Part-way through this film Deadshot
(played by Will Smith) stumbles on one of those top secret folders
(you know the ones), and discovers what's really attacking New York.
Turns out it's the Enchantress, who used her original enlistment into
the Suicide Squad as her chance to go rogue. In other words, the
action of recruiting the Squad generated the enemy they now need to
face. It's a neat irony. A flashback handily confirms all this.
Except the 'flashback' almost entirely
reprises scenes we previously saw in real time. Which kind of
scuppers the surprise element a little.
And things are often like that here.
Expert critics have spotted that this film is thrown together in an
often haphazard way. But then so has everyone else. The rest of the
Squad, bar Deadshot and Harley Quinn, occasionally up and do
something significant-seeming, in the firm belief they're adding to
their backstory. Not in this movie, they're not. (Diablo comes
closest, and luckily his back story is so predictable it doesn't need
much screen time.)
And it bizarrely manages to combine repeat
load-tipping of info dumps with the assumption the cinema viewer will
know their comics lore. Some things we're told twice, others not at
all. Harley jumping into the chemical vat, those not familiar with
the Joker origin story find that a particularly mystifying moment.
(Me, I'd have started the film with the
conference room scene, where the Suicide Squad project is first
announced. The aide to Walker, the Black Ops boss, would then have
manifested as the Enchantress to the audience the same time as the
Generals. Then the rest of the Squad could have been introduced, one
by one. All of whom within their own unique personalised holding
cell. But I digress...)
Critics (and everyone else) rightly point out the way the
soundtrack sounds so slapped on they might as well have stuck an
i-Player on shuffle. And that Cara Delevingne might look the part of
the spooky Enchantress, but acts just like a model. Which becomes a
particular problem in the finale, where instead of commanding
proceedings she gyrates like she's in a really bad music video. And
when your cast is all bad guys, you need to a
pretty good antagonist to up the ante of evil on them.
While Deadshot is projected as the
primary protagonist, getting the nearest there is to
characterisation, it's Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie) who
really dominates. It's hard to find a publicity image where she's not
centred. If he's intended as the heart of the film, she's its face.
She actually gets a back story. Trouble
is, it isn't just bad, it's about as bad as it gets. As if the career
woman who throws it all in for the bad guy wasn't bad enough, the
scene where the Joker tortures her into her new identity is
effectively a euphemistic rape scene, so we even have the 'conversion
through rape' trope.
Much of this has been said already, and ably enough, so let's
make just one further comment. Notably, both Deadshot and Diablo are
conflicted over their bad guy status. Deadshot is shown sniffing
gunpowder like a crackhead with a pipe, yet at the same time he's
motivated by love for his daughter. That's some... not much,
but some indication of an inner life. Whereas both Harley and the
Enchantress are simply split, the well-behaved good girl (Harleen
Quinel and June Moone respectively) alternating with the sexy bad
girl. Not depth but appearance. Times two.
And Harley leads us on to the next
common criticism of the film, the way the Joker is reduced to such a
cameo role. (See for example this YouTube review.) Most likely, this is another thing down to
poor structuring and edit wars. Actor Jared Leto has confirmed he not
only shot a whole lot more scenes, he was less than pleased to find
how few made it to the finished film. (Asked if any of his scenes
were cut, he's responded by asking if any weren't.)
But actually, that's one thing which
works in the film's favour. Had the Joker been onscreen more, Harley
would have once more been relegated to his girlfriend and sidekick –
the Batgirl of the crime world. As it is, his being remote from the
plot but forever trying to force his way back in all but reverses
things. He comes to represent her desire to be out there, driving
recklessly round town rather than being stuck in boring detention. In
short, the essential nature of Harley necessitates that the only way
the Girl Joker can dominate the film is to keep the Boy Joker at
arm's length.
But then again, that's what they
do. It doesn't atone for the egregiousness of her
origin story, of course. But when we complain about superhero films
being so concerned with the heroes, and the heroines always shunted
into supporting roles, isn't this something to cheer? (Me, I'd have
given Harley none of the unnecessary backstory, and almost no scenes
together with the Joker save the brief moment where her rescue seems
to be working. But that's probably another digression.)
The conceit underlying both characters
is that crazy counts as a kind of super-power. It leaves the wielder
so unconstrained by social norms, so ready with the unexpected it
becomes an ability akin to the ability to set light to things or be a
crack shot. (Neither has any particular powers beyond this.) And
then, just to throw you even further, they toss in the notion that
crazy might just be an act after all, there to distract you while
they get on with their scheming.
And this is accentuated with Harley,
who also delights in playing the part of the bimbo stripper. On
release her very first action is to toy with the guards' minds,
leaving them unsure whether she's lunatic or player, goofy simpleton
or corkscrew-minded schemer. Her costume is less the... well, the
harlequin image of the original cartoons and more a cross between the
peeling facepaint feral joker of 'Dark Knight' and the punk kinderwhore look - both of course designed to sew confusion
among those they encounter. And she pretty much keeps up that act
throughout. It's her not Deadshot who dispatches the Enchantress, a
victory she achieves through cunning and deception.
The one time we see her without the
make-up, so to speak, is when she believes the Joker died in trying
to rescue her – and we see her crying in the rain. But only
we see this. By the time the rest of the Squad have walked up, the
act is back on. (Admittedly for this to be true you have to disregard
the risible scene where the Enchantress tempts her with the fantasy
of becoming a stay-at-home mom. But then you have to do a whole lot
of mental re-editing with this film.)
All of which is sold by Robbie's
performance, which could without exaggeration be called
scene-stealing. It's everything Delevingne's isn't. As she repeatedly
sidles up to other characters, they can never be sure whether she'll
screw with them, try to snog them or stab them.
And here we've hit the upside. When it
works, which in fits and spurts it does, the film treats you just in
the same way Harley does. No wonder she's the face for it! You're
never quite sure what it is, what it will do to
you next, what angle it will come from - dark or comic, dramatic or
surreal. The film itself behaves like a lunatic let loose from the
asylum. That may well be because the film doesn't really know itself
what it is. But it can still press that into service.
And there are times where it does seem
to froth with deranged invention. The Joker's henchmen conduct a raid
in ludicrous fancy dress, one machine gunning guards in a panda
costume. And shouldn't it be like this? if superhero films try to up
characterisation, they're still going to be lagging behind in the
Academy awards. They're simply not playing to their strengths.
And the concept of a motley collection
of bad guys is actually a pretty good one. It's often said the
strength of a superhero title is the strength of it's rogues gallery.
So why not have just the rogue's gallery? “Let's
do something fun”, asserts the Enchantress early on. And something
fun does sound a more inviting prospect than another two and a half
hours of sour hero grimdark. This ragbag army follow a very crooked
path indeed, sometimes doubling back on themselves, at others leaping
blocks ahead. A route map they're not. But at least they're moving in
the right direction.
Featuring both the guitarist and
drummer from Bo Ningen, pyschedelic noise purveyors and Lucid Frenzy fave, Xaviers might seem their side project. But they're dominated by the
keyboards of Kenichi Iwasa, the guitar lines often as metronoic as
the drums. In fact for the one section the guitar takes to the fore
he immediately switches to secondary drums.
To this day, there are those who
associate space rock with prog. Yet his child's-play stabs couldn't
have been further from their sophisticated swooshes, a buzzing
biplane against a Red Arrows display. His cheap, insistent and
off-kilter lines lead the band through one long improvised number.
They're strongly Krautrock influenced,
never a bad thing in my book. And Krautrock of course can mean either
the propulsive rhythms of Neu!, so much a forerunner of the
repetitive beats of dance music, or the deranged freak-outery of
Faust. Except Xaviers somehow manage to cover both of those styles at
the same time. It's a set which lurches forward like a drunken robot.
Imagine the clanking castle on chicken legs of 'Howl's
Moving Castle' combined with the humanising imperfection of
Wall-E. (This analogy is handily pictured.) You were never quite sure
whether it would be able to keep going, while it actually assaulted
your senses for a full set length with none of the longeurs impro can
lead into.
From listening you'd have no idea how
proficient the musicians were or even if they had any idea themselves
how it was working. It might have been propelled by sheer forward
motion for all we knew. And it's refreshing to see such a safety last
approach to taking to the stage. The band name comes, I would assume,
from the psi powered head of the X-Men. And they certainly seem
possessed of advanced telepathic powers.
An earlier, and less keyboard-led, set
from London...
NB This review boldly goes
into plot spoilerific territory (as surely as it splits
infinitives)
If I haven't written much about the
Star Trek movies so far (only a brief response to the first one here) it's partly because I felt responses were hard-coded. It just came
down to have much of a classic Trek fan you were. Hardcore fans of
the original series hated the reboot with a vengeance, whereas I...
well I was never that much of a fan, so was more
amenable to change. Which suggests at different perspectives, rather
than different analysis. Which would make any debate purposeless.
It's true, for example, that the the
original series was powered by the Kirk/Spock/Bones triangle. But
that seemed effective because of the chemistry between the three
actors, the way some bands can only work with a classic line-up,
making it something of a fool's errand to try and reproduce. Better
to vary from it. Admittedly, they strayed too far, and made films too
much about Kirk and his supporting cast. But it's better to go in the
right direction and overshoot than the wrong.
This time the script conspires to
divide the crew into twos, but is only interested in the effect of
this on Spock and Bones. And it's actually handled reasonably well,
Spock suddenly finding a joke funny and Bones worrying he's become
delirious, Spock attempting to say he'd always assumed their
relationship to be based on an underlying respect and Bones firmly
insisting it doesn't need saying. It's reminiscent enough to work,
without being trapped inside imitative.
And when Kirk's two-hander with Chekov
yields nothing similar that's probably just as telling. Kirk's job is
to move the plot along, and anyone with him is an audience or
sounding board. There's some feints to give him one of those
'atonement-with-the-father journeys' out of Scriptwriter's Basic, but
that tends to lurk around the film trying to find some sort of
purchase. And, surprise, his 'arc' is his considering giving up being
a starship Captain only deciding to stay one after all – meaning he
comes out of the film just the way he was on the way in. Phew, that
was close!
We're clearly intended to connect to
him by him being coded as connected to our era. So much so you half
wonder if there's a director's cut scene where he wakes up in the
future, Buck Rogers style. Perhaps what's significant is how
this is played. He's a rock'n'roll Starship captain, riding a
motorbike round an ancient planet to distract the enemy, and later
seizing victory by blasting the Beastie Boys at them.
If these moments are annoying, rather
than goofily charming as they seem intended, it's most likely because
they're so absolutely unearned. At the close he tells another
character, now enlisted with Starfleet, she doesn't have to obey all
the rules. Because, you know, he said so. There
may well have been eras before ours which had lower levels of
personal freedom. But the gap between perception and reality, the
idea of how free we are compared to the way our lives really
function, that must be unprecedented. Short of some truly
dystopian turn in history, nobody is going to look back on us and say
that was the time you didn't have to obey all the rules. And
consequently our heroes have become coping strategies, ways by which
we can lie to ourselves.
And the flashy, frenetic direction of
the film (by Justin Li, who's previously directed things like
'Fast and Furious' sequels) makes the perfect
accompaniment for Kirk. As it leaps, giddyingly and unrelentingly
from one set-piece to the next, its almost a trailer extended to film
length. At times the flash-cutting is so unfollowable you end up just
guessing what must have just happened, and you're normally right.
That said, the set-piece scene where
the swarm attack the Enterprise, effectively slipping under the radar
of its mighty weapons to literally dismember it, is genuinely
effective. It's almost like the opposite to the classic opening of
'Star Wars', where a great big spaceship is shown
to be chased by an even bigger one – this is death by an army of
minnows. The scene's even given a neat fillip later, when it's
revealed that their peer-to-peer inter-ship communications jammed the
Enterprises' in themselves rather than through a deliberate plot,
like they attacked us with their very unlikeness.
It's one of those classic moments where
you can watch a Hollywood movie and root for the bad guys without
having to rewrite much in your head. In fact it's virtually Negri and Hardt's theory of multitude versus empire, laid out on
the screen. (Not, it must be said, a theory that's particularly
convincing. In fact it's quite possibly no more than rock'n'roll
autonomism the same way Kirk's a rock'n'roll Captain. But for all
that it's fun to see it on the screen.)
And of course at the very same time the
film seems cheerily innocent even of the concept that the 'bad guys'
might portray positive features. In the standard clash-of-values
conversation with the villain Kraal, he snarlingly mocks their
“unity” as a “weakness”. Yet not only are his crew as unified
in purpose as Kirk's, they are defeated precisely by having this
unity disrupted.
Even if we weren't already expecting a
plot twist over Kraal, Uhura is given a line to tip us off that one's
incoming. And the way it's delivered is effectively handled, suddenly
fixing on a clue which has been hiding in plain slight just as we've
been looking elsewhere.
Yet it's this twist which truly
scuppers the film. It turns out... I said there'd be plot spoilers,
didn't I?... it turns out Kraal was himself a Starfleet captain, who
wound up marooned on a distant planet, became convinced he was dumped
there and consequently got a little embittered. And okay, aliens in
science fiction are never going to be truly alien. That would make
them beyond imagining, and then no-one would be able to imagine them.
They're always going to be our shadow selves in some form, us at our
worst so our best can get in a fistfight with them.
But there's a question of degree.
Making them our literal shadow selves and no more turns them from
disturbing shapes into mere reflections. It's taking those shadows
and wringing the darkness from them, it robs them of any element of
alienness. Historically as the Earth became delineated to the inch by
spoilsport cartographers, the edge of the map was pushed further out
and finally space became the place for the weird and inexplicable.
This is more less what lies behind the rise of science fiction as a
popular medium. It's where the strange can still be strange, where
the unknown rears up at us. If you don't honour this then the science
fiction becomes just a setting, a desktop background interchangeable
with any other.
And this fault line is blown wide open
by the ending. In'Into Darkness' we returned to
Earth for a final battle with a terrorist bad guy intent on blowing
up stuff. And here... okay, it's the futuristic city of a space
station, but that's pretty much the same thing. And it's worse than
repetition, it's even worse than the nagging sense we never
really went anywhere, it runs counter to the most
basic premise of 'Star Trek' – the bit spelt out
up front about boldly going. Significantly that fabled opening
monologue is now relegated to the end of the film, like the franchise
is permanently being thrown off course and trying to get back on
track. This film should really be called 'Star Trek Back
Again'.
Because Star Trek is inherently about
frontiers not home bases. Roddenberry's well-known original pitch
for the show was “Wagon Train to the Stars”. Starfleet can be
referenced, but needs to be kept in the background of a story. Kirk
should land on an alien planet like a Marshall bringing law to Dodge
City, explorer and policemen simultaneously. In short, this film is
not without it's moments. But it's reached the point where they made
Star Trek so unlike itself, that even a non-fan like me thought of
throwing in the towel.
(Yes, twice in a row! Reviews of art exhibitions which are still on!)
”I want the work to have a
strong formal presence, and through the physical experience to
activate a psychological and emotional response.”
- Mona Hatoum
The Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum is
effectively a double exile. Her family had been forced to flee
Palestine for Lebanon before her birth. Then, visiting London in
1975, an outbreak of civil war effectively cut her off from home.
Such themes, it's generally held, pervade her work.
Which they do. But rather than the
polemical artist this might suggest, her work is actually strongly
influenced by Surrealism. Of all Modernist art movements, Surrealism
may be the one of which people have the most skewed impression. As
it's most successful self-publicist Dali came to characterise it
after himself, portraying the idea that it's something frenzied and
shrieking. Yet Hatoum has none of this in-your-face shock but is
instead quietly disturbing, to the point it's sometimes hard to work
out how her works have their effect. For example her frequent use of
domestic objects, in the show's words, “find the unsettling within
the everyday... making the familiar uncanny”.
And at the same time as it unsettles
Surrealism can be genuinely funny. It is to society what the Joker is
to Gotham city, looking at a mad world and deciding the best response
is to laugh. Her performance pieces do sometimes seem set to shock.
Her notes for 'Live Work for the Black Room'
(1981) even promise “DEATH, DISASTER, DOOM & GLOOM”. But many
works have the Surrealists' impish humour, for example with titles
which echo their love of wordplay.
'Grater Divide'
(2002, above) for example is a food grater blown up to the size of a
room divide. While 'No Way' and 'No Way
II' (1996) are respectively a colander and sieve with the
holes uselessly plugged, form's link to function broken. Both are
reminiscent of, for example, Man Ray or Meret Oppenheim. While a
chair conjoined with a desk, part of the installation 'Interior/
Exterior Landscape' (2010), recalls Magritte.
Put together these two influences and
what results is art which has a political impetus without being
politically assertive. It may be relevant that the scale of her work
can vary, from large-scale room-sizes installations which can look
like grand public statements to very small pieces which we more
associate with personalisation.
Hatom herself has said “I’m never trying to make a direct
political statement. There are issues in my head, but they’re in
the background; they’re not foregrounded in the work, and they’re
not specific to my own history... The tension is between the work’s
reduced form and the intensity of the possible associations.”
Or “each person is free to understand what I do in the light of who
they are and where they stand... I don’t want to pin a single
meaning on each one.... I want to make use of... contradictions, play
on ambiguity, never take anything for what it appears to be.” And
to be political without polemical is in itself a hallmark of
Surrealism, as in for example their response to the Spanish revolution.
In the early performance piece 'The
Negotiating Table', (1983, a still above) she lies prone
and plastic-wrapped on a table, surrounded by empty chairs. It's akin
to Gilroy's classic cartoon 'The Plum-Pudding In Danger' but here the
artist has substituted her own body as the prize to be carved. Her
becoming Palestine (and by implication all occupied territories)
makes the point in a visceral way – for many, this is a
flesh-and-blood issue. It's common for Hatoum to place her self
physically in her work in this way. Even in her more conventional
artworks, where she's not personally present, she'll use her hair and
nails as materials.
But the chairs being empty, that's as
significant as the table being full. The politicians and diplomats
who decide our fate don't occupy the same space as us, they are
absent from our lives the same time as they devour us. The chairs
become totems of power, magnifying it through absence, like the
master’s boots in Strindberg's ‘Miss Julie’.
And in general in Hatoum's work, the
absence of the human body can be as significant as its presence. Take
for example, 'Homebound' (2000, above). It's a
domestic situation, kitchen utensils scattered on the table,
children's toys on the floor. But nobody's home. Even the clothes
rail is bare of clothes. With the empty hangers and mattressless
wire-frame bed, it looks like some kind of bare skeleton of a
dwelling. This is perhaps the closest to her signature work, the
domestic situation shot through with something defamilarising until
the scene becomes menacing. And in this case, it's literally true. An
electric current runs through the scene at intervals; it's hum rising
to almost a shriek, the lights building to a glare them dimming away
again. You hear that hum before you encounter the scene, like the
thunder of an oncoming storm.
The show states “the title plays on
ideas of domestic confinement or house arrest”. And perhaps the
bare bed does suggest torture by electrocution. While a small cage,
for a pet mouse or gerbil, is recursively placed within the scene.
(And watch out for that cage motif.) But overall I think the
opposite. Literally, our perspective is outside, looking in. Of
course we can't enter the scene, at least not without getting
ourselves fried. But the bars between us and it seem less required
health-and-safety initiative than part of the work. Many Palestinians
have been driven out of their homes in precisely this way. In some
cases it has been forced on them so suddenly they have had to leave
almost all their belongings behind, creating a scene not unlike this
one.
The video work 'Measures of
Distance' (1988, still above) explores similar themes. In
the soundtrack, Hatoum reads out correspondence between herself and
her mother. Voices in Arabic can be heard beneath, apparently a
conversation between the two. The video images are of her mother, but
they're indistinct, not the equivalent of the neat and arranged
family snapshots you'd stuff in with a letter. (Her mother's actually
in the shower, but you only know that once told it.) And, much as the
soundtrack is layered, they are then placed behind a screen of Arabic
writing.
The screen becomes not a portal but a
membrane, likened by the show to “a curtain or veil”. With her
mother speaking of her “being born in exile”, it seems a much
more personalised work. But perhaps, like 'Homebound',
the point is that we the audience are outside the picture. The
distance to us is immeasurable, the experiences unknown and
unknowable, the English translation only marginally more
comprehensible than the Arabic.
But, as is common of Hatoum's work, at
the same time it hints at a universal experience. As Thomas Wolfe
said, “you can never go home again”, and so it's significance
takes on a positive feedback loop with it's inaccessibility. The more
we can't get back, the more we want to
look. We all have Fall myths about how we lost our
close connection to things, whether religious or political. But
perhaps they all come down to the personal, our veneration of our own
childhood perpetuating the sense of that childhood being external to
us.
'Light Sentence'
(1992, above) is formally reminiscent of Conrad Shawcross' 'Slow
Arc Inside a Cube IV' (2009), shown as part of the Hayward's 2013 Light Show exhibition. In both a light bulb is remotely moved
within a wire cage, to change the play of shadows on the walls. Yet
beyond that formal similarity the works are entirely different, as
different as two canvases might be while still using oil paint.
Shawcross uses a much smaller cage,
across which the bulb travels proportionately further. The effect is
almost like a simulated fairground ride, as the shadows fly around
the walls you have the feeling of hurtling through space even as you
stand stationary. In Hatoum's work the bulb moves slowly, up and down
between two banks of wire-mesh lockers. And what's evoked isn't a
ride but an entrapment. The cages suggest containment without refuge.
They reminded me of the way soldiers are given their own kit to look
after, but are expected to have it not just arranged in a determined
way but available for inspection at any point.
Similarly, the title suggests at
imprisonment. The shadows playing on the walls around the viewer
create a double layer of wire mesh, as if we the viewers are being
enclosed by the work. But it also suggests the modern open-plan
office, granting you a small square of territory but at the same time
opening you up to scrutiny. As with 'Homebound'
the absence of the human figure creates menace, as if we're looking
at a space created for people which gives no consideration to them.
When an artist's biography is, to us,
exotic there is a temptation to turn it into their Rosebud. This may
be exacerbated when that artist is Palestinian, due to the drastic
nature of their situation and the media's tendency to reduce them to
either terrorists or victims. Our antennae can be out for
'Palestinian voices', who might interpret the situation for us.
Yet exile is a double-edged affair, and Hatoum has said quite explicitly that her work is as informed by
arriving in London as it is by leaving Beirut; “My first impression
was the control on the individual, the surveillance issues, cameras
pointing at you all the time. That’s why these things came into my
work right from the beginning... At the Slade, my first encounter
with a big institution, I was shocked by the coldness, by all the
rules. I was this chaotic person who wanted to find space. But they
wouldn’t give me any.” And sometimes it takes an outsider to show
your own country to you. She's also commented that the Slade contains
the mummified body of Jeremy Bentham, deviser of the omnipotentPanopticon.
'Cellulites'
(2012/13 above) in many ways reprises these themes. Open metal
'cells', something like metal lobster pots, echoing the wire mesh
lockers, contain glass-blown red hearts. The hearts look as though
their shape may be conforming to the imprint of their cages. Or
alternately they may be squishing themselves through the gaps, unlike
their prisons unconfined to a fixed shape. And then the
biological-sounding title suggests at another possibility – the
human heart is kept in a cage, we even call it the
ribcage.
'Performance Still'
(1985), as the name might suggest, is a still from a performance work
where she walked around Brixton dragging Doctor Martin boots behind
her which were tied to her feet. It feels as internal as
'Homebound' and 'Light Sentence'
are external. Perhaps analogously to the proverbial monkey on the
back it suggests that we can never really remove our boots – we
always drag behind us the dead weight of ideology.
The exhibition shows us both this still
and a video of the performance, but strangely at quite separate
points. And perhaps ironically the close-up still is much more
effective than the video. The video cannot help but highlight the
difference between her and everyone else on the street. Some laugh at
her, while she's straightfaced. But even when they just ignore her
it's still too reminiscent of the Jesus-like suffering artist,
bearing the world's sins on behalf of others more concerned with
frivolous things.
'Impenetrable'
(2000) is again reminiscent of the wire mesh cages. A block of thin
rods appears to float etherially, reminiscent of marsh reeds or a
bamboo forest – simultaneously substantial and insubstantial. It's
immediately aesthetically enticing, in a way that's unusual for
Hatoum. It's only when you go up to it do you realise that the
smooth-looking rods are barbed. I kept trying to parse this and
finally realised the point was that you can't. As the name suggests,
it calls to the eye at the same time a meaning can't be hung on it.
If this is not a perfect show, Hatoum
is not a consistent artist. Some of her work does stray into the
post-modern. (For example, 'Don't Smile, You're On
Camera', 1980, a performance piece where she video-scans
herself and then members of the audience.) And too many pieces are
commentaries on another artist's work, when that work is not even
particularly well known.
Plus the show is over-reliant on boards
to document her performance pieces. Which reminded me of when museums
just line up broken bits of pottery along a shelf. If Hatoum has
spoken of the effect upon her of the cold, institutional world of
Britain some stills of her work place them in haunted institution
surroundings. These work so well it suggests the best place for this
exhibition would be the peeling paint and exposed piping of some
disused post-war office block, rather than the neat and clean tourist
trap of the Tate galleries. The above does focus on the highlights.
But then the highlights... well, they're high...
(Yes, a review of an art exhibition that's actually still on!)
”Conceptual art was a
critical art rather than a contemplative one – not necessarily for
looking at, but for analysing or for reading.”
- From the indicia
”No Rhapsody Here”
Things you will see if you attend this
show...
Art made from non-art or even
perishable materials, such as oranges, sand and ice. Photography, but
clearly intended as documentation rather than as artform. Sometimes
documenting the perishable stuff before it... well, perishes. (See
for example Bruce McLean's 'Six Sculptures'
(1967/9) below.) More widely, a focus on the paraphernalia of
recording - on reports, on filing drawers and card index systems.
Documentation as a thing in itself, often at the expense of what's
being documented.
Hamish Fulton's 'Hitching
Times From London to Andorra, And From Andorra to London'
(1967), rather than give us photos or sketches of his trip, provides
a dryly typed list of the time it took him to get from one place to
another. For 'The Spring Recordings', (1972) David
Tremlett took field recordings of spring sounds from each of the
eighty-one English counties. The eighty-one cassettes are displayed
lined up neatly on a shelf, with a sign to helpfully tell us what
they are. And with no means for us to hear them.
But what you will really
come across is text. Reams and reams of the stuff. Normally in bold
geometric fonts, as if serifs weren't considered sufficiently
rigorous. The group Art and Language, in the show's words, “echoed
the conventions, format and content of academic philosophical
journals”. No. 1 of Vol. 3 of their journal was headlined 'Draft
for an Anti-Textbook' (1974, below).
Some works come ready-built with their
own indicia. While others effectively are their
own indicia, words in a frame or just thrown up on a wall. With both,
of course, the show then recursively slaps their own
indicia on. The show comes to look like the largest and most
comprehensive optician's eye test in recorded history.
Okay... so... what do we make of all of
this?
Reviews of the show, which were almost
universally negative, focused on it's dour tone, it's monochrome
look, on those uninviting chunks of text. Adrian Searle in the Guardian called it “uptight... bleak...
pleasureless... [and leaving] a taste of ashes”. And it's true, it
does have a similar hair-shirt tone to the Godard films of this era.
You know, the ones with the five-minute shots of someone eating an
apple at the camera while someone else recites Marx. Even the dates
it gives in its title are unrounded and unwieldy. It's like it has a
disdain for the digestible, like it's decided it'll best gain
attention by scraping it's nails down a blackboard. As Art and
Language proudly declare, “there is no rhapsody here”.
But beneath the dry deadpan surface
there's traces of an impish humour, as if all this is a mischievous
provocation. The show's quoting Marcel Duchamp's “art of the mind”
as an influence before we've even got in the door, and his philosophically pranksterish brand of Dada does seem a
strong influence.
Keith Arnatt's 'Self
Burial' (1969, above), is made up of a time lapse series of
photos in which the artist, maintaining an identical pose, sinks
deeper and deeper into the ground. It couldn't be closer to Duchamp's
mission statement to “annihilate the ego of the artist”. Ian
Burn's 'Mirror Piece' (1967), quite adequately
described by it's title, is one of those works which comes with it's
own indica. Which also seems to be channelling Duchamp, stating “any
of the materials may be replaced at any time necessary/The technique
of assembly must be devoid of any interest/ the process is to be
simple and ordinary.”
Because this is conceptual art of a
particular kind. It's not art in service to a big idea, with anything
not conveying that idea in the most direct way possible dismissed as
irrelevant. It's concept is art, which is another
way of saying it's concept is itself. And it exists not to clearly
convey that concept but confound the brain. It doesn't seek to make
art in new ways, but corrode the art already made. This is the King
exposing himself in your face and defying you to claim he's wearing
clothes.
It's true some of Duchamp's chief
strategies, such as the use of the random, aren't particularly taken
up. But the main way they differ from him is by taking it further.
He, for the most part, used objects as art. He didn't use art
objects as art, but found objects or assemblages of non-art
materials. But times had moved on. Anthony Caro, for example, would
make his sculptures from any old bits of metal, not necessarily the
'classical' bronze. So the conceptualists mounted an attack on the
art object in itself.
As Joseph Kosuth said in 1969: “Being
an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is
questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the
nature of art... Painting is a kind of art. If you
are painting you are already accepting the nature of art.”
Toppling the Plinths
And those dates in the title, however
unwieldy, tell all. By the Sixties Modernism was no longer the wild
child but the steady parent. As seen in
the earlier 'Out There' show at Somerset House, local authorities by that point had a budget
to stick modernist statues up in shopping centres and around housing
estates. People now knew what it was and where to find it. It had
triumphed. Which of course meant it was time to depose it.
As Richard Cork said, looking back on
this era: “It was extraordinary; everything was being questioned,
everything opening up, nothing was sacred at all. And all the work
you had grown up thinking was revolutionary, like Caro, all that was
being superseded.” Caro seems to have been a particular target,
which suits me as I've never taken to his work. But Moore and
Hepworth, in fact pretty much everybody seen in 'Out
There', were doubtless in the sights too.
Take for example Bruce McLean's
'Pose Work For Plinths' (1971, above) in which the
artist improbably substitutes himself for his artwork. In some
pictures he does valiantly seem to be trying to pose, but in others
he's more trying to settle back on them like into the world's worst
sofa. The repeat images become like a kind of cartoon strip which
betrays how impossible this task is, as he tosses and turns in
different failed combinations.
This time the joke's so visible you
almost need to look past it for the point. The differently-sized
plinths stand for art removed from it's environment, possibly for
hierarchy in general. They stand not just for all the plinths in all
the galleries, but all the perspex vitrines, the little bits of red
rope and watchful attendants. Those plinths need to be toppled.
But, inevitably, it may have been not
an artist but art theorist Clement Greenberg (champion of American
Abstract Expressionism) who functioned as their main Aunt Sally. John
Latham borrowed a copy of his 'Art and Culture'
from the St. Martins College library, held a party where guests were
encouraged to chew and spit out it's pages, collected these in a jar
then sought to return it. His contract was instead suspended.
But the attack was not always so
direct. The show says “placing and context for the artwork were
seen as key issues”. And this was true in both the immediate and
the general sense. Once people figured they knew what a Modernist
artwork was, making those elements absent was to deliberately
with-hold them. And conscious with-holding starts to take on an
almost totemic force. What's not there matters as
much as what is.
Art and Language's Terry Atkinson and
Michael Baldwin provide two anti-maps, 'Map of a Thirty-Six
Square Mile Surface Area of Pacific Ocean, West of Oahu'
(1967). It's entirely accurate but, being just of the surface of the
ocean, entirely blank. While the somewhat gloriously titled 'Map
Not To Indicate' (1967, below) is of the United States, but
showing only the states of Iowa and Kentucky. (Chosen, I suspect,
because both have borders which are simple straight lines.) Keith
Arnatt even called a work 'Art As An Act of Omission'
(1971).
“Artists were making blank films,”
said Lucy Lippard in 1969. “They locked galleries and practiced
doing nothing. They were denying conventional art by emphasising
emptiness, cancellation, the vacuum, the void, the dematerialised,
the invisible.” (Most probably about the similar American scene,
but it's too good not to quote.)
Art is Language
The second big influence, at least as
big as Duchamp, doesn't get mentioned by the show at all. Which is
probably because it wasn't itself an art movement. But then
Conceptualism was almost unique in being an art movement based in art
schools and academia. Normally, you went to art school only if you
wanted to join a band. Not here. Art and Language for example were
based at Coventry College of Art.
And they picked up on the then-current
academic interest in Structuralism and – increasingly, as the
Sixties progressed – Post-Structuralism. This was the notion that
language was not just slippery or open to abuse. It contended that
what language really described was itself, it was
a self-referential, self-defining system. Language was not a neutral
labelling device, providing tags by which we might describe the
world, but a mechanism by which we impose meanings upon it.
We're used to the idea of
institutionalisation, of how a powerful organisation can not just win
people's compliance but shape their thinking to its moulds. We're
used to the idea of this being achieved partly through language, by
devising terminology that people inevitably then adopt. Get them to
talk your talk and you're almost there. But this, it was contended,
was inherent - language always worked that way.
And more, it threw open the definition
of language - seeing it as a system of signs. The clothes you wear,
they're a language where you 'say' something about yourself to the
world. Road signs and traffic lights? Language. And visual art?
Language, too. Art, in seeming to spring from the individual genius
artists, is quite possibly ideology in it's neatest form. And visual
art may be the most pernicious form of ideology. Images appear to us
to be naturalised. Literally, and with it metaphorically, they seem
to be not saying anything.
So all this text as art was an attempt
to jog us into seeing art as text – to look in
the same critical way that we read. As the show
says of Art and Language, “language was to be used as art to
question art”. And as soon as you convert image back into words the
outline of a critique starts to appear. Supposing you read something
like “this painting is a portrait of a Seventeenth Century
landowner, at home with his possessions”? There's no real value
terms in the sentence, no 'feudal' or 'exploiter' or even 'wealthy'.
But doesn't it sound like it's already being set up for a social
critique, the lead-in to the John Berger chop?
Props Without Agit
The show seems keen to connect this
movement to the tumult of Sixties political events, devoting a long
wall to a timeline paralleling show openings with anti-Vietnam
demonstrations and the like. Those unwieldy years in the title are
themselves politically driven, spanning from the start of the Wilson
government to the end of the Callaghan.
And, unlike Post-Structuralism, Marx
is mentioned. Art and Language in particular
declared “a class analysis through the study of meaning in
discourse, and the practice of class struggle through didactic
activity”. The even said it in a work not so subtlety titled
'Dialectical Materialism' (1975). There's talk of
“an art that might reconnect with the world, and act within it”.
But is any of this earned? Like
Post-Structuralism, Marx was then fashionable in academia, a name to
cite if you wanted to be in the cognoscenti. You could carve a career
out of studying him. True, we shouldn't get too sweeping here. Many
took up academia as the best means available to combine earning a
living with spreading Marxist ideas. But all too often Marx, the man
whose axiom was “philosophers have only interpreted the world”,
became the subject of academic interpretation. And Marx without the
commitment to social engagement isn't Marx any more.
So, in the precise mirror image of
Post-Structuralism, Marx is mentioned when he probably shouldn't be.
It's like that Godard film with the five-minute shot of someone
eating an apple at the camera. Without the other guy reciting Marx.
There's something strangely rarified,
even hermetic about this world, those neat shelves of tapes, card
index files and aligned text. However rigorously insistent it is that
art as a whole should be critiqued, that art is a social product, it
seems strangely uninterested in that wider society. Look back at
'Map To Not Indicate'. Something it doesn't
indicate is the wave of civil rights, black power and anti-Vietnam
agitation then raging across the USA. In fact, it spotlights two
states where those movements weren't particularly strong.
The Sixties as we think of them, a
conflagration so bright and vibrant, are happening somewhere else.
It's almost entirely unlike the agit-prop art of Pete Kennard, so recently seen at the Imperial War Museum. And certainly it's stark monochrome anti-aesthetic
and it's incessant problematising is the polar opposite of hippie
subculture, with it's dayglo psychedelic posters and it's “do what
you feel” hedonism.
But what's perhaps most surprising is
how unlike it is to the other Dada-derived movement of the era.
Fluxus (originally Neo-Dada) had it's Festivals of Misfits, it's
iconoclastic happenings, it's pranks and stunts and jamming of high
culture. Fluxus was as messy, as convulsive, as Conceptualism was
neat and rigorous. Just compare those neat lines of aligned text to
the scrawl and collage of the 1963 Fluxus manifesto (below), before
you even get on to the content calling to “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY
FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART”.
The critique commonly (if wrongly) made
of Dada is that anti-art was still art. Whereas the critique of
Conceptualism, that anti-academia is still academia, that an
anti-textbook is still a textbook, is much more on the money. This
was, let's face it, scarcely inflammatory stuff.
Conceptualism's impersonation of
academia was simply too successful, the
infiltrators gone native. By rooting itself in art colleges and
public funding, it was genuinely trying to bite the hand that fed it.
But who else was it encouraging to do the same? You wonder what kind
of audience it considered itself to be aimed at. The attempts to
reach “the people” by the public artists of the 'Outside
In' show may have been flawed, and to a degree even
patronising. But at least there were some.
So have the Tate simply gone for the
wrong target, and it's Fluxus we need to be spirit guided by right
now? Certainly the summation of the manifesto is stirring stuff -
“FUSE the cadres of social, cultural and political revolutionaries
into united front & action.” But it's not just that it was
active in the political and cultural spheres simultaneously. It's
that it seized culture by it's lapels and shook, audaciously stoking
up people's imaginations. Dissent was made to seem not just necessary
but enticing and attractive – we were too cool for rule. That is
something we seem to have lost hold of in more recent years.
But it might be truer to say that the
two movements were the broken halves of what needed to be one thing.
Inheritors to a radical tradition, Fluxus was never as hippy-dippy or
bliss-out hedonistic as other Sixties scenes. But it was more
concerned with iconoclasm than incisiveness, more about motion than
substance. It was often accused of uncritically replicating that
radical tradition, of diligently reassembling the past and so making
yesterday's mistakes today. While Conceptualism was merely critical.
One frenzied, one lucid.
And perhaps those halves mirrored the two
wings of original Dada, the cerebral questioning of Duchamp on one
hand and the savage tracts of Grosz and Heartfield on the other.
Time For Strife
The show states “by the mid-1970s
there was a widespread recognition and institutional support for
conceptual art”. Which of course meant orthodoxies had to be
overthrown all over again. And in fact the final room, 'Action
Practice', is so different from all that’s come before
that it’s like walking into a different exhibition. As the name
suggests politics finally enters the frame, and as it does the
monochrome anti-aesthetic departs.
Why should that be? This segues into
another point. While earlier it seemed far from convincing this
wasn't the British wing of an international movement, making the
parameters of the show somewhat arbitrary, here the context does seem
more uniquely British.
In Britain 1968 had not been the
seismic year that it had in other countries. In France, they talk to
this day of soixante-huitards. While the Wikipedia article ‘Protests of 1968’ doesn’t even
contain a section on Britain. It's widely accepted that here the
social changes most associated with 'the Sixties' almost entirely
happened in the Seventies.
And the politics employed have moved
from the theoretical to the concrete. Two of the main works are
concerned with feminism and the troubles in Northern Ireland.
Feminism had not been shy of savvy media events, such as the 1970 Miss World protests. But it's backbone had been grassroots consciousness-raising groups, and it had devised the now-well-known slogan 'the
personal is political'. If much Sixties activism had been no more
than the radical chic and attention-grabbing antics it's detractors
claimed, feminism was one of the exceptions.
And those roots gave it a staying
power. Moreover, while it was as keen to expose and question unstated
norms as Conceptualism, it was not some dry and disengaged formal
enquiry – it was directly concerned with lived experience. (It was
only at this point I noticed how few women artists there'd been up
till now. So much for my political credibility!) Northern Ireland, in
some ways similarly, was a slow-burning issue – something which
refused to go away.
In fact, when you start to look at
Margaret Harrison's 'Homeworkers' (1977, above)
and Conrad Atkinson's 'Northern Ireland 1968 – May Day
1975' (1975/6) you can still see traces of Conceptualism's
dry formalism. Neither work is at all concerned with self-expression,
but with social enquiry – art as reportage. Harrison's subject is
the then-widespread practice to get women to perform piece work from
home, so she stitches in examples of the things those homeworkers
would assemble – buttons, stamps and jewellery.
While Atkinson juxtaposes quotes from
Loyalists, Republicans and British soldiers. One squaddie is reported
as wishing the Catholics were “wogs”, the easier to shoot them
with impunity. It's posted up without comment, it's for us to decide
how we feel about it. This is still some way from the heated
agit-prop of Pete Kennard. Yet in art the aesthetics matter. And
Harrison's work in particular looks mid-way between a collage and a
banner, messy and immediate, art as weapon in the culture wars.
Downhill To Here
Okay... so... that's what to make of it
was. But a more pertinent question might be, what
does it look like from here? Whatever the faults, I think the short
answer to that is “we look back up at it from downhill”.
Complaints made about this show often
suggest that this is where we got sold the magic beans. Conceptualism
was a bum deal where, seduced by fine-sounding film-flam, we swapped
aesthetics for empty gestures. At which point it normally gets
associated with Brit Art. For example the Stuckists, Brit Art's
perennial antagonists, use the slogan “death to conceptual art”
(variant above). But if people associate the two that's because they
dislike both, so figure they must be linked.
Art and Language always exhibited under
the group name. (Even if I've followed the show's convention and
credited individual artists here.) Can you imagine Brit Art doing
that? It marked the inevitable degeneration from artist as individual
genius to artist as celebrity. Art became the means to propagate
yourself as a brand, just as music had before it. Tracy Emin's bed
gets displayed in a gallery like Kurt Cobain's smashed guitar,
something come down from the world of fame which we can gaze on. It
was because of this that Brit Art could become the public face of
contemporary art.
But the face is not the body. Go to a
regular, not a well-known, contemporary gallery and chances are it
won't be Brit Art you'll see. And it's this art,
the crappy polaroids attached to some polysyllabic screed, which is a
debased parody of conceptualism. (See here for a particularly egregious example, but there's plenty of them.) It's like the
difference between piss and shit. Shit smells worse, but piss is more
prevalent.
“By deciding one area to be
the 'area of attention', then the area that is designed as 'not the
area of attention' will demand a sufficient amount of attention for
it to be acknowledged as 'not the area of attention'.”
...against...
“...anathema to an
understanding of a modernist compositional syntax that valued quality
of presence over process.”
The first is from Art and Language
describing their work 'Air Conditioning Show'
(1966/7). The second is, irony of ironies, from the show's own
indicia describing Art and Language. The first is sharp and witty and
above all does actually mean something. (It describes, for example,
the white surround on Malevich's 'Black Square' perfectly accurately.) The second... well I
don't think it means anything. But more to the point I don't
care. It's just so damned uninvolving. It
sounds like its saying something clever. So let's
just assume it is, rather than bother reading it again.
What's significant here is that this is
so unlike the pseudo-poetic luvvie speak so often associated with art
writing. It's prose is sterile and bloodless, the jargon of academia
without the content, the glossolalia of intellectualism. Ben Davis called IAE “the joke that forgot it was funny”.
Just like anti-art became art and anti-music became music, this
deadpan parody of discourse became discourse. Yet by remembering when
it was funny, by looking back up that slippery slope we rolled down,
perhaps we can get out of that lake of piss art is now in.
