Third Text
Issues
Volume 35, 2021
Issue 6
Number 173, November 2021
Decolonising Love: Frank Bowling in the early 1960s 645–666
Giulia Smith
This article reconsiders Frank Bowling’s figurative paintings from the early 1960s, emphasising the recurrence of intimate affects in this body of works. It argues that the representation of romantic entanglements is cardinal rather than marginal in this artist’s negotiation of both personal and pictorial freedoms. This becomes especially clear when Bowling’s early work is set against the backdrop of nativist anxieties about the growing visibility of interracial unions in postwar Britain. With this in mind, and in a nod to the growing literature on love and anti-racist resistance, the article presents affective relationships and their visual manifestations as charged sites for the renegotiation of unequal power relations. Not only does this analysis restore political substance to a series of paintings that is rarely considered by scholars of Bowling’s work, but it points towards new ways of reassessing the field of mid-twentieth century modernism in terms of diasporic and intersectional phenomenologies of desire.
Nuclear Aesthetics against the Colonial Desert: The Sand-Covered Paintings of Jonathan Kumintjara Brown 667–688
Jacob G Warren
From 1956 until 1963, nuclear weapons developed by Britain were being detonated in the mulga and saltbush plain of Maralinga, South Australia. A large tract of the Western Desert was bombed, burnt and radioactively contaminated. This article analyses how this history has been engaged with in the works of artist Jonathan Kumintjara Brown (Pitjantjatjara, 1960–1997) whose ancestral lands were directly impacted by the Maralinga nuclear testing program. Through close examination of selected works I show how Brown critically interrogated nuclear colonialism in Australia. Nuclear colonialism describes the claiming of politically peripheral land for nuclear mining, testing and development. The work of Brown is argued to be an example of nuclear aesthetics and is shown to redress the material, cultural and historical invisibility of radioactive contamination at Maralinga, revealing the impacts that it has had on the ecological, cultural and physiological health of the South Australian desert and its people.
Containment in Doris Salcedo’s ‘Atrabiliarios’ 689–708
Jamie DiSarno
Doris Salcedo’s ‘Atrabiliarios’ is a widely revered installation, one of the first to bring the artist to an international stage in the early 1990s. Yet virtually no critical account of her work provides a comprehensive and nuanced history of the context that instantiated it. This article presents an entirely new art historical investigation of ‘Atrabiliarios’ read through the context of the Cold War in Colombia. I argue Salcedo’s installation can be understood as a critique of the logic of Cold War containment, alluding to US influence on the Colombian conflict. I argue that Salcedo is intentionally attempting to disrupt a safe distance between a perceived barbaric other of Colombia and the ‘civilised’ subjects of the Global North. The artist manipulated the space of the exhibition so that, through her work, viewers are placed in close relation to the indices of those already met with violence and pervasive indifference.
A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s Collaborations with ‘Art & Text’ and Chilean Art Workers during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1981–1990 709–731
Verónica Tello and Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
From 1981 to 1990, the Australian art journal ‘Art & Text’ and the affiliated ‘Art & Criticism Monograph Series’ had a productive, if at times fragmented, relationship with a small but influential group of Chilean arts workers during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Initiated by the Australian-Chilean artist, Juan Dávila, this collaboration — including key figures such as Paul Taylor, Paul Foss, Nelly Richard, Patricio Marchant and Francisco Zegers − gave rise to multiple and significant essays, books and translations that contested the limits of Pinochet’s epistemological frontiers on the one hand, and Euro-North American centrist readings of the artworld on the other. This article returns to several archives across Australia and Chile to trace the simultaneous developments of southern thinking, and asks what can be learned about the co-production of epistemologies across two distinct Pacific locations. The almost instant anachronism of art criticism, especially that on the margins, has meant that ‘Art & Text’s and the ‘Art & Criticism Monograph Series’s history of supporting Chilean art writing during the dictatorship has not been effectively transmitted into the present. It is, by now, pretty much unknown or forgotten in both Australia and Chile − and elsewhere − awaiting the attention of a younger generation of art workers hoping to connect to these fragmented histories.
Yin Xiuzhen’s ‘Portable Cities’: ‘Homemaking’ via Domestic Preservation 733–750
Vivian K Sheng
This article examines Yin Xiuzhen’s ‘Portable Cities’ created since 2001. A range of miniature cities, constructed from restitched washed worn clothes, rise from unfolded suitcases. The discussion draws on Iris Marion Young’s conception of preservation – an important, but often overlooked dimension of care and cultivation in the formation of home and one’s sense of belonging. It investigates how Yin’s artistic practice of domestic preservation might make and remake oneself ‘at home’ in an ever-shifting urbanising and globalising world, bringing to the fore an iterative temporality of embodied inhabitation. Built upon recent feminist debates about affective labour, this article casts new light on women’s relation to home and domesticity and women’s status and contribution in the current stage of neoliberalism. It considers how Yin’s works might challenge normative accounts of social advancement, global capitalism and international migration, which often push women aside, forging interpersonal intersubjective connections across cultural and geographical boundaries.
The Remarkable Power of Language in ‘The Battle of Algiers’ 751–763
Libby Miller
The bilingualism of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ is one of the film’s most salient characteristics, yet it is mostly absent from the literature. The use of two languages within the film creates disjuncture in its textual fabric, disjuncture in places that do not always align with neat French/Algerian fault-lines. The alternating use of French and Algerian Arabic exists in productive tension with a unity of perspective that the film offers the viewer, revealing the difficulty of holding together and making narrative sense of the historical moment that constitutes its subject matter, the eponymous Battle of Algiers, at the time at which the film was produced, in the newly independent Algeria of the mid-1960s. The representation of the FLN’s unity and legitimacy as the sole representative of the will of the people paints over historical divisions, but the irrepressible force of the Algerian masses frequently de-centres the FLN, a fact revealed in the film’s linguistic make-up.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group