Third Text
Issues
Volume 30, 2016
Issue 3–4
Number 140–141, May–July 2016
Toward a Materialist Photography: The Body of Work 149–158
Lee Mackinnon
This article moves toward a materialist photography in response to a recent photographic exhibition by Giles Duley. Duley's work is made under the auspices of a ‘humanitarian project’, a notion problematised by its display in the context of the art gallery, and by the photograph as the final product in a process that is also the property of the photographer. I use this work as a starting point for moving photographic discourse beyond consideration of the final image and author to explore the materiality of the photographic apparatus and its event. Key to this task is the work of Ariella Azoulay (2015) and Judith Butler (2010) who have approached photography as, respectively, an event and as extended materiality. It also borrows on some definitions of matter and materiality from Karen Barad (2012). Barad moves the question of materiality into a field of political interaction, taking account of all participatory elements.
Alone in the Crowd: Appropriated Text and Subjectivity in the Work of Rirkrit Tiravanija 159–172
Liz Linden
The practice of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is perhaps the best-known exemplar of relational aesthetics, a distinction first made by Nicholas Bourriaud and affirmed in the writings of many subsequent art critics; but the critical focus on the interactive aspect of his works has tended to rely on utopian modes of community engagement, which ignore Tiravanija’s strategic deployment of relational, interactive structures to implicate the viewer, publicly, in problematic political positions. Tiravanija commonly uses appropriation in his artworks as a way of exposing viewer's biases and this paper focuses specifically on his use of appropriated text to explore divided subjectivities in a globalised world. In Tiravanija’s work with text, his longstanding engagement with appropriation is made plain, not only because found language has for so long served as a cornerstone of his practice, but also because the way he uses appropriated language underscores the broader political operations of his work that are often concealed in the rhetoric of relationality.
Asghar Farhadi: Acknowledging Hybrid Traditions: Iran, Hollywood and Transnational Cinema 173–187
Daniele Rugo
Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been praised for its emotional immediacy and compositional simplicity. The work of Asghar Farhadi stands as an exception to this canon. His films focus on domestic conflicts and cultural contradictions in urban life and are marked by emotional complexity and intricate narrative structures. Focusing on these characteristics, critics have stressed his proximity to mainstream American cinema. The article analyses this proximity by discussing the thematic parallels that Farhadi's work enjoys with classical Hollywood films, as conceptualised by philosopher Stanley Cavell. The article explores the limit of this approach by connecting Farhadi's films to pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, a body of work that, despite the little attention it has received, can nonetheless provide significant insights into Farhadi’s oeuvre to date, whilst bringing to the fore the heterogeneous tradition of Iranian cinema.
Global Modernities and Post-Traditional Shadow Puppetry in Contemporary Southeast Asia 188–206
Matthew Isaac Cohen
Under global modernity, Southeast Asian shadow puppet theatre is being re-worked in art galleries, the internet, community arts contexts, intermedial collaborations and festivals. Even while cultural conservatives mourn vanishing traditions, a generation of Southeast Asian practitioners are seizing the codes of performance culture, inhabiting received forms and re-making them to speak to both local particularities and global issues. These post-traditional artists mine traditions for political parody and carnivalesque revelry, violating the sacred aura of puppets to assert their own authorship and critique heritage discourse and development policies. Puppeteers fashion new performance genres, ephemeral creations re-negotiating connections between the local and the global. Animators and game designers re-work the figures, performance dynamics, and stories of shadow play traditions in digital milieus. Such abductions and radical interpretations stoke debates about cultural identity and patrimony, aesthetic norms and moral values, individual agency and collective creativity, postcolonial exoticism and the politics of recognition.
‘Neutrality Does Not Exist in the Face of Murder’: Bosnian Minimalism and the Politics of Neutral Observation in Tanović’s ‘No Man's Land’ 207–218
Dina Muhić
Though not the first film made by a Bosnian since the nation's establishment after the Yugoslav war, ‘No Man’s Land’ (Danis Tanović, 2001) came out to such international critical acclaim that it can readily be considered the first major contribution toward a national cinema of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Citing Bosnia's investment in cinema as a foundational component of its national identity, I argue that Tanović uses a specifically Bosnian style to portray what he terms Bosnian Minimalism, an aesthetic and narrative approach that is steeped in the nation’s culture and politics. Despite many Western misreadings of the text that laud the film for its supposed balance and neutrality, I propose a more culturally aware reading that uses the concept of Bosnian Minimalism and the lead actors star persona to highlight the text’s clear stance on the war, particularly in terms of aggressor and victim.
‘La Grande Danse’ by Moustapha Dimé in Local and Transnational Encounters 219–237
Susan Kart
In 1995 Moustapha Dimé began creating a novel series of sculptural installations around the theme of ‘The Dance’. Instead of being exclusively hand-carved as were his works from the 1980s, or composed solely from found objects like his objects from the 1990s, the Dance series is a hybrid of both styles. This series not only indicates the circularity and consistency of Dimé's artistic project, but also his desire to inject a Senegalese cultural philosophy into transnational art discourse and visual consumption. I surmise that Dimé's interrogation of differing Euro-American and Senegalese practices of consumption and viewership of the same art object is the focus of this final series. The parallactic nature of the Dance series warrants an understanding of why Dimé manipulated the group to create a simultaneous dissonance and convergence between his works and those of European modernism.
The Edible Book in the Era of Riots 238–252
James Day
By tracing instances in which words are choked on or eaten in recent artwork and poetry, this article argues for an encompassing disruption to language in the so-called Era of Riots. Following a run through of the argument for the self-abolition of the poet by the editors of Commune Editions, the article cuts to the eating of words in video works by Melanie Gilligan and Lise Skou and Nils Rømer. Sean Bonney’s ‘Letters on Poetics’ are then turned to for their reflections on engaged poetry before the article ends with a closely related fragment on Danny Hayward’s ‘People’ and ‘Pragmatic Sanction’. Whether or not a new militant poetics answers to an actual politicisation of art or poetry or not remains unresolved, though how they relate to their apparatus, whether or not they are consumed by their own progress, is tentatively put forwards as a measure.
Gugulective as Biopolitical Collectivism 253–263
Massa Lemu
Gugulective is an art collective that has been at the forefront in the contestation of neoliberal capitalism in post-Apartheid South Africa focusing on the economies of place, space and race, and using the shebeen as the centre for its activist aesthetics. Installations and photomontages are the group's well-known signature media. However, an emphasis on these material aesthetic objects occludes the immaterial dimension of the group's collaborative projects. A focus on Guguctive's immaterial practices such as performances and discussions, which I call biopolitical collectivism due to their subject-centred and life-forming collectivist aesthetic praxis, reveals how the group contests the dehumanisation of black bodies in contemporary capitalism. This is particularly evident in projects such as ‘Indaba Ludabi’, ‘Akuchanywa Apha’ and ‘Titled/Untitled’, in which the Gugulective confronts issues of place, space and race by deploying a cross-disciplinary and interstitial aesthetic practice which situates itself between the art institution and the non-artworld, between aesthetics and activism, the township and the city, the shebeen and the gallery, affects and the art object, art and life.
Diagnosing the Selfie: Pathology or Parody? - Networking the Spectacle in Late Capitalism 264–273
Raymond L M Lee
Social networking sites are now reportedly flooded with millions of selfies, the purportedly narcissistic tendency to reproduce with webcams and smartphones self-images intended for widespread online dissemination. Like the chain-letter craze of yesteryears, selfies have become fast reduplicating memes targeted at no single destination and orbited in digital space as self-identities transformed into virtual signs. Psychological interpretations cast them as pathological manifestations of low self-esteem and attention-seeking behaviour, perhaps even a form of psychosis. However, defenders attempt to demonstrate selfie circulation as a reality sui generis with its own codes of communication and decorum that may even suggest the formation of new digital communities. However, this defence neglects the question of selfies as spectacles in network culture coinciding with the growth of surveillance practices. Intensification of spectacles aided by the spread of new media technologies may be seen as favouring an interpretation of selfies as reflecting the power of network memes rather than a pathological manifestation of narcissism.
Rubber Ducks and Ships of Fools 274–290
Elfriede Dreyer
The trope of boat figures centrally in Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's travelling public artwork, ‘Rubber duck’ (2007–2016), in the media images of migrant refugees arriving at European destinations by boat since 2015, and in British artist Paul McCarthy's ‘Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools’ (2010). Functioning as a hybrid vessel containing conceptions of global and nomadic transitivity, the image of a boat forms the coalescing crux of the discourse in this article. The boat is interpreted as figuratively representing vessel transporting the nomadic individual as an autobiographical subject positioned in liminal and polycultural circumstances. Following Russell West-Pavlov, it is argued that autobiographical discourse continues to manifest as one of the most potent forms of ideology and that subjective nomadic ideology is utopianistically coloured. In the course of the article, notions of polyculturalism, rhizomatic identity, the Foucauldian notion of a Ship of Fools, minor, minority, difference and Otherness are explored as core aspects of the constructions around autobiographical trajectory in the nomadic context.
Voicing Concerns over Women's Destiny in the Market Society: ‘Lunar Eclipse’ (1999) as an ‘Art Film’ 291–307
Xiaoping Wang
The present conflict between Marxism and a certain strand of feminism centers on the role of class in the oppression of women. This debate can be examined in a recent Chinese ‘women’s film’. ‘Lunar Eclipse’ (Yùe shí月蚀, 1999), written and directed by the renowned Chinese director Wang Quan’an (b 1965) is acclaimed as one of the earliest leading art films in China by the Chinese sixth-generation auteur. This article aims to explore the cultural-political import and social significance of the film through analysing its narrative structures and cinematic methodology. It contends that through layers of love stories and the notion of searching for the ‘other half’, it represents the rampant class division and restructuring in Chinese society after the 1990s. Ultimately, in terms of aesthetics, it depicts the harsh social reality through its deployment of a realist approach. However, the lack of a class perspective prevents the film from going deeper into an exploration of the social contradictions and consequences of class restructuring.
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