The deadline for submission of this text is today - Monday 28th July 2008. This is a day after the final screening of Susan Hiller’s recent film "The Last Silent Movie" at Matt’s Gallery, in East London. Your opportunity to see this film, in this context, has been lost.
The film is composed of audio-archive fragments of 25 extinct, dead or endangered languages from across the planet. The screen is black aside for white subtitles translating the spoken words.
The Klallam language (nəxʷsƛ̕ay̕əmúcən), spoken until 1975, is one language in a large family of Native American languages called Salishan or Salish languages that have been spoken in what is now Washington, British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana and is present in "The Last Silent Movie".
Moved to temporary speechlessness after experiencing this work, I offer a new word:
squarch’eath / n. the destruction or erasure of a culture as a result of the dominance (esp. economically, militarily, religiously, linguistically) of another culture(s) (esp. in relation to globalization) [ 21 c. constructed word, Klallam, skʷáči anglicized as squarchee , world, universe + English death]
Monday, 28 July 2008
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Anarchy is Ordinary / Kate Hawkins at Bischoff/Weiss 9.05.08 - 21.06.08
In the basement space of Bishcoff/Weiss gallery on Rivington St, a video is projected on the far wall. In the video Kate Hawkins, in Liberty-style floral dress is fronting a musical outfit, in a deadpan, disaffected, ‘home counties’ / slumming-it-aristocrat drawl she repeats the refrain: ‘Anarchy is Ordinary’. Either side of her, men head-to-toe in black, including balaclavas - sway plaintively, feebly knocking wooden blocks, keeping time. The musical tone is reminiscent of the certain post-punk groups such as Alison Statton’s of Young Marble Giants, singing flatly with untrained vocals. The resulting effect is a comic conflation of a banal-drugged-stupor-delivery with a bizarre visual of a ‘young Lady’ flanked by two ‘cartoon’-styled terrorists. They are silent. Hawkins sings - but she is not their mouthpiece, the film is an opposite scenario to that of Stockholm Syndrome - it is not the unarmed, now captive, that have become docile but those in the balaclavas.
They have been assimilated into a band, for popular consumption: the video is a film of an event that took place in an East London pub called the Betsey Trotwood. This reversal of a normative power-relationship between the potential hostage and anarcho-terrorist, proposes the assimilation of genuine dissent. The power of rebellion neutered. [Opposition] “leached of meaning has become alarmingly habitual, failing to confront or shock” reads the Bischoff/Weiss press release. However it is necessary to distinguish and identify the source and nature of opposition. Particular symbolic rebellions such as hairstyle, clothing, use of slang, choices of music and drugs, have certainly being assimilated: the torn and destroyed clothing associated with the punk aesthetic in its early incarnation is now an off-the shelf feature of many designer clothes, ‘jeans with rip included‘. The online dissemination of music - no matter the genre -means hearing it is no longer dependent on a tribal gathering in an exclusive location; geographic knowledge of which would distinguish you from those not-in-the-know or with a reactionary political outlook. Marketing and advertising campaigns are hyper-quick and adept at assimilating emergent symbolic rebellion in order to align themselves with it…assimilation itself is slightly ’old hat’ these same campaigns are engineering the signs and cultural statements themselves - for the consumer to follow. No longer assimilation - just dissemination from the marketing boardroom.
Looking at two of the many forms of ‘opposition’ one might consider the anarcho-terrorist destruction of landmarks and people: the creation of disorder in public space is paramount here; systems like public transport, media stations… bedrocks of the city system are disabled, our use of them is subsequently permeated with fear. London has recently been the focus of such attacks. It would be inaccurate to sweepingly argue that ‘opposition’ no longer exists’. This form of dissent continues to be a regular part of our news content. Clearly this has not been assimilated or ‘leached of meaning’. If we were to follow this admittedly singular reading for the work (led by the press release); the terrorists as backing singers becomes a visual fallacy. An alternative to the presence balaclava-wearing men might be two of the many people seen wearing ‘Che Guevara’ t-shirts bought from a store on Oxford Street. For the argument to hold Hawkins must point her gun at a more ’internal’ form of opposition: that which happens within the system it critiques. Perhaps one who is in the system - and wants to remain, but also change it (whereas those in the video are more likely to be read in line with Hollywood-movie-stereotypes as symbolic of an opposition that has not been assimilated, of the sort the US military claims to pursue).
A recent successful example of this ‘internal opposition’ could be Plane Stupid; the environmental activist network, who earlier this year (27th Feb 2008) gained access to the roof of the Houses of Parliament to protest Heathrow’s expansion and the construction of a third runway. This kind of disruption ignites discussion. If the dominant media and politicians will not push Plane’s Stupid concerns to their front of their agenda, they devise actions to engineer it to be so. Significantly, Plane Stupid’s disruption remains symbolic: they crossed territorial borders (in this case entry and occupation of the Parliament’s roofs), but they were not destructive. They unfurled a pre-made banner, but did not deface the building let alone explode it. They were removed and no physical trace of their being there remains. Yet they made the front page of the Evening Standard the day after and 3 months later they are being interviewed and their opinions canvassed in the Guardian newspaper (31.05.08) Nonetheless it should be recognised, via the documentation - the materially destructive acts by the anarcho-terrorists’ their activities - too become symbolic as images (not that it wasn‘t symbolic as an act in the first place), and the symbols can easily become assimilated. Sadly, for 15 dollars it is possible to order a t-shirt design with a montage of the American flag back-dropping a smaller image of the Twin Towers mid explosion - headed in bold red print “God WeTrust”. It is advertised as being “a unique special patriotic gift”.
The space upstairs consists of paintings and another video work on a TV monitor. Here we can engage with the more structural-material games at play in Kate Hawkins’ work. The paintings or ‘paint-things’ or more accurately ‘performed-objects-which-hang-on-the-wall’ - are canvasses originally folded as though napkins into a variety of formations. A certain side was then sprayed. The canvasses were then unfolded: the creases reveal the folds, and sharp-sided regions of grey reveal the upward facing sides in their folded form. This series of works explicitly bears the marks of the physical process that led to its being. However, the process of their making is not their sole concern. The folding of the canvasses as napkins derives from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Isabella Beeton (1836 -1865) wrote this compendium of articles as an aspirational guide for those wishing to manage a certain kind of Victorian household. The formal appearance of the works is reminiscent of abstract geometric modernist paintings by the likes of Ben Nicholson (1894 -1982). The associations of the end-result coupled with the logic behind their making hurls two independent (by politics, time and function) cultural practices (the modernist and Victorian) together.
I name Nicholson in particular because it seems one of the subterranean themes connecting all the works is Englishness and class mobility. The scrutiny of this aspect of Englishness is brought into sharp focus by the press release’s allusion to ‘Taarof‘: a Persian form of civility emphasizing both self-deference and social rank - in reference to the video work on this floor. A work which structurally contains something of the stiffness and rigidity of its content. Here, a TV monitor, features a single static shot of an autocue. There is a scrolling text on the autocue. The still and the moving are brought together within a single frame. We are presented with text as image, but the text is large enough for us to read, so of course we do….The text was the basis of a performance piece You’re Too Kind by Kate Hawkins and Eloise Fornieles. It took place on the opening night of the exhibition .The two read a series of complements to each other from an autocue which gradually becomes more and more barbed and bitchy. The autocue serves to emphasize levels of insincerity. These Pinteresque language duels are the ghost voices of the veiled and coded speech-attacks so frequent in the 19th century English literature by authors such as Austen and Eliott, as well as the contemporary and associate of Ben Nicholson, Virginia Woolf. Thus the series of canvasses, the video work Anarchy is Ordinary and You’re Too Kind can be read as a bleak triptych exploring a seemingly inescapable tension (across the lives of several generations of Englishmen and women) between the irrational desire for social acceptance by a society (or individual) you feel ill at ease with (or even subjugated by)…a situation where even rebellion can lead to the deeper entrenchment, sustenance and affirmation of that against which you rebel.
They have been assimilated into a band, for popular consumption: the video is a film of an event that took place in an East London pub called the Betsey Trotwood. This reversal of a normative power-relationship between the potential hostage and anarcho-terrorist, proposes the assimilation of genuine dissent. The power of rebellion neutered. [Opposition] “leached of meaning has become alarmingly habitual, failing to confront or shock” reads the Bischoff/Weiss press release. However it is necessary to distinguish and identify the source and nature of opposition. Particular symbolic rebellions such as hairstyle, clothing, use of slang, choices of music and drugs, have certainly being assimilated: the torn and destroyed clothing associated with the punk aesthetic in its early incarnation is now an off-the shelf feature of many designer clothes, ‘jeans with rip included‘. The online dissemination of music - no matter the genre -means hearing it is no longer dependent on a tribal gathering in an exclusive location; geographic knowledge of which would distinguish you from those not-in-the-know or with a reactionary political outlook. Marketing and advertising campaigns are hyper-quick and adept at assimilating emergent symbolic rebellion in order to align themselves with it…assimilation itself is slightly ’old hat’ these same campaigns are engineering the signs and cultural statements themselves - for the consumer to follow. No longer assimilation - just dissemination from the marketing boardroom.
Looking at two of the many forms of ‘opposition’ one might consider the anarcho-terrorist destruction of landmarks and people: the creation of disorder in public space is paramount here; systems like public transport, media stations… bedrocks of the city system are disabled, our use of them is subsequently permeated with fear. London has recently been the focus of such attacks. It would be inaccurate to sweepingly argue that ‘opposition’ no longer exists’. This form of dissent continues to be a regular part of our news content. Clearly this has not been assimilated or ‘leached of meaning’. If we were to follow this admittedly singular reading for the work (led by the press release); the terrorists as backing singers becomes a visual fallacy. An alternative to the presence balaclava-wearing men might be two of the many people seen wearing ‘Che Guevara’ t-shirts bought from a store on Oxford Street. For the argument to hold Hawkins must point her gun at a more ’internal’ form of opposition: that which happens within the system it critiques. Perhaps one who is in the system - and wants to remain, but also change it (whereas those in the video are more likely to be read in line with Hollywood-movie-stereotypes as symbolic of an opposition that has not been assimilated, of the sort the US military claims to pursue).
A recent successful example of this ‘internal opposition’ could be Plane Stupid; the environmental activist network, who earlier this year (27th Feb 2008) gained access to the roof of the Houses of Parliament to protest Heathrow’s expansion and the construction of a third runway. This kind of disruption ignites discussion. If the dominant media and politicians will not push Plane’s Stupid concerns to their front of their agenda, they devise actions to engineer it to be so. Significantly, Plane Stupid’s disruption remains symbolic: they crossed territorial borders (in this case entry and occupation of the Parliament’s roofs), but they were not destructive. They unfurled a pre-made banner, but did not deface the building let alone explode it. They were removed and no physical trace of their being there remains. Yet they made the front page of the Evening Standard the day after and 3 months later they are being interviewed and their opinions canvassed in the Guardian newspaper (31.05.08) Nonetheless it should be recognised, via the documentation - the materially destructive acts by the anarcho-terrorists’ their activities - too become symbolic as images (not that it wasn‘t symbolic as an act in the first place), and the symbols can easily become assimilated. Sadly, for 15 dollars it is possible to order a t-shirt design with a montage of the American flag back-dropping a smaller image of the Twin Towers mid explosion - headed in bold red print “God WeTrust”. It is advertised as being “a unique special patriotic gift”.
The space upstairs consists of paintings and another video work on a TV monitor. Here we can engage with the more structural-material games at play in Kate Hawkins’ work. The paintings or ‘paint-things’ or more accurately ‘performed-objects-which-hang-on-the-wall’ - are canvasses originally folded as though napkins into a variety of formations. A certain side was then sprayed. The canvasses were then unfolded: the creases reveal the folds, and sharp-sided regions of grey reveal the upward facing sides in their folded form. This series of works explicitly bears the marks of the physical process that led to its being. However, the process of their making is not their sole concern. The folding of the canvasses as napkins derives from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Isabella Beeton (1836 -1865) wrote this compendium of articles as an aspirational guide for those wishing to manage a certain kind of Victorian household. The formal appearance of the works is reminiscent of abstract geometric modernist paintings by the likes of Ben Nicholson (1894 -1982). The associations of the end-result coupled with the logic behind their making hurls two independent (by politics, time and function) cultural practices (the modernist and Victorian) together.
I name Nicholson in particular because it seems one of the subterranean themes connecting all the works is Englishness and class mobility. The scrutiny of this aspect of Englishness is brought into sharp focus by the press release’s allusion to ‘Taarof‘: a Persian form of civility emphasizing both self-deference and social rank - in reference to the video work on this floor. A work which structurally contains something of the stiffness and rigidity of its content. Here, a TV monitor, features a single static shot of an autocue. There is a scrolling text on the autocue. The still and the moving are brought together within a single frame. We are presented with text as image, but the text is large enough for us to read, so of course we do….The text was the basis of a performance piece You’re Too Kind by Kate Hawkins and Eloise Fornieles. It took place on the opening night of the exhibition .The two read a series of complements to each other from an autocue which gradually becomes more and more barbed and bitchy. The autocue serves to emphasize levels of insincerity. These Pinteresque language duels are the ghost voices of the veiled and coded speech-attacks so frequent in the 19th century English literature by authors such as Austen and Eliott, as well as the contemporary and associate of Ben Nicholson, Virginia Woolf. Thus the series of canvasses, the video work Anarchy is Ordinary and You’re Too Kind can be read as a bleak triptych exploring a seemingly inescapable tension (across the lives of several generations of Englishmen and women) between the irrational desire for social acceptance by a society (or individual) you feel ill at ease with (or even subjugated by)…a situation where even rebellion can lead to the deeper entrenchment, sustenance and affirmation of that against which you rebel.
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