always capable of handling, despite it being a space of transcultural exchange where hybrid bodies, often produced from colonial histories, intermingle.3

The art world is also a hybrid and contradictory product of empire. At least, this is what I will propose by weaving a spectral frame around two exhibition formats that define it on global terms—biennials and art fairs—in order to think about the historical dynamics inscribed into their forms. To do this, I want to pull back to a single event in 1851. One that many scholars have considered in relation to the phenomenon of biennialization, though less so when it comes to the art fair4 —The Great Exhibition of Works and Industry of All Nations, commonly referred to as the first World’s Fair.5 The initiative of Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert and Henry Cole, who was inspired by the national fairs he had seen in Paris, this was an imperial extravaganza staged at

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London’s Hyde Park in the Crystal Palace, a pre-fabricated building constructed especially for the occasion from iron and glass.6 Some 100,000 objects were displayed by over 15,000 contributors,7 with Great Britain taking up one half of the space alongside exhibits from its colonies, and the rest of the world (including France, Austria, United States of America, Turkey and Egypt) taking the other.8 The exhibition continued for around six months and attracted some six million visitors—astounding numbers facilitated by a period of transformative progress that resulted in such engineering feats as steamships that could cross the Atlantic in two weeks.9 (This was, after all, the time of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.)

At the time, Prince Albert described a moment of “wonderful transition” when distances once separating “the different nations and parts of the globe” were “rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention.”10 This accelerated period of progress pointed towards the fulfilment of what Albert called “that great end, to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind”.11 The Great Exhibition consolidated this development within Britain and its Empire, and also propelled it forward. As Sally Mitchell writes, London became a metropolis after the event, in part furnished by funds the exhibition raised, which were used to acquire the land to build the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.12 The new Houses of Parliament were built, work on the London Underground began, sewers and water pipes were laid, and department stores began to line Oxford Street, Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1858—though the first attempt at a submarine telegraph link between Dover and Calais was completed in 1851, the same year as the Great Exhibition—and was followed by a more successful attempt in 1866.13 Then, in 1869, the Suez Canal opened, creating faster sea routes to India and the Far East; today it is still “considered the shortest link between the east and the west.”14

Within this contextual frame, the Great Exhibition was not only emblematic of a period of industrial development and global capitalist expansion inscribed with imperial aims—it offered a soft power model through which to harness these dynamics. This was reflected in the exhibition space, where colonial strategies were enacted through means of cultural and material categorization.

As historian Paul Young details, aboriginal products were “stripped of any cultural resonance and offered up … raw”; described in terms of what they comprised, and not what they culturally signified.15 The China exhibit, which had little to no participation from the Chinese, was described in one account as exhibiting the qualities of art exemplified by the early stages of civilization.16 Professor Robert Rydell offers a rationale for such a decontextualized approach to other cultures when discussing the subject of Universal Expositions in the United States, which followed the template laid out by the Great Exhibition’s example. “[P]rimitive” societies were “[d]epicted as resource rich and lacking the material goods the anthropologists equated with civilization,” which “had the effect of underwriting the predictions of a bountiful future for the culture of imperial abundance.”17 Rydell goes on to quote historian William Appleman Williams, who saw the evolving delineation between “advanced industrial societies and the rest of the world” in these exhibitions as “central to imperialism.”18

Trade was seen as both a form of cohesion and stratification, in which supply and demand, not to mention the tiers of industrial production and consumption, became the new bonds that could not only fuse an empire together while organizing it along industrialized—and racialized —hierarchies, but also expand its boundaries further. In reflection of this intention, William Felkin, then mayor of Nottingham and ‘displayer of lace’ at the 1851 Great Exhibition, noted: “To induce l

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all the world to become customers and consumers would appear to be the wisdom of our country and our age.”19 All of which was smoke and mirrors to Marx and Engels, who called the spectacle “striking proof of the concentrated power with which modern large-scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, society and national character among all peoples.”20 Later, in an 1853 New York Daily Tribune dispatch, Marx would reflect on the British impact on India in a way that recalled the processes of reduction that took place within the Great Exhibition, accusing England of “breaking down the entire framework of Indian society… not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade.”21

In this light, the Great Exhibition was a weaponized space, in which culture and industry were instrumentalized to enact the economic violence of an industrialized trading power with aspirations of global dominance. It was also a political act of social engineering: a regulatory spectacle, in which national and colonial identities were ultimately constructed through the frame of empire.

The Great Exhibition’s supposed message of capitalist unity was self-serving, in that it offered a counterpoint to the events taking place within Britain and throughout Europe at the time, including the working-class Chartist movement, the European revolutions of 1848, and the publication of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto that same year, which not only raised concerns about the future of capitalism, but of imperial power. Reflecting the political atmosphere of the times, the organizing committee included, as The Times noted, “every shade of political opinion in the country”22 and after 24 May, the fair (which opened on 1 May) admitted all classes into the halls.23 The exhibition even appeared to embrace the revolutionary mantra of the period by filtering it through its branding, offering an example of how capitalism successfully absorbs its discontents. One statement, made in January 1851 by The Times, proclaimed how the event would “open men’s eyes with what may be done and what will be done with the means in our possession.”24

So, the World’s Fair was never a world’s fair. It was an imperial marketplace, an engine of modernity, and an apparatus of security: designed to not only assert an imperial—or sovereign —power, but also to mediate, manage and shape the world through that power’s designated narrative. As Stuart Murray writes: “By 1855 every nation with colonial possessions wanted to display both the economic potential and the exotic difference of their empires. In part, this clearly aimed to reveal the benefits of imperial tenure, validating and legitimizing the colonial process.”25 On the subject of turn-of-the-century international fairs in America—“developed as organized responses to class conflict in the aftermath of industrial depressions that occurred… between 1873 and the onset of the First World War”—Rydell observes a worldview that demanded an acceptance of “empire as a way of life.”26 In short: “[T]he commodity fetish became an imperial fetish as well.”27

The same racial hierarchies as those demonstrated in the 1851 Exhibition also abounded in the USA. “Beginning with the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition”28—which Tolstoy called “a striking example of imprudence and hypocrisy”, albeit “with noble aims ascribed to it”29 —“every American fair held through World War I included ethnological villages,” writes Rydell.30 This gave “millions of Americans first-hand experience with treating non-whites around the world as”—decontextualized—“commodities.”31 The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair celebrated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of said territory from France by the USA in 1803.

It featured a live exhibition of Filipinos: a “celebration” of the recent annexation of the Philippines by the USA following the Spanish-American War.32 The overtly imperial tone of the St. Louis World’s Fair—dubbed “the largest and finest colonial exhibit ever made by any government” by one of l

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it organizers33—adds a dark shadow to the words its president, David Rowland Francis, used to inaugurate the event: “open ye gates! Swing wide, ye portals! Enter herein ye sons of men and behold the achievements of your race.”34 Be open, be worldly: but under a sovereign power’s conditions.

Sharing thus becomes conforming to an inherently discriminatory system while propagating it in turn.

Indeed, on the subject of the Crystal Palace, philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk finds “a new aesthetics of immersion” that “began its triumphal march through modernity” from the moment of its construction.35 The Crystal Palace, “an emblem for the final ambitions of modernity,” was “a valid prophetic building form of the nineteenth century (which was immediately copied all over the world)” that “already anticipated an integral, experience-oriented, popular capitalism in which no less than the comprehensive absorption of the outside world in a fully calculated interior was at stake.”36 Citing Dostoyevsky’s 1864 text Notes from Underground, in Sloterdijk describes a “palace of civilization” that “symbolized the will of the Western branch of humanity to conclude the initiative it had started—to make the world happy and achieve mutual understanding between peoples.”37 Yet, after Dostoyevsky’s deportation to Siberia, which acquainted him with life in a “house of the dead”—“the prospect of a closed house of life now revealed itself”—“biopolitics begins as enclosure building.”38 It is at this junction that Sloterdijk makes the astute observation that the Crystal Palace-as-metaphor restates “the oft-noted and oft-denied symmetry between the capitalist and socialist programmes: the socialist-communist project was simply the second building site of the palace project.”39 (As I have pointed out elsewhere, just think of the slogan for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, “One World, One Dream” and China’s neo-colonial aspirations currently being enacted through its Belt and Road Project.)

This brings me to theorist Dan Smith’s summary of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Smith argues that the event “helped forge Western modernity’s formations of display, spectacle, surveillance and commodity” and “determine the form of the modern museum and gallery as well as spaces of commerce, denying any possibility of conceptually separating these sites.”40 Smith aligns this assertion with sociological historian Tony Bennett’s description of “the exhibitionary complex” —“an arrangement of institutional forms that are museological but also encompass modes of public spectacle, and sites of commodity arrangement and exchange.”41

Biennials and art fairs are forms in the art world’s own exhibitionary complex, whose DNA seems unmistakably connected to the World’s Fair. Take Kunstmarkt Koln, the first modern art fair that started it all in 1967 when it was launched for the purposes of creating an art market from a post-war recession—what was then seen as a radically new exhibition form that was quickly copied.

Or consider Art Basel, the second modern art fair to establish itself in 1970, which now operates as a global network across three continents: the Americas, Asia and Europe, and which has spawned scores of other fairs that seek to emulate its effects. Art historian Pamela Lee has noted how biennials have “come to stand as a country’s cultural point of entry into [a] global economy” and art fairs could be described in the same way.42 These two exhibition formats represent replicable and replicated display models that have proliferated around the world to produce nodes in a transglobal network bound by art and culture: nodes that connects galleries, museums, cultural institutions and other such organizations—be they public, private, non-profit or artist-led—not to mention the agents who populate and circulate the field. As academics Anthony Gardner and Charles Green write, “The historical basis for such networks”—in this case, “the networked semi-coordination of biennials” and art fairs—“was the Romantic-era paradigm of the World Exposition, as many scholars have

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noted, and behind that the even earlier vogue for the Grand Tour.”43 To quote Gardner and Green on biennials while drawing art fairs into their reading, both events have the tendency to function as touristic spectacles that frame art works as “Great Exhibition marvels for visitors and political masters alike.”44

That the Venice Biennale was launched in 1895 as a direct result of the trend that the 1851 Great Exhibition kicked off is also telling. Like the Great Exhibition, Venice marked the birth of a very specific kind of world stage through which cultural politics and cultural economies are produced, performed, negotiated, asserted and regulated in a mediatory space. And there is a wonderful symmetry to the fact that documenta, a quinquennial exhibition created in Kassel in 1955 by Arnold Bode along the lines of a biennial, staged Harald Szeemann’s game-changing documenta 5 in 1972, a large-scale thematic art show that kicked off a curatorial trend known as Großausstellung, or Great Exhibition, which rejected classical and academic modes of curatorial framing in favour of a conceptual, cross-disciplinary approach that organized art works around a theme, rather than a discipline. documenta itself was conceived as “a therapeutic agent to heal the emotional wounds” of World War II, which recalls the rhetoric of unity offered by the 1851 Great Exhibition and the world’s fair format in general.45 Decades later, Szeemann curated the 2001 Venice Biennale, Plateau of Humankind, to reflect on the dimension of the global, stating: “We don’t wish to illustrate a style, a theme, but to offer a possible opening: to give connotation, to sustain freedom against barriers erected by styles, nationalities and nationalisms.”46 l

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But even a ‘global space’ like the Venice Biennale is inscribed with clear hierarchies. Consider the representation of artists by “race and ethnicity” at the Venice Biennale’s 57th edition in 2017, which, included a majority of “57% white” and a minority of “1% First Nations”.47 Or the fact that nearly seventy-eight per cent of the exhibiting artists in Okwui Enwezor’s 2002 documenta 11—described as offering “an unprecedented presence of artists from outside Europe and North America”—were living in North America or Europe at the time.48 Indeed, just as the 1851 Great Exhibition proclaimed its intention to unite the world and its economies in a global space, the reality of the World’s Fairs and the exhibition formats it spawned, Venice included, offers a different picture, in which historically violent cultural hierarchies remain in full view.

When entering any art fair or biennial, then, we are entering a contradictory space where an ongoing history of globalization is unfolding, in which a myriad of heightened dynamics are both at play and in conflict. Consider here the 1901 Pan-American Art Handbook for visitors, which informed its readers that when they enter the gates of the exhibition, they become part of the show.49 This show sounds uncannily familiar. As Pamela Lee describes it, the contemporary art world is “both object and agent” of a market system that is inextricably linked to the processes of globalization—a process that, with the aid of technology, is charging ahead with one of the “most insidious mantras”50 calling for “a ‘borderless’ world of smooth flows, unimpeded international travel, and ever-expanding networks of limitless communication.”51 And those of us who engage with the art world’s networks become objects and agents in this process. Through these spaces, historical capitalism continues to

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evolve, hinged as it is on the imperializing processes of industrial modernization, not to mention a neoliberal globalism that thrives on unregulated flows within a circulatory system. Under such circumstances, to borrow Paul Werner’s words, “the very admiring of art becomes an adherence to a free-market ideology”52 that the 1851 Great Exhibition espoused, and which continues to shape the global today—an ideology that Fredric Jameson might call a “universal market order” which speaks to the forces of homogenization so often observed in such spaces.53

But while the global sentiments behind these exhibition formats harbour a darker modernity, to borrow semiotician Walter D. Mignolo’s phrase, this does not mean we should write off these spaces, either. Often opaque, an art fair could also be read as an example of an informal market, as identified by Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenbock: places where the conditions are made to produce “a volatile body of knowledge” that “passes between informal global structures and the subject emerging from them.”54 To read a biennial or art fair as a place where the image of a future global order is appearing out of a political, cultural and historical blend of objects and bodies, is to understand it as a site of transformative and active breakdown as well as a site of conflicting and contradictory formation. I have often mentioned Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial as cases in point; both events have exploited each exhibition platform as a site of negotiation with various publics, from local and regional to international, as a way to assert a presence on the global stage on terms that counter those offered by the Western world, albeit within a structure that has its roots in the imperial forces that the UAE liberated itself from in 1971.

Nevertheless, in these instances, we see what social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey describes as both a spatializing and globalizing of modernity’s story—gestures with intentions to “rework modernity away from being the unfolding, internal story of Europe alone.”55 Such spatialization rejects a singular universal—in which progress is perceived as a single line of progression, or what Massey describes as a historical queue—in favour of a spatial conception of a world in which multiple trajectories co-exist, intermingle and overlap, often times in productive dissensus.56 In that sense, the number of biennial and art fairs does not necessarily signify straightforward replication: rather, they represent the art world as a microcosm composed of microcosms—a site of globalization that is both colonial and decolonial; a battleground and a site of conformist cohesion at once.

There is no denying the overlaps between the World’s Fair network and that of the contemporary biennial and art fair—overlaps that render these spaces complex sites of intersection, contradiction, community, and conflict. On World’s Fairs and biennials, Caroline Jones has argued that both have enabled artists to challenge and subvert structures of power, with art fairs easily slotting into this reading.57 At the same time, art fairs and biennials, like World’s Fairs, are also spectacles that replicate and reinforce “neo-colonial flows of international commerce [and] politics”58 that, to borrow Professor George Yudice’s observation on biennialization in the Americas, offer “expedient means to support the political and corporate interests of their sponsors.”59 The complexities of both contemporary exhibition formats bring to mind Gardner and Green’s description of Okwui Enwezor’s documenta 11, which they saw as mirroring documenta’s original intention “to connect postwar Germany with the rest of Cold War Europe” by seeking to reconnect the Global North and South in a twenty-first-century iteration of the show.60 Considering the cross-hatching dynamics that filled the space of Enwezor’s 2002 exhibition, Gardner and Green used the word entanglement, not difference.61 That is to say: no binaries but overlaps, intersections, knots, and threads.

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This condition is perhaps the main reason why art fairs and biennials represent a fascinating landscape of study when it comes to observing how “the standardization projected by capitalist globalization”62—of which the end goal appears to be full global union—is crafted, and in turn, crafts its subjects. As spatial and organizational forms representing a wider network of intricate and localized infrastructures, art fairs and biennials facilitate a highly contradictory process of globalization precisely because they operate within a historical system of global production and exchange—one that has produced contradictory spaces and subjects which, returning to where this essay began, look very much like my own.

This text is a precursor to ‘Now Where? On Navigating Without a Compass,’ published in the previous issue of di’van | A Journal of Accounts 4, 2018 (pp. 32-45). Both essays form part of a trilogy, with the third instalment, on decolonial practice, to be published in 2019.

Notes 1 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London and New York: Verso, 2002, p. 99 2

Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies, Oxford & Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1993, p. 185

3

Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq, Introduction to the exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics, at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, 2014; http://afteridentity.muhka.be/about 4 Although Chrisitan Morgner has explored a different—though related—genealogy of the art fair through the history of religious and artisanal festivals, in ‘The Evolution of the Art Fair’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, Vol. 39, No. 3 (149), Special Issue: Terrorism, Gender, and History. State of Research, Concepts, Case Studies, 2014, pp. 318-336; http://www.jstor.org/stable/24146123. Morgner made reference to Paco Barragán’s 2008 book The Art Fair Age, with Barragán publishing a book in 2019, From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Grand Tour to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials, which includes the World’s Fair in the art fair’s genealogy 5 As Morna Daniels writes on the tradition of exhibitions in France, “The series of the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century began in the seventeenth century, with exhibitions of works of art. These were held biannually from 1667 to 1793, with the exception of 1677, 1679 and 1708 to 1725. From 1793 to 1802 they were annual, before reverting to a biannual pattern under the Empire. Four were held in the reign of Louis XVIII and one under Charles X; under Louis-Philippe they were annual.” In ‘Paris National and International Exhibitions from 1798 to 1900: A FindingList of British Library Holdings’, Electronic British Library Journal (EBLJ), 2013; https://www.bl.uk/eblj/2013articles/pdf/ebljarticle62013.pdf 6

See ‘Building the Museum’, Victoria and Albert Museum website; https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/building-the-museum

7

Liza Picard, ‘The Great Exhibition’, The British Library, published online 14 October 14, 2009; https://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/thegreat-exhibition 8 “Of foreign contributions to the Exhibition France will be the largest contributor; next to it will come the Zoolvereign [Northern Germany] and Austria; then Belgium. To these succeed Russia, Turkey and Switzerland. Holland, its commercial importance considered, will occupy a very small space... Egypt, Spain, Portugal, the Brazils and Mexico, have confined themselves within still narrower limits; and China, Arabia and Persia have the smallest. Of the British dependencies the East Indies claim the lion’s share of the room...” Extract from a specially written handbook by R. Beasland that was published as a guide and souvenir for prospective visitors to the 1851 Exhibition, as quoted on the Victoria and Albert Museum website; http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-displays-and-products-from-overseas. See also Stuart Murray, ‘Canadian Representation at the 1851 London Great Exhibition and the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle’, Historie Sociale, 32: 63, 2001, p. 15. “The Canadian exhibit was located on the Ground Floor, close to the crystal fountain and statue of Victoria. It took its place with other British colonies, being surrounded by exhibits from Africa, India, and the Caribbean, all contained within the western half of the huge building devoted to Britain and her Empire, while the eastern half accommodated the displays of other nations.”

9 See ‘Steam & Speed: The Power of Steam at Sea’, Victoria and Albert Museum website; http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/the-powerof-steam-at-sea 10

Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 60

11

See Jeffrey Auerbach, or Geoffrey Cantor, Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851, Oxford and New York: Oxford, University Press 2011, p. 175 12

See Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 8

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13

The institution of Engineering and Technology; http://www.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/featured/trans-cable1865.cfm

14

See ‘About’ on the official Suez Canal Authority website; https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/About/Pages/WhySuezCanal.aspx

15

Paul Young, ‘Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition’, Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Jeffery Auerbach and Peter Hoffenberg eds, Aldershot: Asghate Publishing, 2008, p. 16 16 As Francesca Vanke writes, “A new emperor, Hsien-feng, had ascended the throne of China in 1850. He took a determinedly anti-foreign line, particularly towards the British, and was resolved to cooperate with them as little as possible.” Francesca Vanke, ‘Degrees of Otherness: The Ottoman Empire and China at the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, op cit., p. 201 17

Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 21

18

ibid., p. 22

19

As quoted by Young, ‘Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition’, op cit., p. 18

20

“By putting on show the massed resources of modern industry in a small concentrated space, just at a time when modern bourgeois society is being undermined from all sides, it is also displaying materials which have been produced, and are still being produced day after day in these turbulent times, for the construction of a new society. With this exhibition, the bourgeoisie of the world has erected in the modern Rome its Pantheon, where, with self-satisfied pride, it exhibits the gods which it has made for itself. It thus gives a practical proof of the fact that the ‘impotence and vexation of the citizen’ which German ideologists preach about year in year out, is only these gentlemen’s own impotent failure to understand the modern movement, and their own vexation at this impotence.” As quoted by Kevin Hetherington in Capitalism’s Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 14 21

Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, first published in New York Daily Tribune, 25 June, 1853; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1853/06/25.htm

22

Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, op cit., p. 29

23

Liza Picard, ‘The Great Exhibition’, op cit.

24

As quoted by Young, op cit., p. 15

25

Murray, ‘Canadian Representation at the 1851 London Great Exhibition and the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle’, op cit., p. 17

26

Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, op cit., p. 18

27

ibid., p. 22

28

ibid., p. 21

29

As quoted by Rydell, ibid., p. 15

30

Rydell, ibid., p. 21

31

ibid., p. 22

32

Greg Allen, ‘Living Exhibits at the 1904 World’s Fair’, NPR, published May 2004; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=1909651. See also Sharon Delmendo, The Star-entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines, Manila: University of Philippines Press, 2005, p. 51 33

As quoted by Rydell, op cit., p. 20

34

Joe Sonderman and Mike Truax, St. Louis: The 1904 World’s Fair, Mount Pleasant SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008, p. 18

35

Peter Sloterdijk, The Interior World of Capital, Wieland Hoban trans., Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2014, p. 169

36

ibid., p. 175

37

ibid.

38

ibid.

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39

ibid., p. 176

40

Dan Smith, Traces of Modernity, London and New York: Verso, 2012; E-Reader Version courtesy of Kindle (location page undefined)]

41

ibid.

42

Pamela Lee, Forgetting the Art World, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2012, p. 14

43

Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials, and documentas: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art, Hoboken NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 241-242 44

ibid., p. 242

45

Abassin Nessar, ‘dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul, Bamiyan, and Kassel: A Synergy of Art and Politics’, in Keeping History Alive: Safeguarding Cultural Heritage in Post-Conflict Afghanistan, Brendan Nassar and Sara Noshadi eds, Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 2015, p. 148

46

See Kaldor Public Art Projects Education Notes; http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/_assets/download-kits/2.%20Kaldornotes_Szeemann.pdf

47

Artsy Editorial, ‘Venice Biennale Artists by the Numbers’, 3 May 2017; https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-venice-biennale-artistsnumbers. I have quoted these numbers in my editorial for Ibraaz Platform 010, ‘Now Where? On Navigating without a Compass’ published online on 1 August, 2017; http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/177, which was also published in di’van | A Journal of Accounts, Issue 4, 2018, pp. 32-45 48 Wu Chin-Tao, ‘Biennials Without Borders?’ Tate Papers, Issue 12; http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/biennialswithout-borders#footnoteref7_toslpno> 49 Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 74 50

Lee, Forgetting the Art World, op cit., p. 14

51

ibid.

52

Paul Werner, Museum, INC: Inside the Global Art World, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005, p. 20

53

Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, op cit., p. 13

54

Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenbock, ‘Trading Places’, Networked Cultures, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2008, p. 156

55

Doreen Massey, For Space, London:SAGE Publications, 2005, p. 63

56

ibid., p. 69

57

See Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, and Gardner and Green, op cit., p. 4, 242

58

Gardner and Green, op cit., p. 3

59

ibid., p. 4

60

ibid., p. 188

61

ibid.

62

Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, op cit., p. 12

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TAREK EL-ARISS

The Beachcombers

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Your fate is to remain forever prisoner between water and fire.

The Soothsayer, Nizar Kabbani1 He sleeps in the sunlight, one hand on his chest, Tranquil. In his right side, there are two red holes.

The Sleeper in the Valley, Arthur Rimbaud2 Beirut is a city that goes into the sea, which envelops and contains it. Its coast is rugged, modern, protruding into nature. Beirutis push the sea away like they push an overwhelming mother.

They claim their space and assert their independence by dumping garbage and pouring concrete.

And the sea hates back by cradling foreign fleets that bring bombs and bondage. The sea of Beirut disguises fire beneath every wave, a combustion with every ebbing, spoken in different tongues.

This incendiary sea tortures Beirutis with lamentations over exiled lovers and outlaws seeking other shores. The sea drowns them in tears, sparking their desire to join those who departed and to disappear with them beyond the horizon, never to resurface.

Yet Beirutis find ways to reconcile with the sea. Their coastline is home to private beach clubs nestled at the foot of rocky cliffs. For many Beirutis living through the 1975-1990 Civil War, these beach clubs became the only outlets for them during months and years of siege and enclosure.

This essay tells the story of those who withstood the war by playing a dangerous game—a forbidden game—in the sun. It is about a fearless class that was unwilling to give up its privileges, risking the lives of its children for a swim, a tan, and a short drive to the beach. I reflect on these Beirutis’ violent and perverse affront to war by choosing to cohabit with it. I try to understand what valuables they were seeking by going to the beach every day, from May to October, from morning to evening.

My reflection, which arrives after years of inspection and introspection, depicts the work of memory.

This memory is accessed through a portal, a red hole in the head of a handsome youth named Ahmad.

THE BEACH When one thinks of Mediterranean beaches, one imagines France’s Côte d’Azur or the Greek Isles.

These beaches have captured people’s imagination and inspired dream and fantasy, love and conquest. In the film Summer Lovers (1982), young men and women dive into Santorini’s blue sea, blissful yet full of dangers. In Alexandria, the iconic Stanley Beach was immortalized in Youssef Chahine’s film, Alexandria… Why? (1979), recalling the city of his youth, a melting pot of Arabs, Europeans and Jews. Menaced by World War II, these Alexandrians came together at the beach, fishing, boating, swimming and flirting on the Corniche, which stretches for miles. Chahine blends sea and war to portray his own Alexandria: personal, fantasized and accessed through special currents and tides going in and out of rock constellations strewn along the coast.

Further north and further east from Alexandria, Beirut boasts a vibrant beach culture, where people swim and snorkel, play backgammon and palettes.3 This culture could be traced back to the first part of the twentieth century, with such beach cafés as Qahwit Daood. One of the last survivors of these traditional cafés is Qahwit al-Rawda or Shatila, which continues to attract families, artists, and tourists in search of a bygone era. The coast is so much a part of Beirut’s identity that a mere rock formation has become its icon. Like Paris’ Eiffel Tower or New York’s Statue of Liberty, Sakhrit el-Raouche (Raouche’s Pigeon Rock) figures on the Lebanese currency, affirming the city’s attachment to its rocky shore.

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By the 1950s and 1960s, a cast of simple beach clubs, poured with concrete, appeared—Bain Militaire, Long Beach and Sporting, to name a few, adorning Beirut’s coastline. In the 1980s, such beach resorts as Summerland and Coral Beach appeared, introducing a glitzy model with various nightclubs, restaurants and tennis courts. Gloria Gaynor sang at Summerland in 1980. That night, my parents were readying to attend the concert as the Israeli Army, it was rumoured, were preparing to bomb the Palestinian refugee camps across from the posh venue.

The war gradually infiltrated Beirut’s beaches. When the city was divided in 1975, the beaches that survived were on the west side of the demarcation line.4 In fact, one of the first battles of the war revolved around a cluster of beachfront hotels and became known as the Hotels War, vividly described in Ghada al-Samman’s novel, Beirut Nightmares (1997). Some beach clubs ceased to exist, surviving only as memories in the minds of a previous generation (Saint Simon, Saint Michel), while others remained open, flaunting their bombed-out shells (Saint George). The war raided Beirut’s beaches but couldn’t wipe them out. In fact, the fighting turned them into the only outlet for those trapped in a city encircled by hostility and deprived of greenery. Beirutis flocked to these beaches not for the glamour they afforded but as an alternative to the dailiness of war. Going to the beach became an act of survival, an act of creation, in a city where the social fabric was disintegrating as a result of a violent conflict that would last fifteen years. For many, the beach was the last stand against an evertightening noose.

WEST BEIRUT During the Civil War, my family decided to stay and struggle on. My father, who had studied and lived in the USA, was never going to leave Beirut again. Perhaps he was afraid to leave, like the father in Ziad Doueiri’s film, West Beirut (1998). During the Israeli invasion in 1982, my father was proud of being one of only seven physicians who had kept his hospital running, performing all kinds of surgeries. Defying water, electricity and fuel shortages, he sold his inheritance and spent from his savings throughout the protracted conflict. We continued to go to school, however intermittently, and the parties, dinners and occasional trips abroad were a staple of our life at war. Crossing checkpoints to visit friends and family in the East, or travelling to Syria or Cyprus to catch a plane when Beirut’s airport had closed down, we confronted violence with an illusory courage and obstinate joie de vivre.

In retrospect, I wonder if we shouldn’t have left. Surviving the way we did forced us to suppress fear and eliminate its symptoms. My father always insisted that we were the courageous ones. We never went into the shelter no matter how close the bombs fell; we stopped militiamen from squatting in empty apartments in our building; and we flouted shortages by buying water which we’d store in the kitchen, the attic, and once, in the bathtub. We stocked food and toothpaste, detergent and spices.

During one of the worst episodes of the war, my father bought dozens of Perrier bottles and cans of boiled potatoes, which were all that was left at the only supermarket he found open that day.

I remember witnessing the shopping bags reveal strange food items that were to be incorporated into our war diet. We found a way to live around war, on its side, at its limits, in-between bombs and abductions, fuel and power shortages. And we had the sea and the privileges of those Beirutis who could go to the beach every day, especially when work was slow and school was closed.

My father, who passed away suddenly in 1987, went to his clinic from nine to one, most days. Before leaving work, he would call me—when the phones worked, that is—asking if he should pass by the house and take me to the beach or if I was going to ride with my mother. Having lost our mountain home at the beginning of the war, the beach was all we had left. By the end of the

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summer, we were freakishly tanned. People had different recipes for tanning oils, some involving Pepsi and beer, others, peroxide and mercurochrome. We also had the iconic Ambre Solaire, which gave way to Lancaster, the potent tanning paste that left a bronze hue on new skin. Being white during the summer was an anomaly, a disease, a sign of staying in and capitulating to war’s violence. When the beach season started, I remember my mother and sister sitting in an isolated location, all the way at the end, by the rocks, ashamed of their white skins. It was only when they got some colour that they would join the rest of their friends and become like everyone else, equal in the sun.

At the beach, I fished, snorkeled and collected seashells for my sister, who used to display them on a little blue table by her bedside. I remember making the dough for fishing—yes, I used dough—melting butter and mixing it with flour and water. I spent hours fishing. I was alone in my world, at my designated position. I would mostly catch small fish called marbled spinefoot, which used to sting my fingers when I took them off the hook. The stinging, I was told, could only be relieved if one urinated on the wound. At the end of the day, I would bring home my fish, insisting on cleaning and cooking them myself. I remember cutting their little bellies with my mother’s cuticle scissors, and then frying them in a kitchen dimly lit by a lux (camping lantern), due to power cuts.

The beach was a space that was no longer a site of leisure and recreation but a space for inventing a reality adjacent to that of war. This new reality, however, came at a great price.

How many times did we have to pack and rush home when the situation suddenly deteriorated?

How many times did we endure the sounds of explosions, pretending they were too far away?

Though we put on new skins and masks of courage, we were exposed, naked in our vulnerability, desperate to be together. So we played and gossiped and flirted. We used to swim in the piscine naturelle, also known as crique el-moj, which was a pool-like enclave that created a current effect, sucking us in and out. It was for the bold kids, the good swimmers, who would dive in to catch the wave, only to reemerge with cuts and bruises.

Our glittery bay that eyed the horizon, trapped between water and fire, provided us with the illusion of freedom. It made us carefree, alive, boisterous and courageous in ways that we were not and could no longer be on the outside. In this space, life grew again, defying war, for a short while.

So we tanned and groomed and snorkeled, inventing a reality that was a little more meaningful, a little less violent. These activities were not just an escape from war but rather a quest for something valuable that was lost and needed to be found, reinvented, ever so gently, every day. We were like those beachcombers, looking for valuable objects on the shore.

COMBING Recalling this today, beachcombing gives new meaning to our daily rituals in the sun. Also, the Beachcomber was a famous nightclub at the Coral Beach Hotel, where people danced and drank Jamaica cocktails throughout the conflict. In the language of war, combing designates a military operation that cleanses areas of rebels and intruders. As for musht (which also means comb), it refers to the machinegun’s magazine, full of tightly stacked bullets that would fly hysterically in all directions. The sound of bullets, which used to lull me to sleep during the war, awakens me today and triggers my associations about our combing rituals at the beach in Beirut.

Combing also means to render orderly the hair. It is the morning ritual that inaugurates the day, announcing its beginning and setting its rhythm. One of the first tools available to mankind, the comb neutralizes disorder, stemming through continuous and methodical movements the parasitic and the unwanted. This beautifying weapon maps the human and identifies its limits and what l

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lies beyond them. With every stroke, the comb produces and excludes the louse, the other, and the outside. Combing is thus a form of weeding, a resistance against scavenging plants trying to take over the lawn, the garden, the beach at the edge of the city, which we cultivated daily with much love and great diligence. The comb’s repetitive pulling on the hair, from the root out, straightens, organizes, and eliminates the louse, war, and anxiety.

Oh comber comb her hair Gently gently and don’t cause her pain For she is a noble girl Who’s used to pampering5

This traditional lullaby that we used to hear as children is sung for the bride on her wedding day. It pleads with the comber to go gently on the hair and comfort the girl who is used to pampering.

Combing thus involves a pain that needs to be tempered, attenuated. This pain arises from breaking apart the embracing curls, intertwined in tiny knots. It is also the pain of separation as the girl readies to leave home. Combing contains the girl’s anxiety by reaffirming the familiar, recreating home, our home at the beach during the war.

Fishing, swimming and tanning are the kinds of combing we performed during this time.

Other species practice combing or grooming as well. Monkeys and gorillas, our close kin, groom not only to delouse but also to express loyalty, love, affection, remorse and distress.6 Our combing and grooming in a war-ravaged city allowed us to restore a social bond that belonged to a different time, a different species. They allowed us to restart civilization, building it anew around swimming, tanning and fishing. From this vulnerable space, where bodies were exposed to the sun and to the stray bullets of the Lebanon’s Civil War, a new community arose through daily practices of intimacy.

There are several Sayings by the Prophet Muhammad about combing that come to mind as well. In one instance, the Prophet compares the Muslim community to the comb’s teeth: “From the time of Adam to this day humans have been created equal like the teeth of a comb, with no advantage for the Arab over the Persian, the red-skinned over the black, except in their piety.”7 According to the Prophet, the comb is a model for equality, closeness and intimacy. The comb is blind to race and ethnicity, and to the sectarian and political divisions that consumed the Lebanese during the war.

The comb brings them together, makes them equal, naked, equally vulnerable and equally tanned.

Beirut’s beachcombers survived war and divisions as God had created me, naked, bare, equal in front of God, in the sun.

In another Saying, the Prophet aligns combing with smelling and remembering in a liminal state between life and death, heaven and earth. On his nocturnal journey to heaven (Isra’), the Prophet remembers smelling a sweet fragrance, and asking the angel Gabriel about its provenance. Gabriel replied that it belongs to the comber of Pharaoh’s daughter. This woman revealed her true faith when the iron comb dropped from her hand and she exclaimed; “In the Name of God!” (bismillah!).

When her mistress heard her, she inquired about the woman’s faith and whether she believed in a god other than Pharaoh. As the comber proclaimed her belief in the true God, she was thrown into the fire.8 The dropping of the comb exposes the comber’s identity and transports her to heaven, where the Prophet smells her fragrance, learns of her story, and relays it to the believers. Combing thus describes the work of memory, of remembering what the Prophet said and experienced on his journey. It’s also the recounting of episodes, anecdotes and encounters by sifting through the past in a state of vulnerability. l

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Today, my comb has dropped as well, revealing a lost world that continues to live in me.

The beach life we invented in the midst of war is a landscape drawn by a painter through successive brushstrokes, cajoling the canvas, the screen, the scene of writing my war experience. The movement of water going in and out of rocky enclaves regulates the work of memory. With every wave and every bubble forming at the surface, this movement uncovers new images, old ones. The foam that kids like myself used to recreate in their bathtubs with bubble bath, going under water and provoking a wave that would flood the bathroom, is the theatre of memory, its primordial stage. As they burst, the bubbles expose the past in all its playfulness and pain. Today, these bubbles lead me to the beachcombing we practiced in Beirut during the war, and to 1985, the year of the jellyfish.

THE YEAR OF THE JELLYFISH We had never seen jellyfish before, or perhaps it was me who didn’t remember seeing them.

When they came, they contaminated the water by spreading their stings like an aquatic minefield.

These creatures, which people attributed to pollution, were messengers of great calamity. It was as if the gods had sent them to punish us for our hubris, our affront to war, our denial of the real pain of others. The jellyfish arose from below, from afar, joining the carnival of war. The Barbarians, for whom the Romans longed as they partied on the hills of their eternal city, had finally appeared in the shape of sea creatures that would sting and awaken us forever. It was our day of reckoning.

That summer, Lebanon was consumed by the Camps War, which pitted Lebanese militias loyal to Syria against Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian fighters and their Lebanese supporters. For Beirutis, Arafat and his men were thought to be wealthy, flush with petro-dollars pouring in from the Gulf States. As militiamen were besieging the camps and firing at its inhabitants, Palestinian fighters would hurl at them Cadbury chocolate bars and exotic fruits for respite. These were the anecdotes from the Camps War, jokes and rumours that veiled the spectacle of slaughter.

That year school closed early, extending our beach season. Only the boldest were at the beach: my family and a few others, a couple of dozen children and adults, going about their daily combing. As I was swimming in the crique, I started hearing the whistling bullets fly over our heads.

The camps were not far, a couple of miles away, but far enough for Beirutis who had mastered the art of compartmentalization. The other children and I tried to continue as usual until we saw someone pointing from the restaurant overlooking the beach. Yelling and pointing! Yelling and pointing!

He was pointing at a man lying in the sun close to where my parents and their friends used to sit.

In the commotion, people started running, not knowing what had just happened. It was Ahmad.

He was shot in the head.

Ahmad was the son of our close family friends, the eldest of three boys and a girl.

In his early twenties, he was tall and handsome, a courageous swimmer and an avid beachcomber.

He worked on his tan and on his butterfly strokes all summer long. The bullet, nestled in the back of his head, caused Ahmad to go into a coma and then into a vegetative state, only to die some ten years later. I remember visiting him in the hospital in Beirut and then in London, having to put on gloves and a mask to enter his room. They never extracted the bullet from Ahmad’s head. They couldn’t.

The bullet became part of his being. His grey matter wrapped itself around it, cradling it like a lost child that had finally found refuge from war. Ahmad cradled this foreign object, holding on to it as if holding on to life itself. The beachcombing we all practiced could not keep war away or remove its offspring from Ahmad’s head. War had finally come to us and forced us to embrace it on its own terms.

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COMBING AS REMEMBERING 1985 put an end to our combing rituals, our daily inventions of the social at the edge of the city.

The illusion of cohabiting with war in this carefree enclave had finally been shattered. That summer, my sister married and left home; the woman who raised me and who had been living in our house for seventeen years left as well; the Lebanese pound was devalued overnight, squandering whatever was left of my parents’ savings; and my brothers went abroad after graduating college. 1985 inaugurated my adulthood at the age of twelve. The bullet that put Ahmad to sleep awakened us all from our dream in the sun. We knew we could no longer swim, fish, and play palettes. War had finally caught up with our game at the beach.

Ahmad’s bullet lives in my head. Its burning metal prevents me from forgetting or taking the currents and tides for granted. The hole in his head became my portal to a life I suffered, loved, and lost. I can’t say I was traumatized by war; perhaps I don’t allow myself this experience. I have accepted the fact that the bullet cannot be removed, that it’s there, alive in me as I hold on to it in my own way. It became a point of entry and exit through which memories come and go like air, water, and waste. I can’t pour concrete on it as Beirutis usually do. Through ebbs and flows, the memory that comes from afar, swimming towards me, is embodied in writing, in this essay. Its movement mimics that of water, going in and out of the crique, which controls the flow of the waves and of the bodies jumping to catch them. As the waves crash on the rocks, they reveal the valuable, the painful, the bruised bodies of bold swimmers, and the aging beachcombers finally embracing their vulnerability. Like the war-scars that mark a few remaining buildings in Beirut, Ahmad’s bullet scars me, and allows me to remember and to forget my childhood, my life at war.

Notes 1 “Qari’atu al-Finjan” (my translation); see http://www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=287 2

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud1.htm#_Toc196916307

3

Beach racket ball

4

Like Berlin, Beirut was artificially divided in 1975 into two zones reflecting the new identities of war, Christians and Muslims, east and west.

New resorts were built in the east, along the coast north of the city 5

Folk Song, “Ya Mashta” (my translation); see http://www.shakwmakw.com/vb/showthread.php?t=327479&page=3

6

Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 1, 21. The ability to gossip, writes Robin Dunbar, set humans apart from their animal kins, placing grooming at the origin of language 7

http://www.islamweb.net/hadith/display_hbook.php?bk_no=503&pid=128452&hid=22

8

http://www.ekabakti.com/mss_searcho.php?txtSearch2=%E3%C7%D4%D8%C9&B1=Find&topic=mss&utf8=1&ruziah=hadith#

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This essay is a response to several thematic threads of the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, Leaving the Echo Chamber—being Making New Time and Trialing Time—on the invention of time during a period of war, of Beirut in the 1980s.

Making New Time: Ours is an age of constant speed; we barely have a moment to breathe.

Time is the irreversible, indefinite and continued process of existing in the world. Yet technological, social, and political change has altered the means by which we relate to images, objects, and the concept of history itself. Spatial and temporal orders have shifted with the advent of a reality that moves like mercury in and out of our hands (our bloodstream) and into an abyss, a space of chaos —but also toward a new portal, a space of possibility: Reality and history have been augmented by the realm of the virtual. This process encourages us to look back with a critical eye at the history of material cultures as we think we know them. With all this in mind, how do we slow down and “experience” the experience? How do we make “new time”?

Trialing Time: History is that most elusive of things. It proclaims to account for our time, but it is marred or at the very least contorted by the subjectivity of others and of notions of what might constitute tradition. Can we invent new modes of time in the face of competing narratives?

How do we negotiate the trauma wrought by perpetual conflict, and by the echo chamber that circulates around it? Embers turn to dust. (See http://sharjahart.org/biennial-14)

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Stones Turned: Digging into The Past, Digging into The Present

Shadows move along ladders under the silence of ordinary things there is another silence: it belongs neither to the leaves nor to the dead Etel Adnan, ‘The Manifestations of the Voyage’1 Contemporary art and archaeology appear to be very different animals—the former predominantly interested in making a dent in the present moment, the latter predominantly concerned with understanding the past. Whereas archaeologists methodically try to record and piece together the remnants of the bygone, artists seem to find poiesis in temporal gaps. Put differently, one can be seen as a practice of empirically connecting the dots, the other of willingly scrambling, or even, undoing them. In archaeology it is mainly human presence that is at the centre, and that directs what is being excavated. Contemporary art is, as always, much messier and going on recent production that favours the speculative, human absence and any variations thereof, seems just as important as human presence. It allows for a practice that not only is—to use McGill University Professor Christine Ross’ helpful wording “a pivotal site of temporal experimentation”2—but also one that takes temporal scale into account. Expanding on Ross, who notes that the aesthetics of contemporary art “brings together time and history, contemporary experiences of temporal passing and modern historicity,”3 it “free[s] the three categories of time (past, present, and future) [and] activates the past in the present and allow[s] it to condition the future in that very process.”4 Digging literally deeper into temporal layers by folding in archaeology, might to a degree, explain why at this moment in time we see a surge in artists working with and around archaeological subject matter. Given that the current political climate of polarisation, populist nationalism and xenophobia rekindles all kinds of nasty shadows of the past, whether ancient or recent, this is not so strange. l

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Add to this growing awareness of decolonizing museological practices results in hard ideological and ethical questions being asked of the discipline of archaeology, and makes a fertile playing ground for artists. Questions include how archaeology is instrumentalized in furthering nationalist, nativist and other narratives. A stark example of this is the ‘weaponization’ of archaeology in Israel to demonstrate a biblical connection to the land.5 This is craftily countered by Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour in her most recent film In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015), which I discussed in the third issue of this journal. Perhaps the starkest examples of how issues of provenance, ownership, looting and the destruction of heritage and material culture have been mediatized and brought to the fore, are the devastating wars in Iraq and Syria.6 Here Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s project The invisible enemy should not exist (2007-ongoing)7 is an example of calling attention to the artefacts stolen from Baghdad’s National Museum of Iraq during the 2003 American invasion. To this day there are still over seven thousand objects missing. In his project Rakowitz has recreated these objects from the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs and Arabic newspapers, echoing how in war these artefacts often become collateral damage, lucrative throwaway items that are disposed of, not only from their (institutional) home, but worse, from their place in history. At the same time Rakowitz has attempted to reconstruct their material presence, refusing that these objects become forever lost to humanity, no matter how inadequate their substitutes.

Another recent example of archaeological controversy, in particular on the level of institutional responsibilities, is the much-debated Humboldt Forum,8 Berlin’s latest prestige project.

Planned to be housed in a rebuilt palace that oozes Prussian imperial grandeur, the Humboldt Forum is to show a vast collection of ethnographic objects, amassed—questionably—during Germany’s colonial past. Critics have accused it of ignoring the atrocities committed during Germany’s colonial era and the project’s celebratory discourse worryingly veering into the dangerous territory of national and nationalist mythmaking.9 Indeed, archaeology, mythology, national identity, and nation- and state-making are inextricably intertwined.10 Testimony to this, and showing the other and extreme side of the coin, is the highly mediatized destruction by the Islamic State, of pre-Islamic antiquities and heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, and even bloodier attacks on archaeological museums, such as the 2015 attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, leaving twenty one people dead.11 LAYERING TIME AND SPACE In their most recent project Unconformities (2017), Lebanese artists/filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige make slippery the very notions at the heart of archaeological debates: geography, historical scale, chronology, identity and belonging. The backdrop to this project is very much informed by their artistic oeuvre that spans over two decades and is primarily concerned with the politics of visual representation in the aftermath of rupture, not solely, but often related to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) during which the artists ‘came of age’. Key to their practice is complicating configurations of time and space. Unconformities is in this sense a poetic interrogation of the slippage between archaeological and geological temporalities, destruction and (re)construction, as well as human and non-human subjectivities. These are big topics, personalized by focusing on places significant to their own personal and professional biographies. These places are respectively: Beirut (city of their birth, upbringing and a returning referent and site in their artistic production), Paris (their current place of residence and production), and Athens (Hadjithomas is of Greek descent and the city was a refuge for her family during the Lebanese Civil War). In and by themselves Beirut, Paris and Athens as urban, but also mythological centres, produce their own imaginaries. l

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Stones Turned: Digging into The Past, Digging into The Present

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It was the reality of rapid urban transformation in Beirut that the artists witnessed on a daily basis from the windows of their family home that initially sparked this new body of work. The reconstruction of post-war Beirut, the on-going erasure of architectural—and often by corollary archaeological —heritage sites by real estate developers for new lucrative construction is a bone of contention amongst many Lebanese.12 To this should also be added unbridled land speculation, gentrification, and social polarisation. Unconformities, however, invites us to look at cycles of urban destruction and (re)construction and the effects of disaster—man-made or other—through a wider temporal lens. Unconformities is comprised of three components: Palimpsests (2017), a film showing the drilling of soil cores at construction sites in Beirut; Time Capsules (2017), an installation of suspended core samples from Beirut, Paris and Athens; and Zig Zag over Time (2017), a narrative timeline composed of photos, drawings and text. What binds these three elements together is that they each materialize, but also scramble, representations of time and space. As such, the aesthetics of each piece follows the project’s conceptual logic of ruin and creation. While the video Palimpsests roots the project in Beirut and serves as its contextual and catalytic framework, the other works trouble and widen conceptions of a fixed geography and temporal scale. The opening sequence of Palimpsests shows us the drilling of core samples, a common practice in construction to determine the properties of the soil before building. The technique, though filmed sensuously, seems crude. The cores are displayed in wooden crates, depths are marked manually, while chains and cogwheels rattle into place.

This pragmatic mechanical choreography is contrasted with the archaeologist’s fine brushes, mesh nets and dexterity picking through the dirt and categorising whatever is brought to the surface. l

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Stones Turned: Digging into The Past, Digging into The Present

This figure of the archaeologist appears tiny next to the bulldozer mercilessly ploughing away.

And yet it is this very tension Hadjithomas and Joreige want to draw to our attention: the archaeologist sifting through the past and the bulldozer destroying the old for the new, they are very much part of the same historical cycle. The latter is emphasized by a stunning aerial shot that pulls away from the construction site and pans out to show us Beirut while it incorporates footage the artists filmed in the aftermath of the 2006 July (Lebanon) War. In this case, the bulldozers dig through the debris of the bombing. It is here through the rubble where the city’s many chronologies and ontologies, its cycles of destruction and construction, come together and form a palimpsest.

This not only stretches the idea of scale, but also our own position in history. Demolition and disaster, resilience and survival: the earthquakes that destroyed ancient Beirut, the Ottoman period, the French Mandate, the Lebanese Civil War, the 2006 July War—they are all flecks on the same timeline.

VERTICAL TIME Unconformities was first shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017. But it was at the Acropolis Museum in Athens (2018), the first time ever a work of contemporary art was shown in this archaeological museum, that its potential to disrupt clearly surfaced. The Acropolis Museum, like most museums—especially those dealing with antiquities—is as much an ideological and nationalist project as it is scientific. Timelines and historiographic scripts are carefully crafted to convey a narrative that is distinctly demarcated, linear in its chronology and very much centred on the human experience. Unconformities however, which derives its title from the geological term indicating a break in the geological record,13 suggests a fluid and mutable approach to time and place.

The exhibition as a whole functioned as an unconformity subtly unsettling the premise of the museum that hosted it. This is best demonstrated by the work Time Capsules, a mesmerizing installation of soil cores taken from Beirut, Paris and Athens. Suspended vertically in a resin, the history of these three cities is displayed and at a first glance they look remarkably similar: stones and rock. However, closer inspection reveals that to each city there are specificities and nuances in the dug up matter.

Whereas two adjacent layers of rock in Paris may span two hundred years, in Beirut, it may only be thirty years. There is a continuous stretching and shrinking of time at play here. In a way, time, even if suspended and captured in a resin, continues to flow. An unintentional side-effect of the chemical preservation process used by the artists is the formation of crystals between the rocks. Like a growth they form a web around the rocks and stones, as if they were alive, enveloping the material manifestations of history with something that cannot quite be controlled or subdued. It becomes a beautiful metaphor for the idea that history is never static, but always in movement.

HORIZONTAL AND FOLDED TIME Time moves in a linear way in the third component of the Unconformities project, Zig Zag over Time, timelines that frame the exhibition as a whole. Also here time does not necessarily move at the same pace; its rhythm is disrupted, accelerated, slowed down. Fittingly the artists chose long leporellos (zig zags) to represent their timelines that are composed of photos of the soil cores, and annotated with textual notes and drawings by various scientists with whom the artists collaborated.

They include amongst others geologists, natural history museum illustrators, and archaeologists, who all have their own style of drawing and coding soil samples and time, specific to their discipline.

This assembly of inter-disciplinary voices shows that the representation, as well as the interpretation, of history is manifold. Indeed, the textual notes that are featured on Zig Zag over Time are highly

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subjective and reveal only snippets of what the scientists told the artists, never the full story.

They range from the technological such as ”[r]oots, stones and concrete from the infrastructure of public networks”, the ecological “[m]odern and industrial fill from the gas industry, significant pollution”, to the archaeological “[n]atural red pottery clay from Iridanos river, first traces of settlement” and the geological “[d]ark grey tectonic schist, revealing discontinuous unconformities, latencies and ruptures”. It is no coincidence that the artists use a representational form that highlights the timeline’s ruptures: the leporello’s folds are subtle yet visible pauses for the viewer. They indicate that even when chronologies seem linear and horizontal, they are always defined by their gaps.

OBJECT MATERIALS MEET STORY MATERIALS Beirut-based art critic Ari Amaya-Akkermans observes in his review of Hadjithomas’ and Joreige’s exhibition in Athens that “most archaeological institutions remain off-limits to artists.”14 It took the Acropolis Museum almost a decade—and much negotiation—after opening to allow for that to happen with Unconformities. The questioning of who, in the case of archaeological museums, and what, in the case of natural science museums, makes history, remains sensitive, if not uncomfortable for many Western institutions. This is because the very premise of their foundation—Eurocentric knowledge—is often challenged. “While not necessarily scientific or quantitative, [art projects like Hadjitomas and Joreige’s] qualitatively serve to decolonize archaeological knowledge from its role in the legitimation of European historiography.”15 In other words, Hadjithomas and Joreige counter an exclusive and Eurocentric gaze by foregrounding the malleability of time in order to recuperate notions of possibility and a shared history between Beirut, Paris and Athens.

Lebanese artist Ali Cherri similarly shifts this Western gaze, but he looks specifically at how archaeological museum objects tell us stories of power, identity, history and belonging. Here he is not so much interested in what the object is per se, but more in its materiality and which kind of historical narratives can be woven around it.16 To Cherri archaeological objects are by default artefacts of ruin and survival: “An archaeological site is where things survive the catastrophe of time.”17 Throughout his art practice he complicates the meeting of animate and inanimate, notions of embodiment, and how we understand the latter’s survival and demise. This is exemplified in various ways in his most recent works that all draw from archaeology. In his video Somniculus (2017) the artist’s own bodily presence in archaeological museums is central, while in another video Petrified (2016) the objects in the museum themselves are the embodied agents of ruin and survival. The ghostly reigns in The Digger (2015), in which Cherri portrays the Pakistani caretaker of a necropolis in the desert of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates: here is a figure whose forgotten presence amongst the dead not only drives the narrative, but becomes spectral itself.

In all of the above works the museum becomes similar to an archaeological site: a locus where ruin and survival is displayed and where artefacts are disciplined in narrating the tale of their survival over and over again. Still, Cherri is convinced that artefacts in museums can speak to us in different ways and counter what the museum really wants them to say.18 This is most clear in the video Petrified, where Cherri’s voice-over asks, “What are we looking at when looking at relics in a museum? We expect everything to speak to us: the beasts, the dead, the stones. And these statues are mute. They have mouths that do not speak. They have eyes that do not see us. Their eyes are petrified.

They are not asking to be saved.” What is interesting here is that Cherri undoes artefacts from their agency while simultaneously bestowing it upon them. This is further augmented by showing the artefacts in the dark, out of focus, in detailed close-ups, or only lit from one side. They are always l

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shown in a fragmented way as if they exist out of time and are robbed from their historical grounding and meaning. In the background we occasionally hear the amplified ticking of a clock. Also here time passes, but how does time really flow then in a museum populated by these objects?

This poetic image is disturbed when Cherri introduces a second channel to the video installation. We see the hands of archaeologists brushing away the earth from human bones at an excavation site. It is very matter-of-fact with highly trained and confident gestures that are almost mechanical. It is difficult to imagine that these bones are the remains of an actual person. Nevertheless, these skeletons form the bridge from the realm of the dead to the living in the film. The following scene is filmed in an aviary where we are greeted by birds tweeting and cooing. If anything must signify life, it must be birds. However, they too in their captivity have become petrified objects of display. A remarkable flattening between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman occurs in Cherri’s film. Animal, bone, stone, though they remain silent and out of history in Petrified, they do speak to us in a different way.

It is probably no coincidence that Cherri is fascinated by taxidermy. Somehow the presence of the animal is still there. Taxidermy animals are made to look like their referent, perhaps even commemorate them, yet however lifelike, they have a very different ontology. In a way Cherri’s modus operandi could be viewed as taxidermic, as in moving the metaphorical skin of objects so that they can exist elsewhere, in a realm between the living and the dead, outside of what is assumed, and in a place where everything can be entangled.

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FRAGMENTS OF NEW KIN In 2017 the Archaeological Unit of Saint Denis, a suburb close to Paris, offered Cherri 300kg of excavated animal bones dating back to the tenth and twelfth centuries which had been examined, classified and catalogued, eventually taking up too much storage space.19 The Archaeological Unit had exhausted the usage from this stock and as a last resort they were given to the artist. This spurred Cherri’s interest in the life cycle of objects and how their value can be demoted over time,20 in this case from a living entity, to an object of science and study, to eventually a thing without use and no value. It is perhaps ironic that the only afterlife for such an object is transforming it into an artwork.

Working with discarded stuff, or what Cherri calls “the debris of things,” allows him to forge new material alliances. Kinship is created between objects that take in different positions in the value hierarchy. This is beautifully articulated in his installation Where do birds go to hide (2017) in which he draws from the Saint Denis archaeological stock and uses the botanical principle of grafting to meld one demoted object to another: one large tree trunk harbours the small body of a taxidermy bird, on another shards of bones seem to grow like fungus. And then there’s a small taxidermy bird lying on its back, with a Roman brick from the archaeological site of Ostia Antica stacked on top of it. Shifting the object’s value here means shifting its skin. These works are fragile and speculative, detailed and full of life and mortality. They are open-ended and remind me how anthropologist Anna Tsing speaks of human and non-human interspecies, intersections and “assemblages” as “open-ended gatherings.”21 They emit glimmers of hope and possibility in dark times. l

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Notes 1 Etel Adnan, ‘The Manifestations of the Voyage’, The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage, Tucson, AZ: The Post-Apollo Press, 1990. Cfr. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53852/from-the-manifestations-of-the-voyage; accessed 1 October 2018 2 Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too. The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012, p. 4 3

ibid, p. 5

4

ibid, p. 6

5

The instrumentalisation of archaeology by Israel is a case in point. See for example Natasha Roth, ‘Parks and Occupation: Archaeology is the new security’, +972 Mag, 7 March 2015; http://972mag.com/parks-and-occupation-archaeology-is-the-new-security/103855/; accessed 27 December 2015 6 Cfr. Craig Barker, ‘Fifteen years after looting, thousands of artefacts are still missing from Iraq’s national museum’,The Conversation, 9 April 2018; http://theconversation.com/fifteen-years-after-looting-thousands-of-artefacts-are-still-missing-from-iraqs-nationalmuseum-93949; last accessed 10 November 2018, and Frank Gardner, ‘Saving Syria’s heritage: Archaeologists discover invisible solution’, BBC World News, 21 March 2017; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-39331342; last accessed 10 November 2018 7

Cfr. http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/the-invisible-enemy-should-not-exist/

8

Kate Brown, ‘The Big Move to Berlin’s Humboldt Forum Has Begun, as Pressure for Restitution of Colonial-era Objects Grows’, Artnet News, 11 June 2018; https://news.artnet.com/art-world/humboldt-forum-move-1293233; last accessed 10 November 2018 9 For an excellent summary see Graham Bowley, ‘A New Museum Opens Old Wounds in Germany’, New York Times, 12 October 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/arts/design/humboldt-forum-germany.html ; last accessed 10 November 2018 10 See for an excellent discussion on the complex relations between archaeology, nationalism, colonial and postcolonial geopolitical contexts in the Levant, Chiara de Cesari’s article ‘Postcolonial Ruins. Archaeologies of political violence and IS’, Anthropology Today vol. 31: 6, December 2015, pp. 22-26 11

Cfr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_National_Museum_attack; last accessed 10 November 2018

12

Perhaps most debated is the reconstruction of Downtown Beirut by former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s company Solidere. See for good discussions on the relation between war, post-war reconstruction, loss of architectural and archaeological artifacts and real estate development; https://en.qantara.de/content/lebanons-architectural-heritage-a-race-against-time and https://www.thenational.ae/world/ mena/developers-threaten-beirut-s-architectural-heritage-1.451322 and https://www.icomos.org/risk/world_report/2000/leban_2000.htm; last accessed 13 November 2018 13

Cfr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconformity; last accessed 13 November 2018

14

Ari Amaya-Akkermans, ‘How Archaeology has fuelled Successful Art Experiments’, Hyperallergic, 25 May 2018; https://hyperallergic. com/444344/how-archaeology-has-fueled-successful-art-experiments/; last accessed 11 September 2018 15

ibid.

16

Skype interview with the artist, 13 September 2018

17

Jim Quilty, ‘The art of ruins falling into ruin’, The Daily Star, 22 August 2015; https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/f814a2_853c1d0be1f34f109c 165d2ae7241900.pdf; last accessed 3 December 2018 18

Skype interview with the artist, 13 September 2018

19

Cfr. brochure of Ali Cherri’s solo exhibition Dénaturé at Gallerie Imane Farès, 12 October 2017–16 February 2018

20

Skype interview with the artist, 13 September 2018. Cherri refers to Jane Bennett’s notion of demoted objects, in which she defines demotion as “the power of humans to turn nonhuman things into useful, ranked objects.”

21

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015

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We Can’t Even Call Them ‘Dead’: On Köken Ergun’s Heroes

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A rather bizarre question introduces the Turkish President’s TV commercial for the 2015 centennial of the Gallipoli Campaign (also known as the Battle of Çanakkale) in World War I: “Have you ever heard the martyrs’ voice?”1 This inquiry ensues as the only one presented by an unidentified, nondiegetic male voice in the advertorial, and prompts a number of citizens from various backgrounds and geographies to look dreamily into the distance: despite the voice’s preference for the much less common Arabic plural for martyr (şuheda) acting as a collective noun in Turkish (hence, the singularity of “the martyrs’ voice”), staged flashbacks to these citizens’ male relatives responding to their commander(s) with their names and hometowns implicate a multiplicity of martyrs’ voices.

In fact, these imaginary2 soldiers who served in the Ottoman Army during the First World War not only hail from Asia Minor, but also strategically from the present-day disputed Kurdish territories of Erbil and Kirkuk, with one Christian Ottoman subject from Istanbul thrown into the mix for variance.

(In order to achieve its galvanizing potential, the rollcall ends on a soldier from Sakarya with an amputated arm and an overly zealous stutter.)

A strange plurality. Though their names, localities and demeanours are very different from one another, they become united with the same militaristic litany—a fervent bid for the commander(s) to give them orders: “Emret komutanım!” Just as in the unfolding of the rollcall, the descendants of these soldiers striving to hear their forefathers’ voices turn into metonymically expanding fragments of a ‘nation’ with unmissable national heritage sites, such as Mimar Sinan’s Selimiye Mosque in Edirne and the fairy chimneys of Capadoccia serving as contemporary backdrops. A similar pushand-pull between individual specificity and communal projection characterizes the remainder of the presidential advertorial, but this time with a particular reliance on Islam as the common denominator: the second half begins with a soldier’s recitation of the morning call to prayer from the Gallipoli Peninsula, oddly broadcasting not towards a congregation but towards a sea littered with battleships.

But battalions on the hills behind him have heard the call nonetheless; they raise their hands to their ears in order to enunciate God’s greatness, and subsequently lower them for the qiyaam (standing prayer).

During these first two movements of the prayer, interspersed with scenes of soldiers leaving the trenches to fight, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s voice is heard for the first time, uttering another sentence in which the word “voice” is prominently featured: “We are the lowered voices” (Biz kısık sesleriz). The word “biz” (we [are]) precipitates with a brisk crescendo at the beginning of the sentence—one of Erdoğan’s signature rhetorical moves—but his tone of voice drops and stabilizes for the rest of the sentence, bringing with it a rather quick phasing out of the call to prayer in the background. Now, accompanied only by an occasionally soaring and falling chorus, Erdoğan launches into a long list of exhortations to God, the first one being; “Do not leave minarets without a call to

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prayer, my God.”3 Overall, his increasingly booming voice stitches together three types of related imagery: war re-enactments, ritual praying and individual mourning. The century-long sustenance and survival of a community of faith is underlined by the seamless blending of the movements of the ‘martyrs’ and a present-day all male congregation at a mosque in order to achieve a full arc of sujud (prostration). Finally, the regimented, synchronised praying ripples into collective and closeup views of individuals leaving flowers and praying with hands turned towards the sky, mostly alone, at the memorial graves of their loved ones. Only when the disembodied voice finishes its last exhortation (“Do not forsake us, without love, water, air, and the homeland, my God!”), does its owner appear on camera, praying among others, at the Çanakkale Martyrs’ Memorial. Inevitably, it begins to snow.

The above description is only that of a four-and-a-half-minute long TV broadcast paid for by the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey. It does not purport to encapsulate, even from a Turkish viewpoint, what artist Köken Ergun has playfully referred to as “a heaven of rituals” for the memorialization of the by now-fabled Gallipoli Campaign during World War I.4 What it does, however, is expose the core attitude behind the ongoing refashioning of Turkish nationalism in the image of populist Islamism, entirely submerged in a hallucinatory denial of the ruptures—most notably, due to Republican reforms—with the Ottoman past. An image/imagination of the nation coalesces with the movement of not just one “solitary hero” but many—including the President himself—“through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the (representation) and the world outside”, be it the battlefront, a stream of national landmarks, or the Martyrs’ Memorial.5 The ubiquitous undercurrent of Islam intimates individual membership in a collective entity larger than life, able to traverse centuries with defiance and triumph, thus “transforming fatality into continuity”.6

Co-commissioned by the Australian War Memorial (Canberra), Protocinema (Istanbul) and Artspace (Sydney), Köken Ergun’s film Heroes (2018), casts an ethnographic eye on citizens of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey who flock to Çanakkale (Gallipoli) every year in order to have a first-hand impression of the former battleground that has provided not just one but three modern nation-states with major founding myths. His methodology favours complete immersion over the upkeep of a so-called ‘critical’ distance, often necessitating him to literally follow in the footsteps of his subjects.7 However, even in the throes of a desire to achieve proximity to, and thereby, to assert ownership over grand historical narratives, some of Ergun’s subjects appear and sound bored, drained, indifferent, or otherwise completely disillusioned during the in-between moments when their feelings are not being agitated by what Australian historian Marilyn Lake calls “the manufacture of emotions” undertaken by the state and the tourism industry.8 Unlike the nationalist literatures Benedict Anderson cites in Imagined Communities (2006), there are no “solitary heroes” to be found in Heroes: the ‘real’ heroes remain buried under layers of (usually misguided) representation, and their followers’ participation in certain rituals of commemoration eventuates as a thinly disguised leisure activity, or a rather onerous school trip. Ergun’s work makes this point very clear: a nation comes into being only with the temporary suspension of boredom and disbelief, transpiring here and there as a result of the performative gathering of a group of people for the same sites/sights. ***

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The rift at the heart of Heroes—the discursive and attitudinal differences amongst commemorative practices for the Ottoman and the ANZAC9—is made visible as early as the film’s title which appears in both Turkish and English. Şehitler is not a lexical equivalent of “heroes”—it categorically means “martyrs”. Indeed, Ergun has given the film two non-identical titles in Turkish and English, seeking a contextual correspondence instead of a linguistic equivalence. While “hero” retains a degree of genericness, şehit as one may expect, is loaded with the weight of death for a holy cause. Historian Tanıl Bora, among others, notes the shared Aramaic and, later, Arabic root of şehit and şahit (witness), denoting “those who have witnessed the miracle of the prophet and the supreme Truth.”10 “After the first witnesses,” Bora writes, “others who braved persecution and lost their lives in the name and with the faith of this testimony were, too, considered ‘witnesses’.”11 Undeniably, the perception of şehit has also been coloured by centuries of ghaza12—the practice of conquering foreign lands for the glory of Islam—during the Ottoman Empire, as well as by one of the five pillars of Islam, kelime-i şehadet (the word of testimony, known in Arabic simply as shahada), which requires the believers to profess their faiths by enunciating “there is no god but God (and) Muhammad is the messenger of God”.

Given the weight of this term, a general semiotic confusion seems to underlie Heroes: confronted with the question of “what do you think of our martyrs?” one interviewee coming from Izmir replies; “There is nothing to say. I hope we will have the same honour [of being martyred] for our country, for our nation… We can’t even call them ‘dead’.”

Similarly, when Ergun questions a New Zealand visitor if offering martyrs to war is as big a deal in her native country, the young woman responds, vigorously nodding; “Yeah, we’ve got quite a few Anzac heroes…”13 On the other hand, achieving linguistic homogeneity around the act of commemoration holds the promise of maintaining and shaping a community, as one guide insists on not using the word gezi (trip, outing) in favour of ziyaret (generally visit, but here, a visitation or a pilgrimage), expressly announcing the main purpose of their journey as ‘praying’. The strictures of Islamist conditioning, whether their source is a tour guide or the state rhetoric, are felt both at an individual and collective level: the same interviewee from Izmir admits, “the war could not have been won without iman gücü [the power of faith],” while a student from Konya, perhaps wishing to impress his classmates smirking by his side with a smart remark on camera, proclaims they will show the ANZACs that they have not forgotten Çanakkale with takbir (declaring “God is [the] greatest”).

Otherwise, several school groups, including one composed of veiled young girls marching behind the revolutionary Syrian National Council flag and another from Tokat entirely clad in WWI Ottoman uniforms, appear in the film, chanting the takbir as they walk along the trails.

In Heroes, rituals and representations are shown to be inextricably enmeshed, often performatively crafting new traditions—as well as discourses—for a ‘New Turkey.’ In the very first sequence of the film, Turkish scouts don red vests with the words “GRANDPA, I AM HERE”, perform the ablution, let an older woman smear henna on the side of their heads to the soundtrack of the sela prayer. Inspired by none other than the Dawn Service held by the Australians and New Zealanders,14 this ritual takes the liberty of linking various, largely unrelated tropes around (Islamic) death. Customarily sung outside the regular call to prayer times in order to invite the believers to an Eid, Friday, or funeral service, sela was ‘revived’ by, and is most readily associated today with the recent failed coup attempt on 15 July, 2016 when President Erdoğan instructed sela to be broadcast from every mosque in Turkey as a call to arms.15 The popular and largely demilitarized Turkish metaphor for children—their mothers’ “hennaed lambs” after boys being sent to the front like animals marked by henna for sacrifice during the Eid-al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice)—is, in turn,

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literalized and re-militarized on the bodies of youth, as the sela prematurely announces their eventual death as martyrs to the Battle of Gallipoli.16 During the day, other teenagers dabble in more overtly theatrical representations: in one such performance, an ‘ANZAC soldier’ behind the trenches reveals his fear of being captured alive and subsequently tortured by Turks. In between dodging bullets and shooting back, another ‘soldier’ assures the first that no such thing would happen to him, as “Turks are a heroic and noble people.” Indeed, during a moment of ceasefire seasoned with a zeybek-like score, an ‘Ottoman soldier’ carries a ‘wounded ANZAC’ back to the enemy’s trenches.

The centrality of heroism and virtuosity to Turkish culture—a trope shared with older, secular Republican rituals—is thus fastidiously reinforced by formal and informal performances.

Just like the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Turkish government seems to have taken a shine to theatre as a vehicle for inspiring a nation,17 since Heroes is punctuated by several of the many state-commissioned theatrical acts on the Battle of Çanakkale, running every fifteen minutes, from March through to October, with professional actors. As Ergun notes himself, the success of these tearjerkers lies in their inclusivity—the emphasis on the sacrifices of both men and women, as opposed to the almost exclusively male, militaristic protagonists of (earlier) hardline Republican celebrations. For instance, in Ergun’s earlier document of a nationalistic ritual I, Soldier (Ben Askerim) (2005), an officer confesses to a stadium full of people how soldiers also grow hungry, become exhausted, and fall in love (but when they do, they “love like a man”), only to arrive at the punch line of his speech, that “a soldier does not die, and cannot be killed.” Entirely delivered in roars, this extended declaration of exceptionality is addressed only to an upcoming generation of soldiers, including young men who neatly perform athletic feats on the field during his longer pause. Differently, the plays documented in Heroes prominently feature women as constantly crying wives left behind by future martyrs. In many scenes, separation of newlyweds and the breakup of budding families take precedence over military manoeuvres and other historic events in a bid to highlight the greatness of sacrifices of both genders. These plays most significantly carve out spaces for women, and by extension, families to exist in the myths of Turkish nation-building: the impact of their familial sentimentality remains legible on the faces of their audiences.

Other state-sponsored theatrical acts, such as the one concerning the iconic story of Corporal Seyit Ali, strive towards singling the heroism of Ottoman soldiers as the exceptional manifestation of an innate strength. Charismatically—and certainly over-animatedly—pacing the stage back and forth, the actor playing Corporal Seyit Ali recounts how he managed to carry a 215kg artillery shell on his own to the gun emplacement. Despite claiming not to know how to take aim, the only other fellow soldier left alive does as instructed by Seyit Ali, and shoots the gun, “hit[ting] the giant ship from the helm.” The next day, when his commander asks him to lift a shell again for a photograph, Seyit Ali is not able to perform the task, but, nonetheless, delivers his famous quip: “If I find myself in the same situation, I will lift that shell [again] without hesitation!” By overlooking the fact that Seyit Ali’s battery was actually able to hit the British battleship HMS Ocean only at the third attempt, a dramatic—if not mythical—aura of precious uniqueness is created around the historical event.

This exceptionalism and fetishization of uniqueness also pervades the informal, albeit no less dramatic ‘performances’ within Turkish-language guided tours of Çanakkale/Gallipoli filmed

by Ergun. Exalting and emphasizing the Turkish nation’s power of faith (iman gücü), virtuosity (asalet), and even cleanliness with over-the-top moralizing deliveries, the leaders of these tours stand in marked contrast to the Australian and New Zealand guides, who rather dryly dispatch facts to their groups, sometimes even reading from a sheet of paper. The attitude of the former fits most l

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squarely with a worldview best exemplified by the presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın’s book Akıl ve Erdem (Intelligence and Wisdom) (2013), in which he stipulates that “civilisations have unique aspirations, [and that] these [aspirations] are transmitted with ‘religious and national codes’ [din ve millet kodları] carried through by tradition.”18 Tanıl Bora succinctly summarizes this worldview as “we are [just] different.”

From this self-admission, the beatification of martyrdom is, indeed, just a short stone’s throw away: martyrdom is (also) just different. In one guide’s particularly impassioned portrayal of a fictional Ottoman mother, the latter avers that she did not let her son touch roses growing up, because they had thorns. It turns out, however, she is all too ready to make a sacrifice and give her son up for the cause, “lest the infidel step on this blessed land, lest the foreigner wrap his whip around our throats, lest they stamp upon the graves of our martyrs, lest our calls to prayer be silenced.” Then, it follows that in a conservative Islamist understanding, the smallest, most fundamental unit of the society is not the family, but the martyr. Literary scholar and art theorist Zeynep Sayın suggests: “Cemaat [congregation, community] renders itself visible in death, and death, in cemaat.”19 If so, this society has become a cult of purposeful deaths for the sake of ethno-preservation, and as is the case with many cults, you cannot call the object of sublimation what it actually is. We can’t even call them ‘dead’.

In conversation with Ergun, historian Marilyn Lake observed that there is no such emphasis on mothers’ sacrifice from the Australian/New Zealand perspective, and notes that the former, having acquired the right to vote in 1902, overwhelmingly voted against conscription in two WWI plebiscites (1916 and 1917).20 Though these plebiscites appear to be mostly unknown today, ambivalence and scepticism still characterize at least some of Australians’ and New Zealanders’ attitudes towards the causes of the Gallipoli Campaign, including that of the young woman interviewed by Ergun: referring to the ANZACs, she opines “so many people died, no reason.”

Curiously, holding this view did not prevent her from coming all the way to Gallipoli and becoming tearful at the rollcall of names of the soldiers who lost their lives. If there is a certain plenitude to the “purposefulness” of the Ottoman martyrs, the ANZAC deaths are marked by a hollowness (of raison d’être) that often goes unmentioned or ignored, but, in fact, these are two sides of the same coin, embossed by nation-building, or rather nation-binding.21

In his essay ‘Anzac Day: How did it become Australia’s national day?’ historian Mark McKenna writes Anzac Day returned to prominence in the 1980s at the same time Australia Day (the official national day)—marking the British colonisers’ arrival at Sydney Cove—was coming under public attack by the Aboriginal protest movement.22 The mass pilgrimage to Çanakkale in modern Turkey is cited by Ergun as an even more recent phenomenon championed by the government of Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party), in order to rival the mythologies of the War of Independence (1918-23) centring around the Republic’s founding figure of Atatürk.23 Just as the “demise of ex-servicemen and women… made it easier for recent generations to commemorate war in their own image”24 on the ANZAC side, i.e. a festive event with a laid-back atmosphere,25 the Turkish government appropriated Çanakkale for its own purposes—primarily, an urgent need to create a space for an affirmative stance on an ever-growing number of officers killed fighting Kurdish revolutionaries in the east. And, above all, as Bora acknowledges; “We also know the title of martyrdom facilitates the acceptance of deaths, especially young deaths, and helps deal with the loss. It is a title that embraces the pain of loss with honour, with pride.”26

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*** A Turkish scout song recorded on Ergun’s film features rather bizarre lyrics: “Spread the sand that covers the earth/Not grass they are, but your grandfather’s hair/Listen, [its] wind is the voices of martyrs.” In fact, the lyrics are taken from a 1912 poem by Mehmet Âkif Ersoy—an iconic Islamist poet who also composed the words to the current Turkish national anthem. Here, similar to Erdoğan’s presidential advertorial, it is implied that the martyrs can be heard: the fantastical suggestion of their audibility opens up a plane of projection and association for the youngsters, ready to be colonized by another voice—whether it is Erdoğan’s disembodied preaching or not. The exhortation to hear martyrs’ voices is, indeed, the pursuit of full admission to a community,27 and provides the structuring logic for Ergun’s most remarkable autographic intervention. Instead of creating multichannel juxtapositions of dialogue with complex choreographies as in some of his previous works, in Heroes, the artist simply extends the audio track of one scene to a preceding or succeeding another, and lets it subtly linger, uprooted from its original image. This leakage does not usually present itself as a jarring incongruity; rather, it helps bolster a comfortable yet artificial sense of continuity emblematic of neo-Ottomanism, for “neo-Ottomanism repeats that which has never happened, designs a past that never was”.28 After all, collective psychosis, coupled with a knack for forgetting, allows anything to become familiar, audible, and even tangible one day.

Notes 1 Fatih Özdemir, ‘Çanakkale Zaferi’nin 100.yıl reklamı–Recep Tayyip Erdoğan–AK Parti’, YouTube video, 21 July 2016; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-aCcjSHYBBY 2 I cannot, of course, vouch for the fact that people in the advertorial cast do not actually have relatives who have passed away during WWI. The first person to appear in the video appears to have a rather unofficial looking certificate for an ancestor’s martyrdom 3 Other exhortations include, “The minarets are without illuminated messages [mahya]; do not forsake the sky, without [its] Milky Way”; “Do not leave the homeland that has been shaped by Islam without Muslims”; and “Give us power; do not leave the battlefields of jihad without heroes.”

4 Köken Ergun, ‘Köken Ergun in conversation with Prof. Marilyn Lake’, Artspace Sydney, 23 April, 2018; https://soundcloud.com/ artspace-619083596/artist-talk-koken-ergun 5

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso, 2006, p. 30

6

ibid., p. 11

7

The artist states on multiple platforms that, after a preparatory phase of embedding himself in guided tours without filming, he documented more than fifty tours in Gallipoli 8

Marilyn Lake, ‘Köken Ergun in conversation with Prof. Marilyn Lake’, op cit.

9

Historically, ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) is an acronym devised by Major General William Birdwood’s staff in Cairo in early 1915. It was used for registering correspondence for the new corps, and a rubber stamp was cut using the letters A.&N.Z.A.C. After the landing at Gallipoli, General Birdwood requested that the position held by the Australians and New Zealanders on the peninsula be called “Anzac” to distinguish it from the British position at Helles, at the southern tip of the peninsula. Permission was also sought to name the small bay, where the majority of the Corps had come ashore on 25 April 1915, “Anzac Cove”. The letters now were upper and lower case, indicating that the original acronym had already found a use beyond that of a military code word or corps designation. Since that time, “Anzac” and “ANZAC” have been used interchangeably. “Anzac” has become a modern day usage for events such as Anzac Day, Anzac Centenary and references to the Anzac “spirit”. There are strict regulations for the protection of the word; see https://www.dva.gov.au/commemorationsmemorials-and-war-graves/protecting-word-anzac. New Zealand has similar protective regulations

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10

Tanıl Bora, ‘Şehitler ve Şahitler’, Zamanın Kelimeleri: Yeni Türkiye’nin Siyasî Dili, Birikim: Istanbul, 2018, p. 186

11

ibid.

12

The names of the first two Ottoman sultans are often evoked alongside the gazi title for their active participation in the ghaza. This title has been more or less secularized across the centuries, and simply denotes a veteran today 13 Despite this affirmative response to the artist’s question, John Simpson (Kirkpatrick), an Englishman known for bringing several hundred wounded soldiers back to safety on the back of a donkey, remains one of the few, if not only, comparably lionized ‘hero’ of the ANZACs 14

Ergun, ‘Köken Ergun in conversation with Prof. Marilyn Lake’, op cit.

15

Although sela is popularly also known as a supplementary prayer proclaiming jihad, i.e. an announcement of war against non-believers and a call for able-bodied males to join the cause, I was not able to verify this claim. Here, I am using the definition provided by the Turkish Language Association. Sela should not be confused with salah (though it may sound like a Turkified version of this Arabic-language word), which simply denotes the five daily prayers. The sela was broadcast again from 90,000 mosques throughout Turkey on the first anniversary of the failed coup attempt. Keskin Kalem Yayıncılık ve Tic. A.Ş., ‘Darbe girişiminin yıldönümünde 90 bin camiden gece yarısı sela okunacak’, diken.com.tr, 7 July, 2017; http://www.diken.com.tr/darbe-girisiminin-yildonumunde-90-bin-camiden-gece-yarisi-sela-okunacak/

16 This term of endearment is often used today on a day-to-day basis without a military context (with the exception of mothers mourning for their martyred sons and romantic historical texts), and thus appears (or appeared until recently) largely removed from its raison d’être.

The appropriation of sela for the commemorations of the Battle of Gallipoli also appears to be a distant echo, if not a mirror image, of Mustafa Kemal’s famous command to the 57th Infantry Regiment in Gallipoli: “I am not ordering you to fight: I am ordering you to die.”

17 “Therefore we think that the only way to inspire Italy with the warlike spirit is through the theatre.” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, quoted in Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, London and New York: Verso, 2012, e-book 18

Bora, ‘Medeniyet denen...’, Zamanın Kelimeleri: Yeni Türkiye’nin Siyasî Dili, op cit., p. 54

19

Zeynep Sayın, Ölüm Terbiyesi, Istanbul: Metis, 2018, p. 58

20

Lake, ‘Köken Ergun in conversation with Prof. Marilyn Lake’, op cit.

21

In 1967, The Australian newspaper appears to have espoused a rhetoric strikingly similar to the exceptionalism of the current official discourse in Turkey: “Anzac Day expresses, as no other day or symbol can, something that we understand and nobody else can.” Quoted in Mark McKenna, ‘Anzac Day: How did it become Australia’s national day?’, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds eds, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010, p. 148 22 McKenna, ibid., p. 130. I derive this dichotomy, of course, from the representational realm of Ergun’s film, fully aware of how vigorously Anzac commemorations are actually held and disseminated. Heroes, however, appears mostly preoccupied with the flat and disinterested delivery of Anzac history during private guided tours, as well as the younger generation’s ambivalence towards this history 23

Ergun, ‘Köken Ergun in conversation with Prof. Marilyn Lake’, op cit.

24

McKenna, op cit., p. 128

25

“Anzac Day had in any case long since ceased to be a day of solemn remembrance and become a festive event, celebrated by backpackers wrapped in flags, playing rock music, drinking beer and proclaiming their national identity on the distant shores of Turkey.”

Marilyn Lake, ‘Introduction: What have you done for your country?’, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, op cit., p. 13 26

Bora, ‘Şehitler ve Şahitler’, op cit., p. 186

27

“Full admission to a community takes place not only through identification with its present visual tradition, but when one takes upon one’s self that magnificent dimension which carries through tradition and the secret history of traumatic fantasies, transmitted only in between lines, thanks to half-dead spirits haunting the living and the voids, as well as the manipulations, of the [newly] opened symbolic order.”

Slavoj Žižek, quoted in Sayın, op cit., p. 43. Author’s translation from Turkish to English. The quote comes from a book originally published in German: Blasphemische Gedanken, Islam und die Moderne, Berlin: Ullstein, 2015, p. 36 28

Sayın, op cit., p. 113

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Administering Time: The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste JERUSALEM AND TEHRAN For whatever reason, it is my past, and not my current position in life, that holds the key to my problems; I can neither escape from it nor entirely accept its mandate.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar1 Two cities: Jerusalem and Tehran—of unique, contested and complex conditions, possessing a combination of diverse stories with fragmented, contradictory sources and narratives. Conflict, tension, antagonistic histories and geopolitical machinations constantly determine representative considerations and concepts from, and for different perspectives. Jerusalem is zone with a loaded history and, exceedingly documented, a recent colonial past and a current occupation, while Tehran, excluded from such subjugation (though occupied during both World Wars), has progressed from a provincial town to an overpopulated city with “extraordinary politics, rooted in a distinctive tension between what looks like a deep-seated ‘tradition’ and a wild modernity.”2

What Jerusalem and Tehran share is an urban development axis that began around the mid-nineteenth century. The juxtapositions and clashes of modernising approaches, and the endeavour of preserving cultural inheritance can be clearly observed through architectural signifiers that were built in both cities during this period.3 Proportionately, both Jerusalem and Tehran have been subjected to extremes of religious demonstration and regulation. As Eyal Wiezman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Culture in London has stated, “besides its complex political edges, Jerusalem is surrounded by a boundary that defines not its municipal border, but the geographical limits of one of its religions.”4 A deliberate polarization process intensifies its urban socio-spatial divisions—with the persistent continuation of religious, social and political unrest, the structure and demography of Jerusalem remains more fragmented than ever.5

Both cities are perceived, in the Middle East and beyond, to be hyper-politicized and principle signifiers for social, geopolitical and economic debate, and conflict. Regardless of content or intent, every element of information or communication conveyed from both locations is scrutinized through these socio-geopolitical filters, categorized through constructed narratives, denying any space, order, or intersection for new and/or other modes of reception and legacy. Consequently,

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this exaggerated degree of politicization compels a premeditated expectation of art production and its reception that affects social and political rhetoric, through a desired fetishism for conflict and tension—artistic and cultural expression is obliged to present the same voice on resistance, freedom, conflict, human rights, identity politics and consensus. The criterion for processing any issue is thus decisively reduced to fulfil a demand for illustrating a political stance and/or statement, defined by a specific intellectual and elite Western perspective.

THE ARTISTS AND THE IDEA OF COLLABORATION To my mind, these men acted in response to something more important than mere belief. All three held most fervently that there should be no limit to the concept of the “possible.” Everything existed within a universe in which anything could happen: objects, matter, human beings—all stood on a threshold of infinite potential, waiting for a magic word, prayer, or experiment to transform them in an instant. The flaw these men shared was to mistrust anything they could see with their own eyes or touch with their own hands.6 Operating within this criterion, artists Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi-Noori have been managing endless assertive Western expectations regarding their artistic practices. Boyadgian is a Finnish-Armenian artist born and raised in Jerusalem, where he lived until 2001 before studying in Paris, Helsinki and San Francisco, receiving his MA from the ENSAPLV School of Architecture (L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette), specializing in urban sociology in postconflict areas. He returned to Jerusalem in 2010 and has been working on research-based projects that explore themes engaging perception, heritage, territory, architecture and landscape. Khosravi-Noori was born in Tehran and studied film at Tarbiat Modares University, followed by studying Art in the Public Realm at Konstfack University College of Art and Design in Stcokholm. In his research-based practice, Khosravi-Noori focuses on micro-history and narrative strategy within hyper-politicized socio-political environments.

Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori met in 2015, following which they initiated an ongoing dialogue on the representation and expression of hyper-politics and aesthetics, Jerusalem and Tehran being the starting point for their research projects. The first installment of their collaboration was Around About (2017), a monument to the First Intifada, sited in the Felestine (Palestine) Square in Tehran, known as a location for demonstrations, before and after the Islamic Revolution.

Rachel Brandenburg, who as Middle East program specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, in ascribing the Square’s significance, wrote in 2010 that, “during the monarchy, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had close ties with the Iranian opposition. Many Iranian dissidents trained at PLO camps in Lebanon in the 1970s.”7 By detailing how the PLO backed the 1979 Islamic Revolution she described the significance of the square: “Days after the revolution, PLO chief Yasser Arafat led a fifty eight member delegation to Tehran. Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan hosted the official welcome ceremony, where the keys to the former Israeli Embassy were handed over to the PLO. The road in front of the mission was renamed Palestine Street.”8

By adopting ever-changing perspectives on regional politics, the Around About project developed a narrative drawn from this monument, presenting (devoid of any apparent motive) an upside-down map of Palestine, circumventing interrogatory by looping around places and events via the integration of historical information. The video within the work shows the camera circling

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the roundabout of Felestine Square, followed by a recurring set of random images, suggesting a persistent repetition endlessly converging to the same point of departure. The monument’s sculptor, Nader Qagashie and the politician Yasser Arafat, as its two ‘protagonists’, embody the amalgamation of politics and aesthetics, the artists’ statement displayed during their exhibitions in Lund9 and Ramallah10 affirming; “The territorial dialogic juxtaposes micro and macro political histories of those two places in relational comparison. A third territory appears in the introduction, the museum of resistance in Mleeta, Lebanon, a counterpoint between the two geographies.”11 The work drew attention to the contradictions perceived between a territory and its image, and an event and the memory of it. Their statement further indicated the two cities mirror each other, “in a melancholic atmosphere, simultaneously crossing borders to present their similarities. An attempt to blur the borders [is] entrenched in the imaginary.”12

Around About attempted to rupture categorizations that its geographies are subject to, and by blurring their specificities, challenged normative forms of classification. The project re-conceptualized the monument by creating an additional narrative based on their research, by questioning: how do we position ourselves in the process of production in the language of art coming from politically condensed environments?

PROCESSING DISTANCE AND TIME AS AN ARTISTIC METHODOLOGY I would watch in awe as the work unfolded before my very eyes: the months from both Arabic and Gregorian calendars; other divisions of time and years, from elsewhere, that were older than the seasons to which they were respectively aligned; the solar and lunar eclipses; the meticulously calculated times for morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening prayers; the great storms and the seasonal winds, the latter, according to his calculations, no less relevant than the former; the solstices; the days scheduled to be bitterly cold or unbearably hot.13 With Jerusalem and Tehran being their individual bases, Boyadgian’s and Khosravi-Noori’s collaborative practice began with an inquiry into how to imagine a territory each could not engage —it is impossible for Boyadgian as a Palestinian to enter Iran with Israeli visa stamps in his passport; for Khosravi-Noori, as an Iranian artist, while it is not impossible for him to enter Israel (but very challenging to do so), it would be impossible to return to Iran with his passport stamped there.

Their art work has not only defined this dilemma, but also the convergent restrictions of the conditions and accessibility to their working methodology. Distance as a concept and a tool to process their subject matter operates in two layers: (i) the physical distance between the artists (being in different countries) and (ii) the distance to the locations that they process.14 Utilizing distance is a very distinctive researching and working methodology that enables temporary states of absence and presence. This distance expectedly requires another mode of collaboration to balance the frequency of their dialogue. It encompasses processes of deliberation, sharing, negotiation, decision-making, and ultimately working together. With their research operating through different time periods and spaces, both distant and disconnected, they also began to question the positioning of the artist as an active agency, vis-à-vis the subject of inquiry. While maintaining a critical approach to the object of inquiry, they constructed protocols determined by the conditions of their collaboration. Employing an empirical approach, the artists therefore became embedded in and responsive to this process, in respect to their personal, social and cultural contexts.

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THE CROSSSECTIONS PROJECT Dream after dream came to life from his brass inkpot as he sat on his low divan in the small room beside the mosque, a skullcap on his head and a reed in his hand; he would line up his calculations like little grains of rice on the scrolls propped up on his right knee, and they all swirled together in a corner of the room where the light was most dim and the sound of all the watches and clocks was most concentrated, as if waiting for their time to rule the world.15 In 2017, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori were invited individually to participate in the CrossSections project,16 an interdisciplinary platform for exploration into artistic research, dialogue and production, employing an open format curatorial model, and reacting to ‘process’ with the intent to share and articulate diverse critical reactions and collective strategies. By placing artistic production at the centre of its research and design, the project has evolved through accumulative, interdisciplinary input by way of meetings, residencies, performative presentations and publications, over three years.

Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori decided to collaborate, given that CrossSections proposed the sharing of diverse conditions and strategies in different geographies, complementing their working methodologies. The structure of CrossSections also enabled them to develop their work based on their dialogue, by fragmenting its execution in time. With each meeting, presentation, talk and exhibition of CrossSections, they added, subtracted, articulated and experimented with their ideas and presentation modes, receiving feedback from the project curator, other participants, the project’s network and the audiences in the three presentation cities of Vienna, Helsinki and Stockholm.

For example, a silent short video work exhibited in CrossSections_Intensities in June 2018 transformed into a narrative-based full-length video with the CrossSections_Intervals exhibition in September 2018 at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, while a concept notionally discussed in Helsinki in May 2018 developed as a project talk given by Khosravi-Noori also at Kunsthalle Exnergasse.

THE OWLS, THE QUEEN AND THE MAQUETTISTE As important as creating a movement is maintaining its momentum. In extending our movement to the past, you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbears were both revolutionary and modern. No one can begrudge his past forever.

Is history material only for critical thought?17 During one of their discussions in 2017, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori directed their attention towards landmarks in Tehran and Jerusalem infused with significant and resonating historical meaning. Realizing that the substance of their research and collaborative methodology pivoted upon the concept of time, they decided to focus on clock towers given and destroyed by the British in both cities, to allow the histories behind each to direct the pathway for their research and the development of a new collaborative work. This project presented; A tale about time… [it] attempts by means of collage to narrate and fictionalize the story of three clock towers in Iran and Palestine in relation to colonial history, architecture and Middle Eastern geopolitics. A single video essay narrates a tale, a fictional dialogue between an owl and a maquettiste. The starting point of the project juxtaposes three clock towers… built between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Tehran and Jerusalem, as subjects of comparative analysis. A new territory is suggested where the clocks exist in the same time and space.18

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During his visit to the United Kingdom in 1873, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Iran was appointed by Queen Victoria a Knight of the Order of the Garter. The Queen further presented him with a large two-faced clock with the wish that the people of Tehran could ‘keep time’ accurately.19 Naser al-Din ordered a clock tower to be built on the Golestan Palace (the official residence of the Qajar dynasty). According to some oral histories, the volume of the clock was so loud that it disturbed the harem, pregnant women miscarried and the frail suffered heart attacks. In response the Shah ordered the sound of the clock to be lowered by covering it in felt; but it stopped working.

The clock was repaired after the Shah’s assassination but broke down again in 1925. Ninety years later it was repaired once more, only to stop working again after ten months. In 1907, a fourteen metre high white limestone clock tower was built by (the 34th Sultan) Abdül Hamid II in Jerusalem. In the Ottoman Empire, from Anatolia to Damascus, sixty-three clock towers were built and this was one of the most significant examples as an imperial symbol for mastering time, and as a meeting point for Ottoman authorities to communicate with and make announcements to the local population.20 As an indication of the Ottoman modernisation period, both Arabic and Latin numbers appeared on these clocks.21 When the British Mandate became effective in 1923, the civilian governor, Sir Ronald Storrs, claiming to maintain Jerusalem’s historical appearance had the tower demolished, supposedly being incompatible with the architectural style of the Old City Wall. Following violent public objections Storrs built a small tower with the clock in Allenby Square outside the Jaffa Gate. When there were further complaints, Storrs was forced to dismantle this tower and transfer the clock to the British Museum in London.22

Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori take these three clock towers, which were gifted and/ or demolished by the British, as a conceptual focal point for their project, accumulating various narratives, documents and architectural elements. Referencing a colonial past, personal stories, architecture and geopolitics of the Middle East, The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste (2018) is a collage of collision points and associations in a fairytale format. The multi-channel video mimics the artists’ dialogical interactions and narrates a fictional dialogue between an owl and a maquettiste (model maker). Boyadgian states that, Fictional historiography in this project originates from the role of the nonhuman in urban mythology in the Iranian context. Factual historiography stems from the archival material collected; photographs, film, texts, all revolving around the subject and its memory. The owl serves as a signifier of mythological value, and the maquettiste, the human condition in its banality. The nonhuman and human protagonists shed a light on the question of factuality of fiction as well as fictionality of fact, in colonial history its materiality. Through a dialogical collaboration, we attempt to destabilize historical narratives within the context of conflictual histories and hyperpoliticized social environments that are under the permanent shadow of hegemonic discourses.23

This magical and fictitious domain invites new expectations and instinctive interpretations that challenge viewer perceptions. Its inquest targets the importance of its endeavour, to open up a new visual perspective on the accumulation of images projected onto an over-politicized space.

For example, Jerusalem is a site overwhelmed by already established images and narratives.

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THE MAQUETTISTE We are indeed engaged in work, and work that is vital. Work is a matter of mastering one’s time, knowing how to use it. We are paving the way for such a philosophy. We’ll give our people a consciousness of time. We’ll create a whole new collection of adages and ideas, and spread them all over the country.24 Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori consider any definition based on established geopolitical origins as a problematic approach, and accordingly, draw a parallel line to modes of categorization that affect artistic research, production and reception. This methodology emerges as a strategic move to sidestep what is being dictated and encoded by the central discourses of contemporary art. Classifications that define anyone as ‘other’ certainly exclude inclusiveness or any common denominators. In this context, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori offer a simple gesture and modest attempt to remove Jerusalem and Tehran from their respective existences as sites of individual significance, their aim being to deconstruct such a classification, by shifting the position of interpretation.

As Khosravi-Noori notes in their project statement, an environment that is imagined by its signifiers is a “hyper-politicized” environment.25 This criterion relates to Barthes’ notion of mythical signifiers and their formation, in his 1972 book Mythlogies: “When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains. There is here a paradoxical permutation in the reading operations, an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier.”26 From this perspective, their project feeds from these manifestations; these hyper-politicized environments are hence built by images stripped of their content.

Such an approach raises a further critical question concerning autonomy: how can the artist produce an autonomous work by using the same resources that already contain so much consumed and clichéd information? By apposing two cities with their complex historical, political, social, psychological and economical references, The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste diverts the audience’s attention towards a fictional narrative with new associations, constructing a unique world of reflections. Through this fairytale, Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori succeed in translating elements of their research in a unique and poetic way. Here, the owls have symbolic connotations—there is significant literature and mythology over centuries in various geographic regions centred upon owls.

In ancient Greece, Athena was the goddess of wisdom and owls nested on the Acropolis where she lived; they were associated with the goddess and knowledge.27 In one African culture the owl is either a sign of evil, associated with sorcery,28 or as a messenger that brings sickness or even death to the observer. In Shakespeare’s plays the appearance of an owl indicates the imminence of death.29 In The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste, the owls are appropriated from an urban myth in Tehran.

Iranian writer Jafar Shahri states in Old Tehran (1978), “There are owls in the clock tower. Each time that they appear immense political change will arise. So far twice… it is rumoured that after the Naser al-Din Shah assassination they appeared for three days;” countering both rumour and myth he continued, “I saw them myself on Sunday, 7 September 1941 for three days. Reza Shah resigned.

[The] Allies occuppied Tehran.”30

In the tale, the maquettiste is haunted and possessed by the orders from the owls and works strenuously to regulate time for everyone, though he aspires to be architect of his own desires.

One can clearly and amusingly detect the logic and its path that Boyadgian and Khosravi-Noori have been experimenting and creating for him.

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Notes 1 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar,The Time Regulation Institute, Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawee trans, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2013, p. 52. The Time Regulation Institute, first serialized in 1954 and printed as a book in 1961, is a satirical novel about developments in the ‘modern’ Republican period portraying the contradictory and challenging social and cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire. While working with Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori on their joint project, this novel has been my guide to see their project from an alternative perspective. Each section of the text is accompanied by a quote from the book to reveal pathways to this thinking 2

Asaf Bayat,‘Tehran: Paradox City’, New Left Review 66, 2010, p. 99

3

In this context two examples are the Palace of the Sun in Tehran and the Clock Tower at Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem

4

Eyal Weizman, ‘The Subversion of Jerusalem’s Sacred Vernaculars’, The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City, Michael Sorkin (ed.), New York: Monacelli Press, 2002, pp. 120-145 5

Yonatan Mendel, ‘New Jerusalem: On the Israeli Capital Metropolitan Disorder’, New Left Review 81, 2013, p. 56

6

Tanpinar, op cit., p. 45

7

Rachel Brandenburg, ‘Iran and the Palestinians’, The Iran Primer, United States Institute of Peace; https://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/iranand-palestinians 8

ibid.

9

De lova de oss en skola, de lovade en Simhall. They promised us a school, they promised a swimming pool, curated by Hans Carlsson, Skånes konstförening, Lund, 2016 10

Desires into Fossils, Monuments without a State, curated by Lara Khaldi and Reem Shileh, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah, 2017

11

The artists’ exhibition statement, unpublished but displayed at the venue

12

ibid.

13

Tanpinar, op cit., p. 41

14

This kind of distance also implicates the impossibility to experience either of the cities

15

Tanpinar, op cit.

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16 The CrossSections project (2017-19) is curated by the author, with the participation of artists, scholars and cultural workers, involving meetings, workshops, exhibitions, performances and talks in three cities: Vienna, Helsinki and Stockholm. The project partners are Kunsthalle Exnergasse–WUK (Werkstätten und Kulturhaus), Vienna; iaspis–the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Program for Visual and Applied Artists, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, and NFK–The Nordic Art Association, Stockholm; Nya Småland in different locations in Sweden; Helsinki International Artist Program and Academy of Fine Arts-University of the Arts Helsinki; Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia, Tallinn; and Press to Exit Project Space, Skopje 17

Tanpinar, op cit., p. 314

18

The project text provided by Benji Boyadgian

19

Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 289

20

Mehmet Tütüncü, ‘Filistin ve İsrail’deki Saat Kuleleri (Clock Towers in Palestine and Turkey)’, Collected Studies 1, p. 27

21

Hakki Acun, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Saat Kuleleri (Clock Towers of The Ottoman Empire), Ankara: Atatürk High Council of Culture, Language and History, Atatürk Culture Center Publication: 402, 2011, p. 171

22

Simon Goldhill, Jerusalem: City of Longing, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 146-147

23

The project text provided by Benji Boyadgian

24

Tanpinar, op cit., p. 259

25

Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori, ‘The Owls, The Queen and The Maquettiste’, CrossSections_Intervals Exhibiton Guide, Vienna: Kunsthalle Exnergasse, 2018, p. 9 26

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Annette Lavers trans., New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, p. 116

27

James Brooks, ‘The Enigmatic Owl’, American Birds, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1991, p. 382

28

Mark Cocker and Heimo Mikkola, ‘Owl beliefs in Africa’, Owls and Traditional Culture in Africa, Volume VMIV, Tyto, 2000 p. 174

29

Yogananda Rao, ‘What the Birds Tell: Reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the Bird Imagery’, International Journal of Academic Research Vol. 3, Issue 7 (1), 2016, p. 131; http://ijar.org.in/stuff/issues/v3-i7(1)/v3-i7(1)-a021.pdf

30

Jafar Shahri, Tehran-e Qadim (The Old Tehran) vol. 3 and 4, Tehran: Moien (in Persian), 1992

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“I want to wrap the black box for white artists in chains,” he said. “No, thank you,” they said.

Richard Bell did not receive the Australian pavilion commission for the 2019 Venice Biennale but his proposed project, We don’t really need this/BELL Invites received national and international attention nonetheless. And, the artist’s plans for a revised, self-determined version, EMBASSY 2019: Venice are presently underway. Bell lives and works in Meanjin (Brisbane, Australia). He is a member of Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities, and a founding member of Indigenous artist collective proppaNOW. This text elucidates the story of Bell’s long road to the 2019 Venice Biennale through his yet unrealized project. Far from one actor caught among Australian art world elites and the major arts funding body, Bell’s efforts to incorporate Venice into his ongoing Embassy project’s (2013–) cumulative transnational, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movement discloses something particular about the relationship between cultural patronage and patrimony within the settler-colonial state of Australia.

Bell’s proposal to the Australia Council for the Arts, titled We Don’t Really Need This/ BELL Invites, constituted an onsite architectural intervention vis-à-vis wrapping chains around the Australian pavilion (newly built for the 2017 Biennale) and an offsite iteration of Embassy. The latter is both a politicized, architectural assemblage that borrows from the iconic tent form and agitprop material of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established in 1972, and a social space for discussions programmed by Bell and his artist/activist collaborators. In his now classic study, American sociologist Howard Becker argues that works of art always reveal signs of the “cooperation” that bring them into being, with much of what goes on behind the scenes remaining legible in the final work.1 In addition to the obviously challenging nature of Bell’s proposal, this text takes the whole affair—from changes in the selection process for the Venice Biennale national pavilions, to Bell’s apparent failure within that, and the subsequent rerouting of his project—as an opportunity to identify Australia’s participation in the Venice Biennale’s complicated context since mid-twentieth century, and the recurrent diagnosis of national historical amnesia in Bell’s oeuvre.

Bell’s proposal to enclose the pavilion in chains made his refusal to represent Australia plain: he would not be going inside the pavilion. On one hand, it is obvious why his proposal would make an unlikely selection: how could a project be selected to represent the nation-state it seeks to assail? The proposal reiterated that in the Indigenous lands now known as Australia, “invasion is a structure and not an event”. This is Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe’s most oft-cited line from Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1998). At the time, Wolfe’s work presented an intervention within existing understandings of coloniality as well as the discipline of anthropology’s entrenchment within European colonial praxis and discourse. He argued that in the instance of settler-colonial states such as Australia, rather than being entirely dependent upon stolen labour from Indigenous peoples, the formation in which settlers ‘came to stay’ en masse required or rather desired the elimination of the Indigenous population in order to validate the legal fiction of terra nullius.2 Bell’s use of “invasion is a structure and not an event” thus conceptually connects Wolfe’s argument with the semiotics of the Australian pavilion’s architecture and Indigenous-led activism that organizes protests on Australia Day, the national holiday, and rebrands it as “Invasion Day”. It is worth pausing here and holding the imperfect nature of terminology in mind—and the necessity of its continual revision—including the term “settler” which has crucially been critiqued and rejected for its overly-benign connotations.

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DESIRING REPRESENTATION IN THE GIARDINI: WHOSE SECTOR IS IT ANYWAY? The first Venice Biennale, held in 1895, was founded as a means to develop cultural tourism and a market for paintings.3 Within the glut of global biennial exhibitions, Venice occupies both a singularly reified and fraught position. It is the regal forebear of “the exhibitions that created contemporary art” according to Australian art historians Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, and remains the credentialling crown for contemporary artists throughout the global/izing art worlds.4 Caroline Jones is among a growing number of art historians who have shown that biennales are the offspring of nineteenth-century modes of cultural tourism, such as the elites’ Grand Tour, and imperialist exhibition and industrial exposition, such as world’s fairs.5 Today the floating (sinking) city of Venice endures the highest ratio of tourists to locals in any city in the world.6 Though biennale culture contributes to this far less than, for example, the cruise ships that Venetians have tirelessly fought from the canals, the fact that the 2017 exhibition clocked attendance at over 615,000 is significant to a range of both local and foreign metrics. In November 2017, the commissioning procedures for the Australian pavilion made the international art media headlines. There would no longer be a role for a commissioner due to changes in the rules of compliance. The BBC reported as “World News,” There is no room for democracy when it comes to choosing Australia’s leading artist, according to one of the country’s most prominent philanthropists. Simon Mordant has donated heavily to the arts in Australia over the last decade, including about A$3m (£1.7m; $2.4m) towards Australia’s involvement in the Venice Biennale. But he and his wife Catriona have withdrawn financial support for next year’s entry. They made the decision after artists were told they would have to apply for the position instead of being invited… The [Australia] Council says the process has been changed to comply with Biennale guidelines, and has resulted in expressions of interest from seventy artists currently being considered by a panel of experts.7

Financier and philanthropist, Mordant expressed his view on the changes, ‘Why I’m no longer funding Australia at the Venice Biennale’ in The Art Newspaper. This text passionately describes the Mordants’ decades-long commitment to building audience capacity for Australian art through their dedication as patrons and latterly his role as commissioner of the Australian pavilion.

“I expressed dismay,” writes Mordant, … that there had been no consultation with the sector or key supporters, that I didn’t believe the Board had any members with deep contemporary visual arts expertise and that I didn’t believe an open expression of interest was an appropriate way to source our leading Australian artist. Further I noted that I didn’t believe the Australia Council was qualified to advocate and champion to attract the international curators and museum directors to visit the pavilion and see the artist and curator.8

Mordant’s words are worthy of scholarly, not just economic interest, as whose sector is it anyway? Corralling Mordant’s concerns with Bell’s proposal raises the question of value: what is the value of participation or representation in Venice, and for whom? Why doesn’t Bell need ‘this’? If not him, then who? These positions highlight the complex and contested intermingling of domestic cultural practices, international diplomacy, and global capitalism that occurs each Venice Biennale. The following sections articulate some of the concerns of representation through the story of Australian art’s ‘provincialism’ and the local/global market for Indigenous art within the apparently global context of Venice’s Giardini. l

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AUSTRALIA’S PROVINCIALISM PROBLEM REDUX In 1974, writing from within the presumed centre of the art world (New York City) and in its purported most influential outlet (Artforum), Australian art historian Terry Smith diagnosed Australian art’s problem as “provincialism”, citing the unilateral cultural influence of the United States, from centre to periphery. Smith substantiated his claim with the fact that Sidney Nolan (191792) was considered a great painter only in Australia; whereas New York artist Jackson Pollock’s place in the Western canon is clear from any position. It must have been apparent to Smith that even though Nolan had inaugurated Australia’s presence in Venice in 1954 this had not achieved the desired effect of mutual cultural recognition. There is, in fact, little evidence that representing Australia at Venice has as yet produced significant or remarkable cultural impact for the artist and their place in the global canon or market.9 Nolan is an obvious example, but it is also significant that more recent Australian representatives have hardly received major international follow-up exhibition invitations or collection opportunities. Yet the constant reinvestment in or patronage of this model and site clearly contains a great deal of another kind of value for both local market players and ideology.

One possible inference to be made is that the national pavilion model in which the world’s great artists meet in Venice before a global audience is an example of faux international democratization that is tied to domestic markets and national interests.

BELL’S THEORY OF ART WORLDS, AND EMBASSY’S TRANSNATIONAL TURN For the past fifteen years, Richard Bell has been among the most significant critics, both at home and internationally, of the Australian art world. Bell started showing paintings in Brisbane in the 1990s but rose to prominence, or perhaps more accurately, notoriety in 2003 with his Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award-winning painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) (2003), which appropriated the paint-drip technique from Jackson Pollock and canvas-board tile compilation from Sydney artist Imants Tillers, declaring “Aboriginal art–it’s a white thing.” Scientia E Metaphysica and the essay he released with it, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a White Thing!’ catalyzed debate on the lack of critical discourse on the production, consumption and appropriation of Aboriginal art, beginning with the initial boom of the remote art centres in the 1970s for, and by, the white Australian art market. Memorably, he delivered us the “triangle of discomfort” which bluntly illustrates the role of middlemen (sometimes colloquially referred to as “carpetbaggers”) in the Aboriginal art “industry” who proliferate in their exploitation of Indigenous artists.

The significance of Bell’s iconic analysis was that it effectively redirected Australian art’s dilemma, from Smith’s ‘provincialism’, to the fact of ongoing colonialism.

‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a White Thing!’ articulated an explicit concern with infrastructure, by problematizing multiple and interconnected art worlds: “Aboriginal Art is bought, sold and promoted from within the system; that is, Western Art consigns it to ‘Pigeon-holing’ within that system. Why can’t an Art movement arise and be separate from but equal to Western Art —within its own aesthetic, its own voices, its own infrastructure, etc?”10 Bell’s deployment of “separate from but equal” echoes the phrasing of legally-sanctioned racial segregation in the USA, which was (apparently) overturned in the Civil Rights Movement’s historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Thus Bell provocatively invokes the history of anti-black racism, and that the concept of an Aboriginal art is always a doubled movement, whereby it is coeval with both civil and land rights political activism. One of his standard lines is that he is “an activist masquerading as an artist.”

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Bell rarely misses an opportunity to expose the desperate situation of racialized politics in Australia. Since 2013, Embassy has continued to interrogate the role of Indigenous civil and land rights activism within the separation and connection of multiple art worlds via the infrastructure of the biennial exhibition circuit. This project is a direct continuation of the Indigenous land rights and antiracism activism mobilized through the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy established on the lawns of the Australian Parliament in Canberra in January 1972, which tapped into the contemporaneously occurring global anti-colonial Indigenous and Black Power movements.11 Analyses that position Bell’s project as an ‘homage’ to the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy fail to fully capture the extent of activity of that former event.12 Rather, each time Bell produces Embassy he is demonstrating the incompatibility of the Australian state’s colonial processes of possession, such as Native Title, with the ongoing activism of the Indigenous civil and land rights movements.13 Perhaps no single artwork produced by an Australian artist has been so widely exhibited within biennales and major international museums. As Bell’s website documents, since 2013, Embassy, has been invited into some of the most significant international exhibitions and venues of the past five years, including: the Moscow Biennale curated by Catherine de Zegher in 2013; Performa 15, New York City in 2015, curated by Rose Lee Goldberg; the 16th Jakarta Biennale, curated by Charles Esche; the Sonsbeek International in Arnhem, Netherlands, curated by ruangrupa; BELL Invites… an exhibition of Bell and work by friends and collaborators opened at the Stedelijk Museum SMBA, Amsterdam. In 2016 Embassy was presented as part of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal; the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair also 2016; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; the Jerusalem Show VIII curated by Vivian Ziherl.

In 2017, Embassy travelled to e-Flux, New York City, in the Toxic Assets exhibition, and the Indigenous New York, Artists’ Perspectives program curated by Alan Michelson at the New School.14 l

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Each iteration of Embassy reflects a different range of exhibition and coalition building capacities affected by fluctuating levels of funding as well as time allowed to produce the project.

His presentation in New York City, as part of Performa 15 in November 2015, is instructive in commingling New York’s ‘provincialism’ (Terry Smith was there to moderate), and Bell’s place in global Indigenous art networks contextualized by the forthcoming Venice Biennale.

In Performa 15, Embassy was publicized as a “a hub for film screenings, workshops, discussions and as an exhibition space” that “presents a program of talks that explore the historic and contemporary relationship between performance and protest with contributions from Black and American and Australian First Nation[s] artists and activists.”15 The final day comprised over six hours of presentations and discussions, beginning with Terry Smith’s opening remarks on the contentious meanings produced across and between the terms “Indigeneity”, “art” and “institutions”. Smith was followed by New York-based, Six Nations artist Alan Michelson who described the history of the Lenape’s dispossession (of Manhattan Island) and the glaring absence of Indigenous artists in the city’s major contemporary museums (such as the Whitney Museum of American Art), and artist talks by Tanya Lukin Linklater and Duane Linklater. Movement co-founder Sylvia McAdam also gave a presentation on the “global grassroots Indigenous-led resistance called Idle No More.”16 The last panel, ‘What is the future of solidarity?’ comprised a “public meeting between artists Emory Douglas, Richard Bell, Alan Michelson, Vernon Ah Kee, and Stuart Ringholt, activists Sylvia McAdam… and Autumn Marie of Black Lives Matter and many other initiatives, amongst other activists and thinkers.”17 They are examples of some of Bell’s network of interlocutors, that he draws from in other iterations, and those he plans to expand upon in Venice.

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BUT WHY DOES HE WANT AN ABORIGINAL EMBASSY IN VENICE? The national pavilions in Venice are obviously not ascribed the same powers as official foreign embassies, but they undoubtedly perform ambassadorial work for the nation and participate in domestic-global circuits of capital. We don’t really need this/BELL Invites builds upon the undeniable and ongoing connection between settler-land and cultural theft. Forty years after Terry Smith’s critique of the art world’s provincialism, the Australia Council for the Arts announced Bell, in a media release during March 2018, as one of the shortlisted artists for Australia’s representation at the 58th Venice Biennale. Bell has stated that he had not expected his controversial and knowingly titled proposal would actually be accepted. It is worth quoting Bell’s proposal at length; I intend to deliver an entirely new artwork for the Australian Pavilion at Venice in 2019: a monumental outdoor sculpture in which I propose to wrap the Pavilion in chains. This would effectively lock audiences out of the building in a symbolic gesture against not only the full scale invasion of the arts by capitalist colonialist forces but more importantly as an insistent Aboriginal refusal of the white space that symbolizes the ongoing dispossession and dehumanisation of Indigenous peoples. We must understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process: invasion is a structure and not an event. Therefore, we insist that in 2019 ‘the black box for white art’ which is the Australian Pavilion (one of the most significant international cultural signifiers of the settler state) must be refused. Ways in which my architectural ‘intervention’ can be understood include: As a comment on the treatment of Indigenous peoples; As a critique of colonial history, including its monuments; As a disavowal of the nationalism upon which settler colonialism is based (including its global representation vis-à-vis the Venice Biennale); As a comment on the restrictions of freedom placed upon Aboriginal communities…

As a comment on the erosion of democratic rights globally; As a comment on immigration/refugee policies (and the racist fantasy of a homogenous nation); As a comment on the history of slavery and its inseparable relationship to colonialism and global capital; To address the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from their own lands; As a critique of architecture and its role in colonial contexts by creating architectural hierarchies that exclude or oppress the dispossessed; To address the collapse of democracies into fascism via demagoguery; As a commitment to refuse assimilation into settler colonial ideology. … A point to emphasize here is that while the Pavilion is shut down, a conversation about matters beyond the confines of the Venice Biennale must ensue. As such, BELL Invites... will present a political program that will be developed as the next instalment of EMBASSY to be co-convened by myself, Clothilde Bullen and Professor Gary Foley (Victoria University).

This manifestation of Embassy will coalesce around several key themes including Indigenous Sovereignty; Forced Migration; and the effects of late capitalism.18 MOVING ON, OR BELL CONTINUES THE JOURNEY TO VENICE Since the Australia Council announcement, Bell has modified and also exhibited his proposal.

In October 2018, he inaugurated the new premises of his Brisbane gallery representative, Milani Gallery, by installing Embassy in the carpark/loading bay. Bell invited Quandamooka land rights l

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activist Dale Ruska to speak about the travesty of North Stradbroke Island Native Title, which after sixteen years of negotiations was the first such determination, in 2011, for the south eastern (and most populous) region of the state of Queensland. ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a White Thing!’ contained an early, forceful critique of Native Title, which legal scholar Aileen MoretonRobinson (Quandamooka) has strikingly defined as part of “the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty.”19

For some, Embassy’s proximity to the commercial site of art might seem difficult to parse; it is easier to lament the total co-option of ‘political’ or ‘radical’ art than to think about the attendant complex contexts and corresponding ethics. But Bell’s strategy has consistently utilized existing infrastructure, folding its shortcomings into the long list of revisions taking shape in his political imaginary. In ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a White Thing!’ the artist linked the settlercapitalist-state extraction of Indigenous cultural value with its (the state’s) maximum expropriation of Indigenous land. Since then one way to look at his practice is to view it as an exercise to make more use of the Australian art world’s social and cultural processes than it extracts from him.

For Stó:lō First Nation artist and scholar Dylan Robinson, “The material and physical structures of the museum, public squares, and modern gallery ‘starchitecture’ are structures that apprehend Indigenous belongings with their gaze.”20 Nevertheless, he says, “Indigenous writers and artists are exploring forms that are not merely containers for knowledge collection; we are advancing models for readings that inhabit other temporalities.”21 For Robinson, this is one part of understanding sovereignty not as “a thing, but an action; it is a form of doing.”22 In taking Embassy to Venice and situating it among the national pavilions of the Giardini, Bell insists on a place for his practice and his politics in a way that is clearly distinct from the colonial-settler sovereignty performed by the Australian pavilion: this is Indigenous sovereignty in action and a demonstration of global Indigenous art’s transnational bonds.23 This is what Bell began when he staged Embassy at various sites in Venice in 2015. For 2019, he will both broaden global Indigenous art networks and actively diverge from the Venice-as-picturesque-backdrop art world model.24 When Bell and I last discussed his ideas for Venice, he detailed plans to produce an Embassy project during the week of the Vernissage. He also intends to produce a model of the Australian pavilion wrapped in chains to be sailed among the vaporetto (and past the billionaire yachts) as many times as he can afford. (Parts of this plan have already been reported in Art in America.25)

I opened this text with Becker’s claims regarding the traces of cooperation that produce and exist within works of art. However, the archives and sources holding such evidence are not always forthcoming, especially in moments of controversy. Even more so, then, the recent Australian “‘stoush’ among the arts elite” as the BBC presented it,26 insists on a renewed interest in and enriched understanding of art’s political economy, and the practices that exceed our sector/s in the multiple, contested forms and uncomfortable conditions they generate. At the time of writing the 2019 Venice Biennale is still some ocean and months away. Thus Bell’s journey is an unfinished story about one artist’s ‘feel for the game’ within the longer histories of global cultural-financial circulation.

Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Bell’s story insists that we take pause to consider the processes that precipitate exhibition. This particular moment in the artist’s longest-running project to date demands a taking stock of the attendant (or apparent) global machinations of exhibitionary culture.

At the same time, the logic of the work insists we continually labour to understand it in relation to both the historical and ongoing political actions of Indigenous self-determination and how they are continuously enacted by Bell and his collaborators within and beyond Embassy.

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Notes 1 Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds 25th Anniversary Edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 2 A Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land”, the principle used in international law to describe territory acquired by a state’s occupation of it. Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that in 1770 on behalf of King George III, “[Captain James] Cook as the embodiment of patriarchal white sovereignty, willed away the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples by placing them in and of nature as property-less subjects to claim the land as terra nullius.” See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The Legacy of Cook’s Choice’, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. In the landmark case of Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled that the doctrine of terra nullius should never have been applied to Australia. One could choose from thousands of examples when settler elites have failed to assimilate this fact but one relevant to our discussion of Meanjin and global diplomacy is how, in 2014, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott basically reiterated the legal fiction of terra nullius during the G20 summit in Brisbane. To his international audience he said, “[it is] hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush and that the marines and the convicts and the sailors that straggled off those ships not far from where we are now must have thought that they’d come almost to the moon.” (NITV News, ‘Prime Minister Tony Abbott Celebrates 200 Years of Colonialsm’, 2014.) For a canonical scholarly explanation of the elision of 1770 in favour of 1788, see Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, New York: Knopf, 1988 3 ‘La Biennale di Venezia: From the beginnings until the second world war’, La Biennale di Venezia; https://www.labiennale.org/en/history/ beginnings-until-second-world-war; accessed 1 November 2018 4 Charles Green & Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 5 Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016 6 Robert Davis and Garry Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004 7 BBC World News, ‘Venice Biennale: The row over anointing a top Australian artist’; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42868463; accessed 1 February 2018 8 Simon Mordant, ‘Why I’m no longer funding the Australian at the Venice Biennale’, The Art Newspaper, 27 November 2017; https://www. theartnewspaper.com/comment/why-i-m-no-longer-funding-australia-at-the-venice-biennale 9 That Sidney Nolan’s paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection might be considered a caveat to this argument, but it is decades since they have been shown 10

Richard Bell, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a white thing!’; http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html

11

In his push for more transcultural and transnational approaches to Indigenous historiography, leading Indigenous historian John Maynard’s research has addressed both the influence of Black Power and the US civil rights movement on young activists in, for example, the Freedom Ride across rural New South Wales in 1965 and the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Also see The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State, Gary Foley, Andrew Schaap, and Edwina Howell eds, London: Routledge, 2014 12 See for example Eleanor Heartney, ‘History Wars’, Art in America, 1 October, 2018; https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/ magazines/history-wars/ 13 ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art–It’s a White Thing!’ contains an early and poignant critique of the Native Title process, which then and now, is failing to deliver land rights to Indigenous peoples. According to Indigenous legal scholar Nicole Watson, though $100m is invested in the native title system every year, this has not affected either “a ‘new relationship’ between Aboriginal and other Australians, nor a redistribution of the country’s extraordinary wealth in favour of our people.” Nicole Watson, ‘What Do We Want? Not Native Title, That’s for Bloody Sure’, The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State, op cit., p. 288 14

https://richardbellart.com/embassy/

15

‘Performa 15 Richard Bell: Embassy’; http://15.performa-arts.org/events/embassy

16

http://15.performa-arts.org/do-not-enter-or-modify-or-erase/client-uploads/PDFs/Venue_materials/Richard_Bell.pdf

17

ibid.

18

Richard Bell, Pericolo! Artisti al Lavoro (2018), 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Prize, National Art School, Sydney

19

Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision’, Borderlands 3, No. 2, 2004; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm. See also Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016 l

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20

Dylan Robinson, ‘Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space’, Art Journal 76: 2, 2017, p. 98

21

ibid.

22

ibid., p. 85

23

Jolene Rickard, ‘The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art’, Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, Greg Hill, Candice Kopkins and Christine Lalonde eds, Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013 24 For background, see ‘Venezia e non Venezia. Racconti di Giudecca’ (‘Venice and not Venice. Tales of Giudecca”), Vogue Italia, 7 October 2018; https://www.vogue.it/news/notizie-del-giorno/2018/10/07/venezia-e-non-venezia-racconti-di-giudecca-casa-vogue-ottobre-2018/ 25

See Eleanor Heartney, ‘History Wars’, Art in America, op cit.

26

BBC World News, ‘Venice Biennale: The row over anointing a top Australian artist’, op cit.

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色即是空 空即是色 1 Re-Enchanting The World

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Sitting on top of a mountain, facing another mountain, I sketched a mountain.

In China, painting and writing a mountain is the same thing.

Xu Bing2 THE LANDSCAPE 山水 Chinese landscape painting traditionally did not seek to depict any particular landscape; its aim was never directly representative. Rather, the scenes depicted symbolized the entire world as such, with whatever mountains, pagodas, rivers representing the concept of a landscape ordered by human vision rather than the things in themselves. This is a world defined primarily in terms of the relationship between the subject (often the painter himself, a small dab lost in hills and pavilions) and the vastness of the world, with endless particularities and endless resonances; this leaf entirely unique, yet clearly similar to all the other leaves, isn’t an attempt to realistically depict a particular leaf so much as the concept of ‘leaf’. Urban planning, such as the plan of T’ang Dynasty Chang’an or Beijing, also reflected this wish to echo the cosmos in a manageable miniature: in Beijing, every street is an actual place, but also a symbol of the way that the different components of the world interact with each other, forming a harmonious whole (that’s the hope, anyway). As taxi drivers in Shanghai know, it’s impossible for any subject to grasp reality as an object; our perceptory organs, whether physical, such as our eyes, or artificial, like a painting or system of thought, necessarily select a part to stand in for the whole, but no matter what apps we are using, surprising things can leap out of the streets at us. Perhaps the whole of reality is an endless, somewhat monotonous set of details which could be classified; but feasibly we could make it simpler, and say that the reality encountered by the subject has two halves: self, and world. It is this relationship, rather than any particular mountain or river, which is the subject of Chinese landscape painting.

Superficially, the world that human subjects encounter in China today can be very dissimilar from that which we observe in those old paintings; less green, more grey; in other words, if the source materials of the world of the Chinese past were mountains and water, today it is people and more people. However, on a fundamental level, in the maps of Qiu Zhijie or the digital worlds of Cao Fei, the structure of the work still resembles a landscape: here is the setting, here is the subject. Whether the setting is a green hill or a grey tower is not of particular importance: what is superficially chaotic is in fact a pattern of eternal return. There’s order here, an aesthetic order, but a political one as well.

Why then do artists, particularly successful mid-career artists, who not only have a creative practice, but also a bureaucratic practice as teachers, managers or businesspeople return to depictions of the equation self:world? Depictions are powerful, is the answer. Representations of reality, particularly in contemporary China, have a strange way of becoming real—whatever that means. Qiu Zhijie’s maps of communities and worlds illuminate a murky world of emotion and affect; but then again, so do corporate spread charts. Qiu seems to follow Bruce Nauman’s dictum: the artist’s work is to reveal mystic truths. Yet these social truths, relationships and perceptions only

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exist once they are illuminated; and in the illumination, in Cao Fei’s choice of, say, a Panda rather than a Polar Bear, a world is summoned into being, one which does echo the pre-existing world, but which also may echo into it, just as every time we say “I love you” we’re simultaneously referring to a past and creating a future. In the China that has emerged since 1979, there’s no artist whose practice toys with representation, real, tradition and revolution more than Xu Bing: between image and words, politics and art, Xu’s career embodies both the peculiar characteristics of contemporary China and also the ancient literati tradition that dates back millennia. Like that leaf in the landscape: particular, yet at the same time, an experience which can help us to understand all the others.

The goal of Xu Bing’s invented characters, his books from the sky and ground, seem to be to reveal that the words which we have are incapable of articulating the world which they would express; and to try to make sense, to order, that inarticulate muddle into a coherent system. In inventing ideographs which could logically be new words, Xu’s project is to make the endless fragments of human life into a coherent, ordered whole. Yes, and this is the goal of China itself.

THE PEOPLE 人民3 Our earliest established view of art was a socialist one, which was, roughly: art comes from life, art is higher than life, art returns to and enriches life... I have never departed from this artistic mindset4 The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary,5 already seems like a monument to the class of 2008, an unprecedented moment of openness in Chinese history. Recent years have seen artists and galleries leaving Beijing and dark talk of government repression and censorship, a return to the bad old days. And yet, I’ve never seen an exhibition as intellectually ambitious as the Xu Bing retrospective, Thought and Method (July-August 2018), which charts Xu’s career from his sketches as an adolescent in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to his pastiche of surveillance camera footage, Dragonfly Eyes (2018)—being as much in dialogue with curator Philip Tinari’s Art And China After 1989 Theater Of The World (held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017) as it is with the background noise of the Chinese art world in 2018. Xu Bing’s entire career is shown to beautiful effect, most notably his Book from the Sky (1987-91), installed in the same space in which it was presented in 2007, during UCCA’s opening exhibition. But of course, Beijing and New York City mean very different things for Chinese art; the UCCA exhibition doesn’t try to explain Xu Bing to the world so much as to the younger generation.

UCCA, despite the many difficulties that operating in Beijing entails, makes it something like a centre of political and cultural optimism in itself, a new sort of public space in China.

The centre of Chinese utopianism and avant-garde art has been Beijing for over a century.

The May Fourth Movement which Xu Bing alludes to so frequently, from his invention of new words to his circular glasses, was a sort of Enlightenment with Chinese characteristics. Following the fall of the Q’ing Dynasty in 1911, students and intellectuals in north Beijing had crystallized around a modernizing desire; protests sparked by the Versailles Treaty, which gave German colonial concessions to Japan, quickly morphed into a populist, nationalist left-wing movement. The ideas and circles of friends that eventually became China’s successful revolution began here.

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The historical ‘world’ of mountains and rivers had been covered in soot; the language, the images and political forms of old China seemed to be incapable of comprehending what a small group of students began to see on 4 May 1919. And so, the Chinese language redefined its claims to universality: both in the class sense, of universal literacy, as opposed to a literacy being confined to an elite, male group of poets, scholars and government officials who were often the same individuals, but also in the sense that the Chinese language formally floated free from China as a reference point.

The Chinese language is etymologically so material—for example, 家, “house, home and family” is literally a pig under a roof. What the May Fourth activists wanted to achieve was to change the Chinese language meant to describe the animals, plants and people found in Beijing into one that would be capable of articulating universal sentiments, of describing the contours of utopia, and today of being used to invent technologies of artificial intelligence.

The somewhat legendary figure of the Chinese literati foregrounds Chinese cultural production—these men, such as the poet Li Bai, whose finicky arrogance was too great to subjugate to the daily and practical demands of politics, and who sought primeval forms of the universal in poetry, calligraphy and painting of the landscape. The class called 文人, “people of the word” were defined by an aristocratic detachment. In their poems and paintings, the individual protagonist was rarely, if ever, present; in fact, words like 自我 or “self” did not really exist. The individual and their place in the world related as a body and clothing; the clothing never defines the body, although it may temporarily change its conditions. Each Chinese character then, describes something like a Platonic ideal; never one specific person, but “personhood”—never one specific country, but “country”. Each concept, realized as an abstraction, is cognizant of the mortality of any specific condition; the Chinese language, therefore, is abstract, neutral, and can be used to describe any condition whatsoever. Each concept is defined in terms of distance from the individual cogito.

What we (and those who use post-language reform Chinese) consider a ‘self’ seems to be modern, and refer to the ‘committed’ intellectual; the point at which political positions, national positions, or gender roles became actually part of one’s identity, to the extent that we no longer have universal heritage of humanity, but women artists, Chinese-American artists, queer artists. Perhaps, in fact, ‘self’ refers neither to some abstract cogito which lives in us all—that which, in Xu’s film Dragonfly Eyes “the character of characters”—a brain with grasping tendrils which sorts phenomena into words—and neither to one’s position, whether as party member, as a holder of a Beijing hukou, as a chairman of a socialist danwei or a capitalist corporation. Rather, the enmeshedness of the cogito and the material situation, instead of the constituent parts, becomes ‘self’. At the same time, and particularly in Shanghai, the extended family became the nuclear family, the day once indicated by sunrise and sunset began to be split into hours, and the old courtyards that families lived in became urban apartments.

And so, the May Fourth Movement intellectuals, no longer satisfied to take a gentleman’s banishment to write poetry, created the notion of fixed, stable identities: in the writing of Lu Xun or romantic counterparts such as Xu Zhimo, the prototypical feminist Xiao Hong, but also academics and institution builders such as Hu Shi and Cai Yuanpei; these were the first selves in China, the first individual intellects that incorporated political or cultural attitudes into their very flesh. And yet, these selves expressed their subject identities not for themselves alone, but for the many unrealized selves imminent in their own existence. In a vast crowd of people, a few rose to speak; were they the best speakers, or simply the ones closest to the podium? In any case, their words were taken to represent the feelings of everybody else.

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Xu Bing’s father was the dean of the history department in Peking University,6 the community created by Cai Yuanpei and the May Fourth generation. It’s rarely in good taste to discuss the fate of such persons during China’s Cultural Revolution, and so I will not, but it’s fair to say that many intellectuals, from the caste and class of intellectuals—a historically and materially significant class dating back thousands of years, with specific living facilities, food and drink, and language—a sub-species of the Chinese genus—felt orphaned by this cultural revolution. Xu’s banishment to the mountains, where in the 1970s he kept notebooks and drew photorealistic sketches of Handan City, of the Changbaishan mountains, and grubby villages in the south of Hebei—could be understood as an echo of literati in times past who had been removed from power. But if in the T’ang Dynasty, intellectuals sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution understood it as a form of isolation, they were asked to learn from the people, to share the lives of the people, that formerly illiterate group, entirely defined by the small patch of land into which they had been born. If Xu’s heritage was the Chinese language and its idea of the world, the peasants’ heritage and life-world was the world itself. No paintings of mountains on the walls; just a window looking out to mountains.

Returning to Beijing in the 1980s, Xu participated as a sardonic observer in the 文化热, a sort of “cultural boom” that was the result of the many different orphans in the era following the Cultural Revolution—a question never fully answered, and left unanswered—trying to locate themselves, and to discover a sense of self. In those years, artists threw out kitsch on all sides, like a child lost in the woods would throw crumbs to make a trail that they can follow home; the cultural output of this moment, like blips of sonar, had the intended purpose of helping the creators discover where they were. Xu’s Book from the Sky lampooned this, with a giant scroll of characters which signified nothing; an edict from on high which was as grand as it was incomprehensible. Readers are encouraged to make sense out of nonsense, a feeling that is quite familiar to a person in Chinese cities today, bombarded with meaningless words and exhortations, advertisements, propaganda, fake news.

In this hall of mirrors, the city with its advertisements and signs, we only see distorted and puny versions of our self; rarely, if ever, in the words that we see around us do we see any possibility of transcending the self, of leaving this empty form of selfhood behind entirely. *** The culture boom crested in Beijing in June, 1989; the unity of intellectuals and workers which the Communist Party encouraged in the 1970s met its apogee, as Beijing’s working classes from the southern part of town and intellectuals from the north, met in the Tian’anmen Square.

The government meant to represent both squashed this rebellion; some intellectuals were killed, and commemorated; more workers were killed, and forgotten; and the intellectuals trudged back north, the workers back south, and class began to reassert itself. No longer would there be a ‘Chinese self’, in which the intellectuals and governors participated in side by side with the workers. The new Chinese class system, in which some persons lives, opinions and struggles were deemed as more important than others, was born in that moment; not in the firing of the tanks, but in the abandonment of the workers. Xu Bing went to New York. He returned eighteen years later, as China had regenerated in his absence, lifted by the anonymous hands of these workers.

Around the time of the Olympics and indeed, his own return to China, Xu Bing began constructing his sculpture Phoenix (2008-10), using detritus from construction sites, and with nostalgically egalitarian conversations with workers, a souvenir of youth. Commissioned around

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the time of the Olympics for a commercial client, Phoenix was two huge statues of China’s mythical bird, which rises from the ashes; Xu chose to construct it out of trowels, construction worker safety caps, concrete blocks and other material from worksites that dotted the Chinese capital at that time.

Deliberately using popular materials, folkloric symbols and constructing it in a way that recalled socialist-era work units, Phoenix seemed to rise from the catastrophes of Chinese socialist history into the real existing socialism of Beijing in 2008.

Phoenix, sadly, was unable to rise from the ashes of Beijing’s Central Business District, but did succeed in taking flight to Boston and Venice. It might seem ironic that an artist whose focus is so directly on the Chinese intellectual tradition as Xu should seem more successful in the West than in China; correcting this is one reason why the Ullens exhibition is so welcome. However, Xu’s work has often been vulgarized into political statements in the West, shorthand for Chinese development or critique thereof, much like his boorish ex-flatmate Ai Weiwei. In fact, the meditation on the Chinese language has more complex valence points, encompassing the historical divide between governors and poets on one hand, and the people on the other; the ambitions and failures of the May Fourth Movement and its heir, the establishment of New China, and the Cultural Revolution; in Xu’s forest of nonsense words, the individual can get lost, and fall asleep, dreaming of China. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that Xu’s erstwhile patrons in the CBD did not want to give him space for Phoenix; Xu’s iconoclastic approach impacted the icons of contemporary China, whereas it meant little more than an amusing spectacle for those illiterate in Chinese.

Phoenix recalls nothing so much as Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which looks backwards onto wreckage and flies forward into the unknown. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin wrote, A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.7

Benjamin arrived at an understanding of history by meditating on Klee’s angel, and Phoenix gives us something to consider as well; Benjamin observed a world in which mechanization and logic had removed enchantment from it, or its aura. If Marx and his Chinese followers attained selfhood by understanding that it is not enough to observe the world, but rather that one must change it, then Phoenix represents an attempt to make useless and discarded objects into a symbol of our collective journey into an unknown future, to imbue the wreckage of a construction site with aura, with the memory of the labour of the people. It is entirely beside the point to complain about the lack of aura, the lack of peace and tranquility, the pollution, corruption, traffic, of contemporary China—even more so when one recalls that the lost idyll of the ancient literati was the fruit of a society in which ninety-seven percent of the population were condemned to endless labour. We must re-enchant our sick world, going through its mountains and valleys casting spells, and finding new ways to

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understand it in such a way as to overpower the logic of the economy; instead of seeing space as so much unrealized real estate, and a crowd as so much congealed labour-time, the project that was begun on 4 May 1911 can only continue by insisting on the equal value of all human beings and all places in China, dignifying each and every one, without subordinating any one to economic logic.

The self is constricting, and it is difficult to breathe within it; a chrysalis, which we are in the process of outgrowing. In Xu’s nonsense words, in his collections of rubble made flying machines, and even in his casual chats with real estate magnates, a serious engagement with a world in which poetry seems to be extinct, and an attempt to revive it, is visible. Art is intrinsically culturally conservative, in the sense that it elaborates upon the forms of the past; Xu’s calligraphy certainly does, as do his allusions to mythical creatures and folkloric images. The artist must not be naïve about the past, nor the present which, constantly in motion, will itself soon be the past; and yet, the spirit of new China remains oriented to the future—a dialectical material.

Xu Bing is no gentleman poet, but a worker, willing to get his hands dirty with the soil and ashes of the Beijing landscape. His being has left an imprint in his time and his institution (as vice-president of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing). One might wish for the luxury of detachment, of not having to care, but this is not a luxury which is afforded to residents of contemporary Beijing.

HOMELAND 家园8 Now artists and the government are basically the same.9 When I was hit by a taxi on Fuxing Road, central Shanghai, on the evening of 15 April 2018, I easily could have died. I was both hurt by, and rescued by, a system alien to me—the Chinese urban network—within which, however, I’ve spent a decade by choice, dwelling and thinking (and, by writing, hoping to build as well). So many different objects and movements all flung together: to call this collective ‘China’ insisting on their unity, is a work of the aesthetic imagination—not of mine, but of the Chinese government.

At different times, I’ve felt paranoia and intense frustration with this system which has, on the face of it, given me so much. This network of cars and roads, mobile phone apps, CCTV cameras and of political secrets which produce gardens filled with fruits which may or may not be edible.

The hospital I was sent to, less than a kilometre from my apartment, is apparently among the best in Asia for brain injuries; I was told that this felicitous expertise exists as Jiang Zemin, the former President of the PRC (1993-2003), lives nearby as well, and the hospital is anticipating the day when he might have a stroke or other injury. China—not the people, not the land, but specifically the political organization that rules the country—confuses me so much that it has driven me to drink, and careening to near-death, but then saved me: and as I write now, on a tranquil terrace, observing ‘China’, or individual components thereof, it is difficult to say whether my relationship with this phenomena is love or hate; the only certainty is that in either case, it is unrequited. The cogito ‘China’, e.g. the Communist Party, is seeking to sort out and understand the individual pieces—human beings, parcels of land—under its administration with ever more scrutiny. This is partly a contemporary political phenomenon, but is also reflective of the fact that those individual pieces are ever more individual and less predictable; prosperity brings complexity, and if a village watchman worked for a village, then banks of glowing screens are necessary for the twenty-five million person city.

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Implicit in the acceptance or rejection of authority in Western modernity is the understanding that ‘we’ ourselves resemble that authority—as in Freud, or in Sartre, or wherever else you care to look; if the archetypical Chinese genre of representation is a landscape which contextualizes the subject, in the West we’ve traditionally painted portraits of the subject, one which is often capable of dismantling, blowing up, or otherwise transforming whatever landscape one happens to find oneself in. ‘We’ see ourselves in a Holbein or a Goya, in a way that we might not in a Song Dynasty winter landscape. In saying that, one is forced to admit that this ‘we’ is not universal; just as the history of representation in China has been historically intertwined with power, our portraits of kings, ancestors and ambassadors have been as well.

For the entire period in which the discipline called art history has existed, the world has been dominated by persons who physically resemble the subjects of Holbein’s portraits; but that seems to be less the case today, as I discovered in my encounter with the alien and competent authority that saved my life. China means different things for different people: ‘Chinese’ people may speak for themselves. For me, China is a word signifying alterity, an alternative to the alienation of the capitalist world my ancestors created. And even if the wreckage that Xu’s Phoenix is made from resembles that which Angelus Novus observes, the former seems to move more quickly.

Is this system omnipotent? It scarcely seems human, and indeed it is not; the American President may express himself and his wishes via his Twitter account and the subjective individuality that we have come to be familiar with, but the Chinese government does not. In fact, although power is concentrated in the person of Xi Jinping, decisions are invariably attributed to Zhongnanhai (CPC headquarters)—not a person, but a place. The operative assumption of most Western observers has been that this power is malign; inscrutable, wicked, and likely to displace ‘Us’. But it seems childish to assume that this authority is malign simply because it exists. Our own patriarchal structures seem barely capable of supporting themselves, and when they were able to, it was only at great cost of life; a loss of life that commenced at the beginning of our empires, at the beginning of our enlightenment. Just because every Western monument to civilization has been also a monument to barbarism, does that necessarily imply that the Huashan Hospital, where I was nursed back to health by authoritarian nurses and efficient machines, is as well?

What is quite evident to any observer of America’s media wars, of the fraught politics surrounding fictional categories such as race and gender, but also the notion of ‘China’ threatening us, is that representations have a reality, indeed constitute reality. Representations of reality which reshape our perceptions, or as Nauman would have it, art, relate to political power in a very direct way. I spent years fretting about ‘China’. What is ‘China’? Defining that is, properly speaking, the task of Chinese art, of the Chinese language, of the People’s Republic of China; of Xu Bing, who has at different stages in his life represented Chinese art, Chinese language, Chinese government.

I hesitate to describe the Cultural Revolution in detail because my parents weren’t involved, but I can speak for the desire to transcend restrictive categories of identity which serve to separate me from my comrades, whether they are ‘Chinese’ or not. Viewing one’s own subjectivity and behavior with the detachment of a neutral observer is one of the most difficult challenges a person can set her/himself; to do so requires extraction of the cogito from the self; a reversal from the process of individuation that I argue took place during the Enlightenment for my ancestors, and during the May Fourth Movement for Xu Bing’s. And so, it is very difficult for me to know what the impact upon me of a decade of Chinese life has been; upon my self-awareness, upon my sense of identity, upon my reaction to the notion of privilege. l

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In the population enclosed by globalization, the dream of a universal subject has come close to realization. From New York to Beijing, we drink the same coffee, get hit by the same cars. However, our experience of the human world remains as fundamentally alienated as the experience memorialized in classical Chinese poetry and painting; the world is a thing of itself, and the human cogs whom we encounter are generally of interest only for the ways that they can serve a predestined economic function. When we’ve consumed until we don’t want to consume any more, there’s no reason to speak to the People anymore. Unsurprisingly, this world is lacking in magic and colour; our cities feel more like wreckage than like gardens. The participant-observer form of subjectivity which we call ‘artist’ must weave this wreckage together into a beautiful tapestry of life, one upon which we can fly into whatever future materializes; must re-enchant the world; must turn the apartment complexes into homes and the airports into clouds; must sleep and, in sleeping, let their minds weave the constituent moving parts of this world into a totality, in which every human experience glows from within.

Notes 1 A Buddhist sutra meaning “emptiness is the world, the world is emptiness”—reflecting on the hollowness of mortality and human power 2 Xu Bing, quoted in En Liang Khong, ‘Xu Bing: Landscape Landscript, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford–Review’, The Financial Times, 2 April 2013; https://www.ft.com/content/86f48960-9ac1-11e2-97ad-00144feabdc0 3

While a direct translation there are several terms for “people”—this one has intentionally democratic socialist connotations of modernism

4

Quoted in Shelagh Vainker, Landscape/Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2013; see https://issuu.com/accpublishinggroup/docs/xubingissuu 5

See Robin Peckham, ‘The Loss of Centre’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 2, 2017, pp. 100-107

6

Even though situated in Beijing, the university still calls itself, in English, Peking University. In Chinese of course, Beijing and Peking are the same characters 7 Walter Benjamin, 1940. An English translation by Harry Zohn is included in the collection of essays by Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), New York: Randon House, 1968 8

A direct translation, literally meaning “Home garden”, the latter character having resonance with landscape painting

9

Xu Bing, quoted in David Barboza, ‘Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China’, New York Times, 30 March 2008; https://www.nytimes. com/2008/03/30/arts/design/30barb.html

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The Art of Disappearance The idea of the modern state underwent a significant revision by Michael Foucault through his work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Physical violence and repressive legislative power are no longer its dominant features, he argued, rather discipline and surveillance as applied to the whole social body. With these state measures, liberal democracy became a ‘disciplinary society’, one sustained by pervasive regimes of monitoring and meticulous scrutiny. Academic specialists on China have seized upon Foucault’s thesis, and began to speak of slippages and detours of state power. Their hypothesis is that the totalitarian state is often less ‘totalizing’ that it is often thought to be.1 It is a tantalizing proposition. Among other things, it proposes that state power is widely distributed over the social sphere; favours, gifts and personal relationships are means through which state power and political sponsorship are bestowed upon the well-connected and the deserving.

With this Foucauldian legacy one may ask: if the Communist Party of China is still the dominant wielder of power in China, in what form is this anti-state discourse presented? *** The juxtaposition of artworks by Xu Bing and Feng Mengbo in the same thematic exhibition2 offers an interesting viewing and deliberation experience. I was provoked and made uneasy by my own thoughts. In their artworks the subject is grave and immense but made ironic; even humorous. Their treatment of the subject that so drives them is defused, made trivial. But has it, really? One is not sure.

It is like one of those moments when something—love, desire, allure of a new iPhone—you think you have in your grasp suddenly vanishes. Potent yet elusive, it has its own life and refuses to be reined in. In contemporary Chinese art, there can only be two subjects that prove to be so enchanting.

Culture or civilization—the grandeur and the burden of it, is one—the other is the communist state.

For many observers, the engagement with the state has given contemporary Chinese art a rigour and vitality not seen in the West for a considerable time. The Andy Warhols and Damien Hirsts of the artworld have been arrested by ennui and the imposing nihilism of our time, while Chinese artists appear to hold on to a solid core of references and meanings rivalled only by the works of Socialist Realism. It is fortuitous then that authoritarianism has given Chinese art its subject, you are thinking. It would be facile, of course, to suggest a sense of direct influence, as if everything in China’s contemporary art has sprung from a single source—Maoism’s excesses since the People’s Republic of China’s founding in 1949. Yet, one is amazed by the confidence, by the unwavering foundationalism, in the way the Chinese artists have laid out their polemics. Perhaps this explains the central character of Chinese art that emerged from the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. From the work of the Scar artists of the late 1970s to those of the Star Group the following decade, they shared the cynicism, the rage, the pained disenchantment in their tussles with the institution that drove their censure. Often, even among the so-called Cynical Realists (critics have been fast and easy with their labelling), for all their demotion of things of post-Deng China, artists like Zeng Fanzhi, l

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Lui Wei and others gave the impression that they knew exactly where their works were directing their critique—towards the Chinese state—social and personal trauma having been their driving forces.

If this is correct, their expressions increasingly look like a symptom—an irrepressible manifestation —of the experiences that had torn apart the nation. An event like the Cultural Revolution has given contemporary Chinese art a psychological tenor, a heightened imagining of history and its cataclysmic effects. Trauma may be too modish for an art review. But it depicts succinctly what is hard to miss: how history has morphed into a persistent theme, how the artists seem to work by returning to the critical events that were terrifying, yet inspiring.

In psychological jargon, the suffering of the traumatic is personal. But it is also social, especially when it is shared by a collective of people: what immediately comes to mind are the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution. Chinese contemporary artists are not wrong in identifying the communist state as the source of their ruinous experiences. For many of them 1966 to 1976 was a decade of lost childhood. But Maoism made no apology for its brutal repression in China’s march to socialist paradise. We know which side we should invest our politics. We are less sure when it comes to art criticism.

Through his decades-long career, Xu Bing has taken on the Chinese state through his work.

Perhaps unlike many artists of his generation, Xu shuns the psychologically obsessive; his approach is light, almost laissez faire. The work that established his international reputation is Tian Shu –Book from the Sky (1987-91).3 The wood prints on paper reproduce, with immaculate fidelity to the traditional form, thousands of fake characters. However, it is a fakery that both demolishes and celebrates one of Chinese civilization’s greatest achievements. It is said that Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of all China, had standardized Chinese characters for use in his realm. The reform in writing, like his other measures, was undeniably a state project. Tian Shu is, if you like, a work of ‘desire delayed’. For those who can read Chinese, the recognition is kept back by the immaculate form: the characters are so perfectly crafted that it takes a while to recognize their fakery. The pleasure and the surprise is like meeting a long-lost friend in a moment of shock recognition. Carved by woodblock masters, the nonsense characters took unmistakably the traditional calligraphic form. Book from the Sky is most powerful when it invites cultural insiders into a game of sleight-of-hand both witty and revealing; to recognize the faked characters, to see through their ‘non-sense’, and to flatter your cultural skill. One can also see it another way, however. If Tian Shu belittles Chinese civilization and its achievements, it also celebrates them. As cultural critique, Tian Shu is most powerful when it resurrects calligraphy’s immaculate form. If its fakery has torn down the edifice of Chinese civilization, it also resurrects it in an even more faithful act, of replication.

There is plenty of this double-footed dialectic in Xu Bing’s latest offering, Dragonfly Eyes (2017), a work of different tempo and polemics. The surveillance videos that form the bulk of the film flickered and gleamed, the rapid cuts create in the mind an impression as fluid as the images themselves. Dragonfly Eyes has emanated from a rich harvest, of ten thousand hours of (publically accessible online) surveillance videos from various sources: shopping malls, carparks, traffic police, street CCTV, for any number of purposes: anti-crime, graffiti-prevention, traffic monitoring, people surveillance. (To these Xu Bing might probably add: human curiosity). Among these functions, surveillance is the most potent: the all-seeing, scanning and monitoring without aim, waiting to capture things that may or may not happen. Eyes of a dragonfly, with their multiple lenses capable of a baroque array of visions—they seem just right to describe Xu’s work and the Foucauldian enterprise of the Chinese state in the use of surveillance as state policy. Like much of the world,

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everyday life in China’s towns and cities is ‘eyed’ and ‘gazed at’ by an explicit, ubiquitous technology of observation. The headline of a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly tells all: “China’s Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone: The country is perfecting a vast network of digital espionage as a means of social control—with implications for democracies worldwide”4—the implication being that China’s usage has moved beyond declared reasons (of public safety and criminal apprehension), this extreme surveillance becoming the central measure in the creation of an uber-disciplined society, the totalitarian state enhancing its totalizing power by way of this technology.

As a critique of the state, though, Dragonfly Eyes is more mischievous than disparaging.

State surveillance may be a part of everyday life—shopping malls, car parks and private residences have it as well. CCTV is the norm and the state one of the players. Watching Xu Bing’s film, you are reminded that in China, as elsewhere, separation bewteen state and society is never straightforward, like the notion of the nation-state with its awkward, giveaway hyphen. In all of Xu Bing’s art, his approach has been a sliding flanking movement, rather a frontal attack. From Tian Shu to Dragonfly Eyes, his take on the confluence of the Communist Party of China and culture is ambiguous, an ambivalent desire, as it advances the Chinese state and society to a grim assessment.

It is not surprising then when a love story is interlaced with this oppressive surveillance reality—one of love lost and found, and lost again. The man pursues a woman and is soon abandoned by her. But then, she is in search of someone, something; we don’t know. Has he actually met her, or has he conjured her from his yeaning among the debris of urban chaos? The mise en scène of longing is cast in a hairdressing salon, a cheap hotel, a gym. For all the misery of abortive love, the style is in the mode of a Douglas Sirk film, lush and melodramatic, as in the courtship of Rock Hudson the gardener, of the upper-class widow stricken with blindness in All that Heaven Allows (1959). Despair is a pencil line away from personal fulfilment: this may well be the perfect metaphor of the magic of the Chinese state. The love affair adds a lyricism to the work’s images of urban wretchedness. And the Hegelian moment: if China’s urban malaise can hold the possibility of love and carnal tenderness, so can the communist state—any state—steer its awesome machinery towards fulfilling its obligations of care and keeping the peace.

Indeed, the European idea of the state is similarly associated with brutality and oppression.

For Max Weber, the state is defined by the legitimacy of its use of violence. However, if the state is an instrument of the ruling class, as Marx would have it, it is not without its redeeming social functions.

The state represses, but it also maintains order; it protects society from chaos, it makes laws, it keeps the proverbial trains running on time. For the theorist Thomas Hobbes, the state keeps at bay the conflict between individuals because in nature they put first their own interests. If in nature people are free, they are also driven to dispute and conflict. For all its philosophical complexities, from Hobbes to Hegel to Marx, the state delivers. And in China (not to forget the former communist states of Eastern Europe), the most important of its offerings has been economic security: the proverbial “iron rice bowl”.5 *** You are now in the next room, and no more the dark and gloomy urban scenes that have kept your vision affixed on the screen. The bright light startles, and the electronic smog of China’s cityscape gives way to a computer game. The Long March Restart (2008) manifests its intentions so blatantly that you suspect a trick. The communist state is unambiguously the subject of engagement, but the l

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anti-state sophistry is of a different kind. The artist Feng Mengbo’s video (game) bravely enters the belly of the beast. The story of the Long March recounts the Red Army’s nine thousand kilometre retreat from October 1934 to escape the encirclement and pursuit of the Nationalist forces, reaching the base of Yan’an in China’s north in October 1935. Children at school learn about the Long March, movies have been made of it, and the hillside town of Yan’an has become the must-see for those following the trail of Red tourism, from guerrilla base to guerrilla base. Detraction drops easily from the lips. The Long March is a cliché, the Long March is state propaganda—until we remember every state deserves its own Long March. Russia has Stalingrad, Australia has Gallipoli, Britain has Dunkirk (amongst others), the USA has George Washington crossing the Delaware River; let China have the Long March! Like the others, the Chinese communist legend is full of epic endurance and monumental achievements. And here too the hand of the communist state is everywhere in the remaking of history into national myth.

Feng Mengbo, born 1966, is of the post-Cultural Revolution generation. His take on the Long March reflects the relatively liberal climate of post-Deng China. I find The Long March Restart humorous, with a touch of the tragic. As such it tends to seduce and corral you into a single discursive position. I watch a young woman playing the interactive video game, and from the screen the Red Army soldier is busily hurling thoughs at my mind. It is not too much to think that Feng too wanted a great arena of play, not only to wrestle with the communist state and its powerful ideology.

Feng’s work takes the form of a computer game in a retro Super Mario-style, but with a Red Army soldier replacing the eponymous plumber. Not a habitual gamer, I fix my cursor on the soldier and take him on the loop. This gamer, this effete intellectual, is on the controls. The Red Army soldier leaps, fights, throws Coca Cola cans as bombs as he fences off his foes at each obstacle. But the foes are not Nationalist soldiers, or evil landlords, or anti-revolutionary rightists. Each push of the joystick stalls the soldier’s movements, then takes him leaping across another hurdle. I am learning the patience of the seasoned gamer: the player’s dexterity does not always reward; risk and disappointment are a part of the gamesmanship. Having given up his traditional nemeses, the Red Army soldier looks lost. He is battling enemies not of his choosing: ghosts, demons and other fiendish beings. It is the Long March meets The Journey to the West (Monkey of the Japanese TV series).

The soldier is heroic, but there is no posturing of the Socialist Realism mode. I play on, feeling fatigued. I find it hard to remember the wins and the defeats, the stages of the game before the finale.

Like every gamer, I want to win but everything soon becomes a blur: the Red Army soldier, his journey, his nemeses, the whole point of the game.

The experiences of viewing and playing feel like a deception. The subject—it’s in the title —lures you in. But much is left out. Even the Red Army soldier is not how he normally appears.

What kind of Long March is it without the 1935 battle of the Luding Bridge, when less than thirty Red Army volunteers crawled over the iron chains of the suspension bridge over the Dadu River while under heavy Nationalist machine-gun fire to secure the bridgehead? Your mind swims in a sea of meaning and inferences; but you are hard put to draw a single conclusion.

It is phenomenal that, in these post-Cold War days, much of what China does still earns the label ‘propaganda’, which suggests exaggeration, and falsehood; it is morally insidious in justifying what cannot be justified. Propaganda lends dignity to the state; it implies a conspiracy to prop up its legitimacy and power. The People’s Republic of China does this, as do the liberal democratic states, in different ways. The PRC is constituted by many a myth. But myth is more than falsehood.

For Barthes, “Myth is type of speech, a system of communication.” Myth might be deceptive if not erroneous, but it is never arbitrary. Myth transforms history into what is true and natural.

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He writes, “for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things.”6 All the concealments, the falsifications, of the Chinese state are revealed in Barthes’ notion of myth.

And it shows up the unease we feel as we try come to terms with what we see, with the question: what is Dragonfly Eyes trying to say, what is the central motif of The Long March Restart? Both appear to take on the state, yet what they impart is less than a feeling of certainty. I speak for myself: as I view and consider my thinking, the Chinese state is like a bait, luring me into a trap, and casting out the thoughts except those of its glory and terrible power. The state, in love with itself, preens before the mirror, and the critic is the sole, privileged witness. *** A photographer friend tells me of her experience. Imagine strapped inside a two-seater plane, a camera in your hands, fighting nausea while waiting to take the perfect shot. You see below an empty open pit, like a launch site of a departed alien spaceship after a visit to the pathetic earthlings.

You urge the pilot, get lower! Get lower! The plane descends; it is a huge abandoned mining pit, desolate and empty. As you point the camera, your mind is already busily thinking, what shall I do with these photos? What kind of art shall I make of the image? You know you have found your subject—the rapacious mining company and the destruction corporate capitalism has unleashed upon the environment. Forget the ground’s visual majesty and spiritual grandeur, or the magnificence of its pure abstract patterns. Political criticism is the thing.

After John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the shaping of the manner in which we see and understand art by power and class has gained an ineluctable argument. That is how it should be.

Our economic and ideological interests make us focus on this or that object or figure, and what we find interesting and choose to look expresses this class position. Some of us who grew up with his writings saw his argument as a necessary corrective of the view of art as complete and self-sufficient in its beauty and the power to please. Quite simply, one’s aesthetic choices are largely politically based. Speaking of my discipline—anthropology—social constructionism is still the instrument with which to critique culture, tradition, the nation-state and most famously, imperialism. In subsequent years, additional important issues have been proffered. If ‘X’ is ‘socially constructed’, it forgets the historical and cultural forces taking place that make ‘X’ real. Social construction is not argument, it points to a given and to what has already been accomplished, Michael Taussig has suggested.7 For me, critically reviewing art forces one to truly see and to recognize seeing as the first indispensable step in the forming of judgement. Art is not a domain one can view through a window or an open door; we need to be there, inside, up close with the artwork. Dragon Eyes and The Long March Restart have driven me to a set of misconceptions and speculations. Are they really a blow to the Chinese state? Both artists seemingly want to nudge their work towards that direction; or do they?

The outside-looking-in social construction of the state narrative didn’t lead us very far. Xu Bing and Feng Mengbo are artists of mental agility and talent for imagination, their work strikes one less an assault on the state, than a subtle exploration of the communist state’s hold on people and society—a state that oppresses as much as it protects and keeps in order instills a collective desire in its citizens that is difficult to be explicated and deconstructed.

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Notes 1 See Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994 2 The Sleeper Awakes, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, 9 March–28 July, 2018 reflected upon on China’s society where unprecedented freedom, ambition and optimism coexist uneasily with anxiety, isolation and ubiquitous state surveillance 3 “It is awful Xu and Feng work with poor translators. Book from the Sky should be Books from Heaven—“Sky” is a neutral term, the terrain in the cloud. “Heaven” and “sky” are the same in Chinese, but “Heaven” has an entirely different meaning. And The Long March Restart should be The Long March Reboot for a computer game.” Souchou Yao, email to the editor, 22 June 2018 4 Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond, 2 February 2018; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/; accessed 22 June, 2018 5 A Chinese term used to refer to an occupation with guaranteed lifetime security and benefits within the communist system, with all workers and farmers, and all aspects of their daily lives under state control; now post-Deng both the term and its reality has been abolished by the government to reduce financial pressures upon the state 6

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Annette Laver trans., New York: Noonday Press, 1972, p. 101

7

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, London: Psychology Press, 1993

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Beyond Dialogue: Interpreting Recent Performances

by Xiao Lu Xiao Lu was born in the People’s Republic of China in April 1962. Graduating from the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art (now the China Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou—where her father was president—in 1984. Xiao Lu is best known for the action often referred to as Dialogue, or The Gunshot Event in which she fired two shots from an illegally acquired handgun into her own installation (titled Dialogue) in the survey exhibition China/Avant-garde in Beijing in 1989. Xiao Lu has described Dialogue/The Gunshot Event thus; “At about 11:10 am on 5 February 1989, during the opening ceremony of the China/Avant-garde exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, being moved by inner psychological needs, I raised a gun and fired two shots at the installation work Dialogue where it was set up in the exhibition hall.”1

Her participation as the sole ‘shooter’ is confirmed by a video of the action taken from a vantage point overlooking her installation. Xiao Lu and a male artist, Tang Song were detained and questioned by police shortly afterwards. Both had signed a declaration handed to the chief curator of the exhibition, Gao Minglu, who appears not to have known about the action in advance. As Xiao Lu has clarified; As parties to the shooting incident on the day of the opening of the ‘China Avant-garde Exhibition’, we consider it a purely artistic incident. We consider that in art, there may be artists with different understandings of society, but as artists we are not interested in politics.

We are interested in the values of art as such, and in its social value, and in using the right form with which to create, in order to carry out the process of deepening that understanding.2

In spite of the statement’s claims of a disinterest in politics, Dialogue/The Gunshot Event was heavily politicized within the PRC in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square killings of 4 June 1989, attracting the description as the “first gunshots of Tiananmen”.3 Shortly after its enactment Dialogue/The Gunshot Event was also upheld outside the PRC as a signal moment in the development of contemporary Chinese art, seemingly conforming as it does to Western(ized) post-Enlightenment expectations of dissident artistic intervention on the institutions of art and by association the wider body politic.

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More recently, Dialogue/The Gunshot Event has been described as the first feminist art work of contemporary China, in part due to an assertion by Xiao Lu first made in 2004, that she is the sole author of the work; a claim that has since attracted opprobrium from the established art world of the PRC as a brazen rewriting of historical fact, evidenced by her and Tang Song’s joint statement.

(Xiao Lu’s declaration is the basis of a novel written by her, titled Dialogue which was published in 2010.4) It also reflects changing political circumstances within the PRC, which have seen in recent years a shift away from a generalized desire for greater individual freedom after the extreme collectivism of the PRC’s Maoist period (Mao Zedong died in 1976) towards specific identarian concerns resonant with those operative in Western(ized) contexts internationally.

The aim of this text is not to enter into further discussion about the contested status of Dialogue/ The Gunshot Event, whose current significance is now principally a matter of discursive debate rather than of potentially verifiable facts, to which perhaps little might therefore be usefully added beyond an ultimately gestural virtue signalling. Rather, it is to foreground later performance/installation works

by Xiao Lu and to interpret them in relation to current conditions of contemporaneity, under which the critical legitimacy of discursive positions divergent from those associated with Western(ized) post-Enlightenment modernity, including discourses related to traditional Chinese aesthetics, have come increasingly to the fore. This is not to dismiss feminist readings of her work entirely out of hand, nor the validity of Xiao Lu’s related claiming of authorship, but to acknowledge that in the particular case of Dialogue/The Gunshot Event the artist has already (retro)activated the significance of the work in that regard in ways that require no further elaboration.

Further to which, it is important not to conflate this continuing debate in relation to the patriarchal différend within the specific context of China with Western(ized) post-Enlightenment feminisms; the latter encompassing structuralist, modernist feminisms that look towards a rationalist sense either of integrated gender equality, or equality as a matter of profound identarian difference, and poststructuralist, postmodernist feminisms that witness the deconstruction of asymmetrical rationalist dialectics.

There is within the PRC a durable anti-imperialism that refuses any straightforward acceptance of Western(ized) modernist and postmodernist feminist discourses. This anti-imperialism extends not only to misplaced governmental assertions of gender equality under “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (the PRC remains an often cruelly patriarchal society), but, in addition, to a distancing among Chinese women artists from any direct alignment with Western(ized) feminisms (and this in spite of a history of translations of feminist concerns as part of Chinese modernity since at least the beginning of the twentieth century). Refused within the PRC is on the one hand what is seen—in the context of a historically non-rationalist Daoist-inflected cultural habitus—as an unduly rationalist view of gender relations, and on the other a deracinating deconstructivism inimical to the specificities of non-rationalist ‘Chineseness’.

The unfolding contention over the authorship and significance of Dialogue/The Gunshot Event is consequently accompanied by a paradoxical endogenous resistance, both to the authority of a still-patriarchally administered localised social order within the PRC and ostensibly consonant Western(ized) post-Enlightenment conceptions of progressive gender equality perceived as a continuation of Western imperialism. It is therefore necessary to preserve an existing scepticism with regard to contemporary Chinese women’s art as being necessarily feminist in nature.5 There should not, in any event, be a rush to sanctify Xiao Lu as an iconic feminist ‘shooter’, in part a refracted image perhaps of Valerie Solanis, Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin in 1968. l

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Beyond Dialogue: Interpreting Recent Performances by Xiao Lu

The two works that this text focuses on are the performance One (Yi) (2015), and the performance/installation People (Ren) (2016), to demonstrate how both interrupt critically on traditional masculinist modes of artistic production associated historically in China with neoConfucian literati culture through an appropriation of some of the means of traditional literati painting (ink, water, rice paper and silk), in the context of defamiliarizing techniques characteristic of postmodernist, contemporary performance/installation. One was performed by Xiao Lu at the Valand Academy of Fine Art, Gothenburg, Sweden on 5 September 2015, utilising a large sheet or sheets of rice paper laid out on the exhibition space floor, water, black ink, a glass bottle and a plastic bucket.

She performed the work barefoot, dressed in a white silk shirt and skirt. Video of the performance shows Xiao Lu in a trance-like state during which she pours a mixture of ink and water over herself and the paper under her feet. The enacting of such a trance-like state engenders both perceptual and affective disjuncture (defamiliarization) within herself and her audience. People was performed at the Beijing Kirin Contemporary Art Centre on 19 March 2016, with a transparent rectangular acrylic box circa three metres tall, held at its base by a metal/acrylic stand and open-ended at the top, ink, water, plastic buckets and a ladder. Xiao Lu again performed the work barefoot, but dressed this time in a black smock. The video of the performance shows the artist holding up the heavy acrylic box partly filled with ink, pivoted precariously on its base. The initial intention of People was for Xiao Lu to support the box with the eventual assistance of audience members to form an ink ‘ren’ (pinyin for the Chinese character signifying “people”). Unexpectedly, the acrylic box developed a leak, covering the exhibition space floor with ink in a similar manner to the performance One.

Both performances have an intentional relationship to traditional Chinese thinking and practice; in particular that associated with Daoist notions of cosmic reciprocity signified by the now internationally recognised yin-yang symbol. In a short statement related to One, Xiao Lu asserts that “Ink is Yin, water is Yang, Yin and Yang becoming One is the Way of the Universe.”6 The writer Wang Huiqin makes a similar connection in relation to People; The work ‘People’ continues Xiao Lu’s response to the concept of yin and yang. In Eastern philosophy, yin and yang, as the two core elements that make up nature, reinforce and neutralize each other. The opposition and interaction between them contribute to establishing the rules for everything in the universe. With “ink as yin, water as yang”, the audience poured water, then ink, into the vessel, indicating the fusion of yin and yang. From the original idea, the Chinese character for “people”, written with one stroke to the left and another to the right, represented a kind of constrained condition in a person, a living body, both internally and externally.

When the artist tired during the performance, the audience began to participate. Following the theory of yin and yang as a tiny part of nature, the collaboration and interaction represented individuals advancing the shared development of human society. Artist and participants shared the burden of the increasing weight of the liquid, trying to keep “people” balanced. However, the leak unbalanced the relative state unpredictably. In fact, there is an evolutionary basis for everything in the world that yin and yang created, which precisely emphasised that it is also a non-static, dynamic process.7

Of presiding importance to an understanding of Daoism are the related concepts of the Dao,8 qi,9 yin-yang,10 wu wei11 and ziran.12 The Dao (literally “way”) is a supposedly metaphysical state of oneness that constitutes the origin of all being and the path or, perhaps more accurately, flow of its development over time. As such, the Dao is simultaneously ineffable and immanent to

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all things. Moreover, it is, as the fundamental manifestation and demonstration of nature, entirely spontaneous. In spite of its status as a fundamental ontological ground, the Dao is by no means static.

Rather, as something infused with qi (literally “breath”)—that is to say, in the context of the Chinese intellectual tradition, a vital cosmological energy involving continual interaction between actuality and potential—the Dao always remains open to spontaneous transformation as a condition of cosmic harmony while otherwise remaining, in a non-rational sense, unchanging.

Considered crucial to this interaction are the interdependently opposed abstract states of yin and yang: that which is turned away from the sun (feminine) and that which is turned towards the sun (masculine), respectively. Dynamic reciprocity between these opposed states, as represented by the famous taijitu or yin-yang symbol, is seen by Daoism as the active manifestation of qi, whereby the cosmos moves cyclically away from and towards fundamental harmony through interaction between actuality and potential (sometimes referred to as “dialectical monism”). Wu wei is the concept of spontaneous action in accordance with the Dao or way of nature, often referred to somewhat erroneously in English as “non-action”. For Daoism, any non-spontaneous exercising of the individual human will against nature is almost certain to disrupt cosmic harmony leading to unintended and perhaps calamitous results. The wise therefore seek to bring their actions into accordance with the spontaneity of the Dao (Nature) through wu wei. Ziran—used to signify Nature —refers to the natural spontaneity of the Dao and the state of non-desiring disinterestedness required by wu wei.

Xiao Lu’s use of ink and rice paper also points towards traditional connections between Daoist cosmology and the making of shan-shui (literally “mountains and water”) landscape painting as part of Confucian literati culture (the literati [shi dafu] served as administrators of the Chinese imperial state for over a millennium, from the Han Dynasty until the founding of Republican China in 1911-12). Characteristic of so-called literati landscape paintings are a number of related visual tropes that supposedly engender feelings of empathetic reciprocity between artist, viewer and depicted subject. Literati painting is distinguished by depictions of the landscape using ink and brush on silk or Xuan paper, which organize topographic relations of foreground, mid-ground and background—sometimes referred to as the “three prominences”—not through consistent use of any structured perspectival geometry, but instead combinations of aerial perspective, multiple shifting viewpoints and relative pictorial scale as part of integrated, sometimes highly simplified/abstracted, compositional arrangements of line and tone. As such, literati painting draws on observable qualities of actual landscapes in China13 to establish a formal interdependence between untouched areas of the paper/silk support, signifying cloud or mist,14 or intervening atmosphere, and blocks of painterly depiction corresponding to foreground, mid-ground and background. The effect of which is to set up a constant shuttling on the part of the viewer between an awareness of the artificiality/abstractness of picture-making and ‘realistic’ illusory depiction.

This bringing together of formal elements is not considered a means towards objective verisimilitude in accordance with Western cultural expectations.15 Rather, it is an attempt to express a felt non-rationalist reciprocity between the painter and nature signified by the term qiyun shendong (vital energy resonance)—considered since the fifth century as the ruling desideratum of traditional Chinese ink and brush painting—with which viewers might empathize as a matter of resonantly shared aesthetic feeling.

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Such thinking also extends to a perceived reciprocity between presence and absence signified by the compound term xushi. As the art historian Jason Kuo indicates, when the otherwise distinct terms of xu (void, empty, unreal, absent) and shi (solid, full, real present) are combined in this linguistic relation “they often refer to the ways in which the artist deals with those things in a poem or painting that are real and present to the reader or viewer (shi) and those things that are absent and left to the imagination (xu).”16 As such, “Xu and shi, like yin and yang in traditional Chinese philosophy, are two complementary forces, interlocking and mutually interdependent.”17 References to xu and shi appear repeatedly in Chinese writing about painting after the sixteenth century, with a more self-conscious usage by artists and writers emerging during the seventeenth century concurrent with early codifications of a specifically literati art by writers, such as Dong Qichang.

Crucially, the literati remained an exclusively male class within a highly patriarchal Confucian society that, in principle, required women to occupy abjectly subaltern positions in relation to their husbands and senior male members of their family, supposedly in support of a harmoniously ordered society. In practice the position of women in imperial China was less rigidly constrained, as the Confucian text Lessons for Women (Nüjie), written by the female Confucian scholar Ban Zhao during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), the accession of Wu Zetian, China’s only women emperor, to the position of head of the Chinese imperial state during the Tang (618-906), and the supreme power exercised by the Empress Dowager Cixi during the late Qing (1644-1912) attests. Nevertheless, women were for the most part strongly disempowered throughout the history of imperial China. Although expressly excluded from the shi, women did contribute historically to the production of paintings, including shan-shui landscapes. However, those who did tended to do so as relations of male professional or amateur painters, or as trained courtesans;18 traces of which can be understood to persist in relation to the work of the early twentieth century modernist painter Pan Yuliang, whose supported status as a concubine enabled her to pursue an international career as an artist.

By encroaching bodily (as an embodied woman) on thinking and practice associated historically with literati painting, Xiao Lu is therefore also presenting a challenge to its traditional masculinist order.19 This is open to interpretation from the purview of poststructuralist, postmodernist discourses as taking place through artistic defamiliarization techniques, now conventionally considered to inhere as part of post-Fluxus artistic performance, which can be understood to deconstructively negate supposedly authoritative meanings though the productive proliferation and dissemination of others. It is also open to interpretation from the particular purview of traditional Chinese neo-Confucian aesthetics, as both a prolongation and a remotivation of those aesthetics towards a more expansively gendered, culture-specific related practice. This is not to suggest a synthetic dialogic relationship between Western and Chinese aesthetics, nor simply a hybridization of the two after the deconstructive manner of Third Space postcolonialism. It is instead to register inconclusive mutually decolonizing resonances between the non-rationalism of traditional Chinese aesthetics and of poststructuralism, which places each, by turns, in a position of deconstructive différance and of dynamic reciprocity with respect to the other.

A comprehensive treatment of the polyvalent resonances in question lies beyond the scope of this text, including a consideration of relationships between other performances staged as part of the international Western(ized) art world which also have an intentional relationship to East Asian aesthetics; for example, the work of Yoko Ono. Rather, this text concentrates on two related lines of interrogation that draw out relationships between Xiao Lu’s performances One and People, and the

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principles of traditional neo-Confucian aesthetics. While maintaining the relative cultural specificity of the principles in question, it will also be argued that an adherence to those principles provides negative-productive ways of rethinking art beyond its traditional patriarchal ordering in China.

Xiao Lu’s appropriation and translation of defamiliarization techniques associated internationally with postmodernist, contemporary performance suggest a radical breaking with artistic traditions indigenous to China. It is however possible to identify resonances between the enactment and outcomes of her performances—with their seemingly indiscriminate splattering of ink—and historical accounts of Chinese painting in the literati tradition. During China’s Tang Dynasty, artists in Southeast China are reported as having adopted ‘wild’ techniques. These included the painter known as Ink Wang who would “get drunk then spatter and splash ink onto the silk, then, laughing and singing, stomp on it and smear it with his hands as well as with the brush.

He also dipped his hair into the ink and slopped it onto the silk.”20 Also involved was a Mr. Ku, who “would cover the floor with silk, then run round and round emptying ink all over the floor sprinkling colours over it.”21

The British art historian Michael Sullivan notoriously interpreted these historical accounts as precedents for ‘action’ paintings produced by Jackson Pollock and others during the twentieth century claiming, without substantive evidence, that ‘wild’ painting during the Tang “must have been a public performance”22 (one might assume in ways that echo in Sullivan’s mind Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock in his studio and, perhaps, film recordings of body paintings orchestrated by Yves Klein). Sullivan also asserted that the two are “moments in time and space that are not linked in any kind of historical continuity. They simply occur, and occur again, in an eternal present.”23 Sullivan’s justification for making such a link can be seen as akin to Roger Fry’s equally spurious notion of pan-historical/cultural ‘significant forms’ in its metaphysical sleights of hand. There is no evidence that Pollock had an in-depth knowledge of Chinese ink painting that impacted directly on his work, for example—it is nevertheless possible to discern in Xiao Lu’s work practical resonances with the reportedly ‘wild’ painting of the Tang as a deviation from usually more restrained approaches adopted towards the making of literati painting. This practical resonance is perhaps most keenly felt with regard to her performances, such as Drunk (2009), which presented the artist in actual states of alcoholic intoxication. It can, though, also be registered in relation to her other performances, such as One and People, where seemingly trance-like states are enacted and where an uncontrolled/ spontaneous spilling of ink results.

That practical resonance reverberates still further with the Daoist inflection of literati painterly practice. As previously indicated, of principle importance to literati painting is a Daoist sense of spontaneous non-rationalist reciprocity between artists and nature and between artworks and viewers commensurate with qiyun shendong and xushi. As the art historian Li Zehou explains, in literati painting, … the general idea is grasped and the artist’s feelings infuse his work. It is not just the realistic portrayal of physical form as perceived directly by the senses. This kind of realism does not produce the kind of direct effect on the sensory organs that Western painting does; it allows the viewer greater freedom of the imagination… as such, it might almost be said to resemble a hallucination.24

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In short, there is in relation to literati painting an enacted dissolution of any categorical boundary between subjects and objects, and between perception and imagination. That dissolution of the controlled/controlling self and of the limits of perception is not of merely artistic-symbolic concern. It is sought expressly towards a desired reciprocity of opposites, both cosmically and temporally. As such, it also resonates with Buddhism as another constituent of syncretic neoConfucianism and in particular Buddhist meditation as a means of suspending subjective desire towards a desired state of enlightenment.

Xiao Lu’s own ‘wildly’ enacted relinquishing of the self in the context of her performances is thus open to interpretation, not as an outright breaking with but a supplement to literati tradition, both practically and intellectually. That relinquishing is, though, made through the performative intervention of a female body, which in the case of One becomes a site of painterly inscription.

It consequently interrupts the traditional order of literati painting, inhabiting it (illegally) and turning its ruling precepts upon themselves. That order cannot refuse Xiao Lu’s intervention therefore without initiating an act of auto-deconstruction. The continuity of Daoist non-rationalism considered key to traditional literati aesthetics, is both upheld and deployed as a means of reflexive criticality.

The result is disjunctive rather than entirely transcendental. Xiao Lu’s intervention presents a potent critical double-bind practically and intellectually enmeshed with the very object of its criticism.

As the painter Shitao had already recognized as early as the seventeenth century, literati ink and brush painting, and by moral-critical association wider society and culture, are opened up to the continual possibility of change through actions related to qiyun shendong. To speak of this definitively as deconstructive is unjustifiably loaded in cultural terms. Nevertheless, what might be seen to be posited through the joint naming of both différance and qiyun shendong is a shared interactive potential for negative-productive remotivation; as attested by Shitao’s recognition of the power “that ignorance bestowed upon an artist, allowing the artist to cultivate him or herself in the freedom of ‘ignorance’ and thereby transform or renew human art and culture.”25

To speak of Xiao Lu’s art as categorically feminist in its intentions is made profoundly problematic—although her interventions are discernible within the prevailing socio-linguistic contexts of the Chinese and international art worlds as feminine (as bodily signifiers of ‘womanness’), they ultimately eschew any definitive gendering in starkly oppositional terms. While her performances can be understood to suspend the historical male domination of literati painting, not through opposition but on its own terms as a matter of the perceived authority of Daoist-Buddhist non-rationality, that suspension also resists any straightforward reversal of gendered roles (a simple substitution of a male artist by a female artist). What persists instead is a spectral manifestation of selves—already implicit to neo-Confucian aesthetics—that shuttles between differing, though uncertainly, bounded and shifting identities. Feminist critique is therefore joined at the loss of defined female identity; the decolonizing arguably recuperated within the context of a persistent patriarchal order. The question arises as to how the work of other Chinese artists, historical or contemporary, might be interpreted in this regard.

Notes 1 Written statement provided by the artist to the authors, 29 May 2018 2

Xiao Lu, Archibald McKenzie trans, Dialogue, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, vii-xv

3

ibid.

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4

Xiao Lu’s decision to novelize her claim was made to avoid a legal challenge on the grounds of libel

5

See Joan Kee,‘What is Feminist about Contemporary Asian Women’s Art?’, in Joan Kee, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin eds, Global Feminisms, New York NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2007 6 Artist statement op cit. Xiao Lu’s attribution of the qualities of yin to ink is entirely conventional. The brush, which applies the ink as part of the traditional technique of Chinese ink and brush painting, is conventionally considered to be “‘assertive’ (yang)—a tool of the artist, it reflects the character and qualities of the artist. Ink, on the other hand, is ‘receptive’ (yin)—a material, it possesses and manifests its own qualities, especially in its interaction with water and the naturally absorbent ground. A brush mark, therefore, is a collaborative act between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ between the artist’s brush and his material medium.” Craig Yee, ‘Zheng Chongbin: The Classical Origins of Contemporary Abstraction’, Randian-online; http://www.randian-online.com/np_blog/the-classical-origins-of-contemporary-abstraction/; first accessed 20 July 2017 7

Artist statement, op cit.

8

For a definition of Dao and an account of its historical development as a concept, see Dainian Zhang, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press and New Haven CN and London: Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 11-25 9

For a definition of Qi and an account of its historical development as a concept, see Zhang, pp. 45-63

10

For a definition of Yin-yang and an account of its historical development as a concept, see Zhang, pp. 83-94

11

For a discussion of the concept of Wu wei, see David Loy, ‘Wei-wu-wei: Non-Dual Action’, Philosophy East and West 35.1, 1985, pp. 73-87

12

For a definition of Ziran and an account of its historical development as a concept, see Zhang, pp. 162-169

13

The work of the contemporary artist Michael Cherney includes topographic comparisons of scenes depicted in historical shan-shui paintings with present day photographic representations of their actual locations. Although there are discrepancies between the two, not least because of recent changes to the landscape in China as a result of modernization, it is nevertheless possible to discern existential relationships between the former and the latter. See self-published albums related to Cherney’s work, The Sun is Not so Central, Map of Mountains and Seas and From 2 arises 3 14 For a discussion of the ways in which painterly representations of clouds can be understood to exceed perspectival geometry, see Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 15 Wang Yao-ting, Looking at Chinese Painting: a Comprehensive Guide to the Philosophy, Technique and History of Chinese Painting, Tokyo: Nigensha Publishing, 1996, pp. 13-17 16 Jason Kuo, ‘Emptiness-Substance: Xushi’, in Martin Powers and Katherine Tsiang eds, A Companion to Chinese Art, Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2016, p. 329 17

ibid.

18

Craig Clunas, ‘What about Chinese Art?’ in Catherine King (ed.), Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, New Haven CN and London: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 132 19 Historically in China there has been a group of makers who define themselves as artisanal rather than literati. Artisanal makers are producers of pottery and other artefacts, such as furniture. Although distinct from the literati they adhere to Confucianist principles and Buddhist teachings, often incorporating meditation as part of their practice. The literati procured objects made by artisans in pursuance of aesthetic pleasure 20 Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997, p. 253. Sullivan’s identification of intersections between traditional Chinese aesthetics and aspects of Western modernist art is notorious within art historical circles for its lack of substantive evidence joining the two 21

ibid.

22

ibid.

23

ibid.

24

Li Zehou, The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics, Gong Lizheng trans, Beijing: Morning Glory Publishers, 1999, p. 225

25

Cited in Craig Yee, ‘Zheng Chongbin: The Classical Origins of Contemporary Abstraction’, op cit.

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L E E W E N G C H O Y

On The Intersections of Terror and Performance

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In Terror and Performance,1 the conjunction “and” joins the two complicated terms of the book’s title, even as author Rustom Bharucha states explicitly that he does not want to explain either one through the other. It is not that he doesn’t look at terror through performance and vice versa, but he treads carefully, trying to maintain a—tension—seems an inappropriate word, as do others. While Bharucha does not argue that terror and performance are opposites, framing oppositions is part of his approach. Stanford University Professor of Performance Theory, Branislav Jakovljević, in his review in The Drama Review begins by pointing that out: Bharucha dedicates the first chapter of Terror and Performance to Jean Genet and the last to Mahatma Gandhi. In this way, his rich series of reflections is bookended by a literary criminal and political saint, a (former) small-time crook and a (former) lawyer, a champion of stateless nations and a nation-builder, a traitor and a martyr… It seems that oppositions between them could go on forever.2

For Jakovljević, what brings Genet and Gandhi together is that both took positions of “marginality and excess in relation to their own historical and institutional situations,” and both demonstrated “unique capacities for self-renunciation, so rare and precious in the contemporary world of literature, politics, and especially theatre.”3 Navigating oppositions is only one of a number of tactics Bharucha employs, and here I use the word “tactics” rather than “strategy” to suggest the author’s deliberately provisional approaches, since his purpose is not to proffer any overarching analysis or diagnosis. In trying to find the words to trace his method of working, one wonders about introducing more pairs of terms as a way of entering into the difficult terrain of the book—for instance, “violence and silence”, or “method and meaning”.

Often a response to terror or violence is stunned silence. Yet the concerned thinker, who feels a duty to speak, tries to find a way, a method to move forward, to reflect, discuss, and find or make meaning from trauma. How does one write on terror? How should one? How is a person who is not a direct witness or survivor to speak of its aftermath? Yet silence can only be a temporary holding position, as an impulse to speak eventually becomes a necessity, whether by those who have suffered directly or those adjacently affected. But also, speaking up becomes important because one cannot let violence redouble through its silencing of conscience, analysis and action. Bharucha himself hesitated as he approached the topic. Terror was not something he deliberately sought to write about; rather, it crept up on him—less because of world events, more so because his work in politics, culture and theatre has for a long time been deeply implicated in the intersection between terror and performance—the book is a way of reckoning with these concerns.

Terror and Performance might begin with the obvious point of departure—‘September 11’ —but the author approaches it through personal coincidence and from perspectives removed from New York or Washington DC. Less than a month after the 2001 attacks, Bharucha arrived in Manila to begin rehearsals for his production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, in a Tagalog translation. It was a project that after some time was finally being realized. When the play ended its short run in late November that year and he returned to his hometown Kolkata, he learned that the Republic of Malate, “the funky bar and dance club in which the Maids had staged their rage against Madame,” burned to ashes just days after the last performance.4 In 2003, he wrote about directing and producing Genet in Manila, in which “‘September 11’ provided an arresting backdrop.”5 Years later, when attempting to rework the text, he realized that “it was no longer possible to circumvent terror through a fictionalization of a somewhat bizarre theatrical accident; I had to think through it.” From “providing the mere background

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of an essay,” terror became foregrounded in the book, “doubling as both its catalyst and subject in and through its relationship to performance.” If the burning down of the Republic of Malate was the initial provocation for Terror and Performance, the larger impetus was the question, “How can one free terror from the hegemonic discourse of terrorism?”6

The book offers a catalogue of disparate moments that could all be labelled “terror”.

Bharucha describes the first chapter as a “post-mortem not of [his Genet in Manila], but of the larger historical moment and the time of ‘September 11’ that unconsciously pervaded the rehearsal process” of the play, and which continued to haunt his writing about it.7 He would later point out that during a lecture in South Africa, when the book had just been published, that post-mortem “literally means an ‘autopsy’ performed on a dead body, which is dissected to figure out the causes of a generally unnatural death.”8 In chapter two, he shifts from the sites of theatre and spectacle to look at “performances in everyday life within the larger global immediacies of Islamophobia, which impact at local levels in acts of ‘passing’ and ‘covering’ as a Muslim, and of ‘queering’ the Muslim as ‘terrorist’.”9 Next, in chapter three, he discusses the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa and Rwanda. In the final and fourth chapter, he attempts to rethink “non-violence in the age of terror”, melding together “different readings of Gandhi’s activist performances and the actual video performances of suicide-bombers presenting their testimonials in front of the camera, among other extremist acts performed by refugees and asylum seekers.”10

While the book considers a mix of major and minor events across North America, the Philippines, India, Rwanda, South Africa, Palestine and Australia, as Bharucha explains, if his “narrative engages with terror in diverse geographical locations, it was not because [he] had any particular desire to be ‘comprehensive’.” It is the “terror expert” who surveys from a birdseye strategic vantage point, reporting, summarizing and performing the “regular stock-taking of terror in different parts of the world.” In contrast, his intention was “to think from the ground up, through local densities which provoke a concatenation of thoughts—disjunctive, processual, and, at times, deliberately left unprocessed and unfinished.”11 University of Melbourne academic Paul Rae, in his review in Contemporary Theatre Review, notes that Bharucha emphatically refuses to “prioritize a single event or definition that will ground his enquiry,” and instead “commits to investigating a plurality of lived experiences as unfolded in a diversity of locations and touched by different modalities of violence.”12

It is because the book is a working through, rather than an attempt to synthesize such different, difficult and irreducible moments, that makes Bharucha’s analyses and reflections especially resonant and apropos. Indeed, to ‘work through’ is precisely to embrace moments as profoundly different, difficult and irreducible. Yet by the author’s own admission, his analysis is, from the onset, already late or behind; in an email, he noted, “terror continues to be timely even as it defies normative temporalities. We will always be trying to catch up with terror.”13

So why “performance”, what can it show or tell us about “terror”? Before citing Bharucha’s reasons, it would be useful to provide context by considering some of his critiques of existing approaches to the latter. He speaks highly of University of Chicago’s Professor of Art History and English, W.J.T. Mitchell, calling his book, Cloning Terror14 “a masterful analysis of image production relating the ‘war on terror’ to the simultaneous incursions of biotechnology in the public sphere.”15 However, when he observed Mitchell speak on terror, he was disturbed not by his speech, but the enthusiastic response from the audience.16 Mitchell had ended the lecture soliciting audience responses to the photo, taken by Official White House photographer Pete Souza, of President Obama l

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and his team in the White House Situation Room watching the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. What stunned Bharucha was “the virtuosity with which this image was interpreted by members of the audience in an unconscious spirit of hermeneutic one-upmanship, each interpretation outdoing the other in its brilliant, surely-I’m-right reading.”17 This anecdote reveals the hazards of living in an age defined not only by an excess of images, and images of terror, but an excess of their interpretation. One might lament the lack of the general public’s visual literacy in engaging the spectacle of modern day media, but those who are more visually literate run the risk of hankering to read quickly and proliferate meanings without any deep understanding.

In chapter two, ‘“Muslims” in a Time of Terror’, Bharucha criticizes Arjun Appadurai’s 1998 essay, ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization’,18 in which he “levels the killing fields of the world with a rhetorical bravura and an encapsulation of several taxonomies of violence.

What matters is the citational and discursive sweep of this violence at a global level, rather than a close reading of any one particular genocide, atrocity, or ethnic killing.”19 Appadurai seems to be “more theoretically challenged by the excess of violence than by the realities of violence itself.”20 So, again, why “performance”? Firstly, Bharucha emphasizes that one should not utilize performance without also working through some combination of “the psychological, the social, the political, and the economic dimensions of any analysis of terror,” and secondly; … if [he] had to specify some key concepts and modalities of analysis that are distinctive to performance, [he] would say that its capacities of ‘embodiment’, ‘affect’, ‘corporeality’, ‘kinesthetics’, and ‘reflexivity’ are more palpable than what is found in the social sciences, enabling a different kind of analysis of terror from what is available in political or economic theory.21 If performance has a privileged place in the book, so does non-violence. Bharucha’s last chapter enlists Gandhi, not to have “the last word on terror,” but because he offers some of “the strongest questions and provocations as to how we can go about countering it in the immediacies of the here and now.”22 Bharucha thinks through Gandhi to reflect on the preceding chapter on Truth and Reconciliation, arguing that he was, though not unproblematically, a one-man Truth Commission; he also discusses his politics as “activated with specific reference to the events surrounding the famous Dandi March or Salt March.”23 At a fulcrum in the chapter, Bharucha evokes Brecht and the necessary task of “crude thinking”: “How can thinking against terror get translated into practice?”24—especially when “justice cannot be implemented by the existing legal institutions.”25 His response is, admittedly, no grand revelation, but his book is a compelling re-affirmation of faith in non-violence: … we may need to find new ways of imagining how justice can be envisioned outside the law through new modes of non-violent critical thinking and dialogue. Here one needs to inscribe the courageous and vastly under-reported struggle of peace activists across the world, working against the most formidable odds as they sustain their sporadic and vulnerable movements against the force of state power and counter-terror vigilance.26 An especially thought-provoking chapter is the third. The discourse of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was officially inaugurated in South Africa in 1996, and has been questioned, critiqued and adapted in multiple situations since, including in Rwanda, which Bharucha also discusses. In South Africa, offenders at the amnesty hearings were not required to express contrition or remorse, and while the intention may have been to encourage the telling of truth, ultimately the

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TRC Report excluded the disordered negotiations of pain and forgiveness, accusation and bitterness between victims and perpetrators. Victims waited years for reparations, but perpetrators were given amnesty almost immediately. Some commentators have said the cathartic performances of victims and perpetrators speaking in public were ultimately a distraction in the arduous process of seeking justice, but Bharucha argues that, on the contrary, that was what made the TRC intelligible.

Official rhetoric had argued for the primacy of recognition—but what happens after recognition?

The South African experiment didn’t go far enough; storytelling alone was not enough, as reconciliation without reparation is inadequate, and the TRC failed to fully prioritize social justice as being at the core of healing from violence. There was also the complex issue of who got to tell their stories. In Antjie Krog’s quasi-fictional Country of My Skull (1998) there is a conversation between the author and playwright Ariel Dorfman, who has written about Chile’s own Truth Commission.

Krog asks, “isn’t that sacrilege—to use someone else’s story, a story that cost him his life?” Dorfman replies; “Do you want the awful truth? How else would it get out? How else would the story be told?”27

Bharucha brings the book to a close employing another provisional tactic, the postscript.

The final pages comprise an assembly of leftover fragments that are not so much conjoined or disjointed, as—to employ a phrase the author has used to reflect on his methodology —“a concatenation of… thoughts.”28 Similarly here, my own last paragraphs are a postscript of sorts, reflecting on a pair of unfinished thought processes that are also not quite conjoined or disjointed: the first, on Bharucha’s book, and the second, on large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art. In writing about his book now, in the aftermath of Brexit, the 2016 USA elections and the ongoing tragedies in Syria, Myanmar and elsewhere, one cannot but think about how our public discourses have failed to confront the crises of our time, and speak to terror and power. But my purview here will not be all-embracing; in writing about Terror and Performance my aim is to make the book speak to currents in the contemporary art world. These two boundless topics, terror and biennales, may not be something one typically considers in the same breath, but I have a small personal history with l

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Bharucha and biennales. One of the first instances I wrote about his work coincided with my visits in 2002 to documenta and the Gwangju Biennale. In an essay regarding both exhibitions, I wove in a reading of Bharucha’s own textual contribution to documenta 11, ‘Between Truth and Reconciliation: Experiments in Theatre and Public Culture’, which he had presented at its Platform 2 conference in New Delhi in 2001.29 For the Gwangju Biennale in 2018, I co-convened a panel discussion, ‘Greater Asias’, for co-curator David Teh’s Returns project, and we invited Bharucha as one of our speakers.

In writing about documenta 11 and the 2002 Gwangu Biennale, I questioned how do biennales teach us how to write about them? Isn’t Bharucha’s own central question, how to think about terror outside of the hegemonic discourse of terrorism, also of this form? The premise behind such queries is that the phenomena as such, whether biennales or terror, are so disparate, complex and constantly transforming—and it is they that should teach us how to think about them, rather than to presume and re-enforce a certain privileged framework, such as, in Bharucha’s case, the discourses of terrorism.

Doubtless, it’s an impossible ideal, a contradiction, as analysis is never without its assumptions.

But endeavouring to manoeuvre through this is what I believe motivated Terror and Performance, and in its own way, has been the motivation for my examination and writing on documenta 11 and the Gwangju Biennale.

If Bharucha queries “why performance?” then my challenge is “why the biennale?” Kingston University’s Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Peter Osborne contends that, “Art today lives—can there still be any doubt?—in the ‘age of the biennial’.”30 Biennales currently may be one of the dominant platforms of contemporary art, but I disagree that what is dominant should then be understood to be what is definitive. As an art critic, I have been highly critical of these large-scale exhibitions and, at the same time, have refused to frame them as operating hegemonically—to do so would concede them that power when a critical understanding demands we think of ways to resist such a trap. There is so much more to contemporary art practice than what is presented by biennales, even though they have a seemingly infinite capacity to absorb anything external into their fold.

Some critics contend that biennales repeatedly pursue the same art; yes, many may appear similar,

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but their diversity should be recognized. Furthermore, artists who are new to biennales occasionally bring with them new sets of references and networks—different local communities are represented from corners of the world not yet colonized by the biennale gaze. This ‘not yet’ is not a temporary condition, but a permanent feature; biennales are intrinsically incomplete. Another feature of these endeavours, and of pertinence here, is that ‘terror’ has become, if not an explicit topic in every exhibition, a strong undercurrent in many.

My own experience of documenta 11 and the Gwangju Biennale in 2002 was strongly affected by how various art works dealt with the aftermath of violence and trauma, whether it was still raw or historical legacy. Searching for a way to write on those major exhibitions, I turned to Bharucha’s ‘Between Truth and Reconciliation’, which would later provide material for his chapter in Terror and Performance. Against this context of the TRCs of South Africa and Rwanda, Bharucha also discussed workshops he had conducted with the Siddi (an ethnic group descended from East African slaves brought to India three hundred years ago, some of whom live in the state of Karnataka) in which he wanted to break a chain of causality. Rather than, for example, establish a ‘truth’ through debate and discussions of evidence and then seek a ‘reconciliation’ of tensions and conflicts, his approach was to examine moments of “reconciliation with reality”—a working through—using the theatre rehearsal as a space for improvisation and the unpacking of deeply held emotions and beliefs.

An ambitious project with multiple platforms and sites, Okwui Enwezor’s documenta 11 shifted the discourse of biennales, bringing to one of the premier contemporary art events a more globalized art world. One could describe this documenta as being constituted by artistic interventions that sought to expose the truths of traumatic histories, from regions beyond Western Europe and North America, showcasing art from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and of the marginalized, from women to workers, and ethnic to sexual minorities. But it was not without its problems; to me, it seemed mostly interested in delivering some form of truth but had forgotten the continuing work of reconciling with reality.

Typically, when viewing a biennale, I find a number of works inspiring, but I also find myself frustrated at the level of the exhibition as a whole, thematically and curatorially. Even with the most ambitious of artworks, I feel able to apprehend their scale as human. And it is not just individual works—a whole exhibition can be of a human scale—just not one as expansive as a large biennale.

Questions of scale underpinned our 2018 Gwangju Biennale discussion, ‘Greater Asias’. Among the points discussed was how Gwangju in particular, and biennales more generally, are constituted by mapping and projecting themselves, not onto, but through large geographic regions. The ‘biennale’ is art at its most vigorous world-making.31 The spectacle of ‘the big show’ is so intense that I have never come to terms with all the contradictions, even after all these years of viewing these exhibitions.

To return to terror. At the risk of generalizing, perhaps what all moments of terror share is the vastness of their scale—terror always feels too large. While I would argue against terror and the hegemonic discourses of terrorism, I am not arguing against biennales. Not yet. I am not entirely sure what their purposes are, and I remain skeptical or agnostic. But I think their experiment with largeness has something to teach us. And I am still learning how to write about them.

Notes 1 Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance, New York: Routledge, 2014 2

Branislav Jakovljević, ‘Review: Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha’, TDR: The Drama Review 59:3 (T227), 2015, p. 169

3

ibid., p. 169

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4

Bharucha, op cit., p. 1

5

ibid., p. 2. See Rustom Bharucha, ‘Genet in Manila: Reclaiming the Chaos of Our Times’, Third Text Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2003

6

All quotes Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 2

7

ibid., p. 33

8

Rustom Bharucha, ‘The Aftermath: Reflections on Terror and Performance’, unpublished lecture, presented at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, Capetown, South Africa, 2014 9

Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 26

10

ibid.

11

All quotes Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 30

12

Paul Rae, ‘Review: Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha’, Contemporary Theatre Review Vol 24, Issue 4, 2014, p. 517

13

Rustom Bharucha, email correspondence with the author, 24 October 2018

14

W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The Ware of Images, 9/11 to the Present, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011

15

Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 17

16

Mitchell’s lecture was presented in May 2011 at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin

17

Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 18

18

Arjun Appadurai, ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalisation’, Public Culture 10(2), 1998, pp. 225-47

19

Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 98

20

ibid., pp. 100-01

21

ibid., p. 28

22

ibid., p. 148

23

ibid., p. 153

24

ibid., p. 174

25

ibid., p. 182

26

ibid.

27

Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull, London: Vintage Books, 1999, p. 361

28

Bharucha, Terror and Performance, op cit., p. 185

29

Rustom Bharucha, ‘Between Truth and Reconciliation: Experiments in Theatre and Public Culture’, presented at the documenta 11 Platform 2 conference, ‘Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation’, New Delhi, May 2001, and published in documenta 11 Platform 2, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002; see also, my essay discussing Bharucha’s text: Lee Weng Choy, ‘Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition’, Forum on Contemporary Art & Society No 4, Singapore: The Substation, 2002 30 Peter Osborne, ‘Every other Year Is Always This Year: Contemporaneity and the Biennial Form’, Making Biennials in Contemporary Times –Essays from the World Biennial Forum No 2, edited by Galit Eilat et al, São Paulo: Biennial Foundation, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and ICCo–Instituto de Cultura Contemporânea, 2015, p. 15 31

On the topic of contemporary culture and world-making, see Patrick Flores et al., Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner eds, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014, and Pheng Cheah, What is a World?: On Post-Colonial Literature as World Literature, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016

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Page 20 The Crystal Palace–designed by Joseph Paxton, chiefly known for his celebrated career as the head gardener for the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House and a preeminent figure in British horticulture–after its move to Sydenham Hill in 1854. Among the many exhibits were the first modern pay toilets, with 827,280 visitors paying the 1 penny fee to use them. The toilets remained even after the exhibition was dismantled.

“Spending a penny” has since became a euphemism for using a toilet. Image https://upload.wikimedia. org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Kristallpalast_ Sydenham_1851_aussen.png. The page, in German, suggests that the original is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Page 23 Top: Apparently Sir Joseph Paxton’s structural ideas for the Crystal Palace came from plants–and more specifically the Victoria Regia Lily pictured, which were later cultivated inside the palace.

This image comes from Delamotte’s Crystal Palace: A Victorian Pleasure Dome Revealed by Ian Leith; http://janedzisiewski.tumblr.com/post/46060012749 Bottom: Henry Talbot, Great Exhibition,View of Eastern Nave, 1851 Mounted Calotype depicting a scene from the Great Exhibition of 1851. From Henry Fox Talbot’s presentation report, Spicer Brothers, Wholesale Stationers, W. Clowes & Sons, Printers, 1852. Image https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Great_Exhibition,_View_of_Eastern_Nave_ by_HF_Talbot,_1851.jpg

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Pages 26, 27 Ugo Mulos, Venice Biennale,1968, 1968 Images courtesy https://www.mutualart.com/ Artwork/Venice-Biennale/ The year is 1968 and Ugo Mulas is in Venice to photograph the Biennale, an event he first documented in 1954. It will be the most turbulent he ever experiences.… The build-up was characterized by brutal police crackdowns, unfinished pavilions and artist boycotts. Antiwar banners were draped across artworks… participating artists felt compelled to turn the work around and write on the back of their art on display “the biennial is fascist”… Venice ’68 (called the “biennale of the revolution”) opened on time and the protests died down… as the police presence receded, but the effect was profound… Mulas continued to photograph until 1972 (he died in 1973); http://www.portmagazine.com/art-photography/biennale-boilingover-venice-68/

Page 28 documenta founder Arnold Bode’s concept was for an ambitious international exhibition of modern art that would rehabilitate the art historical past, make a significant statement about Germany’s postwar return to the sphere of international modern art, and rejuvenate Kassel’s local economy in a city reduced to rubble during WWII. Image © documenta archiv/Nachlass Arnold Bode Arnold Bode (1900-77), Inventory Number: docA, MS, 10002817; https://www.documenta-archiv.de/ en/aktuell/termine/956/arnold-bode-founder-ofthe-documenta-archiv-lecture-by-birgit-jooss

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Page 28 Joseph Beuys, Boxing Match for Direct Democracy at documenta V, 1972 Photo copyright Hans Albrecht Lusznat On 8 October, 1972, as part of a farewell action to documenta 5, Joseph Beuys staged a boxing match with a local art student (Boxkampf für die direkte Demokratie at documenta V), capping off 100 days of intense debate on social-reform issues with visitors to his pop-up political office Büro der Organisation für Direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (Office of the Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum).

Image https://news.artnet.com/opinion/josephbeuys-boxing-match-1018865

Page 33 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Lebanese Rocket Society: Cedar IV, A Reconstitution, 2011 Installation view 2011 Sharjah Biennial; produced

by Sharjah Art Foundation Photograph by Alfredo Rubio Image courtesy the artists and In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai

Page 34 The Dalieh of Raouche, Beirut, 1974 Image https://www.csmonitor.com/Photo-Galleries/ In-Pictures/Lebanon-s-Paradise-Before-the-CivilWar/(photo)/903384 Dalieh, a landmark that extends south of the iconic Sakhret al-Raouche (Pigeon Rocks) on Beirut’s shoreline… For decades, Beirut residents claimed Dalieh as an informal space for different economic and social activities that ranged from… fishing and community diving competitions from the Raouche Rocks, as well as swimming in local clubs in the area’s natural pools. Over ten Beirut-based families owned property on Dalieh either through direct sale or inheritance since Ottoman rule and the French mandate of Lebanon; http://www.tadamun. co/2018/03/31/fight-dalieh-al-raouche/?lang=en#.

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Page 36 Beirut Sakhret el-Raouche, uncaptioned photo c. 1970s Image https://dalieh.org/en/about#what

Page 43 Felix Bonfils, Piaz Beyrouth-Beirut c.1880 Image http://oldbeirut.com/post/122763734598/ beirut-1880s#notes Felix Bonfils founded a photographic studio in Beirut in 1867. He made perhaps the most extensive photographic documentation of Egypt and the Middle East in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/ rcs_photographers/entry.php?id=77

Pages 48, 51 Ali Cherri, The Digger (video stills), 2015 Produced by Sharjah Art Foundation Images courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates… Seen under the silhouette of a rock about to devour him or as a dwarfed figure spade in hand walking from the back of the frame, Sultan curiously busies himself from day to day to prevent the ruins… from falling into ruin… here the human remains have long since become archaeological artefacts: the highly luminous outside sequences alternate with shots inside a museum where the bones are sorted and laid out for the visitor’s eye… Above all, it underlines the paradox of these empty tombs, where death is compounded by the absence of the relics. Charlotte Garson; https://www.alicherri. com/the-digger

Page 45 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Unconformities, 2017, installation view George Pompidou Centre, Paris Photo by Thomas Lannes Image courtesy the artists, In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai

Page 52 Ali Cherri, Fragments (installation detail), 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris Pages 36, 39, 42 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, from the series Wonder Beirut,The Story of Pyromaniac Photographer, 1997-2006 Images courtesy the artists and In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai The Story of a Pyromaniac photographer is the first part of the Wonder Beirut project based on the collection of a fictional Lebanese photographer named Abdallah Farah. Between 1968 and 1969, Abdallah Farah was commissioned… to take pictures to be edited as postcards. They represented the Beirut Central District… and its luxury hotels, which contributed to form an idealized picture of Lebanon in the sixties … As of the Autumn of 1975, Abdallah Farah systematically burned the negatives of the postcards, in accordance with the damage caused to the sites by the shelling and street fight; http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/the-novel-of-apyromaniac-photographer/

Page 47 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Unconformities, 2017 Image courtesy the artists, In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai Hadjithomas and Joreige photographed the cores within boxes, immediately after they had been extracted from the ground… From the outset, the artists called upon the help of local geologists and archaeologists to help them read what had been taken out from the ground, an invisible world that they can share; http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/ the-boxes/

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Page 54 Köken Ergun, production still, Şehitler (Heroes), 2018 Photograph by Tolga Baş Image courtesy the artist

Page 57 Video still from ‘Çanakkale Victory 100-year [anniversary] ad Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sdnXSNiFKM ‘Turkish President Erdoğan’s Gallipoli ‘prayer’ stirs debate’. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stirred a heated debate in Turkey by reading an Islamictoned, patriotic poem in a television commercial filmed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Turkish victory in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I… In the video, produced by Turkey’s presidency… Erdoğan’s own voice is heard reciting Dua (Prayer), a poem by Turkish nationalist poet Arif Nihat Asya. After reading the poem…

Erdoğan is seen placing a wreath and praying for an Ottoman soldier who fell in Gallipoli. Part of Arif Nihat Asya’s poem reads : Give us strength... Do not leave the field of jihad with no pahlevan [wrestler], My God! Do not leave these masses, who look for a hero, with no hero, My God! Let us know how to resist the foe, do not leave us lifeless, my God! http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkishpresident-erdogans-gallipoli-prayer-stirsdebate-81350

Page 61 Köken Ergun, Ben Askerim (I Soldier) (video stills), 2005 Images courtesy the artist Pages 68, 69 Joana Hadjithomasand and Khalil Joreige, Unconformities, 2017 George Pompidou Centre, Paris Photos by Thomas Lannes Images courtesy the artists, In Situ-fabienne leclerc, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai

Page 57 Köken Ergun, Şehitler (Heroes) (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artist

Page 58 Top: Köken Ergun, production still, Şehitler (Heroes), 2018 Photo by Niyazi Keskin Bottom: Köken Ergun, Şehitler (Heroes) (video still), 2018 Images courtesy the artist

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Pages 65, 66, 67 Köken Ergun, Şehitler (Heroes) (video stills), 2018 Images courtesy the artist “I knew the War Memorial was closely linked to the Australian state [and] I am a critical human being and believe art should not be made for pleasing… The first question I asked was, are you ready for criticism against the whole Anzac legacy and maybe even your institution and your mission?

I told them, I have an issue with nationalism, patriotism and brainwashing through a national lens and I am probably going to direct my camera to these details, are you ready? And they said yes…

The [ANZAC] dawn ceremony has been going on for many years but the counter dawn ceremony the Turkish Government started is only five years old… it’s more related with many political factions that want to polish nationalism in a time when nationalism is rising all over the world.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-21/ war-memorial-commissions-work-from-turkishartist/9682090

Page 70 Top: Ali Cherri, Fragments, 2016 Assembled over a year of visits to auction houses in Europe, Fragments looks at the commercial value of historical objects. A collection of archaeological artifacts acquired on the ‘legal’ market accompanied by experts’ certificates of authenticity and provenance. The auction house draws in real-time a chart of acquisition desires; the more an object is desired the higher the price would get. Through this gesture of bringing these objects from the market to the museum, I look at the shift in their value from a commodity to a museological index.

Bottom: Ali Cherri, The Digger (video still), 2015 For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the UAE… What is playing out here is the possibility for one man to become part of a landscape that overwhelms him yet seems to need his help… Hamlet’s words in the famous gravedigger scene come to mind: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings at gravemaking”; https://www.alicherri.com Images courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris

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Page 71 Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi-Noori, The Owls,The Queen and The Maquettiste (video stills), 2018 Images courtesy the artists

Page 73 Xu Bing, Book from the Sky installation view Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing Image courtesy the artist The work’s original title, A Mirror that Analyzes the World: The Final Volume of the Century emphasizes this irony… with some seeing it as a beacon of hope for the future of contemporary art in China, and others decrying it as liberal aesthetic heresy…

As Xu Bing has noted, the false charachters “seem to discomfort intellectuals”; Xu Bing:Thought and Method artwork descriptions, UCCA

Pages 76, 77 Feng Mengbo, The Long March Restart (video stills), 2008 Images courtesy the artist Feng… recalled playing with machine parts that his father, a mechanical engineer, always had lying around, calling it an inspiration for his later interest in technology… Feng went on to study traditional art… then in college studied under contemporary artist Xu Bing. In the 1980s, he came across the first generation of Nintendo games… On his hiatus from video games, [he] worked on two painting projects. For Built to Order, he created a 3D computer model of Mao, which he could manipulate, customizing and selecting the pose, the background, and the colours in a process that mixed technology and painting. His next project … influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painting, he used modern software… to create the type of Chinese landscapes depicted in traditional paintings… Feng described himself as not “a chaser of new technology” but “a revivalist of technology.”

He talked about building Long March: Restart on software that deliberately emulates earlier video games, as he chooses to return to not only his Chinese heritage, but his own experience of playing video games; https://jingdaily.com/artistfeng-mengbo-i-always-think-that-video-games-arepieces-of-art-themselves/

Page 72 Top: Title page from A Book from the Sky, 1987-91; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_ Sky#/media/File:Tianshu_title.jpg Bottom: The title page printing woodblock; https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_ american_poetry/2014/10/visual-poetry-day-5ideograms-of-gibberish.html Images courtesy the artist

Pages 74, 75 Xu Bing, Dragonfly Eyes (video stills), 2016-17 Images courtesy the artist It allegorically reveals crises and other events, hidden within everyday life, that are out of control.

They reflect the vulnerability of private emotions and the anxiety and unease of contemporary life.

“Various people enter the frame, and fragments of their lives are implanted into the past and future of another person—the ‘he’ in the story is really ‘they’. In the end, who is whose projection? In this era it’s impossible to define any criteria by which we might judge”; Xu Bing:Thought and Method artwork descriptions, UCCA

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Page 78 Xiao Lu, 人/ Human, 2016 Image courtesy the artist

Page 79 Xiao Lu, Dialogue, 1989 Image courtesy the artist and Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, Beijing Xiao Lu’s Dialogue consists of two telephone booths with photographic cut-outs of a male and female student talking to each other on the phone… The figures are seemingly locked up in their respective booths placed side by side to each other. They appear to have a conversation or dialogue with each other but this dialogue is going nowhere as symbolised by the dangling telephone receiver between their booths. Each party’s message is not reaching the other as they seem to be within their own world and hence not communicating effectively with each other.

The installation can thus be an expression of Xiao Lu’s personal life or estranged relationship with a loved one. To complete the work, Xiao Lu shot her own installation—the mirror between the booths twice, adding a deeper layer of meaning to her work and transforming her installation into a performance piece. Art is also therefore about expressing oneself and what better way to express one’s pent-up frustration and emotion than to shoot one’s own installation about a failed dialogue? Many people including both foreign media and the local government authorities read Xiao Lu’s performance as a politically charged event where her shooting demonstrates her rebellion and direct opposition to the communist government which was known for clamping down on avant-garde artworks; https://mondaymuseum. wordpress.com/2012/02/27/1989-china-avantgarde-exhibition/

Page 80 Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori, The Owls,The Queen and The Maquettiste (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artists

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Page 84 Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori, The Owls,The Queen and The Maquettiste (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artists Golestan Palace was not only used as the governing base of the Qajari Kings but also functioned as a recreational and residential compound and a centre of artistic production in the 19th century. Through the latter activity, it became the source and centre of Qajari arts and architecture. Key to the reason for the variety and amount of artistic production during Qajar rule was the personality of the ruler Naser al-Din Shah… predominantly the creator of the components of Golestan Palace which remain today… The two most admired buildings in the complex are the Shams-ol Imareh and Imarat-e Badgir. Shams-ol Imareh was based on Naser al-Din Shah’s inspirations following a journey to Central Europe. It represents the proportions, features and motifs of outwardly oriented European architecture and combines these with Persian architectural language and layout… In the Pahlavi Period (1925-79) Golestan Palace and the historic Arg complex were subject to a number of alterations… After the Islamic Revolution, the palace was preserved in its previous condition and responsibility for it was transferred to the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization in 1987; https://whc.unesco.org/ document/152634

Page 88 Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori, The Owls,The Queen and The Maquettiste (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artists

Page 89 Benji Boyadgian and Behzad Khosravi Noori, The Owls,The Queen and The Maquettiste (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artists

Page 84 Bottom: Jaffa Gate with clock tower c. 1918-22 Image unknown author, Photograph Collection, Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française, Jerusalem. Between the years 1907 and 1922, Jaffa Gate was home to an imposing 40 foot (13m) clock tower. The Ottoman authorities erected the tower in honour of one of the anniversaries of Abdul Hamid. Not all were impressed with the addition. G. K. Chesterton described the timepiece as “an unnaturally ugly clock, at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to be ornamental,” (The New Jerusalem,1920). Soon after the British took control of Jerusalem, the tower was dismantled. According to a 1922 report of the Pro-Jerusalem Society the tower “has been bodily removed from the north side of the Jaffa Gate, which it too long disfigured, and is being set up again in fulfilment of a promise (less aggressively and shorn of its more offensive trimmings) in the… neighbourhood of the Post Office Square”; https://blog.bibleplaces.com/2010/04/whereaboutsof-jaffa-gate-clock-tower.html Not all the entrances to Jaffa Gate were full of … historical significance. Flaubert, the great nineteenth-century French novelist, was prepared to be disappointed, and records merely that he farted very loudly as he entered (ever in search of the mot juste, he was not one for the clichés of Romantic tourism), Simon Goldhill, Jerusalem: City of Longing, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 146-147

Page 90 Richard Bell proposal for the Australian pavilion, Venice Biennale Original photograph by John Gollings Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Page 94 Richard Bell, Embassy (2013–) installation view, 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Bell’s Embassy can be considered a roving satellite of the original; a reminder of the audacity and tenacity of the original tent ambassadors and a continuation of their diplomacy in the field of Indigenous politics; https://www.mca.com.au/ artists-works/works/2017.10A-D/

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Page 95 Richard Bell, Embassy (2013–) installation view, 5th Moscow Biennale, 2013 Photograph by Yackov Petchenin Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Page 109 It says “natural environments are the most beautiful landscapes”. I took this with my phone camera in Changsha c. 2014. I like it for the obvious irony… it is hardly situated in a natural setting. Jacob Dreyer, emails 27 August and 10 October 2018

Page 99 Richard Bell proposal for the Australian pavilion, Venice Biennale Original photograph by John Gollings Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Page 100 Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness.Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases.

To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data. When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: It may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

Page 104 Top left: Early Spring is perhaps the most controversial of all of Chinese painter Guo Xi’s landscape paintings. It was completed in 1072 and to the casual observer would seem a simple, yet highly detained landscape painting of mountains, trees and a waterfall. But, if you consider that the painting was completed during the Song Dynasty when the country was ruled by Emperor Shenzong, a reformer who worked to improve the living conditions of peasants and the unemployed.

Guo Xi’s son, Guo Si, explained the painting and how it represents a harmonious society…

The mountain peaks represent the emperor and his government, important members of Chinese society are represented by the lofty pines growing on the mountains, scholars travel to a temple near the top of the painting, peasants and fisherman can be seen along the coastline, and a spring rain under fluffy clouds benevolently blankets the landscape signifying a good and just government; http://www. thefamousartists.com/guo-xi/early-spring. http:// www.thefamousartists.com/guo-xi/early-spring Top right: It’s clearly from the inside of a carriage on the Beijing metro. If asked to guess, I’d say it reminds me of the line (14?) which one takes to the exhibition centre, I take it to the Beijing book fair every August. But it could be anywhere in Beijing. Jacob Dreyer, email 10 October 2018 Bottom: Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky, 1987-91 Image courtesy the artist

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Pages 111, 112, 115 Xu Bing, Dragonfly Eyes (video stills), 2016-17 Images courtesy the artist The centrality of Buddhist concepts to the story is evident in what the film suggests about the nature of reality. As Xu Bing observed in an October 2017 interview, everything that you see in the film “has really happened” but all of these real life elements have been put together to make something that is “fake” (jiade) and “concealed” (yangai). The “fake” part is the imaginary story told by the narrative; what’s “concealed” or obscured, is the reality of the original footage, the original stories and backstories, which are there but unavailable to us—hiding in plain sight…Why does the film begin with a possible suicide, and why does it end with a montage of crashes and explosions?… this structure is meant to echo the Buddhist themes… Life is cyclical, and each life is bookended by a pair of deaths: the one that precedes it, and the one that ends it. In the film, as in Buddhism, human beings exist in an endless cycle of life and death, which very few are able to escape; https://chinachannel.org/2018/09/10/ dragonfly-eyes/

Page 116 Feng Mengbo, The Long March Restart (video stills), 2008 Images courtesy the artist The idea of Restart was first embodied in Long March: Game Over, a series of 42 oil paintings, by which Feng Mengbo launched himself onto the international art scene as a pioneering new media artist with a professional printmaking background from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.

As the title of the series suggests, the paintings brought together a surprising marriage of symbols and styles, linking recent Chinese history (the Long March names the famous military campaign, from 1934 to 1936, during which Mao Zedong led Red Army troops from Jiangxi to Shaanxi) with signs of the new economy and popular entertainment —namely, video games. The paintings resemble screen shots from an early home gaming system, depicting a tiny, digitized Red Army solider who hurls cans of Coca-Cola at his enemies, with a cast of characters that range from Street Fighters to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… Feng Mengbo’s immersion in video games has shaped his artistic practice and led to his choosing interactive installations and games as the perfect platform for his art practice. It was not long before Feng Mengbo began creating video games of his own.

The interactive CD-ROM Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy (1997), for example, combines elements of the wildly popular home video game Doom with clips from the revolutionary-era opera and film Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. This was followed by a steady stream of projects, as Feng Mengbo —who does the programming and composes the digital soundscapes in his work—continued to develop new media works that were increasingly sophisticated and challenging. For the artist, Restart is not only another challenging project: “Since the day I finished the series of paintings Game Over: Long March,” Feng Mengbo remarks, “I stated it was a draft of my future video game software.”

The project finally became feasible in 2008 when the artist successfully found new software necessary to realize the work. “My dream, which has lasted for 14 years, has finally come true,” says the artist, describing the personal meaning Restart holds for him… Making reference to the popular 8-bit video games of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Nintendo’s Mario Brothers franchise, Long March: Restart casts a backward glance at video gaming in order to re-engage, however indirectly, with China’s cultural history; http://ucca.org.cn/en/ exhibition/feng-mengbo-restart/

Page 120 Xiao Lu, One, 2015 Image courtesy the artist

Pages 127 Xiao Lu, 人/ Human, 2016 Image courtesy the artist

Page 119 Xu Bing, Dragonfly Eyes (video still), 2016-17 Image courtesy the artist

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Pages 130, 134-135 Rushdi Anwar, One Day We Will Return (video stills), from the series, I Am Not from East or West …

My Place is Placeless, 2018 Images courtesy the artist With regards to images to accompany the main text, it’s arguable that anything taken from the news might ineluctably spectacularize terror, and run counter to the spirit of Bharucha’s book.

Therefore, I chose something from an artist whose practice is based on a careful and caring inhabitation of the everyday. Rushdi Anwar’s One Day We Will Return is an 8-channel video installation that is part of his series, I Am Not from East or West … My Place is Placeless, and was shown at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders. The structure housing the videos is based on the map of Arbat Camp, in Iraq Kurdistan, where the artist recently visited members of his family. Anwar offers a closer look at the daily activities, landscape and mundane lives of the Kurdish refugees, who treat such camps as a prolonged transit zone. The title of the work was taken from graffiti in the camp, and illuminates the refugee mindset and their anxieties regarding home.

Lee Weng Choy, email 18 November 2018 Rustom Bharucha has produced a slender but significant book… Lay readers may find it too specialized and the cognoscenti may find some loose ends. This narrative risk has to be run because what we call “terror” is a central problem of our times and concerns us all. But what may constitute the texts of terror and what meanings these convey are diversely contested issues.

The value… lies in conveying the truth that even when the managers of civil society and the state seek to define, combat and control “terror”, its meanings are simultaneously both pre-given and produced through performance. The focus on the narrative as performance gives a special meaning to this work. This is an impossible work to review in the usual sense. If its writing is plagued by the “onslaught of uncertainties and cruelties at a global level that challenges the basic assumptions of what it means to be human” (page viii), so is its reading. If we are all “biological beasts” (as the linguist-philosopher John Searle puts it), the experience of “terror” is as banal as that of joy.

Hannah Arendt traced this movement poignantly: at one moment, she narrated the Kantian “radical evil” (as a state of affairs which we can neither fully understand nor can ever fully forgive), at another its banalisation where the doer is neither aware of the causes nor the consequences of radical evil but acts mechanically, as did Eichmann as a “cog in the machine”. Interested in the phenomenon of routinisation of evil, Bharucha’s central problem is not so much the secular theology of radical evil as the everyday experience of it. If “terror” is banal, and not a “radical” evil, and thus is integral to life itself, why develop normative (ethical, juristic, philosophical) theories or theses about “what it means to be human”? The book is a serious response to this many-sided question.

Bharucha does a signal service by distinguishing the experience of terror (here grasped as standardless use of force) from the ideology of “terrorism” carefully cultivated with and since 9/11. Terrorism is an official ideology of counterinsurgency, whereas “terror” is the “sprawl” of “human cruelties” that abounds in daily (pages 4-8) experiences of lived life through the world (pages x, 9). This book is a harrowing history, and in part an autobiography, of such horrors that predate, accompany and outlast 9/11; in that sense it is “terror” rather than “terrorism” narrated

by Bharucha… As Raymond Barthes once said metaphorically, the birth of a reader entails the death of an author. There is no, nor should there be any, way out of interpretive pluralism; but Bharucha, well aware of the pleasures and perils of writing, does hold certain truths as providing the boundaries and borders of performance.

This book, written in a masterful vein, will continue to be widely read and discussed. Upendra Baxi, 3 Apri, 2015; https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/ terror-of-performance/article6998742.ece

Photograph taken at Cattle Depot

Participating Galleries # 10 Chancery Lane 303 Gallery 47 Canal

Massimo De Carlo de Sarthe Dirimart du Monde

A Miguel Abreu Acquavella Aike Alisan Anomaly Antenna Space Applicat-Prazan Arario Alfonso Artiaco Artinformal Aye

E Eigen + Art Eslite Gallery Exit Experimenter Selma Feriani Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fox/Jensen

B Balice Hertling Beijing Art Now Beijing Commune Bergamin & Gomide Bernier/Eliades Blindspot Blum & Poe Boers-Li Tanya Bonakdar Isabella Bortolozzi Ben Brown Gavin Brown Buchholz C Gisela Capitain Cardi Carlos/Ishikawa Chambers Chemould Prescott Road Yumiko Chiba Chi-Wen Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Alan Cristea Chantal Crousel D Thomas Dane

G Gagosian Gajah gb agency Gladstone Gmurzynska Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Gow Langsford Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Grotto H Hakgojae Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Herald St Max Hetzler Hive Xavier Hufkens I Ingleby Ink Studio Taka Ishii J Annely Juda K Kaikai Kiki Kalfayan Karma International Kasmin

Sean Kelly Tina Keng Kerlin König Galerie David Kordansky Tomio Koyama Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto L Pearl Lam Simon Lee Leeahn Lehmann Maupin Lelong Lévy Gorvy Liang Lin & Lin Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Maggiore Magician Space Mai 36 Edouard Malingue Matthew Marks Mazzoleni Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Francesca Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mizuma Stuart Shave/Modern Art The Modern Institute mother‘s tankstation N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie

Schwarzwälder Nadi Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Nanzuka Taro Nasu neugerriemschneider nichido Anna Ning Franco Noero O Nathalie Obadia OMR One and J. Lorcan O‘Neill Ora-Ora Ota Roslyn Oxley9 P P.P.O.W Pace Pace Prints Paragon Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Pi Artworks PKM Plan B R Almine Rech Regen Projects Nara Roesler ROH Projects Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Rossi & Rossi Lia Rumma S SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle ShanghART ShugoArts Side 2 Sies + Höke Silverlens

March 29 – 31, 2019

Skarstedt Soka Sprüth Magers Starkwhite STPI Sullivan+Strumpf T Take Ninagawa Tang This Is No Fantasy + dianne tanzer Templon The Third Line TKG+ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Two Palms V Vadehra Van de Weghe Vitamin W Waddington Custot Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube White Space Beijing Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Y Yavuz Z Zeno X Zilberman David Zwirner Insights A Thousand Plateaus Asia Art Center Bank Baton Beyond Dastan‘s Basement Don Empty Gallery Espace

Fost Hunsand Space Yoshiaki Inoue Johyun Richard Koh Mind Set Pifo Star Yuka Tsuruno Watanuki / Toki-noWasuremono Wooson Yamaki Discoveries 1335Mabini A+ Contemporary Sabrina Amrani Christian Andersen Capsule Château Shatto Commonwealth and Council Crèvecoeur Ghebaly High Art Hopkinson Mossman hunt kastner Jhaveri JTT Maho Kubota Emanuel Layr Michael Lett MadeIn mor charpentier Nova Contemporary Project Native Informant Société Tabula Rasa Tarq Vanguard