Bag of Baghdad
By Patrick Thompson, 2007
Water color and ink on ledger paper, 0cm x 30cm

Battledress
By Pat Thompson, 2007
24cm x 36cm

Mejuan, 2008.
Barcelona, Spain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFcdgBbbbAc

Sars Palace
By Pat Thompson, 2003
Latex on found image, 5×25

Fear, copyright and a side order of mind-numbing “art”
Royal, 2008
Spraypaint on concrete

A public lecture by Fuyuki Kurasawa, given on March 28, 2008 at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

How is visuality — understood here as the mutual constitution of the visual and the social (W. J. T. Mitchell) — implicated in the mediated construction of instances of distant suffering in various parts of the world, and what are the effects of such implications? After a brief history of the visual representation of humanitarian crises by Euro-American civil society institutions, the presentation turns to a consideration of the perils and prospects of humanitarian visuality. In particular, I turn to an inescapable aporia of this visual economy, the simultaneous production and negation of the otherness of vulnerable subjects. Finally, the presentation discusses certain strategies for a critical visuality, notably a defence of the image’s interpretive ambiguity as well as practices of phenomenological reintensification and structuralist expansion of the image.

Three key concepts are worth keeping in mind:

1. Visual economy: The distribution and circulation of relations of power that constitute and structure the socio-visual field.
2. Distant suffering: Instances of mass suffering and extreme situational and structural violence that are perpetrated outside the North Atlantic region and which are represented visually via the media.
3. Humanitarian visuality: The set of visual conventions that are consistently reproduced in images of humanitarian crises over time.

Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves lead a group of reporters to visit ground zero at Trinity Site on Sept. 11. 1945
By Pat Thompson. 2006
Ink on braille paper, 20 x 20

Landscape is real-estate. Paintings of the “natural” world are travelogue posters evoking a time and place that no longer exists. The world is no longer divided between the town and country. The planet is now Uber-Urban and Sub-Urban. Today within the economic “reality” of global capitalism landscape painting is nothing more than the evocation of the large suburban lot, where you know you are rich when you cannot see or hear your neighbours. It is a home in the Disney World fantasy of the individual’s natural place surviving untouched and uncorrupted by the corporate collective communism of pollution. Landscape painting is the iconic mantra of private property that lives in denial of the growing global terror of universal communism and its ever rapidly growing collective property - pollution. It spreads like an uncontrollable Stalinist storm of fire and ice across our Mother Earth unchecked.

Holly Friesen in her painting “work in freefall” captures the hope and horror of Omnigothic Neofuturism. Here the horizontal cubism of an environmental Geurnica of the groin finds spiritual threads reminiscent of feudal triptych iconography. Her images are more than just an Orientalist idealization of earth spirits. The pastiche of materials in this painting moves human energy through time and space. This heretical work of visual art has a beginning/middle/and end. Words crawl up and down the flowing spines of hot and cold like kisses of wet spent love turning the viewer’s eye into a licking tongue filled with the sensual taste of raw lust set free from the constraints of consumer society where sex is endlessly sold like bland boiled potatoes to the hungry in a spiritual famine. Pass the salt, and if I could only have a little cabbage broth on the side, then I would be apocalyptically happy.

The raven to one side perhaps says it all. We are doomed. The pure virgin dragon of scientific discourse crashes. Its face is dismembered human fertility. It flaps its angelic wings of material promise, but down it goes anyway. The moon spits human kind back down to earth. Technology is swallowed. We fossilise into a whirling dance of orality as our mouths blister with the collective lies that silences our souls. Yet the cancerous flame of our wonton consumptive desire ignites a spark. With in the split alienation of our cloven existence a fire burns deep and it will rises up like a whore of words howling in the night. The yin and yang will twist and turn. The vaginal face of a wolf will speak. The landscape will burst alive with the language of fire.

Displayed in the Candela Raval Barcelona group show. Series:

A few months ago I took a fallen tile from the Barcelona metro. Days ago I spotted a vacant spot in this row of beautiful tiles near my home and decided to try and interact with the cool mathematics. I guess the best part of the story is that a few blocks from my place is a construction site and in one of the waste bins in the street there were empty bags of cement. In a few of them there was enough for me to concoct the right adhesive to put this up.

“Twenty days. Twenty thousand still images. A single message…. [T]he issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images.” Click here to see the film.

GRAFFITO

“Graffito” is singular; “graffiti” is a mass noun.
Graffito and Graffiti make the world go round.
Graffito is a little scratch, a groove on urban skin.
A record without a scratch, is simply called a mandolin.
Graffiti can be found in Tikal on a Mayan tomb,
In Hagia Sophia, like stretch marks on a womb.
A prolific graffito artist was sent to jail.
Was he a bastard for pinning the donkey on a tail?
When French soldiers carved their names,
During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign,
They were left without a fleet
When the pyramids were stained
An “adult ghetto” is a rigid state of mind:
A Cerebral slum, is scum without a spine.
Social distances are far and near
Stretch your leadership muscles to adhere
In the ghetto, you try to stay alive
Your socks don’t match, and you start to jive.
In the ghetto, your kids get shot at school
Your car does not drive because it has no fuel
In the ghetto, graffito can’t pay the bills
Graffiti feeds the needy when poverty kills
In the ghetto, your heart is frozen to death
Art is life support: it is your last breath
In the ghetto you can’t afford to bleed
Individual pluralism leads to greed.

- Oni the Haitian Sensation

I was going to keep quiet about this for a long while… I wanted to see if it was possible to find mass radical, exciting changes within Graffiti.

Today I broke down and decided to offer up some of the stuff that I’ve been doing just to feed your eyes with an alternative or two.

It’s the kind of art that I want to see in the street but where ever I look, it seems that there’s knuckle draggin’. Just variations of the wild style, tastelesssss broth of the 80s.

If you make art in the street I say to you, take the time to look at your city and really see it. There’s so much more. It’s deep and deeper if you care to look. Old School, Hard Core and Risk don’t have to play part. Take that blinged out ball and chain off and make art that transcends. Let’s not be afraid to reset a standard that was set and handed to us.

INTERVENTIONS:

POST COVERS:

One World
By Peru

I was invited to a group show in Vienna. My idea was against the theme, “Canada VS Spain”, by having a map of Pangea when they were both (and all others) the same place. There is too much fighting in the world already, its time to start helping each other, and create some unity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gud2Yu4bCw

Did you spot the construction workers on the towering buildings? According to the lyric writer, Chan Siu Kei, they deliberately included the shot to emphasize the human element of the city’s success story. But what I can see is that the clip starts with a rather unimaginative, postcard-like parade of skyscrapers, all the modern monuments of economic power, the images of Hong Kong as a city skylined by global capital. By the end of the clip, you see a parade of another sort, this time, a series of pop stars. The ending sequence strikes me with 2 thoughts: first, this particular visual celebration of Hong Kong is primarily a collaboration with pop culture, or pop music in particular. Second, if pop music is that important in making a celebration of Hong Kong possible, why doesn’t the clip include any cultural or pop venues?

The absence is conspicuous, but, on second thought, hardly unexpected. In fact, most if not all of the landmarks of Hong Kong are either super modern economic buildings pointing not only to the sky but also to the future, or archaic, colonial architectures accommodating what would normally be called tradition or history. The second type would strike us less frequently, but often sharply, that is when they are under threat. Like the recent high profiled campaign to keep the Queen’s Pier in Hong Kong. It seems this global city can only be imagined predominantly in terms of the future and occasionally in terms of the past, in other words, the imaginaries of Hong Kong are largely in terms of money and tradition, in terms of construction and destruction. And both academics and activist groups also privilege these two types of architectures, the economic ones and the heritage ones, as the prime site of their analytical concern or preservation efforts, of their understanding of contestation and resistance.

This presentation is not about these structures. It is about what Sophie Watson calls ‘mundane and commonplace spaces of the city where people simply muddle through or rub along’ (2006: 16). It is about pop venues, an important site in cultural industries, as well as, I think, a heavily understudied field in cultural studies. my concern is the relations between public space, in this case pop venues – so between public space, affect and the production of identity through the lens of collective memory. In Saskia Sassen’s words, this is an attempt to ground the soul of the city or a fragment of that soul in the materiality of the city i.e. pop venues. And among the venues, I am particularly interested in the Hong Kong Coliseum, generally considered THE pop venue in Hong Kong, or the local temple of a global popular culture. The massive concerts it has been hosting are a major source of collective memory to the people of the city.

In 1997, the handover year, Ackbar Abbas published a book called ‘culture and the politics of disappearance’, in which he argues convincingly how the emergence of local Hong Kong identity is always intertwined with the condition of its disappearance. He says: “The imminence of its disappearance, I would argue, was what precipitated an intense and unprecedented interest in Hong Kong culture. (…) But then the cause of this interest in Hong Kong culture - 1997 - may also cause its demise.” (Abbas 1997:7)

In the post-1997 decade, particularly in the run-up to 10-year anniversary, Hong Kong culture, particularly pop culture, is characterized not so much by the politics of disappearance but by a politics of reappearance, in the form of comeback/reunion concerts. Older pop stars who have retired or simply fired by the cultural industry reappeared in full glory. And bands that broke up or became inactive staged high-profiled reunion gigs. And all these comeback or reunion concerts inevitably took place in the Hong Kong Coliseum.

The most talked about, the most intriguing of which is probably Sam Hui. Sam Hui, arguably the godfather of cantopop, or the local pop genre and industry, was the first to host concerts at the Hong Kong Coliseum. That was 1983. 21 years later, he launched a series of comeback concert. It became an instant hit, or some would call instant hype. In total, 38 concerts were staged, while almost half a million people witnessed Sam Hui’s comeback. And the venue was of course the Hong Kong Coliseum. There have also been rumours that he might again stage some concerts in conjunction with the 10th anniversary. A local music critic attributed his comeback success to the local need of collective memory.

But my question is: yes, it is about collective memory. But if all these concerts were not held in the Hong Kong Coliseum, would they still function the same way? Or equally efficiently? If all these comeback, reunion concerts symbolize certain articulations of a Hong Kong bygone but not quite, I just wonder if they were not held in the Hong Kong Coliseum, these concerts might become more a reminder of a Hong Kong bygone, even the same old pop temple was no longer there. Just like a school reunion without the school.

In a way, my questioning is not unlike Susan fast’s reflection on her experience with live aid in London 1985. (2006) She was thinking to her the best moments of that concert would be Queen’s performance. But then all the written accounts she came across did not carry any reference to Queen at all. She starts to ask the most fundamental question: ‘whose memory is it?’ (2006: 138) and if this is a legitimate and relevant question, then my question would be: whose collective memory? And even: why is collective memory possible if our individual memories are so selective? I argue the answer, or part of the answer, lies in the venue, literally and figuratively.

The nostalgia, the emotive expression of collective memories and the articulation of cultural identity requires not only the software of pop music, but also the hardware; after all it requires a space, a public space, a venue for the people to gather to confirm/affirm they share the same memories, to confirm/affirm the emotions, to confirm/affirm the collectivity, to confirm/affirm the identity. For the identity to be iterated and reiterated, the venue has to remain the same – far from disappearance, the venue may exude a strong sense of persistence, of defying disappearance. This is perhaps also why Hannah Arendt draws our attention to what she calls the ‘permanence of public space’. In many ways, Borges is right when he said ‘the picture of the city that we carry in our mind is always slightly out of date.’ On the other hand, the permanence of certain public spaces, like the Hong Kong Coliseum, is to comfort the city dwellers with the feelings that something stays essentially the same, i.e. extending from some recent past to some near future. I think this is what city dwellers need to keep the picture of their city not really out of date, but contemporary.

Central thesis of this inquiry, I venture to say, is: the venue is the culture. Of course this is meant to provoke my own thinking, to hopefully develop an argument, more than a statement. For that matter, I do suspect we can always turn the thesis around to claim: the culture is the venue. In the end probably what I will argue is simply: the venue and the culture are mutually constitutive. In any case, the observations I present to you this morning are preliminary, and should be taken as such. In the following I will first attempt a sketch of the development of pop venues in Hong Kong and try to connect the venues to the larger cultural formations of the city. After that I will explore some dimensions of the triangular complex between space, affect and identity.

1/ the first phase would be what I call the pre-pop venue years. This is the time when you asked where a local pop venue is, people would give you the ‘what are you talking about?’ kind of response. To be fair, the British Hong Kong Government did make some efforts. The inauguration of the Hong Kong City Hall in 1962 was heralded as a major breakthrough in providing the city with cultural facilities. The venue, however, followed largely the colonial logic and played host to cultural events and genres privileged by local elite and expatriate circles. During this phase, there seemed to be a dislocation of affect and identity. What I mean by dislocation is that the building itself, through colonial education, was branded to for instance my generation of Hong Kong students as a marker or even icon of the city, something we identified Hong Kong with. On the other hand, most of the local population would have never stepped inside and experienced the space and its cultural activities. You see there on the top is a typical old textbook image of the city hall, isolated, dominant, and proud. 4 decades later, it’s dwarfed by his much more powerful neightbours, a very visual account of the change in Hong Kong.

2/ late 70s and early 80s: saw the appearance of first the Academic Community Hall (1978) and then Queen Elizabeth Stadium (1980). It was also the time when colonial elite culture was being contested, when local pop music, the so-called cantopop, gradually established itself as a major musical genre and market in the colonial city. However, it was also a market characterized more by a ‘workshop’ logic in the sense that pop stars as we know them later in the pop history of Hong Kong were not yet produced. As both of these pop venues were able to host respectively 1300 and 3600 audience, they were perfect locations for smaller concerts. In that sense, I would argue that this phase also saw the emergence of the ‘collective’ in terms of memory and emotion, that local audience started to have a sense of gathering together to share some common experience. But given the smaller venues and smaller gatherings, such occasions remained diverse and instead of THE collective memory, there was a collection of collective memories. It was not yet massive and monolithic enough to elevate the collective into collective identity, at least not in the sense of a Hong Kong culture and identity. My contemporaries, for instance, remembered those venues more in terms of those folk song days, the student era etc.

3/ 80s till now – then came the definitive venue, the Hong Kong Coliseum. It was opened on 27 April 1983. With an audience capacity of 12,500, much larger than QES or A.C. Hall, it ushered the experience of cultural activity to a different intensity and collectivity. According to 2005-6 figures, more than 1,750,000 people attended activities held at the Hong Kong Coliseum, compared to 400,000 at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium (2006-7 figures). This was the phase when local pop music was maturing and canonizing, while the industry saw the full implementation of the, let’s say, ‘factory’ system when stars were largely seen to be manufactured, packaged and sold on a massive scale. The Coliseum became the venue not only to perform stardom, but also to produce stardom. And it was and still is the only venue. Even today, new stars must pass through this temple of pop to be fully baptized into stardom. Collective memory is gradually changing from an experiential, even existential thing, into something expected. And audience who go to a Coliseum concert these days do not only know that they would collect memories; they expect to have strong emotions and they are also willing to own records of their emotions and memories. For instance, dvd recordings of live concerts are one of the bestselling pop genres in Hong Kong. Guy Debord once describes spectacle as capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. In this case, the image has also become another form of capital, that circulates, to be owned by people who have seen the spectacle. Hong Kong Coliseum’s monopoly over audience’s expectation and therefore fulfillment of collective memory turns this unique space into a producer of Hong Kong culture and Hong Kong identity. The city has its pop temple now.

4/ post-Coliseum – Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre (1997), Asia-World Arena, West Kowloon Project. Up till now, none has offered any serious challenge to the function of Hong Kong Coliseum in the production of collective memory and identity.

Now let’s zoom in onto the Hong Kong Coliseum and attempt some further deliberations on the spatial use of Hong Kong in terms of pop music:

1/ lack of outdoor venues. As you may have noticed, all the pop venues mentioned earlier are indoor spaces. However enjoyable these spaces are, however significant the Hong Kong Coliseum remains to the local people, they are generally framed by western media and local English media, most notably the south china morning post as a lack – a lack of venues for international stars, particularly the lack of large outdoor venues presumably favoured by western mega stars or pop festivals. Sometimes this discourse of lack conflates with the general lack of Hong Kong, in terms of competitiveness, suggesting its imminent losing out to other Asian metropolises. Sometimes it conflates with the lack of Hong Kong or Chinese capacity to party, to do culture the Dionysus way. This critique can be understood at least both as Eurocentric and male-centred. Eurocentric, because it imposes western experience and values onto another locality, while ignoring local specificities. I wonder how many Hong Kong people enjoy outdoor venues? Enjoy standing all the time amidst heat and sweat? Male-centred, because outdoor pop festival kind of space, so celebrated as part and parcel of western pop culture, is not particularly woman friendly. To begin with, Asian women need to put tons of sun block before daring an outdoor pop event.

2/ unique position of Hong Kong Coliseum. It’s not only a public space, but also a factory (literally, a production site) of collective memory and a temple of affect and identity. Among all venues, Hong Kong Coliseum has not only the mechanics but also the magic to invest those collective memories with collective affect and identity. On the other hand, it being the canon of pop stardom, the temple of pop music, it also hierarchizes, uniforms or even monopolizes our memories, while the time of A.C. Hall and QES time, for instance, would have more potentials of multiplicity or collectivity in the plural. I wonder how the dominant position of Hong Kong Coliseum may impact on the writing of Hong Kong’s cultural history.

3/ separation of space, affect and identity: Coliseum is inside, confined, forever connected to the city’s entertainment, leisure, and fun. By and large, Hong Kong only has inside, confined pop venues, but no outside, public ones. Whereas outside venues would always be linked to major pop concerts/festivals such as Woodstock, band aid, live8 in the west, where pop and politics and activism form allies, being visible, being part of the public space in the city, there is a clear demarcation in Hong Kong that outside venues such as Victoria Park can be used for political rally (RTHK fora) but not really pop events, and inside venues such as Coliseum is only for entertainment, and invisible, not directly part of the larger public space.

4/ claims to the city. Which makes Saskia Sassen’s question on claims to the city more complicated. Sassen observes outdoor festival such as gay parade or Caribbean street walk not only as a moment of showing off, but as certain groups of people laying claim to the city. But if a city has developed a habit of celebrating its pop events indoors, how are we to understand its politics? Is claiming a city not only public but necessarily visible?

Concluding:

• The issue of public space, affect and identity: certain space/venue has the function to invest memory with affect and therefore identity
• The issue of collective memory: must a city confine its space of collective memories in order to have collective memory and identity? Is it productive or destructive or both?
• The issue of space: argue for more studies on cultural space/infrastructure, not only cultural product/text

To end, I would like to show you a live performance of a song I did some years ago. It is called ‘Yan Hong Guan’. Roughly translated as crying in the Coliseum. And this was a concert taking place in the Coliseum itself. For those who read Chinese and familiar with the venue, you would know it’s a play on the name of the Hong Kong Coliseum. The lyrics read:

Those who have ever loved, come and sing together
Clap hands with thousand others
The florescent sticks were bright, so are our memories
When we recall that night, the two of us tried so see whose encore was the loudest
Those who have ever possessed, have stepped down
I am still expecting the unexpected
If our shouting is loud enough, the star will come back
I don’t believe ours will become a concert without encore
Some say the song is a tribute to the Coliseum, some also think this is about Hong Kong.

Draft version: Based on a presentation given at the Rethinking Cultural Economy, Annual CRESC Conference, 5-7 September 2007, Manchester

Trickle Down Economics