frieze blog

Interview: William E. Jones

2013-05-13T22:36:12+00:00

By Steven Cairns

William E. Jones, Actual T.V. Picture (2013)

Steven Cairns: Your recent video Actual T.V. Picture (2013) features the transistor developed in the 1940s for electronics and communications, as well as missile guidance systems and television. Why did you choose the technology as a focus?

William E. Jones: I chose to combine the Vietnam bombing footage, which is chiefly green, and the television advertisement footage, which is chiefly red, because the alternation of complimentary colours creates an intense visual effect, but also because the subject matter of the two sequences is intrinsically linked. They both present images of technology. The Vietnam footage and the TV advert are also from around the same time, the late 1960s, when I was a child.

Actual T.V. Picture (2013)

SC: How important are the biographical links?

WEJ: : A lot of my work – maybe all of it – comes from personal connections. As a child, I watched so much TV that my mother was concerned about me. What did I see? Anyone who turned on a TV set in the late ’60s would have seen the Vietnam War. It was possibly the last time when media coverage of a war was intensive and relatively uncensored. Images from Vietnam played an important role in turning the American electorate against the war. Actual T.V. Picture was completed on 28 January 2013, exactly 40 years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which brought an end to official US involvement in the Vietnam War. The end of the war was a victory for the Left in the US, but it was also the beginning of the end of the Left’s unity, because there was no longer a single galvanizing issue to rally around.

Bay of Pigs (2012)

SC: Why are there very few people present in Actual T.V. Picture and none in your other recent work Bay of Pigs (2012)? They both focus on the machinery of war rather than the victims of it.

WEJ: : It’s a common strategy in modern times for any country, and the US in particular, to remove suffering human bodies from the officially sanctioned representations of war. After the debacle of Vietnam, I think the ideal for the US became waging war with advanced technology and in places so removed from media attention that atrocities and other misdeeds could go on without the public knowing much about them. New technologies offer the promise of conducting war by remote control. The latest example is the drone, in fact a killer robot, which has recently been approved for use against domestic targets. Actual T.V. Picture shows a stage in the progress of this logic.

The visuals in Bay of Pigs come from a Cuban film about another American military debacle, the attempted US invasion of Cuba in 1961. The source is a ‘captured’ film in the CIA Film Library, now part of the National Archives. The audio comes from one of many shortwave radio broadcasts communicating with spies in the field via a ‘numbers station’, so named because its messages are sets of numbers. In 1995, the station heard in Bay of Pigs was the subject of a case in US federal court, the only time a numbers station has been publicly discussed in an official setting. Intelligence gathered by spies possibly using numbers stations brought the Americans’ plans to the attention of Cuba long before the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Bay of Pigs (2012)

SC: Why do you choose to work with archive material?

WEJ: : Historical distance from the content gives me licence to be freer with the material. And, with time, certain things become clearer. I’m often trying to investigate what I remember from childhood but didn’t understand at the time. For example, as a child I associated the name Bay of Pigs with the ’60s slang for policemen. I suppose I am a rather slow learner, because I usually feel unable to respond to contemporary events directly and in a timely way. Also, the US government has a lot of historical material available for free to whomever can find it in their vast archives. State archives are not simple; there are lots of contradictions and gaps in what might seem to be monolithic institutions at the very centre of power.

Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012)

SC: Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012) is a state film of a different type reworked for a law enforcement instructional video.

WEJ: : I have a collection of law enforcement instructional films, a subgenre of filmmaking that interests me a lot, because these films expose the practices of law enforcement and consequently are not intended for the general public. In Shoot Don’t Shoot, the soundtrack implicates the viewer in a police officer’s decision whether or not to shoot someone. The training scene I appropriated repeats with a variation: in the first instance, the suspect – ‘a black man wearing a pinkish shirt and yellow pants’ – is unarmed; in the second, he is armed. In neither case is the officer supposed to shoot him.

Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012)

It often happens that I have material for a very long time and don’t know what to do with it, then suddenly something occurs to me, and I can edit it. In the case of Shoot Don’t Shoot, I felt a sense of urgency after the death of Trayvon Martin last year. This was a typically American tragedy that called up questions about armed white people and their attitudes toward people of colour. I live in a city where there is no majority, where people from many different backgrounds, linguistic and ethnic, have to get along somehow in public spaces. I get the sense that the rest of America isn’t quite so far along in dealing with these questions, yet at the same time Los Angeles has a paramilitary police force governing what is still quite a segregated city. I hope the material I choose provides an opportunity to reflect on that.

Quizoola!

2013-05-03T11:01:16+00:00

By Agnieszka Gratza

It’s 4am and I’m struggling to stay awake while two people made up as clowns throw questions and answers each other’s way. ‘How do spark plugs and three-prong plugs work?’ I try to process this but it’s more than my battered brain can handle at this hour. The show began practically on the stroke of midnight and I’ve got 20 more hours to get through. Welcome to Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola! in its extended 24-hour run. This is the first time that the show, which normally lasts six hours and 12 at most, will go on for this long. Four hours into it, I’ve come to think in Q&A mode. (‘Am I a glutton for punishment?’ ‘Clearly.’)

Of course, no one is actually forcing me to stay for the full span of the performance. Spectators are free to come and go as they please. I could go home, get some rest and come back, suitably refreshed and in the mood for some more entertainment. Sticking it out seems important, though, not just as a personal endurance test (my only prior experience of durational performance on this scale has been Ragnar Kjartansson’s 12-hour Bliss (2011), staged as part of Performa 11 at the Abrons Art Center in New York, and I didn’t make it to the end) but because staying up all night and collectively marking time is part of what this whole exercise appears to be about.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s 12-hour Bliss (2011), Performa 11, New York

And then I find it genuinely hard to pull myself away. At its best, Quizoola! really is quite entertaining, by turns moving, poetic, thought-provoking, crackling with wit, a seemingly endless supply of it; even when inspiration is flagging and performers fall back on set phrases and tired tropes, resort to scatological jokes and sexual innuendo to grab our attention, the spectacle of seeing people struggle to come up with an answer on the spot, occasionally slip up only to bounce back again, show their weaknesses and thus lay themselves open to our scrutiny makes for compelling viewing.

The clown make-up partly obscures facial expressions, rendering them both inscrutable and overblown. There is something vaguely disquieting, even sinister, to this theatrical front that affords a measure of anonymity and puts performers at some remove from the audience. A simple but effective way of physically demarcating the space in which the game of question and answer unfolds consists in a garland of white light bulbs, loosely strung together with wire to form a luminous circle around the two chairs on which alternating pairs of performers – drawn from a pool of six, three men and three women, allowing for several permutations – sit for much of the time. Above them a red neon sign reads ‘Quizoola’.

In one of the passing self-referential comments that draw attention to what we are seeing, a performer remarks that they seem to be in somebody else’s set. And so indeed they are. The white room, virtually unadorned except for the aforementioned props and a few opulent touches, such as mirrors, chandeliers and French windows, could be the setting for, say, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis-Clos (No Exit, 1944). The minimalist décor was in fact created for The Salon Project, re-enacted at the Barbican by the Scotland-based company Untitled Projects as part of the biennial SPILL Festival of Performance in April.

Three days before the start of Quizoola!, I found myself pacing that very room expectantly in full Victorian regalia, my hair all puffed out and piled up, trying not to stumble on my train, while members of the Untitled Projects company were milling about with other guests sporting formal period attire. We had been asked to give our measurements ahead of time, so that a matching outfit could be selected for us from among the company’s treasure trove of costumes covering a period of 30 years, from 1885 to 1915, during which the Parisian salon waxed and waned. The period costumes, not unlike the clown make-up, were intended as a ‘device to destabilize the audience and provide a remove from their everyday selves’ as well as granting the ‘freedom to converse and think in different ways’, to quote one company member.

Although the audience, thus hurriedly transformed by skilled hair stylists and make-up artists, was centre-stage in this piece of immersive theatre, in practice not enough time had been factored in to allow the guests to get on with the business of conversation. Left to our own devices, in the rare moments when we were not being force-entertained with mini-lectures by invited speakers, piano recitals and a graphic video purportedly alluding to World War I, which brought about the demise of the salon culture, we were doing just fine. As the three-hour event drew to a close and everyone began to unwind, I was introduced to a couple of aspiring salonnières, who promptly extended an invitation to ‘informal gatherings’ of their own.

Postcard from Moscow

2013-04-19T16:40:34+00:00

By Amy Sherlock

Vadim Zakharov (artist) and Udo Kittelmann (curator) at their exhibition 'The Last Stroll through Elysian Fields', Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1995

Moscow seems to have been in the news for all of the wrong reasons recently. The trial of opposition activist, Alexey Navalny, accused of embezzling state funds but guilty of speaking out against President Putin began in Kirov last week; there continues to be intrigue in the case of Alexander Perepilichnyy, the businessman who sought refuge in the UK after denouncing corrupt state officials to Swiss prosecutors and dropped dead whilst jogging near his Surrey home late last year; and, last month, another self-exiled anti-Putin billionaire, Boris Berezovsky, committed suicide in London after having lost to Roman Abramovich in what was supposedly the most expensive legal case involving individuals in history.

We know that there are a lot of Russian billionaires in London; they have become an accepted, if in some quarters begrudged, stratum of the capital’s society. And we have an idea of what people are doing in Moscow, or at least what people are buying in Moscow, now that it has opened itself up so brazenly to the desires of consumer capitalism. (The most surreal moment of my recent trip there was window-shopping at Dior whilst looking across Red Square to Lenin’s tomb.) But the Russian Federation also preserves a certain sense of mystery: Moscow remains a city that feels slightly furtive and unknown.

Udo Kittelmann, Stella Kesaeva and Vadim Zakharov at the Russian Pavilion press conference held at the Stella Foundation

I was in town last month for the press conference announcing that Vadim Zakharov will be representing Russia in the national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The pavilion is to be curated by Udo Kittelmann, Director of the State Museums in Berlin: the first time in the pavilion’s 99-year history that a non-Russian is to hold the role. The conference and dinner was held at the Stella Foundation, whose director, the eponymous Stella Kesaeva (wife of billionaire tobacco magnate Igor Kesaev) is the pavilion’s commissioner. Kesaeva’s appointment raised hackles in certain quarters when it was first announced three years ago, but the 2011 pavilion, curated by Boris Groys and dedicated to Andrei Monastyrski and the Collective Actions group was very well received, seeming a timely reminder of the participatory and performative practices of late-Soviet Conceptualism. Perhaps often overshadowed on the international (and, indeed, domestic) stage by the better known Fluxus or Art & Language movements, this staking a claim for the group’s significance came at a moment of renewed interest in participatory practices and the turn towards performance and the ephemeral that we have seen in recent years (not to mention a corollary suspicion of the art-object-as-commodity, following 2008’s economic crash).

Collective Actions, Pictures, Moscow Region, February 11, 1979

The work of Collective Actions is fascinating because of the very specific economic, social and political context that it grew out of. The greatest collective, the ‘workers of the world unite’, promised by Socialism was a long-since failed Utopia by the late 1970s and early ’80s, and Collective Actions were working out what collaboration might mean in a symbolic economy in which values were shifting and confusing, as the ideological tenets that underpinned them collapsed. Collectivism cast a long shadow over Soviet art-making, right from the early avant-gardes, who aspired to free art from the bourgeois context in which it had come to be mired and to create an aesthetic language that would not only be accessible to all, but that would also shape the new society. Zakharov is of a younger generation of the Moscow school than Monastyrski and has been living mostly in Germany since around 1990, but he is not being glib when he tells me that there is too much of the ‘I’ in most artistic production today when there needs to be a return to the ‘we’. For Zakharov, the artwork is a process of collaboration and dialogue – he dislikes the term ‘curator’, and shuns the implication that Kittelmann will be merely arranging his works according to a preconceived schema. Rather, the pavilion, which will host a new commission, has evolved in ‘partnership’. Kittelmann and Zakharov are long-time collaborators, having met in Germany in 1988 and been involved in projects together since then (notably 2003’s Monument to Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt, the philosopher’s city of birth).

Vadim Zakharov, Monument to Theodor W.Adorno, 2003, installed in Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz, Frankfurt

Much has changed in Moscow since Zakharov first left the city. The Stella Foundation itself is, in no small way, the product of the rampant individualism unbridled by perestroika. Across town, the same is true of Garage, the arts foundation of Dasha Zhukova (partner of the aforementioned Mr. Abramovich), with which comparisons are inevitable. Currently located in Gorky Park, in a specially commissioned temporary pavilion designed by Shigeru Ban, Garage will move to the newly renovated and expanded site of the park’s former Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) later this year.

Where Stella Kesaeva is resolute in her championing of Moscow Conceptualism, the programme at Garage is more consciously international-user-friendly: when I visited they were showing Philipe Parreno’s 2012 film Marilyn, first presented at the Fondation Beyler, Basel, last year; later this month the space will be taken over by the fifth edition of the Museum of Everything. Marilyn: no need for a surname; no need for translation; a figure that transcends borders and eras (not to mention curtains, even iron ones). The film is a beautiful and melancholic attempt to trace the contours of her ghost as it pans through the empty set of a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the actress lived in the 1950s. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of her words, modulated by a computer and an enormous robotic arm that copies out snippets of the handwriting in an endless loop. The suggestion that all individual acts can be replicated according to set of algorithms or computational formulae prevents Parreno’s elegy from becoming saccharine: but the whole affair is as straightforwardly easy on the eye as the eponymous absent heroine.

Philipe Parreno, Marilyn, 2012, film still

As to what is going on the ground with regard to artists currently working in the city, it would seem that neither Garage nor Stella Art Foundation are the places to find out. And whilst I don’t doubt that each organization’s professed intent to develop the city’s cultural scene is both genuine and necessary, given the absence of any significant state investment, there seems to be a divorce between their aspirations to raise Moscow’s cultural profile internationally and the lack of any young contemporary Russian artists in their programmes. Monastyrski and Zhakarov are artists from a provocative, highly intelligent and perhaps slightly overlooked school and Kaeseva’s Venice pavilions are a worthy corrective in this regard, but a back-to-back double whammy of late-Soviet conceptualists will inevitably beg questions about their heir apparent (or lack thereof?). Kaeseva, who will also commission the pavilion in 2015, refused to be drawn on the question of whether there are any artists currently working in Moscow that might take up the baton. A slightly disheartening statistic in this regard – of the handful of (all male) Russian artists that will be exhibited in Massimiliano Gioni’s main exhibition, none were born later than 1973. The number is up on 54th Biennale, where the single (young, female) Russian representative in Bice Curiger’s main exhibition was Anya Titova, though her contribution was unmemorable, and she seems to have since dropped off the radar. Ilya Kabakov, also one of the leading figures in the Moscow conceptualist group (though, a long-term US resident, he has by now been making work outside of Russia for far longer than he did in it) is by some margin the most expensive living Russian artist (after the sale, in January this year, of a collection of 40 of his paintings to none other than Roman Abramovich). So where is the post-Soviet generation?

Rendering of the new Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Gorky Park, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA on the site of the former Vremena Goda restaurant (location shown on photograph from 1970)

Both in the Russian Pavilion and at Garage, there seems to be a piecemeal reclamation of the Soviet past at work, which cannot but feel slightly perverse coming from those who profited most from the USSR’s dismantling. Garage started out inhabiting the shell of a 1920s bus terminal designed by the constructivist architects Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov. Its new Gorky Park site will preserve many of the original restaurant’s 1960s prefab features. The renovation is being carried our by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, and it may be Koolhaas himself whose statement about the project on the gallery’s website best summarises Kaeseva’s project too, in all its ambivalence: ‘We were able […] to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them.’

Correction: this article has been updated from the original text, which incorrectly stated that the work of two dead Russian-born artists would be included in the main exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale. The artists in question, Hans Josephsohn and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, were born in East Prussia. frieze apologises for any confusion.

New Directors New Films 2013

2013-04-16T13:00:21+00:00

By Ela Bittencourt

Stories We Tell (Directed by Sarah Polley, 2012)

New Directors New Films (NDNF), a festival run jointly by Film Society at Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has garnered positive attention this year as a counter-weight to the bigger and hipper Sundance and South By Southwest (SXSW). While some critics complain that the latter two embrace the mainstream, the NDNF remains eclectic, favoring artistic filmmaking.

Jiseul (2012), directed by O Muel, is one example of a film with a distinct authorial voice: An historical epic, shot in black and white and framed at times as a macabre folk tale, it captures the true story of an uprising of armed Korean civilians against their government in 1948. From the absurdist scenes that, through carefully juxtaposed images, draw parallels between an ignoble, stupid army commandant and a slaughtered pig sensuously dipped in an outdoor cauldron, to the long, ethnographic conversations amongst farmers hiding in a dark cave, featuring actors in an ensemble, and finally to the painterly vast winter landscapes, Jiseul gives ample evidence of O Muel’s background in theater and in fine arts. Even though the film’s final scenes borrow pathos from socialist kitsch, its visual power is undeniable, with some shots like a war photograph springing to life.

Jisuel (Directed by O Muel, 2012)

In Küf (The Mold, 2012), Turkish director Ali Aydin draws inspiration from Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), Aydin slows down time to coax drama from infinitely small moments. Two Ceylan actors star in Aydin’s film: Ercan Kesal as Basri, a middle-aged epileptic rail track inspector, whose son disappeared in Istanbul 20 years earlier; and Muhammet Uzuner as Murat, a blasé provincial police chief, who comes across as a spokesman for the oppressors but takes pity on Basri and helps him resolve the case of his son’s disappearance. The two play the game of helpless but dogged citizen versus omnipotent functionary with the deflated sadness of Chekhov. There are rumblings of the empire – Turkey’s vastness, if no longer glory – in the passing trains. The character of Cemil, played by Tansu Biçer, is most Dostoevskian: a drunken apparatchik-nihilist, would-be rapist and blackmailer, who is nevertheless so lame he inspires pity when he tries to coerce Basri into concealing his carousing.

Küf (The Mold, directed by Ali Aydin, 2012)

Some may find Küf overly metaphysical: there is the ticking clock on Basri’s wall, the unending tracks and sepulchral tunnels. But the imagery is pared down by bleak humour: When Basri arrives at the morgue he is handed a wooden box that resembles a crate. Ugly and prosaic, the box serves as an anti-climactic incarnation of Basri’s crushed hopes.

Blue Caprice (2012), a debut by French-born director Alexander Moore, boasts a dense, gray palette, particularly in the long driving scenes, where the car shines in the heavy rain like a gleaming fetish. Similarly to light-boxes, the image conveys both darkness and luminosity: Perfect for a story about two drive-by shooters, whose vigilante sprees are fueled by a delusion so powerful it borders on spiritual. Based on facts, Blue Caprice features two stellar performances: Isaiah Washington as John, a man who adopts Lee, a young boy abandoned in the Caribbean, played by Tequan Richmond. Divorced and stripped of custodial rights to his own children, John brings Lee to America, a faded land of opportunity. Lee’s life on the fringes – no school or legal status – renders the story’s close-third-person point of view claustrophobic, as the mutual adoration between mentor and pupil slips into psychological abuse. While the film may raise questions of racial stereotyping, the inscrutable logic with which Lee is ensnarled by John’s psychosis extends the circle of victims to the young shooter. As thoughtless and cruel as Lee’s random shootings are, Moore also shows the injustice done to the boy: a poignant message as America debates its promiscuousness with guns but also its disproportionate numbers of incarcerated youth.

In Stories We Tell (2012), a film about filmmaking, Canadian director Sarah Polley dismantles her mis-en-scène to then put it back together. Polley plays herself as an anxious seeker-director constructing a docudrama: She stages her half-siblings and gives script directions to her adoptive father, who acts as her story’s narrator. Her ‘actors’ step in and out of character to comment on the discomforts and oddities of playing a role, particularly acting as if the divergent, at times ambiguous threads they weave about their private lives can neatly coalesce into a ‘plot.’

Polley’s narrative exercise has a serious purpose: She is on a quest to find her biological father, a purpose we discover halfway through the film, after she leads us down a few dead-end trails. Allowing mysteries to emerge and to multiply becomes part of the viewing pleasure. At other times, Polley’s stance tilts towards manipulative: After the early intoxication at finding each other, biological daughter and father, who turns out to be a playwright, butt heads over whose story gets to be told – their ‘authorial’ rights. Polley gets her way, but to some extent underplays the enduring folly, and lasting albeit doomed mutual attraction, of her mother’s extramarital affair. Nevertheless, one couldn’t ask for a more engaging, self-mocking tyrant than Polley, whose intelligence and wit are contagious.

Not all films featured at NDNF were as highly self-aware in their stylistic or narrative approaches. L’Intervalo (The Interval, 2012), directed by Leonardo Di Constanzo, is descended from a long line of films mining the criminal underworld, in this case the Italian mafia, for fictive material, viewed through a minutely observed social lens. More than Gomorrah (2008), the famous film by Matteo Garrone that L’Intervalo harks back to, it distils mafia group dynamics to a microcosm: The film’s action takes place in one day, during which a young boy Salvatore holds hostage a local girl, to prevent her from going out with a man from a feuding clan. Prisoner and guard, Salvatore and Veronica test and antagonize each other, only to finally appreciate how similarly trapped they are in an environment where, belied by the bustle of modest working-class domiciles, much in their young lives is beyond their control.

Die Welt (The World, directed by Alex Pitstra, 2012)

Die Welt (The World, 2012) is one of the films that voice discontent of the trans-national Generation Y that sees its dreams crushed in the wake of global instability. In the film, Dutch director Alex Pitstra mines his Tunisian roots, finding the country’s economy bankrupt, and its young people dispossessed, jobless and restless, after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. From the witty opening scene, in which young man Abdallah breaks into a rant about Hollywood’s cultural brainwashing, to the grotesque finale that finds his escape attempt to the West thwarted, his raft inadvertently washed ashore back in Tunisia, there is much in this tart debut to celebrate. Part cinéma-verité chronicle of the vagaries and richness of life in an Arab country caught between an uncertain future and dying traditions, and part hurried, MTV-inflected montage, _Die Welt_’s unevenness may be one of the most refreshing aspects of this year’s NDNF. The fluidity and range of storytelling and editing within the picture demonstrates young filmmakers free of the strictures of style. Implicit in their choices seems to be the hope that audiences may embrace experimentation.

In Search of Harmony Korine

2013-04-12T14:58:24+00:00

By Charlie Fox

Here’s Harmony Korine on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997, aged 23, looking like a teenage Walter Benjamin with the voice of a spooked cartoon puppy. We sneak in as he’s mid-sentence, ears cocked, audience gawping: ‘You know James Joyce, Ulysses?’ Scarcely the stuff of Letterman appearances, but then a glorious swerve, a punchline played as non-sequitur: ‘I was just inspired because I used to know Snoop Dogg a long time ago and he was starring in a production of that story.’ And there, in a few lines, is Korine’s description of where his debut film Gummo (1997) came from. He’ll soon tell a bemused Letterman: ‘I’m a commercial filmmaker, I’m a patriot, I hide in trees,’ then a riot of applause will break out and we’ll cut to a commercial break.

This is a strange scene, and in miniature it maps out Korine’s domain: trash-surrealist juxtaposition, deadpan incongruity, mischief. He’s long concocted art films – experimental, raucous, deformed, mostly starless – from junk: juveniles, Satanic teens, satyr-like rappers and now Disney Channel girls in the lurid fantasia of Spring Breakers (2013). But the precise method of this alchemy matters little, what fascinates is that strangeness. Across his various works, this is what Korine has supplied in a manic profusion: weird tableaux, surreal mixtures, hallucinations of North American trash. Photographs and fragments, taken from his films and elsewhere, provide an oblique portrait of the filmmaker – and his films are always portraits of some damaged contingent: mesmeric waifs, drug-addled teens, celebrity impersonators, a depraved group of aged vandals or, in solitude, a starving magician. By contemplating stills and stray fragments, an image adrift can become strangely more meaningful than a whole film.

What follows is a perverse sort of homage, not so much non-linear as erratic. In Korine’s films, everything drifts. Plot matters little, and instead there comes a sprawling sequence of artfully arranged moments, interludes, digressions and echoes. Perhaps his reputation lies in purveying stretches of grotesquerie meant to make you shudder and stare. But they are fascinating, delirious works made from weird passions, entrancing and sinister, woozy and purposefully aimless, their mood pitched between a strange kind of calm and utter lunacy.

***

Sonic Youth, ‘Sunday’ (1998), directed by Harmony Korine

When I was 16, I asked Korine a question. Pale, jittery and in the throes of a particularly extreme obsession with his strange work, I yelped through a malfunctioning microphone towards the distant director: ‘Why did you want to work with Macaulay Culkin on that Sonic Youth video?’ He told me the boy reminded him of James Dean, especially in his last film, Giant (1956). Strange, I thought, to use a star as an impersonation of another, as an echo, rather than for their own resonance. That was at the National Film Theatre in London. Korine was there with his comeback film Mister Lonely (2007), about a commune of celebrity impersonators. He has always been fascinated by fame, especially the sort surrounded by rumour and weird myth. In Gummo, a perverted cab driver does little more than recite many scurrilous rumours: ‘Tupac Shakur stuttered, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Warren Oates swallowed his chewing tobacco spittle…’ Child stars, especially those who vanish or flee their fame, accrue myths like so much shadow. None more so than Culkin who has been, according to rumour, variously dead, near-death or addicted to drugs ever since he retreated from stardom. In the video, an eerily serene film, he becomes an incarnation of all these anxieties: a leering, burnt-out monster. The adolescent recluse, who had famously retired at 14, staggers out into the spotlight (inhabitants in a Korine film often seem half-awake, almost mid-dream) and smoulders with sinister eroticism, his blood-red lips blossoming in slow motion.

Orson Welles recalled that, before every take her daughter performed, Shirley Temple’s mother would tell her, ‘Remember, Shirley, sparkle!’ and Korine’s film is a study of Culkin’s corroded ‘sparkle’, which has turned sinister but keeps him hypnotic. His nearest relation is herself a witchlike double of Temple, the little girl in the first shot of William Egglestone’s glorious ‘home movie’ Stranded in Canton (1973) who stares darkly into the distance, utterly still, as if under some sinister enchantment. Time seems to have almost paused to lead us into the drowned world of the scene. And a similar druggy, dreamlike languor reigns over Korine’s video: Culkin in junkie swoon, tempo opiated, echoing the lines of the song as it ‘seems to move so slow’. There is an echo, too, of Korine’s explanation for his addictions: ‘The drugs were a way for me to slow things down.’

***

A boy is woken from his sleep by a song. Robert Mitchum, playing the psychotic Reverend Harry Powell, appears by moonlight in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1953), his baritone booming through the dark. ‘Leanin’, leanin’ on the everlasting love!’ he sings. Chloë Sevigny murmurs the same song in Korine’s Julien Donkey-boy (1999); she conducts the cornfield and it nods sleepily, her hair a mass of Harpo-like curls. Pearl is her name, a purposeful double of the little girl’s name in Laughton’s film. Their kinship, though, runs deeper: there is also the matter of light. Laughton’s film is all silver and magical shadow, a supernatural luminosity suffuses everything. A residue of it remains in Julien Donkey-boy where the air glitters, all honeyed light and wintry gloom, ash and atmospheric pollution. The marvel of the film (beneath everything which is traumatic, addled, bizarre) is the splendour of its surfaces.

Chloë Sevigny in Julien Donkey-boy (1999)

The other bond between them is Laughton’s image of a fantastical Deep South which is heavily imprinted on Korine’s work. This is an Expressionist wilderness. Night is otherworldly: owls haunt the trees, the sky remains eerily aglow. Like The Night of The Hunter, Gummo is lurid and yet deeply contemplative, sometimes spellbound by its own movements and inhabitants. It transcribes the elusive climate of dreams, their feel of aimlessness and dislocation, non-sequiturs, weird jolts and flashes of vaguely significant things. A parade of strange images: two albino sisters walking home in the twilight with a certain sprawl like enormous bored cats, a boy with pink rabbit ears wandering through junkyards, a little girl with a defaced portrait of Burt Reynolds stuck to her face like a makeshift mask shouting, ‘I want a moustache, dammit!’ Throughout the film it feels like you’ve wandered into a haunted space, the site of some unique deforming weather that makes everything slow and odd. Perhaps all these films (and Gummo especially) come from this darkness in the landscape.

The foreboding silhouette in the frame, singing in the white night, isn’t Mitchum astride a horse but a midget upon a donkey. Somehow this peculiar detail doesn’t spook the mystery of the image away but deepens it. I think of the black dwarf in Gummo who cheerily defeats a yokel at arm wrestling, the boy who rode a pig named Trotsky in his unfinished script What Makes Pistachio Nuts? and Korine excitedly telling Letterman (another sublimely strange utterance) that he wanted to make a movie about Eddie Gaedel, the midget baseball player.

***

‘My dad used to be a tap-dancer, he hung out with the Nicholas Brothers…’ Here’s Korine on Letterman in 1995, putting himself in the traditions of vaudeville. Though his father was a filmmaker who made films about the folk traditions of the Deep South – moonshiners, carnivals and ‘mouth music’ – this little bit of myth-making has a purpose. Korine’s work is an index of various obsessions: gangsta rap, gleeful depravity, Herzog’s films, insanity… – tap-dancing appears repeatedly. The art requires a bedazzling mixture of manic energy and elegance that seems somehow unearthly, it’s the mode of dance that longs to become levitation.

In Jonas Mekas’s archives, there’s a video of Korine performing a tap-dance. He mumbles about Flashdance and Busby Berkeley’s films, his hair in electro-shock spikes, his voice smoked-out and his sentences broken. This is one of the few recordings from his five or six years of disintegration brought on by numerous addictions, house fires and profound disenchantment with his art. For all his stagger and vacancy, the dance is a joy: demented, all clatter and anarchy, like a scarecrow in the middle of a seizure, or the chicken’s jittery little steps at the end of Herzog’s Stroszek (1977).

A tap dance by Harmony Korine (2001, filmed by Jonas Mekas)

As deeply as Korine is fascinated by trashiness, there’s also a deep, lingering affection for the old, weird American school of entertainment. Tap-dancing is part of a repertoire of magical, bygone acts that appear in his films alongside Groucho’s wisecracks (Gummo was, incidentally, the fifth Marx Brother who left to fight in World War I, then sold raincoats), slapstick and cigarette eating, and scattered echoes of its fondness for the repulsive spectacle of blackface and minstrelsy. With their acts transferred often intact onto the cinema screen, these manic routines became among the first entertainments in the cinema, those comical one-reelers. Recalling the films of these ‘show people’ he’d watched as a child, Korine said: ‘There’s almost a poetry or a strange insanity to what they did. When I was a kid, I would watch their films and I almost couldn’t figure out how they existed […] It was like they hovered above reality.’ Perhaps all his films are about these people who do not seem quite real; strange, surreal creatures.

Tap sequence from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978)

Tap-dancing of a more classical kind appears in this little interlude from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The dancer provides a masterful switch between birdlike flutter, clockwork jerkiness and eerie glide. He’s momentarily in duet with Linda Manz who leaps from the frame after a few hesitant steps. After a long absence from the cinema, she appears in Gummo, delivering a monologue about old tap shoes in memory of Marlene Dietrich. The African-American dancer looks incongruously refined in the parched landscape: his bowler hat and waistcoat making him a peculiar double of Chaplin’s tramp.

***

Paul McCarthy, Rocky (1976)

This is a still from Paul McCarthy’s film Rocky (1976), which is intended to stand in for Korine’s unreleased film Fight Harm (1998, unreleased, Korine claims, owing to the poor quality of its camera-work). In this 21-minute film, a naked McCarthy fights thin air and punches himself repeatedly in the head, sometimes slathers his genitals with ketchup, masturbates and growls throughout like a dying King Kong, all whilst wearing a grotesque rubber mask complete with bloated nose and drooping mouth. The Italian Stallion is transformed into a lumbering oaf, a deformed masochist oddly premonitory of De Niro towards the end of Raging Bull (1980). There’s no trace of the triumphant underdog, only a sustained study in abjection. But it’s also strangely comic; a kind of failed comedy suggested by the cartoonish mask and the smeared ketchup which spurts out in place of blood, a reminder of fake Hollywood violence. There’s also the comedy of repetition and time. Like Stallone, it’s comic that he just keeps fighting. In Korine’s film, he roamed the streets of New York, intoxicated, and started fights which he’d usually lose.

‘It’s high comedy’, he said, ‘like Buster Keaton’. Lacking Keaton’s animal grace, he’d settle for his injuries. The comedy would come, he said, from the repetition, as if Korine was Wile E. Coyote out of his head or one of the burglars maimed by Culkin in Home Alone (1990), doomed to a never-ending defeat. The routines of slapstick would turn real and so, become somehow funnier. Never completed owing to Korine’s injuries, you can guess its effects would come close to McCarthy’s Rocky: a mixture of repulsion, weariness and anxiety. Korine’s films are about extreme states- the dispossession that comes from impersonating someone else, mental illness and violence- and sometimes gruelling, but they are also obscurely damaged, strangely stitched together.

Diane Arbus, Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, New York (1963)

Every still has its echoes. Every time I look at this image I think of the speedfreaks in Larry Clark’s book Tulsa (1971), the delinquent friends he started photographing the same year Arbus took this shot. And I turn to the three nude bodies gathered together on a bed towards the end of that book, when everyone’s haggard and damaged, staring intently at the needle slipping into the middle figure’s arm.

High above their heads, at the very edge of the frame, is a little Hollywood incongruity: Lon Chaney Jr. playing the monster in a horror movie I can’t name, looking haunted, drooling blood. Then I remember the strange way a scene is punctuated in Kids (1995), which Korine wrote for Clark: an amputee appears on the train, chanting ‘I have no legs!’, as if he’s come through the door between Korine’s work and Clark’s studies of teenage lust. Sometimes in Arbus, there’s also an echo of Fellini who had a similar predilection for the more ‘freakish’ sorts of circus folk: hermaphrodites, transsexuals, dwarves and giants. Arbus took them as subjects, too. (Intermittently, her photographs look like Fellini tableaux with all the mischief and jollity beaten out of them.) Her famous and deeply disquieting line echoes, too: ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot.’ There is always a similar anxiety about Korine’s use of people with Down’s Syndrome, dwarves, amputees, albinos, the blind, as if they became merely aesthetic objects whose misfortune carried with it a sort of macabre fascination. (Like Arbus, though, there is a deep tenderness there, too).

I put this last snapshot down in place of the many adolescents in Korine’s work: stoned boys on the couch towards the end of a party in Kids, a girl looking at the sky, bored, glue-sniffers sprawled under the lukewarm sun, Little Red Riding Hood on a blue afternoon, Sevigny wandering through New York like a wounded foal. Spring Breakers (none of the images from the film possess any allure for me) is about teenagers, too, straight from the beaches on MTV – ‘subversive’, I guess, that they’d end up there, like Dorothy thrown out of Kansas and into Hell but… strangely empty, a kind of trick John Waters perfected decades before.

Arbus was also a supreme recorder of adolescence in a way which is scarcely caught elsewhere; a time of mania, innermost contortion, stupor and despair. Think of her store of strange images that contemplate adolescent bodies: the Republican boy whose face is ablaze with acne, the boy on the cusp of his teens in Central Park with his crooked, claw-like hand, the portrait of Marcella Matthaei. Another line from Arbus also echoes: ‘Freaks are aristocrats.’

The critic Serge Daney defined cinephilia as a matter of ‘not just the films you watch but the films that watch over you,’ as if certain works never ended and commenced instead some permanent angelic intimacy with you, the solitary viewer. During my adolescence, I felt that Korine’s films were my angels: demented and misshapen maybe, but we don’t all feel Scorsese or Bergman at our side. I always imagine Korine’s angels look like this.

Postcard from the Gulf

2013-04-08T07:35:17+00:00

By Sarah-Neel Smith

OFFICE, Oases (2012–13), installation view at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial

On day one of the Global Art Forum – a yearly talks programme organized in conjunction with the Art Dubai fair, now in its seventh year – economist Tarik Yousef gave a frant. For the uninitiated, that’s short for ‘friendly rant’, just one of many neologisms, puns and acronyms that were proposed during the GAF, which was organized around the capacious idea of ‘definitionism’ under the title ‘It Means This’. This year, the programme was split between Mathaf, the Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha, and Dubai, where it coincided with the art fair at the hotel-conference-centre-souk complex Madinat Jumeirah. Some 40 artists, writers, curators and academics participated in the six-day event, which also included five artist commissions (two ‘advert adverts’ and a soundtrack), a couple of small books and a fellows programme, all spearheaded by commissioner Shumon Basar and director H.G. Masters.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Douglas Coupland, Michael Stipe and Shumon Basar at the Global Art Forum, Dubai

The frants brought speakers to the stage ahead of their main appearance, each functioning as a sort of screen test, a short teaser that stimulated audience investment in the character-based dramas to unfold on stage minutes later. Some were seat-of-the-pants operations with a low-tech vibe; others were orchestrated performances, timed like clockwork for the 15-minute window. The controlled anarchy of the format accommodated both playful impulses and some serious political flag-planting, establishing a regular swing between the ludic and the long-faced that characterized the GAF as a whole. (The fact that Yousef’s presentation on economic free zones took place between two kitschy potted palms, a nod to American comedian Zach Galifianakis’ online talk-show Between Two Ferns, gives a sense of the dynamic.)

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Uzma Z. Rizvi and Payam Sharifi (Slavs & Tatars) at the Global Art Forum, Dubai

Sometimes, that very playfulness did the important work of easing tensions and smoothing interactions. This was the case for the term ‘MENA’, which, as part of GAF’s ongoing exercise in ‘definitionism’, Masters and Basar proposed as a means to describe a psychological state (Middle Eastern Nervous Anxiety) rather than the more familiar geographic notation (Middle East/North Africa). MENA quickly became shorthand amongst conference participants, providing a new angle on familiar topics and an accommodation for nervousness or irresolution that may not have otherwise been given room – as well as occasion for laughter and release when a talk became tense. At other times, though, the term seemed to function like a get-out-of-jail-free card: one could simply cite MENA and flee from the heavier topics at hand. When does playfulness become facetious or even unethical; when is self-seriousness a handicap? And what are the stakes of these approaches at a conference in the Gulf, as the question of how to produce knowledge within the region is driven ahead by the museums, universities and educational centres busily being established nearby? Itself another nascent knowledge-producing organization, the GAF didn’t hand down a judgment one way or the other, but it did provide a spacious forum in which to begin thinking about these issues.

SANAA, Bubble (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

All of this is part and parcel of a rapidly changing local cultural landscape, where, as of March 2013, the Sharjah Biennial is over a decade old, the Qatar Museums Authority’s Mathaf is still fighting to come into its own as a Museum of Modern Arab Art, the Art Dubai fair continues to expand yearly, and the state of construction of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island remains unresolved. In the meantime, Saadiyat Island hosts a museum devoted to its future museums – if that doesn’t sum up the region’s vertigo-inducing relation to historical time, I don’t know what does.

Shimabuku, Shimabuku’s Boat Trip (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

Distributed across multiple sites, including the Sharjah Art Foundation’s gorgeous new art spaces, a former bank building, a calligraphy museum and the Sharjah Art Museum, the 11th Sharjah Biennial ‘Re:Emerge—Towards a New Cultural Cartography’ features more than 100 artists. Coming after Jack Persekian’s controversial iteration of last year, curator Yuko Hasegawa, perhaps inevitably, seemed to have been tasked with playing it safe. The result was a strange disjuncture between her stated curatorial coordinates and the unacknowledged curatorial statements that asserted themselves in the form of the exhibition itself. (In a throwback to biennial ambitions of the 1990s, the curatorial framework included Islamic courtyards, Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century travel notes, hopes that dialogue between Sharjah’s migrant populations might take place within commissioned architectural ‘oases’, as well as evocations of the Global South.) Ironically, Hasegawa was most silent on the issue of sound. Not only was this an explicit concern in nearly half of the exhibited art works and performances, this unspoken theme arguably served as one of the more effective entry-points into the curator’s stated ideas, retaining a political edge or level of regional engagement that she directed us to elsewhere.

SUPERFLEX with Schul Landscape Architects, The Bank (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

Just an hour’s flight away, in nearby Doha, Mathaf – an institution in search of both a director and a curator – is engaged in its own coming-of-age. Since opening in late 2010, the museum has featured several exhibitions by the freelance curatorial duo Art Reoriented (Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath), including the ongoing ‘Tea with Nefertiti’. The exhibition centres around the iconic 14th-century BC bust of Nefertiti, discovered in Egypt in 1912 (not included in the show but on permanent display in Berlin). Tracing the 100-year biography of the masterpiece, it addresses the broader phenomenon of ‘appropriation, de-contextualisation, and re-semanticisation’ of ancient Egyptian culture in both Egypt and the West from the early 20th century onwards.

J&K, Horus and Anubis in Islamic Cairo (2006), pigment print
on paper, included in ‘Tea with Nefertiti’, Mathaf, Doha

Mathaf’s current conundrum – reliant on mercenary curators, at the cost of a more settled structure of accountability, sustainability and growth that comes with the presence of a permanent staff – might serve as a cautionary example for those involved in the region’s cultural sector. Nevertheless, Mathaf continues to provide a forum for art works and research materials that are difficult to access elsewhere. I, for one, was grateful for the substantial archival research, and intrigued by some of the artistic pairings, like Lee Miller’s Egyptian photos of the 1930s alongside those of Mamduh Muahmad Fathallah and Van Leo from the ’40s. Scheduled to travel to Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe in this month (under the more cerebral Francophone title ‘Le Théorème de Nefertiti’), the exhibition is billed by organizers as the first contemporary art exhibition to originate in the Gulf and travel to the West. Whether this is even possible to confirm, and they’re winning in the game of firsts or not, Bardaouil and Fellrath’s assertion raises the important point that an institution like Mathaf may have a stronger impulse and more significant resources to invest in research on such topics, than many Western institutions do.

Postcard from Amsterdam: The Emerging Amsterdam Zuid-Oost Art Scene

2013-04-04T10:42:53+00:00

By Nicola Bozzi

The Kleiburg housing block and the abandoned Kraaiennest shopping centre in the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam Zuid-Oost

The Vinger office, where I met producer Sara Mattens and artist Daniela Bershan, is wedged in a low edifice that hosts several other ateliers, just opposite the Kraaiennest metro station in the peripheral Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam Zuid-Oost. The spot tells it all: dwarfed by a freshly-built housing block just a few feet away and buried under the sturdy metro infrastructure that zips right by, the modest structure stands out as a small yet visible intruder among the architectural giants surrounding it. One of the biggest mosques in Amsterdam is about a minute away, its minarets tower over the elevated railway and the intersection below, which is otherwise blighted by the deserted Kraaiennest Shopping Centre. A couple years ago, when I came here to interview a few shopkeepers about the Bijlmer Euro – an RFID-powered local currency and community mapping experiment by artist Christian Nold – the mall was still thriving. Now that the building has been cleared out, the retailers that could afford it have moved to more expensive facilities in a new complex nearby.

In the meantime, Mattens, Bershan, and their team have turned the location’s vacancy into an opportunity. Encouraged by Thomas Hirschhorn’s Spinoza Festival, which took place in this area in 2009, they put together an heterogeneous programme of visual arts, music and performances under the banner ‘FATFORM’, bringing people from otherwise separate walks of life – from Taekwondo students to noise DJs – on the roof of the ramshackle behemoth of the shopping mall. An incense-burning candonblé ritual performed by a Brazilian artist on a bike helped guide visitors via olfaction.

The FATFORM location, in a former garage

In 2012, in view of the former mall’s demolition (which is still on hiatus, apparently) the action had to quickly migrate to a smaller venue on the opposite side of the street, the vacant Klieverink garage, where a small headquarters-cum-roof-garden was established for a few months. The group rolled up their sleeves and put up ‘Present Forever’, their biggest project to date: an exhibition populating the awkwardly vacant parking space with art works by no less than 55 artists. More than 1,200 people attended the opening, a third of which were from the Bijlmer itself.

A performance at ‘Present Forever’, 2012

But change doesn’t only come from the bottom up: ‘When we started, people told us we were mad,’ says Bershan, a German-born artist fascinated with physical, material forms of aggregation. ‘Eight years ago taxis wouldn’t drive into the neighbourhood; now it’s more like a suburbia. It has even become hip, somehow.’

Built as a modernist residential paradise for the white middle class in the 1960s, and originally marked by its characteristic semi-hexagonal housing blocks, the Bijlmer failed to attract its intended audience and, once Suriname became independent in 1975, many immigrants from the former Dutch colony moved in. The relatively high crime rate made the neighbourhood long infamous as a ghetto, but – as often happens in cities bigger and more dangerous than Amsterdam – in the last decade the low rent and spacious facilities made the Bijlmer popular with artists. For reasons probably pertaining more to the typically-tight Dutch planning than to the above-mentioned creative colonization, no permanent hipster hangouts like cool cafés have yet appeared in the area. But the Bijlmer is now undergoing major redevelopments and gentrification. With such a rich and layered history and population, it’s easy to expect locally-produced and locally-shown art to embody some kind of social commitment, at the risk of coming across as superficial or patronising. For FATFORM, though, the area’s controversial reputation is a contingent backdrop rather than the main focus.

The Vinger studio

Mattens, who grew up in the neighbourhood and returned years ago to join Jeffrey Croese’s Vinger production studio, explains how the welfare industry has contributed to a bureaucracy-heavy culture that doesn’t really promote creative enterprise. ‘There is a lot of money going into that. You always have to pay attention not to be sucked into these more problematic branches.’ For Bershan, the issue is very simple: it’s about the quality of the art. ‘We are artists, we’re not social workers.’ The confusion can sometimes lead to less-than-spontaneous collaborations, imposed by local politicians as a condition for funding. For the most part though, it seems the Bijlmer art scene that has emerged in the last decade has been shaped by natural affinities and practical necessities.

While FATFORM is a more episodic, volatile initiative, other organizations have established themselves and built different relationships with the territory, also in terms of their collaboration with artists. ImagineIC, which in 2011 invited Christian Nold to create a local currency in order to map the Bijlmer’s multicultural identity – an art project accepted by the Dutch Bank exactly because of its artistic and temporary nature – has since shifted back to its core focus on heritage. The foundation works with artists as collectors of individual stories about urban youth, with projects like Kostana Banovic’s Mijn God (My God, 2012) – a video-installation exploring the relationship between youth and religion – or exhibitions and workshops about subcultures and history.

Installation view of Kostana Banovic’s exhibition ‘My God’, at Imagine IC

The main institution in the neighbourhood that focuses solely on contemporary art is CBK Zuidoost. There, on a rare sunny afternoon, I met curator Renske de Jong and Maria Guggenbichler, the latest guest of the BijlmAIR residency programme. Just outside a street market was in full swing, showcasing the Bijlmer at its liveliest. ‘We had our 25th anniversary in 2012,’ De Jong tells me. ‘We started as an art library. People paid a small amount per month to keep the art works at home.’ The centre then evolved and started organizing educational projects for schools, hosting exhibitions and assigning small commissions to artists. When more space opened up in one of their facilities, the centre took the opportunity to use the extra room to invite artists for residencies – and the BijlmAIR programme was born. CBK started collaborating with SMBA (the Stedelijk Museum’s project space) and, since moving to the nearby apartment block at Florijn 42 a few years ago, it also partnered with Stichting Flat (the collective emerged from the housing block that now hosts the residency and from which FATFORM also originated).

As the board got richer, the activities intensified. Now residencies are shorter and more international, and the quality has also improved. When I asked De Jong about her favourite projects, she mentioned recent interventions by Moroccan artist Yassine Balbzioui, who worked in a variety of formats collecting objects in the area, and Leo Asemota, who also sourced unconventional materials to reflect on post-colonialism. The theme was also explored by artist duo Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, in their Empire documentary project in 2012. But reflecting on such complex social issues is not mandatory. ‘I like the diversity of it,’ De Jong told me. ‘Lots of artists want to do something with the residents of the Bijlmer, but it’s nice to see something different, too.’

Which brings us to Guggenbichler. With a background in theatre, the Munich-born artist has big plans for the flat she’s been provided. The former FATFORM volunteer intends to turn the space into a temporary venue for music, screenings, lectures, parties and a meeting point for Situationist group walks into the night (you can check out her programme here). As often happens with BijlmAIR, the neighbourhood’s architecture has been inspiring to her. ‘I’m interested in utopias coming to life. Even when they fail over a long time.’

Failure or not, the Bijlmer’s architecture is changing fast, and so is the housing market. The iconic Kleiburg building – the only standing memento of the hexagonal, CIAM-inspired beehive vision of architect Siegfried Nassuth – was deemed too expensive to demolish. De Flat, a consortium of independent real-estate developers, has transformed it into a matrix of rugged yet appealing apartments. As for Stichting Flat, it seems the future is unclear. ‘It’s very hard at the moment,’ curator and fellow frieze writer Irene de Craen told me via Skype. She’s on the board of Stichting Flat and, at the time of our interview, she is on a residency in Berlin herself. ‘There are people leaving and it’s hard to replace them. The situation has changed, rent has become more expensive.’ But, overall, she’s optimistic. ‘We’ll have to negotiate what to do. Everything can be negotiated.’

Nicola Bozzi is an Amsterdam-based writer focusing on schizophrenic urban identities. You can follow him at schizocities.com and at twitter.com/schizocities.

27 Gnosis

2013-03-24T21:31:53+00:00

By Dan Fox

Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Ever played 27 Gnosis? It’s my new favourite game. Here are five reasons why:
1) It’s the most fun you can have with wordplay outside a strip Scrabble tournament.
Two) the only time I ever played 27 Gnosis, my team won.
Thirdly) the game is an alibi for a serious and inventive work of art about the limits of language, communication and representation.
Number Four) it’s funny. When I say that, I don’t mean that it flashes a few insider gags about the art world or tired shock tactic vulgarities. I mean that it’s the sort of inventive work of surrealist comedy that critics like to say is ‘laugh-out-loud’ funny. If The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, Andy Kaufman, Chris Morris, Reeves and Mortimer, and Eddie Izzard are your thing, then 27 Gnosis is an out-and-out rib-tickler.
V) Did I mention that my team won?

27 Gnosis was created by artist Michael Portnoy. First presented at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel last year, its latest iteration was staged in early March 2013 at The Kitchen, New York. Some might categorize Portnoy’s absurdist game show as a form of theatre, but as this report is published in the context of an art magazine, I should probably describe it as an inter-disciplinary fusion of sculpture, architecture, performance, music, perfumery, audience participation and dance. Yes, exactly. Theatre.

The evening I arrived at The Kitchen for 27 Gnosis, around 20 people were gathered in the building lobby. Instructed to leave coats, bags and phones behind, we were led by a bossy usher to the venue’s upstairs gallery. In the middle of the darkened space was a large wooden structure (designed by Portnoy in collaboration with Christian Wassmann) that looked like a purple-coloured UFO. Faintly ominous ambient music percolated through the room. The usher lined us up in silent single file. In turn, she lifted each audience member’s left arm and arranged the hand at the end of that arm into a quasi-Masonic, tangled-finger salute. There was then a pause – a long and theatrical pause – and we were finally invited inside the lilac UFO where the instruction was given to ‘assume your lean’.

The interior resembled the set from Rollerball (1975) crossed with a giant lemon squeezer. The circular wall sloped outwards and the audience was told to spread around the perimeter and lean with our backs against it. The angle of our ‘leans’ was surprisingly comfortable and I wondered why more buildings didn’t incorporate gently raked walls for people to rest against. Fixed to the wall was a shelf, on which stood 27 small, black abstract sculptures and a glass of Armagnac. In the middle of the little arena was a circular mound, on top of which were two triangular podiums, or ‘skews’.

Once settled into our leans, the two hosts of 27 Gnosis strode in, closing the arena’s double doors behind them. Played by Portnoy and Ieva Misevičiūtė (who was also involved in the development of the game and choreography) the hosts introduced themselves as, respectively, The Rigid Designator and Modifa the Modifier. Their clothing was designed by threeASFOUR; workaday business suits with absurdly large panels cut from the legs and jackets, like haute couture styled by someone who’d had the idea of fashion explained to them but had never seen actual examples of it. The Rigid Designator wore purple eye-shadow and carried a microphone on a long, thin stem of the sort you might remember from a 1970s edition of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Rigid Designator (Michael Portnoy) and Modifa (Ieva Misevičiūtė) perform an explanatory ritual dance in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

With comical over-confidence the pair welcomed us to the game. They spoke in an unfathomable language somewhere between spoof theory-speak and the kind of pseudo-technical jargon that actors struggle to make sound convincing in sci-fi films. Their delivery was fluid and masterfully deadpan. At one point, as if to clarify the explanation of the contest, Modifa began speaking to us in Russian.

Modifa and The Rigid Designator did a short dance; a gigglesome parody of modern interpretative dance. This ritual out of the way, the game began. Two teams of three were picked from the audience to play the first round and asked to stand at the skews. The Rigid Designator gave the proposition for round one: ‘”A marcescent thing loosens the categorical creance of a guddle.“’ Everyone looked baffled. He continued. ‘I will define some terms. Marcescence is when something withers yet refuses to drop off, like a poor, shriveled bud hanging on at the end of a branch. Creance is when we rope something to our wrist, like a falcon, to train it, and so categorical creance is when we swing categories about in order to dizzy them. And the guddle, well that’s when we thrust our arm into the bitter droll of the river and grope about beneath stones for exubera, or the fruits of exuberance. So, a marcescent thing loosens the categorical creance of a guddle. This proposition is the evidence from which we must derive the three governing constraints of an ontic sphere, or slippery world. What are the three rules which could define a world in which this evidence exists? Each skew will have two minutes to discuss. Your generates will be judged by their: One) intricacy! Two) robustness of confound! And three) sheer diaphragmatic heat!’

Three gnoses from Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

The teams looked uneasy. ‘To make it a bit easier, I will give you each the assistance of a gnose’ announced the Rigid Designator. He reached over to the shelf of small black sculptures and selected one for each team. ‘To you, at Skew One I give: Punctognosis! Or, the knowledge through lancing. And to Skew Two, I give: Hupognosis! Hupognosis, Or the knowledge through heaping, through heaping. Begin!’

The groups went into huddles, each player gazing helplessly at their teammates, hoping that one of their trio had managed to intuit the rules of the game. Modifa moved between each team, keeping an eye on their progress and giving counsel on how to approach the propositions. Useful advice such as ‘make sure you keep to your own bed, don’t narrativize! Notions only!’

Time was soon up and a spokesperson for each team was asked for their ‘generates’. Skew One approached the proposition literally, presenting their three rules for a slippery world in physical terms: no swinging, no hanging and no scrabbling. As their spokesperson gave his answer, The Rigid Designator kept exhorting him to use his diaphragm, to project his answer with force. Skew Two seemed like they were beginning to get the knack of 27 Gnosis. Their confidently delivered answer advised using ‘a laundry list with vigilantized apnea.’ I had no clue what this meant, but it appeared to please Modifa and The Rigid Designator no end and they were declared the winners of their round.

What Skew Two had grasped, and began to dawn on me, was that as far as 27 Gnosis functioned as a game, it was basically one of word play in which the object was to beat the hosts at stretching language to its breaking point, spinning into play as many cod-philosophical neologisms and multiple compound words as you could, and delivering them with as much conviction as possible.

Portnoy and Misevičiūtė’s world of linguistic delirium felt, in its microcosmic way, roundly realized. As actors, the pair seemed to fully inhabit their characters, to believe in the ceremony and language of 27 Gnosis. Their sense of comic timing was well-tuned, and there were pleasingly few chinks in the dramaturgy through which we might see signs of self-reflexivity, signs that they wanted us to be aware of the work’s structural underpinnings. 27 Gnosis was a world unto itself and to engage with its premises, the performance didn’t require prior knowledge of its pedigree. That’s to say, its tangible authority as a work of theatre did not rely on priming the audience with gloss about it being based on, say, a Samuel Beckett or Bertolt Brecht play, or Spalding Gray monologue, in order to boost its intellectual prestige – an insecurity trap that too many art and performance hybrids fall into today. Yes it was absurd, but it was a convincing absurdity; a fiction that, for the 40 minutes you were leaning against the wall of the purple room, made you feel you truly were in the company of two lunatic philosopher game-show hosts.

Modifa (Ieva Misevičiūtė) explains the collision of the four gnoses in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

I was picked to play in round two against the winning skew from the previous bout. I am usually shy of audience participation, but 27 Gnosis looked like too much fun for my normally retiring competitive side to ignore. The Rigid Designator explained that for our round, ‘the proposition was derived from the collision of the four gnoses.’ The formula these gnoses supposedly created was outlined by Modifa in the form of a dance for which The Rigid Designator provided explanation and commentary. It ended with the instruction to ‘construct a notional scaffolding that will allow us to give Political its hill back.’

Just as bewildered as everyone else, my team groped for some verbal hook on which to hang our answer. The matt black gnose in front of us looked to me like a half-formed Henry Moore sculpture, and was about as much help as one too. Modifa asked us if we were going to ‘moisturize the notion closed’ and whether we were clear that it was a ‘notional scaffolding’ we were supposed to be devising. ‘What kind of people do you take us for? Of course we are!’ I replied, sensing that the more you put into the game, the more you’d get out. Modifa was taken aback: ‘I was merely checking – great to know that you’re on the right course!’

As our trio conferred, The Rigid Designator slipped out of the purple UFO. Before we were asked to present our responses, he returned to treat us with a short musical performance, re-entering the ring with a small synthesizer strapped to his arm and playing a sequence of chords that sounded like the theme tune to American Idol might if it were composed by Brian Eno. Following a lengthy anecdote about the previous person who had held the position of Rigid Designator, we were asked for our answers.

The Rigid Designator (Michael Portnoy) tells an anecdote in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Skew One’s spokesperson was summoned to the middle of the arena to deliver their idea for a notional scaffolding that would give Political its hill back. ‘Our notion… is a spanner that would give the tortoise room on the street.’ I smelled blood. My instinct was that this trad-surrealist response would have little traction with Modifa and The Rigid Designator, given their taste for pseudo-critical theory. I was picked as spokesperson for Skew Two and made a counter move: ‘Our strategy is to aim for the clear, to make sure the foundation for the notion is clean and firm to avoid any foamy effervescence leaking into the politic.’ There was a long silence. The Rigid Designator held his head back, peering down his nose at me. Modifa looked anxiously at the RD. With the understated dignity people usually reserve for moments of great cultural significance, the Rigid Designator quietly announced us as ‘the clear winners’.

At this point, Modifa became agitated. She berated us for not generating enough ideas, fearing a collapse of the ontic sphere. She pushed us to think more about ‘logical truth union constants’ and ‘subject clumps’ – at the very least to put our minds to ‘a simple granule of default disjoint.’ I felt as if I was suffering a form of aphasia; I could recognize her words as being spoken in English, but could not attach meaning to any of her sentences. It was like being in a car that’s moving forward even though the engine has cut out – all momentum and no control. Modifa asked us to remain at our skew and face the winners of round one in the final.

Our task was ‘to generate a simple granule of default disjoint through the paranasal hoops of the final gnoses’. The Rigid Designator added two more gnoses to the skews; a philosopher’s stone for ‘notognosis’, or knowledge through the back, and one for ‘angiognosis’, or knowledge through containment. Once again, the teams repeated the ritual of cluelessness, only this time we knew that invention was the solution. Shoulders were once again shrugged and ‘don’t-ask-me-I’ve-no-idea-what’s-going-on’ expressions exchanged, but now, so too were possible phrases and lines of attack. After the two minutes of conferring, Skew One stepped-up to the wooden mound facing Modifa and The Rigid Designator. The gauntlet their spokesperson threw down was ‘a rabbit cloaked in brine and musk.’ It was a bold play. Sidestepping fancy neologistic moves, the metaphor was agile enough to push the trad-surrealist approach of the losing answer from the previous round up to another level altogether. Modifa and The Rigid Designator looked impressed. It was my team’s turn at the plate. A strong parry in the opposite direction was needed. Fixing the RD in the eyes I declared that our default disjoint ‘would be structural: we start at the edge, but in order to oxygenate the network’s through-lines we must keep texturality swampy’. I could tell we’d scored a bullseye the moment I hit the word ‘swampy’. The move had been decisive, and we were declared overall winners.

Our reward as champions of the gnose was to name one of the little black forms. The hosts asked the audience to turn and face the wall and urged us to pick a designation with ‘good mouthfeel’. My teammate chose the word ‘tongue’. Modifa and the Rigid Designator felt this was an unorthodox choice, but honoured our victory and christened the gnose ‘tongue’.

The audience awaits the naming of a new gnose in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Beyond the entirely childish sense of glee I’d felt at being on the winning team, the experience of this performance camouflaged as a game seemed to me like an ingenious microcosm of how art criticism might work. The interpretation of art involves competition, risk, rivalries, strategic agreements and on-the-spot judgement calls. It’s a game of language; of taking the artwork in question as first principle, then conscripting context, history, ideas and imagination in the construction of a persuasive or illuminating argument for that artwork. It’s a game you can play on your own or in a team. There are critics who like to run solo, bringing a particularly individual sensibility to bear on what they see. They play fast and loose with translation and invention, shining light from all kinds of acute and obtuse angles on images and objects that might seem stubbornly opaque or retreat coyly from having meaning pinned. On the other side there are critics who prefer to work as part of a team. The swotty ones tend to check over their shoulders for approbation via the right art historical precedents and interpretative orthodoxies. The best ones understand that in order to score a goal, you don’t always need possession of the ball; you need to pass, play tactical defence, understand when your teammate has strategic advantage.

For 27 Gnosis we were invited to respond in kind to propositions that were oblique, surreal, and rich in imagery or metaphor. We were drawn in with physical and auditory atmospherics and clues. In that sense, it seemed like a good metaphor for the experience of looking at art, one which is so often an experience that begins with mystery – or plain bafflement – and moves towards some sort of clarity about its mechanics. Despite what some may think, there is no right or wrong way of doing this. The only way to get something out of the game was to put something back in, to participate both as a team (a group who might choose to agree on how to interpret a proposition, like the types of critics who prefer to move in the currents of established readings) and also as individuals grasping and groping for some sort of clarity (acting like the type of critic who relies more on a subjective response to an art work, rather than building upon the interpretations of others). 27 Gnosis only functioned if you agreed to the physics and philosophy that governed the bonkers world it inhabited. As Marcel Duchamp taught us, this is how most art encounters work, only less explicitly so and usually dressed with finer words.

27 Gnosis was for me about the pleasure of interpretation and the limitlessly ridiculous permutations of the English language as a tool for grasping the world. Whether you are a critic writing about art, or chatting to a friend about an artwork you’ve just seen, when you feel the pleasure that the game of interpretation can give, that’s when you know you’re winning.

Postcard from Yogyakarta: 25 Years of Cemeti Art House

2013-03-15T12:16:59+00:00

By Alia Swastika

The Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Twenty-five years ago, one of the most important moments in the history of contemporary art in Indonesia occurred in a small living room in a simple house in the middle of a kampong (village) in Yogyakarta. Nindityo Adipurnomo, an artist who had just graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta and went to school at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and Mella Jaarsma, who had just moved to Yogyakarta from Holland, established an independent art space called Cemeti Modern Art Gallery. Cemeti literally means whip, a symbol they chose to represent a new spirit to encourage a new generation of artists in Indonesia.

But starting an independent art initiative was not easy during the authoritarian political regime of the late 1980s. Many political issues needed to be dealt with: censorship, security permits and controlled regulation. At the same time, in terms of the economic situation, there was no government support for arts organizations. Not to mention that the market for contemporary art at the time was dominated by big patrons, who rarely supported younger artists.

Exhibition spaces in the city during 1980s were very limited; though there was an Art Center in every city that was initiated and managed by the government, they were mostly rented out for commercial exhibitions. But there were no professional commercial galleries that operated under the model that Cemeti established. At the same time, more and more varied artistic practices were emerging in the wake of a previous generation of artists like The New Art Movement and Art of What kind of Identity in the late 1970s. Adipurnomo and Jaarsma had seen the importance of providing a new platform for a younger generation of artists where they could show their work, and more importantly, reflect a criticism of the surrounding political situation.

In the last decade of Suharto’s regime, Cemeti hosted numerous exhibitions, which showed the important role artists played in spreading critical thought and opinions against the government. While censorship was common, artists found their own ways to create new metaphors to be shared with a wider audience. At the same time, it also encouraged artists to fight for more freedom of artistic expression. Many experimental projects and different forms of art were exhibited at Cemeti: paintings, installations, photography, performance, video arts or even craft.

During that time, we could sense the dynamic spirit of an aesthetic breakthrough being realized at the Cemeti Art House, as it displayed the wittiest and most cutting edge work of that particular period. Just as importantly, this art space was instrumental in fostering the earlier stages of Indonesian artists’ careers and their participation in international art events. All the famous biennale curators’ had stepped into this hub to research, find artists, give talks, and build new connections with this new generation of artists. All the Indonesian ‘superstars’ who actively joined the global art circuit at the time had started their artistic careers here, from Agus Suwage and Heri Dono to Eko Nugroho and Jompet Kuswidananto.

An exhibition at the Cemeti Art House

Over the past 25 years, the Cemeti Art House has regularly played host to meetings of different art forms: from traditional to contemporary, from political to conceptual, from Eastern to Western, from lowbrow to fine art, from heavy historical subjects to subtle daily experiences, all mixed together to create different discourses and make a strong impact on the artistic community in its surroundings. But it does not only exhibit art works, they also do workshops, talks, residency programmes, publications, exchanges, touring exhibitions and community programmes, and in doing so they have been a fundamental element of the development of contemporary art in Indonesia.

Opening nights at Cemeti Art House are typically not formal: they have a very special intimacy, with small finger foods and coffee and tea. It’s amazing to think that this simple ceremony has taken place more than 300 times. It is interesting to reflect on how the space has survived for over 20 years without permanent funding and without big collectors. I worked there for nearly four years, and I still recall how well everything was organized on a tight budget but without compromising a high standard. For example, rather than printing hundreds of promotional posters for events, they customized the posters using a silk-screen technique and printed them in editions of 50 or so, to be delivered in public spaces, and then they sold the remaining 20 posters. Being there I learned a lot about the practical side of curatorial work, as did my other colleagues who worked as managers or designers. Cemeti has provided a valuable alternative education for art managers and curators in Indonesia.

Year after year, the public had witnessed how Cemeti has transformed itself to respond to the continuously changing social and political context of the local, regional and international art scene: from Cemeti Modern Art gallery to Cemeti Art Gallery then to Cemeti Art House. In 1999, they moved to a new building, designed by renowned Indonesian architect Eko Agus Prawoto, who effectively combined his traditional signature of using old Javanese house with the needs of a contemporary exhibition space.

In the midst of the current art market boom, and as a high accumulation of changing post-Suharto era, Cemeti Art House has once again transformed its identity. Observing the new political and economic context these days, rather than underlining the act of promoting they are now focusing more on encouraging artists to value the art-making process as something more research-based and collaborative, and to offer a critical standpoint to the audience.

The party for their 25th anniversary, which took place on 2 February this year, reflected the casualness they have always had. ‘One Night Stand’ invited artists and other collaborators to celebrate these years of survival in a unique way: to perform site-specific works, interactive projects, disc jockey, all in just one night. It is interesting that few collectors attended or joined this party; instead it was mainly crowded with artists, curators, journalists, writers, art workers, artisans, and such. And yes, observing this, I can recall the same spirit after all these years: despite the glamorous attention from the international market toward Indonesian art, in their home town, contemporary art is still celebrated by its core community, within this intimate and fluid platform. Happy anniversary!

Alia Swastika is a curator and writer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Lahore’s First Literary Festival

2013-03-11T16:51:45+00:00

By Ayesha Hasan

Visitors take pictures by the message board at the inaugural Lahore Literary Festival

It began as the most sought after event in the history of the city – a city full of art and culture, the home to the Mughal emperors and their architectural aestheticism, the city that fascinated British rulers for over 100 years. Book lovers were excited and so were the writers. None of them wanted to miss out the event that had been announced just a few weeks before its launch.

Book lovers poured in on the two days of the first ever Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) held at the Alhamra Arts Centre in the heart of the city. Unhampered by continuous rain, people went through the schedule lists in their hands to make their way into the halls where their favourite authors were speaking. For me, it was a hard choice to make. Though I attended consecutive sessions, my heart and mind travelled to the overlapping sessions as self-created images from other halls popped in my mind. What must Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice Candy Man, 1991) be saying while I listened to Owen Bennett-Jones (Target Britain, 2013) speak about national narrative? What excerpt must Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 2007) be reading from his new book, as I listened to Linda Bird Francke and Victoria Schofield talk about ghost writing Daughter of the East (2008), an autobiography of the slain first woman prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto. Twitter saved my life. Updates from each session every second made me feel as I was present at more than one place at the same time, like a dream where you see yourself at multiple locations. My toes were damp and numb. I kept stepping into puddles on the building premises. I was not alone as I noticed many wet pairs of boots standing in a queue to get into the hall where Pakistani-British award-winning author Nadeem Aslam was about to launch the Indian Subcontinent edition of his new book The Blind Man’s Garden. I grabbed a copy available at a 15% discount and waited for the session to end before I could get it signed. He was personally my favourite author at the event.

Nadeem Aslam in conversation with Declan Walsh

Aslam’s writing has always clicked with me; he creates images where violence and beauty intertwine in a magical way that combines fiction and reality. He grew up in a Pakistani rural city and learnt English only when he moved to the UK at the age of 14. He now references Czeslaw Milosz, Vladimir Nabokov and Herman Melville. To learn English, he copied several books out by hand, including Moby Dick (1851) and Lolita (1958). To write about a blind man, he taped his eyes for weeks to feel what a blind man would do. During a discussion with him a day before the LLF, he told me that he regularly went for a walk to note down things that he found interesting. He would return with his pockets full of notes that would later go into his record books, numbered according to the years, where he had been noting things down since the age of 17. These notes, he told me, helped him create stories. No wonder, I have always found a touch of realism in his work, especially his master piece, The Waster Vigil (2008).

Being a writer in Pakistan can be a tough job. With almost half of its population illiterate, the public is judgmental and sensitive about books and authors, art and artists, love and relationships. They tend to evaluate everything on a scale that is determined by their religions and culture. At an event such as the LLF, choosing excerpts to read can be a tough job, too. In a country, where the majority of people try to connect everything with religion, you never know if the word that leaves your mouth will be your last word.

But the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid and Indian writer Jeet Thayil prefer taking risks. Thayil read from his book Narcopolis (2012) which is about opium and its effect and is set in the 1970s Old Bombay. Minutes after he read the excerpt containing explicit words from the Urdu-Hindi slang that he used for various castes in the Indian Subcontinent, all the copies of the book available at the event were sold out. What could have offended a lot of people there, actually made them laugh their lungs out. The hall echoed with more laughter as Thayil continued to read, literally swearing at each caste. Later, I overheard some people commenting at Thayil’s ‘clever marketing of his book’ by ‘deliberately choosing’ the particular excerpt. Literary festivals are a good way to market work and for readers, signed copies are a life-long treasure.

While there were sessions where authors discussed the globalisation of Pakistani literature and the challenges of use of language in storytelling, several others deliberated on the declining interest of Pakistani readers in Urdu literature. Indian writers had a somewhat similar observation on Hindi literature. But all concluded unanimously that writing in English gave them a larger market to write for. At the same session, Pakistani-Canadian Musharraf Ali Farooqi ( Between Clay and Dust 2012) said he would have preferred writing in Urdu, but could not trust local editors with his work.

The second day of the event brought some sunshine. The umbrellas were gone and so were the boots. Dressed in bright colours, it was now an opportunity for the audience to show off their Hermes bags, their Gucci sunglasses and LV and Chanel sandals. More than half of the visitors belonged to the local fashion and entertainment industries. There were also international bloggers, local and international publishers and journalists from around the world.

People queuing to get into talks

Halls were full and so was the parking lot. It took me 40 minutes to find a safe place to park – 500 metres from the centre’s building. Author Tehmina Durrani made her first public appearance in 12 years after her book My Feudal Lord (1991) was published in which she had explained her personal experience of an abusive marriage to a famous politician, whom she later took a divorce from. Durrani is now married to another politician, who is part of the ruling government. This is her third marriage. Doors of the hall where she talked had to be locked during the session for it could not accommodate even one more person. Dozens of people had to be denied entry. Durrani talked about how her family had disowned her for 13 years for abandoning her first husband for the love of a man, stronger and more powerful than the former. This is something any conservative family in Pakistan would do to such a daughter. Durrani’s courage to speak about it publicly is, nonetheless, a valiant step on the face of our backward society.

In Pakistani society, it is very common for an artist’s years of hard work to be criticised because it might contain overt images of people or has symbolism that is above a layman’s understanding. Most people here are offended by pictures that represent people, calling them anti-Islamic. Religion is the new obsession in Pakistan. Well, not that new, but the implications have never been so extreme.

Selma Dabbagh

Then there were sessions that I unwillingly missed, because I wanted to attend all of them, had they not been scheduled on overlapping timings. I especially regret missing those on the courtesan in literature, Urdu poetry, Kathak dance and women’s voices from colonial times to modern Pakistan. Women were prominent speakers at the LLF. Palestinian-British fiction writer Selma Dabbagh whose debut novel Out of It (2011) a story of a Palestinian family who flees the violence in Palestine and settles in the UK and the Gulf – was particularly impressive. Unsurprisingly, Dabbagh has strong views on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and writes about conflict zones and political issues. Although she lives in Britain, Dabbagh still feels her strong connection to Palestine and her ‘responsibility’ to highlight the problems of the people there, through fiction writing. Her calm speech, reasonable stance, upright posture and specifically her understanding of subject area were impressive.

LLF was a venue for the audience to catch a glimpse of their favourite writers, catch-up with friends and acquaintances or make public appearances. For me it meant more than that. As an aspiring author, I learned two things. First – always know the beginning and end of your story and let what’s in-between come to you and second – always arrive at least 30 minutes before the sessions begins if you don’t want to sit in the stairs.

http://www.lahorelitfest.com