ESSENTIAL KILLING/ ROUTE IRISH

Plot Spoliers Ahoy!

Just when we’d all got used to saying that cinema had made a risible attempt at tackling the so-called War On Terror, with its paltry efforts eclipsed by TV, then two exceptions come along at once. Let’s start with ’Essential Killing’...

When I coined the term “landscape porn” while reviewing ‘The American’, someone even commended me for it in the comments section. Yet truth be told I was merely adding to an already over-stuffed array of such terms - property porn, grief porn, shelf porn, tech porn, riot porn... I expect any day now someone will look quizzically at ’Razzle’ magazine before exclaiming “its like porn porn!”

“Porn” is of course being used as a shorthand for a thing fetishised out of any context. But at the same time the immediacy of film, it’s ability to throw us straight in the deep end of a situation, is one of the form’s greatest assets. Here the landscape isn’t some sweet-looking backdrop, like a moving photoshoot. In ’Essential Killing’ the characters couldn’t be any more in that landscape.

And we’re taken into an unfamiliar landscape not once but twice. First we’re flung into the arid crevices and caves of Afghanistan (actually filmed in Israel) alongside some Americans on some unexplained mission. But pretty soon we’re with rendition victim Mohammed, who escapes his captors to be confronted by the snowy mountains of Poland. Both times, we see the landscape through foreign eyes.

It’s notable that creator Jerzy Skolimowski previously scripted ’Knife in the Water’, which similarly took characters we knew little of and thrust them deep into nature. But the chief difference here is that speech is so scant. For much of the time its’ used as a sound source rather than for dialogue; it conveys ambience over information, like the voice can be with music. Characters are only named in the credits. This adds greatly to the sense of immediacy and forces the film back upon it’s core strengths – it has to show not tell.

 Silent throughout, Mohammed’s only contextualisation comes from his brief, semi-hallucinogenic flashbacks. Over the course of the film he both sins and is sinned against, but where did this cycle start? Is he an anti-imperialist freedom fighter, stolen from home, on the run from murder squads? A gun-toting terrorist fleeing justice? Or an innocent manipulated into battle by religious fanatics, then left freezing and alone? It could be any one of these...

...but I’m tempted to go with the third. An early scene seems to epitomise this, when an American interrogator confronts him with questions - but all he can hear is ringing in his ears from rocket fire. The sheer absence of communication becomes almost Babel-like, as if any common language has long since become confounded. There’s also echoes of the Frankenstein story, or at least the early parts of it, with the sole-befriender blind man in the woods replaced (significantly enough) by a mute woman. If Mohammed does monstrous things, which at one point cause him to break down and cry, perhaps he was made into that monster.

Like both comparisons above, ultimately the specificity is just a springboard from which to ask such questions of identity. In ’The Guardian’ Peter Bradshaw described it as “on the verge of delirium, a metaphysical drama.” Rooted in the political but aiming at the existential, the film is a kind of cousin to Steve McQueen’s ’Hunger.’

(After watching, I discovered a quote from Skolimowski which suggests even this interpretation might not be quite metaphysical enough: “I would leave the question of whether he is guilty or innocent open and ambiguous. The political aspects of the situation didn’t interest me: to me politics is a dirty game and I don’t want to voice my opinions. What is important is that the man who runs away is returning to the state of a wild animal, who has to kill in order to survive.”)

The infamous Vincent Gallo is well cast as Mohammed. But, true to form, he still manages to cement his crazy reputation. Though he performs Mohammed’s extreme feats of survival, running barefoot, eating wood ants and tree bark, the credits mention both “Mr. Gallo’s” water supplier and dietician!

But if ’Essential Killing’ slips the bounds of what might be expected of a political film, ’Route Irish’ dons the mantle with pride – just as you might expect from director Ken Loach. It covers similar ground to the recent TV drama ’Occupation’, the egregious law-defying role played by mercenaries in the carve-up of Iraq. When the company’s CEO announces he’s building the operation to the point where they could “sort out somewhere like Darfur”, it seems chillingly credible. Its unadulterated Blairism, the white man’s burden giving a faux liberal-intervention veneer, combined with the fundamental right of private corporations to make profits at everybody else’s expense.

Liverpudlian seems to be the media’s working class accent of choice, cropping up both in ’Occupation’ and here. I wasn’t entirely sure whether this was deliberate, but the film plays upon the twin popular stereotypes of Scousers. Frankie (played by comedian John Bishop) is the cheeky chappie, the affable rogue. Fergus (Mark Womack) is his sullen explosive Begbie-like mate, the one you hope Frankie won’t bring down the pub with him. But this then gets served the wrong way up. We find Frankie has died on operation before the film even starts and we must follow the brooding Fergus to get to the bottom of it, grief exacerbating his already troubled mind and lashing temper.

It could be the best Loach film for some while, expunging the wayward feelgood elements which marred ’Looking For Eric’. (As I grumbled about at the time.) In fact it’s lurching flashback structure almost relentlessly simulates the post-traumatic stress disorder which has become background noise to Fergus, now he is back to “shopping at Tescos.” (It might make for a good comparison with Shane Meadows’ ’Dead Man’s Shoes’,.)

Fergus’s volatility serves another function, keeping us on our toes. No-one outside of vested interests now supports the costly screw-up that was the invasion of Iraq, it’s a subject we made our minds up about some time ago, a closed book even as the occupation continues. So we need an ambiguous figure to frame it afresh. In an argument with Frankie’s widow, he swaps back and forth between attacking and defending the mercenaries, almost as if he can’t make the distinction.

Interestingly, paralleling ’Essential Killing’,there’s a theme of lack of communication. The film starts and ends with a series of unanswered voicemails. It could be argued that it raises more questions than it adequately deals with. Is male bonding a mere substitute for meaningful relations? With Frankie gone, does Fergus start a fling with his widow out of hope, desperation or just a grab for the most Frankie-like thing left? Is he really concerned with one dead mate more than a whole Iraqi family? But then the film is bookended by unanswered questions, and that seeming weakness may well be a strength. Shouldn’t political films attempt to corrode apparent certainties, rather than reassure them?

Loach films can sometimes have problems with endings, perhaps because they’re depicting situations which are by their nature unending. The one we get here is serviceable. It feints with a good mercenary/ bad mercenary structure, only to reveal at the end that the bosses dunnit. Credible enough of course, but hardly a twist. I was actually hoping for something different. What if Frankie’s death had been down to the very cause Fergus so adamantly refused earlier on, a simple case of “wrong place, wrong time”? His investigation could have revealed corruption and killings along the way, but a smoking gun pointing to every corpse except his buddy’s.

Reproducing the French film poster, for no other reason than it looks cool...

SOURCE CODE

Plot spoilers below!

It’s become almost ubiquitous to compare Duncan Jones’ new SF-style thriller to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ (as reviewed here). And points of comparison there are, though perhaps no more than to the lesser-cited ‘Twelve Monkeys’. But no small part of the reason for this may be the place the film occupies in the director’s career. Nolan had started on much more cerebral films like ‘Memento’ and ‘Insomnia’, then ‘Inception’ marked a far greater engagement with the mainstream. Similarly, Jones’ debut was the austere and low-key ‘Moon’. (Sort of micro-reviewed here.)

Such films are the cinematic equivalent of the organic sausages and gourmet burgers that populate modern-day pub menus. Once you shelled out for a prime cut of meat, or scrimped and plumped for the processed leftovers. But this apparent contradiction in terms is designed to signify a best-of-both-worlds combination. This is neither some generic fast-food thriller, nor an indigestibly good-for-you art flick. The poster tag “from the visionary director of ‘Moon’” becomes a selling-point, even for those who skipped ‘Moon’ because they thought it too short of explosions... probably especially for them. It’s a sign they’ve got a fully-fledged gourmet chef in to flip those burgers.

Of course there’s nothing automatically wrong about this, and indeed man does not live by Tarkovsky alone. But there has to be something genuinely gourmet to the burger, or else we’re sending it back to the kitchen.

And indeed, there are points of comparison to both ‘Inception’ and ‘Moon’. All three offer variants on the same central paradox, perhaps exemplified here the most neatly of all. Our hero, Captain Colter Stevens, is trapped inside a cannister, only able to talk to the girl (Captain Colleen Goodwin) through a monitor screen. (And even she is not necessarily to be trusted.) The implication is that between us falls the shadow. Yet at the same time the self is violable, the ‘besieged castle’ of the mission’s monicker. While it is hard to reach out to the person next to you, ‘they’ can get right inside your head. The film’s landscape overlaps with ‘Inception’ to the point of becoming interchangeable – shiny city blocks like architects drawings come to life, swooping bullet trains, offices built almost entirely out of shiny glass yet devoid of windows. The base’s webcam is so repeatedly reiterated it must be onscreen more than some of the characters.

It certainly has an ingenious premise, which makes you wish we knew less about movies upfront these days and could encounter it at the same time as Stevens. (Click here if you really don’t know it and want to.) At this point the film it doesn’t seem to resemble is ‘Groundhog Day.’ There the premise was almost capital-B Buddhist, about leaving the wheel, about living your life over until you had learnt enough to move on. This is more like a video game you get to play over, returning from each ‘death’ until you finally win. The figure in the tank, little more than a wired-up brain, is the game player, motionlessly oblivious to his surroundings, intent only upon the virtual world.

We tend to think of ‘video game movies’ as a derogatory term, shorthand for shoot-‘em-ups, films released only so the video-game tie-in can follow (or quite possible the reverse). I suspect this may work like the infamous accusation of “comic book plotting”, where those who never play video games only notice when their influence is at its most negative and superficial. (For example, I do that.) But, bypassing such paraphernalia and going for the formal qualities of video games, we actually end up in an interesting place.

Though it brandies guns and offers us explosions, these don’t set the tone and the film feels much more of a whodunnit. The thrust is thrown upon the train carriage where the suspects are all lined up - like ‘Murder On the Orient Express’, except with Chicago, bombs and body-swapping replacing Russia, knives and Albert Finney. For that matter, there’s even two whodunnits for your buck. Who the terrorist is on the train, and what’s the secret of Stevens’ origins, the subject being continually eluded at Besieged Castle?

Unfortunately, the two then tend to compete for screen time- and it’s the train which loses out. First we’re told we’re getting a clock-racer; every time our hero reboards the train, time is reset only in the virtual world. Real time goes forwards another eight minutes, while the next terrorist attack is imminent.

The film rather tips its hand when we’re given a montage scene. Earlier events had been more or less in real time, pressing home the clock-ticking motif. Any clue Stevens picks up, he has to do in front of us, nothing offscreen or up the movie’s sleeve. But the montage scene is all about the effect of ceaselessly being sent back upon Stevens, the strangeness combined with the pressure. The bomb on the train is really just a MacGuffin for a psychological study. (Plus our hero’s detection method more-or-less becomes to accuse people at random. Maybe not such a bad method when they will lose all memory of this inside of eight minutes, but hardly the stuff of Sherlock Holmes.)

 So it’s not so surprising that when the bomber is finally found, through a combination of luck and montage, he has little of interest to say for himself. There’s a Stars-and-Stripes bombing case and a quick gag about “racial profiling” to suggest the terrorist’s a Bible-bashing Militia man, more Timothy McVeigh than Osama Bin Laden. Is this the Hollywood liberalism so decried by Tea Party types, or did they just figure a suspect in a ‘Team America’ beard would give the game away? Whichever, his stated motives are so perfunctory they’d have been better off left as live mysteries in our minds.

Of course, it may be I simply bet wrongly upon the film’s course. But alas, the film’s chosen direction isn’t any more interesting. Turns out our hero is being used... get that, used... by the Corporation. A revelation rather undermined by being the very thing we’d suspected from the beginning - few films, after all, reveal Corporations to be secretly nice. (While ‘Moon’ had an almost identical plot twist.)

There are attempts to stir up some War On Terror style debate. (What if the people on the train were the people in the Twin Towers, now an expendable asset in a bigger ongoing war?) But this is rather undermined by the panto-villain playing of the base’s boss, Dr. Rutledge. He even has a Blofeld-style sinister accent and disfigurement. In short we get two villains, one characterised only by clichés, and the other not at all.

Abigal Nussbaum is correct to point out that making the bad boss a civilian, and his doubting henchman a military woman, is both cheat and cliché. (Besides, in the real world wouldn’t an oath-bound military officer be less likely to break ranks over an act of conscience? You’d get a court-martial, not just a refused reference.) And K -Punk is correct that we should be wary of taking at face value Hollywood’s willingness to paint corporations as evil.

Moreover, and alas, the way to depict corporations on film was already done perfectly in ’Moon’. Briefly, the rule is not to – to just show the results of their self-aggrandising actions. (Similarly, I always liked the way that in the first ’Alien’ film the Corporation appeared only as calculating instructions on a monitor screen. Alas, this restriction was reneged on for the sequels.)

They are, after all, faceless institutions who never care about us because they never meet us - indeed barely belong to the same reality system as us. Legally speaking, a corporation is a person, but they are more like a logo transformed into a ravenous, all-consuming monster. Even if you were to burst into a board meeting you would not really reach a corporation’s heart or brain, merely come across some of the more senior staff while they were passing through. Though the panto villainy on show here is egregious and absurd, it is to some degree the inevitable result of missing this essential point.

It may not have thought it needed it, but it’s notable that once the bomb plot is essentially resolved the film unravels. It breaks almost all its own rules and reverses its tone to serve up a happy ending, to a nadir of chutzpah beyond even the original version of ‘Blade Runner’. Pretty much everyone agrees the film falls apart at the point where the central ‘eight minute’ deadline is busted. But I was already having my doubts when the hero was allowed his one last mission, in defiance of all mission protocols. (He doesn’t quite say “I need this!” but he may as well have done.)

‘Inception’s achilles heel was dream worlds which could never escape the ‘architecture’ of video games – guns, strongholds, secret plans in safes to “take” like enemy Kings. ‘Source Code’, conversely, uses the formal devices of video games to create an invigorating premise – then succumbs to the basest of movie clichés. It becomes a tick-box exercise in the worst kind of Christian Vogler’s accountancy of storytelling. Treating the world like it’s your personal psychological terrain? Check! Atonement with the father? Check! Following your bliss and living for today? Check! Getting the girl as a direct result of this? Check!(As Martin Lewis of Strange Horizons puts it: “hello sky, hello trees; hello train, hello terrorists.”)

Maybe someone will one day make a film which honours the smart and enticing premise we start with here. As it is, you’re really better off walking out three-quarters through and making up your own ending.

PS: I did think of writing a reiterative review to celebrate the film’s structure, forever going back to the start again when some new idea struck me. (“This film is a whodunnit... wait, let’s start over...”) But in the end I couldn’t be bothered...

WHAT THEY SAID...

"THE BIG CUBE: Annual increase in wealth of the world’s richest man.
THE SMALL CUBES: [Barely visible in the photo as orange dots bouncing around the big black cube] Average UK incomes

THE RATIO: 500,000 to 1”

... so, in short, we’re all in this together.

Photo taken at the recent anti-cuts  ’March For the Alternative’ on March 26th. As well as the sheer size of the demo (longer than it’s own route, meaning many people were still starting after it had officially finished) it was marked by a high level of creativity. As well as the cube above there was a giant Trojan horse (presumably left outside the House of Commons after the demo was over), a Banker carried on a sedan chair... much else. Of course there were also the pack-drilled Trots with their inevitable “slogan slogan slogan, SHOUT SHOUT SHOUT.” But for once the day didn’t belong to them.

MODERN BRITISH SCULPTURE (2)

...concluding our look at this current Royal Academy exhibition, on until 7th April. (First part here.)

Un-wowed: Landscape Lies Uncaptured

The next room “encourages us to step figuratively onto the ground itself” as “sculptors began to challenge the convention that sculpture had to be physically present in the gallery.” But rather than unifying around this concept the room splits quite neatly into two. The first group definitely are physically present in the gallery, but look like they’ve merely taken something from the outside world and dumped it here. Richard Long, for example, is rather appropriately named because ‘Chalk Line’ (1984, below) does exactly what it says on the tin. Looking at these tiresome works is rather like being inside Brian Sewell’s id, they’re like some gormless parody of ‘modern art’, like Duchamp’s readymades without the wit or audacity. We’ve seen before how Moore’s sculpture grew in scale the less he had to say. These pieces give us only the scale.

 Happily, the other half of the room is a little less empty. These mostly consist of photos or postcards of something outside the gallery. Rachel Harrison’s ‘Contact Sheet (Should Home Windows)’ (1996, below) merely photographs rubbish bags piled against a bin, yet in such as way as to suggest at a Moore-like figure. Rather than make just another work of art, it’s cooler of course to nudge our vision until anything around us can be seen as art. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why not empower that eye?

But you only really get the suggestion of the figure from the gallery context, you’d walk past the bags in the street just as blithely as do the figures in the photo – in short, we need to stay in the gallery even if the work doesn’t. You can’t help but feel that sculpture is less being modernised and more being abandoned.

As much as this room sparks interest (which frankly isn’t much), it doesn’t come from the stated theme but a more sublimated one – the change from stasis to motion. If ancient art was about the eternal, mostly realised through its sculpture, surely modern society is defined by flux. Unlike many commentators, who seemed to mostly fixate on what wasn’t there, this was one of the few times I felt something to be conspicuous by its absence. Where is the kinetic art? Yet, from an (admittedly perfunctory) on-line search, I couldn’t find one British adherent of this movement. Do we Brits just not do motion? Must our sculpture just lie back and think of England?

Wow 3: The Great Outdoors (Turned Indoors)

The theme of the next room is the vitrine, or glass display case. The American artist Jeff Koons is held to be the instigator of this: “Jeff Koons’ vitrine creates a sealed space within the gallery, its cubic nature allowing it to be faithfully reproduced as sculpture.” Antipathy to Koons may be blinding me here, but surely the Surrealists were busy with their cabinets of curiosities before him?

The room is dominated by a large Damien Hirst work, ‘Let’s Eat Outdoors Today’ (1990/1, below), which has been about as ubiquitous in the media as Hamilton and Pasmore have been absent. As the poster boy of Brit Art, I have never had any time for Hirst. He is quoted later in the exhibition commenting “any artist’s big fear is being ignored.” So... not losing inspiration, running out of things to say or do but being ignored. It’s the artist as celebrity, generating headline-chasing notoriety, as Robert Hughes comments “functioning like a commercial brand.” As the Stuckists acknowledge, “Hirst’s work does mirror society [but that] is not its strength but its weakness.” Battle lines have never been more cleanly drawn since Cable Street.

I absolutely loved this work.

 A standard barbeque set-up, complete with picnic plates and cuts of meat, has maggots released into it on the opening night, which turn into flies and start to feast and lay eggs. By the time I was there, the table was thickly carpeted with black corpses, whose brothers obliviously buzzed and fed on. Reminiscent of much of the recent Gustav Metzger exhibition, it’s a process-based piece dedicated to entropy, parodying the supposed permanence of a work of art.

This does admittedly mean that the best place for this work isn’t behind the paywall of an exhibition. Were it housed in a lobby or busy throughway, somewhere people pass recurrently, they would be able to take in this process of decomposition. Though photos of it appear elsewhere, you mostly get this essential sense through the exercise of imagination. (This is a duplicate of a work first shown in 1991, but I couldn’t find anywhere where or how the original was displayed.)

But there’s also another dimension. It’s partly reminiscent of ‘The Birds’ in the way the familiar is transformed into the threatening, like tuning into an unnoticed background noise whose hum then can’t be switched off. Though clearly in some way about the return of the repressed, there’s a necessary nebulousness to it, a sense that to pin the image to anything too specific would rob it of its evocativeness.

Yet, while Du Maurier’s novel could be successfully transplanted to America for the Hitchcock film, flies are as British as they come... Hirst is described as “peculiarly British” and, perhaps of all the works on show here, this is the most British. It is precisely because of our narrow summers that getting the barbeque out of the shed becomes such a ritual – the squeaky greeting of the title, the overly familiar white plastic chairs, the little pots of salt and pepper. Flies are persistent but peripheral irritants to all this, they don’t normally swarm like locusts or sting like mosquitos. The result is a work which is not strange but strangely familiar. It reminded me of Pinter’s celebrated phrase, “the weasel in the cocktail cabinet.”

Un-wowed by Value:

The final room, ‘Value Systems’, examines “the difficulty of maintaining a radical stance outside the dominant value system.” Which is of course an excellent question. Alas, though, it is not one necessarily addressed by the room.

The afore-mentioned Gustav Metzger now appears with a wall of Page Three girls, virtually as ubiquitous as those flies, updated daily with each new copy of ‘The Sun.’ Seeing these photos lined up together, not served up consecutively, does throw up their trite formality. There’s basically three poses – hands by sides, hands behind head, one hand doing each. Characterful faces are not sought after as they’re not what we’re supposed to be looking at.

But this is an update of a work from 1977, and unfortunately it shows. The point is presumably how prevalent “the female nude” is in art, and how these photos are a reflection of that merely aimed at another class group. But porn is now so ubiquitous that it’s not at all surprising to see it in a gallery. Like the recent reshowing of COUM Transmissions ‘Prostitution’ it feels dated, trapped in time, more removed from us than the vitrines. The Guerilla Girls have offered a pithier and more vital take on such themes. (Which means, in a supreme irony, l liked Hirst’s Metzger-like piece more than Metzger’s own!)

But Metzger’s piece is at least of a time, if not ours. Opposite him is a wall of clippings of reviews and news accounts of the exhibition. We’re seemingly asked to thrill to the modernity of these being incorporated into the show while it is still on, creating a post-modern feedback loop, but if anything it just displays a redundant print fixation. It might have worked better if less ostentatiously displayed, or if it had invited some form of audience interaction. (Perhaps inviting you to rearrange the clippings, according to your favour.)

This exhibition was often poorly received by critics, accusing it of two kinds of straying. The first was from sculpture itself. Hirst’s vitrines, for example, are they sculpture or installation works? Frankly, I don’t care. This exhibition showed them to me, and I was glad to see them.

It’s also accused of straying from the greatest hits and, implied by association, failing at a through-line. As Ossian Ward grumbled in ’Time Out’: “Rather than a heavyweight survey of moulding and assembling, 'Modern British Sculpture' is instead a rough-hewn slab from which we have to carve out our own meaningful history and lineage of the form.”

He says it like a bad thing, but in every other way he’s right. The show is best thought of as a mixtape rather than some ’Reader’s Digest’ crammer of the classics. Many of the names people complain about being absent don’t appeal to me anyway (Amish Kapoor or Rachel Whiteread), but more importantly the very point of a mixtape is to stir it up and show you something new. You may have less in the way of pantheonic tick-lists to learn, but it’s more stimulating and at times it’s even fun.

The lack of a through-line admittedly means there’s little to hold your attention in the sections that are less to your liking, and the show’s so diverse that it’s unlikely that many will take to all of it. For me it went from awesome to risible and back several times. But at the end of the day it packs a good three (perhaps four) wows. Which isn’t such a bad bang for your buck...

Coming soon! For the shame of it, more out-of-date stuff...

MODERN BRITISH SCULPTURE (1)

Royal Academy of Arts, until 7 April 2011

According to the website, this show “replaces the traditional survey with a provisional set of juxtapositions that challenges the viewer to make new connections.”

In other words, there’s no single big idea it wants to strike you with so much as an assemblage of points, a series of suggestions flying in different directions, works not lined up like words in a developing argument but thrown into a grab-bag. At one point, Damien Hirst insists sculpture must have a “wow factor”, or else its not really utilising its own medium.  So, instead of responding to a through-line that’s not really there, let’s take his word and go through things in search of wows.

Wow 1! Transcending the Primitive

After an introductory area contrasting representational and abstract sculpture, we enter the room ’Theft By Finding.’ This alternates primitive sculptures from the British Museum with modernist works which they inspired. Despite all the talk of juxtapositions, what we have here is anti-juxtapositional - separate types of objects are put together so we might see the links. (And, truth to tell, quite frequently I couldn’t tell ancient from modern.)

It’s not too fanciful to say that modernists were not just influenced by primitive art but by this primitive art. It seems generally agreed that it was with its sculpture that primitive art had its greatest influence. (Even when affecting other disciplines, such as Picasso painting heads as African masks.) Sculpture was then seen as inherently primitive, or at most artisan, as it implied working with your hands. And these British Museum displays are some of the very pieces which our modern British sculptors will have gazed upon.

...which has it’s pros and cons. In contrast to the earlier Gauguin show (more of which anon), and despite that headline word “theft”, we see the primitive here pretty much the way the modernists saw it – something idealised, something culturally unified irrespective of where in the world it was made, something easily transportable, something open for plunder.

In an uncommented moment, a male figure from the Congo carries both a staff and a gun. Was this a deliberate attempt to unite the modern and ancient worlds, or was the artist simply depicting what he saw around him? Whichever way, the modern artifact questions the supposed ‘authenticity’ of these ‘primitive’ pieces. The Westerners blithely assumed their arrival would leave this art completely unaffected, in some supposed state of natural timelessness. (The recent Gryff Rhys Jones programme ’Hidden Treasures of African Art’ had some interesting material on this, including workshops where ‘primitive’ icons would be knocked up and then roughed up to give them that lucrative look of age.)

It all seems almost too easy to kick holes in. Of course it’s an absurdly over-romanticised picture, of course the master looking at the servant will see only what he wants. In some ways it feels as if the whole of modernism is held in this one room, like a plant whose growth is defined by its roots.

But at the very same time you see through it all you keep looking. Modernism should be spent, but it’s like something you’re forever picking up to throw away only to find yourself gazing at. In some way I find hard to define, this work remains compelling. Modernism continues to exert its spell.

Yet, however enjoyable an experience this room is, the fact remains that it tells us something uncontroversial, something we already know, and in a fairly orthodox manner. With it we imagine what we have in store is a solid but unchallenging chronology, a kind of Cliffs Notes version of the history of British sculpture. But it turns out the true juxtaposition comes when you walk into the next room where things (almost literally) come alive...

Photograph: David Levene from the Guardian

If you don’t get a wow factor from Jacob Epstein’s giant alabaster ‘Adam’ (1938, above), please check your pulse. As the indicia explains, this “builds on and transforms the lessons learnt from the British Museum by aspiring to give contemporary figures a monumental quality.” But it’s not just the gargantuan scale that marks the shift... The handouts describe it as possessing “an enduring vitality”, neatly summing up the paradox it contains. For this mighty behemoth is a shape of two halves...

The primitive statues in the previous room, whatever the nonsense about them coming from outside time,  are notably almost always static in pose - suggesting they take up a fixed place in an eternal cosmos. Detail will sometimes even trail off beneath the torso, as if that’s not the centre of attention. The giant Easter island heads, embedded in the Earth, take this to the fullest extreme but it’s a general tendency. As Hannah Arendt says, quoted later in the exhibition, “the things of the world have the function of stabilising human life.” And indeed here the head is set straight back, as if fixed upon the heavens, the arms held firmly against the chest.

But look to the lower half – one foot striding boldly forward, the dick swinging as if bouncing along. The active pose reminded me of those old Sinbad films which almost always featured a statue coming to life. It’s no longer merely imitative of the ancient, it’s something modern rooted in the ancient.

Although put in with Henry Moore’s ‘Snake’ (1924), this is Adam in the sense only of the first man. It is nothing to do with the subservient and then fearful character from the Bible, if anything this first man is Nietzschean. It’s a pre-Fall myth of a time when primordial man towered like a giant over the Earth, simultaneously looking skyward and dominating his realm.

Primitive mythology is replete with images of the axis mundi (or world centre), the one tree or giant pillar that joins heaven and Earth. But here that pillar has become man himself. The image thereby becomes the axis mundi equivalent of a two-way street. Rather than a distant mountain or stairway for ascetics to ascend, it becomes not escape route from but linkage point to the Earth.

(Some of the more pointed critiques of this show have lamented that it excludes the Vorticists. Though Epstein was a paid-up member, this work comes from after their dissolution and – great though it is - doesn’t resemble their style. But the good news is that this summer Tate Britain is devoting a show to them! I shall certainly be there!)

Not Quite Wowed: Sculpture as Power Totem

The next room, ‘The Establishment Figure', embarks upon a new theme - “the various ways in which the sculpted figure can acquire authority.” This time Alfred Gilbert’s ‘Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria’ (1887, above) dominates the room, with a wow factor of quite a different kind. Equally huge of scale (the plinth itself over three feet tall), it’s less monumental achievement than grand folly – it looks spectacular but spectacularly wrong!  Though officially commissioned, if the materials weren’t so costly and cumbersome to use you would think it a piece of outsider art.

We see a face recurrently on the coins and stamps we use, and we accept that it is only a tangentially a real person, that what it represents is the focus. But with this work the person is strangely present, yet simultaneously trapped within the apparatus of power. Her legs disappear into the billowing folds of her cloak, as if the years have fused her with her throne – like Prometheus bound to his rock. A crown is on her head, but an oversize one still hovers above, highlit in gilt against the bronze used elsewhere, as if it rules her rather than she rules through it. Its removed depiction of Victoria reminded me of the grand but isolated figure from Moore and Campbell’s ’From Hell’ comic. Though I doubt any of this was intentional on the part of the artist, it recalls not Britannia ruling the waves but a bird in a gilded cage.

('From Hell' by Moore & Campbell, published by Top Shelf.)

But before we let this wow factor distract us we should note that the room’s theme, a recurrent one in sculpture, is perhaps rather glossed over. There are only two other figures in the room, and neither especially memorable.

It seems to me that the next two rooms would have worked better swapped over, with the “public sculpture” of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore following the power art of ‘The Establishment Figure’, so let’s pretend here that they were done that way. In the post-war era power became less personalised, more likely to reside in institutions. A hospital or school was once be named after a local magnate, and have a towering sculpture or commanding portrait of him dominating it’s entrance. Post-war they would be run by a government department. (Increasingly today they will be run by a corporation, and prominently feature their logo.)

It therefore came to be commemorated in sculpture of semi-abstracted figures and idealised forms. Hepworth’s ’Single Form (Memorial)’ (1961, above) was for the UN building. (A body which did not even exist pre-war.) We might quibble that Lutyen’s Cenotaph memorial (shown in the first room), dedicated to the “Unknown Soldier”, was already working in this direction, but this is certainly something which came to a head after the Second World War. 

As was chewed over on the recent show devoted to Moore, this ultimately proved to be the means by which Modernism became conservative. There’s a strange swapping-over afoot. The fault-line running through something like Expressionism is its fixation with the self, with the subjective world. Moore and Hepworth don’t resolve this problem, they merely invert it. Art becomes all about the social and ends up as merely institutional.

But it doesn’t pay to get too schematic about these things, and both works on display here have their impact. I might even have awarded them a fully-fledged Wow! factor had they been less familiar to me.

Wow 2: Splitting the Sculptural Atom

The next room, ‘Ceramics and the Influence of Craft,’ has as it’s thesis that ceramics, particularly from China, led to “a growing appreciation of abstract beauty.” Perhaps a side-effect of this is that it leads to sculpture in the round, works with no obvious front. Though the show does not specifically comment on this it’s notable that the display cabinets have to be single units dotting the room, allowing punters to walk around them.

These roots of abstraction should lead us into the first room to be devoted to a single work – Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore’s “total environment” piece ‘an Exhibit’ (Wacky capitalisation Theirs) of 1957. I’m not sure I saw much mention of this work before attending, yet it’s perhaps the biggest wow of the show. This scant media attention may stem from it being highly site-specific, as much instillation piece as sculpture, you’d only get a much reduced sense of it in a photo or on a TV screen. In fact description does it no favours, just try the following... a series of coloured panes (often semi-transparent) arranged at different heights and angles. Trust me, it’s truly one of those had-to-be-there things.

The indicia comments “the viewer... is placed within the work, looks through it instead of outside.” In fact even the other punters become incorporated, what are normally intruding heads between you and the works  or at best peripheral shadows. As they walk through it, on their grounded linear paths, they emphasise by contrast how it has no up, no down, no left, no right.

It’s reminiscent of those sequences in Ditko’s Dr. Strange comics (below) where an alternate reality system of abstract shapes would suddenly burst into ours. This is enhanced by a juxtaposition that’s presumably unintentional, as it’s geometrical forms stand out from the classicism of the Academy’s architecture and decor – it’s curved arches and ornate ceilings.

I seem to be comparing everything to comics today. (Good job I didn’t mention how Epstein’s ’Adam’ recalls Jack Kirby!) So let’s quickly add another comparison – to the splitting of the atom, another great signifier of the post-war world. Sculpture, once a solid block of a thing, has become a series of elements floating in open space. It couldn’t be further from the sense of the eternal that opened this exhibition.

Not since seeing Gustav Metzger’s ’Liquid Crystal Environments’ at the Serpentine have I felt compelled to stay in a room so long after I’d ‘seen’ the piece of art. I kept thinking there must be some pattern or symmetry to it somewhere, but simultaneously felt delighted when I couldn’t decipher one. (I later read in the notes that “the work was constructed with a predetermined number of manufactured elements and a fixed set of rules.”) I perhaps got this sense from the feeling that the work, while exhilarating, is also calm and ordered. (Making Pasmore and Hamilton true disciples of Duchamp, not mere imitators.)

...but onwards to the only other work to be given a room of it’s own – Caro’s ‘Early One Morning’. When this show was featured on the Late Review, one panellist asked how come Caro’s work wasn’t just a load of old metal bolted together? So it’s not just me then. In fact, despite the single-room status, even the indicia seems lukewarm on the subject, telling us it’s “widely considered to be Caro’s greatest work” but adding that it comes on the coat-tails of Moore and Hepworth. Let’s move on...

The rest to follow...

WHAT SHE SAID!

“BOTH HORROR FILM AND FARCE”: NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL OF MARK FISHER’S ‘CAPITALIST REALISM’

 ”After 1989, Capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system. What effects has this ‘Capitalist Realism’ had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?”

...which is, you must admit, a pretty good question. If you wanted to reduce Mark Fisher’s ’Capitalist Realism’ to a crude soundbite, you could call it neoliberal economics in ideological form, the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” He concedes at one point that postmodernism might have sufficed as a term. (He would probably counter, however, that the need to reduce the term to a soundbite is itself an example of Capitalist Realism in action!) The book begins by utilising Cuaron’s ’Children of Men’ as an indicator: “In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”

What follows will not be a proper review of Fisher’s book (about which you could say much, both pro and con), but an initial focus on one aspect of it which then flies off on its own trajectory. (You are probably used to this sort of thing if you’ve been here before.)

Fisher could be seen as holding a double vision of Capitalist Realism. At one point he compares it to “the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.” It manifests itself as an ungraspable, unslayable foe, always one morph ahead of any opposition.

 Yet it is also characterised as an absurd, even farcical, state of affairs; obsessed with appearance over content, run by over-eager management gurus generating a tangle of meaningless ‘targets’ which merely clog any purposeful activity. Fisher asserts that Kafka, rather than Marx, was the true prophet of all this. But let’s make a more lowbrow comparison - to the “middle sort of people” in Douglas Adams’ ’Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ who (rejected by their home world as “useless”) come to colonise the Earth. Made up only of marketing men and documentary makers, they are unable to invent the wheel because they can’t decide what colour it should be, and in general precipitate planet-wide disaster.

 Neither is it suggested that Capitalist Realism has some schizo existence, shifting between these two conditions. For Fisher to be correct it must be both horror film and farce. One might predominate at certain times, but the other is never absent. We are talking about two heads for one monster – one ravenous beast, one hapless bureaucrat.

The title’s skit on Socialist Realism is of course deliberate. Fisher’s comparison of all this to Stalinism may initially seem mere mud-slinging, but actually proves to be unerringly accurate. Indeed, some of his hardest-hitting passages come in the chapter ‘All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production’, where he accounts his own experiences negotiating target culture while a Higher Education tutor.

“What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than the official goal of the work itself...This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which might be characterised without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement... In a process that repeats itself with iron predictability everywhere that they are installed, targets quickly cease to be a way of measuring performance and become ends in themselves.”

He compares this to Stalin’s Five Year Plans, quoting Marshall Berman on the high death toll and poor productive results of “a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo-events.”

With this “brutal farce”, Stalin could perhaps be described as the figure to pull Fisher’s two faces of Capitalist Realism together. After all, he was both monstrous tyrant and instigator of a thousand black farces. Fisher actually makes little attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction, which might tempt the reader to conclude that it marks some kind of failure of his analysis. But what if he is actually correct, is pinpointing a genuinely paradoxical characteristic of our times? What if this disjunction is actually that of late capitalism itself?

It seems astonishing the speed at which neoliberal economics have colonised the ideological terrain. As Fisher points out “ what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatisations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier... Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic.” The most egregious example must be the term ‘free schools’, which used to mean schools run along non-authoritarian lines and now means schools ‘free’ to be run for profit by private finance.

But what makes this shift so astonishing is that the facts on the ground are so often the very opposite of its innovative dreams. As Fisher says, “with the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life.”

Yet it’s notable that, when you argue this point with people, they will insist quite the opposite. I have worked for private corporations with people who did nothing but complain, day in and day out, about the excess bureaucracy and consequent inefficiency that we endured. But when asked how they squared that experience with their continuing belief in private enterprise, they would simply ignore the contradiction and reassert the mantra that “everybody knows” that free markets work best.

Capitalism sells itself as both rational and dynamic, a system where everything is tested and verified, and the best new ideas inherently rise to the top. But of course it’s not necessary for this to actually happen. What’s necessary is for this to be said to be happening. (Even if it was happening, it being said would still be more important.)

While the trickle-down theory of wealth has a poor basis in proof, the trickle-down theory of ideology is much more successful. For such workplace or pub arguments simply mimic public debates on the subject, merely in a less polysyllabic way. Currently, the British Medical Association is opposing the next wave of NHS privatisations on the grounds that previous examples have failed to make the intended improvements. (And in fact in many cases have made things worse.)

Of course such objections will not be countered so much as disregarded. Any positive results of privatisation will be heralded, any negative results will be at best trivialised, because “everybody knows” what the result would be before the experiment was conducted. (And of course this doesn’t even begin to cover the way in which ‘targets’ are skewed towards the desired results.) Similarly, Fisher comments that Blair’s “equality of opportunity” has resulted in not even a decrease in but a cessation of social mobility and an exponential increase in the wealth gap.

A Capital which is always ahead and infinitely mobile, yet simultaneously strangling itself with red tape, both horror film and farce. A proletariat brutally beaten back, in a permanent state of precarity, yet less class-conscious than ever and revelling in apparent consumerist affluence. How can this all be squared?

First, we should point out one flaw in Fisher’s (otherwise excellent) reading of Capitalist Realism as Market Stalinism. Socialist Realism forbad discussion of its failings, with gulags awaiting those who broke such strictures. But the facts which prove the lie of Capitalist Realism are, if anything, more available than at any other time in history. They are never further away than a mouse click or two. Yet, rather than my being put on trial for writing this blog entry, it is unlikely the authorities will even bother to monitor it.

Of course response to those who determine to do something about the state of affairs is increasingly harsh, with police insistence on crushing demonstrations leading to the death of Ian Tomlinson and the injury of many more. Yet the overall psychological effect is that of a champion boxer not even bothering to raise his fists in the normal defensive stance. It conveys the message that it would be pointless to tackle him.

But more importantly, we should not fall into the trap of taking Capitalist Realism on its own terms. If it did not succeed in delivering better product and services to the consumer, then that was never its aim. Its true purpose, of course, was to break organised labour and it was brought in on the back of a series of class struggle victories Capital achieved in the Eighties. (Principally the Miner’s Strike.) Arguing otherwise is like saying that the Greeks beat the Trojans on the battlefield, so must have had a better system of accountancy.

Capitalism styles itself an innovator, unshackled to tradition, unafraid of (in Blair’s phrase) the “forces of conservatism.” But whenever it made this claim, we’d counter that the motor of innovation was in fact class struggle. Perhaps the core of Marx comes from the introduction to the Communist Manifesto, that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” Examples are legion; for example, the Fordist production line was not some inevitable step in the linear passage of ‘progress’, but was devised with the specific aim of breaking the power of the craft unions in the car plants.

Marx developed this argument by distinguishing between the formal and the actual subsumption of labour by Capital. At first Capital merely houses the proletariat in its workplaces, in effect stealing what they have made as soon as it rolls off the production line, like free range chickens and their eggs. But over time every second, every inch came to be controlled and regulated. Moreover, this continues outside of the workplace. Pretty soon there are no zones left autonomous from it - from free range chickens to battery hens. Of course these zones may still be contested, but that is the very point.

Traditionally, though disagreement raged about when this happened, there was agreement about what it meant. With no more spaces outside of it’s control, Capital inevitably becomes centered in the proletariat’s sight and they must go on to fight it in its entirely. It must be submitted to or destroyed.

Yet the reality has been quite different. As Fisher asserts, “class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy.” Of course, to the Capitalist Realist, that is the development that has made their world possible. Having defeated organised labour they can go on to pick off all their other opponents, such as labelling environmental protestors terrorists and temporarily imprisoning them as soon as they show up anywhere. Having remade society in their image they can now turn to the natural world. GM foods and the patenting of DNA go beyond defining nature as plunder, fit for grabs, and re-render it into one big machine – one which, if not performing efficiently enough for profits, is to be taken apart and tampered with.

But is this apparent victory their very moment of defeat? Will it turn out they needed us all along? Was our opposition actually propping them up? Did our struggle keep their wilder excesses on track, almost literally ground them? Are they like a brawler who lands a killer blow, but then tumbles himself through the swing of it? Target culture is a classic example. In the old, unionised days, targets could only be implemented after lengthy negotiations. This protracted process would force the bosses to consider which targets were most important, and focus on them. Nowadays targets are free to proliferate like weeds. Of course capitalist innovations continue – ‘better’ MP3 players emerge, blu-ray DVDs, HD TVs and i-Pads appear and quickly become desired commodities. But they themselves are symptoms of this over-reach, as capitalism exceeds itself.

In a way, the litmus test of this was the War. While unrest within Iraq soon became an unpullable thorn, there were few domestic consequences. After the biggest protest march in British history, the demonstrators were proved entirely right - but it was as if there was not a single general lesson to be learnt from this story. The buzzword of the political class became “move on”, in every sense except for the occupying troops (who were to stay put). Labour even went on to win the next election.

And of course, the banking crisis almost exactly followed this template, merely on a larger scale. Conceptually it pulled the threadbare rug from under the feet of neo-liberalism, exposing its rotten floorboards. But it’s as if they’re the only floor manufacturer in town. The only question left open is how quickly and how deeply the rest of us will be asked to pay for bailing out the bankers’ excesses, through public spending cuts.

But perhaps the real sign of the future happened within Iraq itself. A hamfisted, ideologically driven attempt to impose a ‘free market’ in Iraq merely brought chaos. Over eight billion dollars flown in to stimulate ‘enterprise’ simply went missing, while basic commodities such as electricity became scarce or unavailable. An infrastructure, damaged by years of sanctions but still high by the standards of the region, was decimated. Iraq was not reconstructed but deconstructed.

If the corrupt volatility of post-Saddam Iraq is the true face of Capitalist Realism, if it is both harbinger and microcosm of our future, then this prognosis is far from a cheery one. It will turn out that Capitalism did carry the seeds of it’s own destruction after all, but failed in it’s other main task – to create it’s gravediggers. The result would not be anarchy of the kind sought by anarchists (self-organised groups federating to co-ordinate production) but in the way feared by Capitalists – chaos, disorder and destruction. Capitalism collapsed will not lead to the same outcome as Capitalism overthrown.

In this way, Fisher’s book makes for an interesting comparison with Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 agitational classic ’The Revolution of Everyday Life.’ They share the sense that the current phase of Capital is the final one, that having left itself nothing to eat it must now devour itself. Of course Fisher is far more cautious than Vaneigem in his prognosis. (At one point, Vaneigem recklessly predicts that capitalism will not outlast the millennium. Most commentators now contend that it did.) But this point of departure is in fact the point. Vaneigem was still talking about those gravediggers, predicting proletarian overthrow. Though he makes a few cautious suggestions for opposition, Fisher talks as though we are witnessing the end of the line.

So is this our inevitable doom? Such a fate is possible, perhaps even likely, but not necessarily inevitable. Firstly, ‘Stalinism’ eventually collapsed in the USSR, but took the best part of a century to do so. Moreover, the conditions it collapsed in are not necessarily comparable to the ‘world market’ of today. It is not the case that, as Stalinism collapsed, so inevitably must all forms of capitalism. As the banking crisis proved, capitalism has proved adept at surviving tremors and its collapse does not seem immediate. (Those who saw in it Capitals’ Armageddon are already looking pretty foolish.)

And of course there’s signs to prove the contrary notion, that the cuts hitched onto the back of the crisis will rekindle the class struggle. Fisher himself, previously somewhat sniffy about the direct action scene, has even participated in education cuts protests and compared their emergence to coming out of a depression.

 This is merely a thought experiment following one possible scenario. Yet it is not a scenario we tend to look into. Our forebears, writing at a time when Capital was weaker, did not have to consider it – and we follow obligingly in their wake. Like Holmes, we struggle without thinking that Moriaty could pull us off the Reichenbach Falls with him as he goes...

Further reading: My review of 'Inception' was heavily influenced by Fisher's book, on how contemporary cinema was reflecting the ideological terrain of neoliberalism.