Third Text
Issues
Volume 37, 2023
Issue 1
Number 180, January 2023
Grid Locks: The Social Life of Abstraction, from Agnes Martin to Mark Bradford 1–23
David Lloyd
This article is based on a painting by Los Angeles-based Black artist Mark Bradford, ‘On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts’ (2001), which was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to a series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, ‘Untitled (Study for 'On a Clear Day')’,
Mining Matter/s: Bonnie Devine, Anishinaabe Cosmologies, and Uranium Extraction on the Canadian Shield 24–43
Zoe Weldon-Yochim
The contemporary artist Bonnie Devine (b 1952), a member of the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario, Canada, works in a wide range of media to address the cultural and environmental consequences of uranium mining that occurred in her community. Uranium extraction in the area has resulted in numerous devastations, including radioactive contamination of all fifty-five miles of the Serpent River. In this study, I use ecocritical methodologies to examine how local environmental conditions, Anishinaabe cosmologies, and histories of Cold War resource extraction inform Devine’s animated film ‘Rooster Rock: The Story of Serpent River’ (2002). The work demonstrates her intensive investigation of the unique properties of uranium, its effect on place, beings and ontologies, and the ways Ontarian uranium mining dovetails with the artist’s personal history. Additionally, this article calls attention to divergent and overlapping modes of knowledge and valuation practiced by Indigenous and Euro-American participants in this history.
Woman as Battleground: Marc Garanger’s Identity Photographs from Algeria and their Long Afterlives 44–60
Katarzyna Falęcka
This article examines how photographs of women taken by Marc Garanger during his army service in Algeria (1960–1962) have become sites of multiple, often competing mnemonic projections. At the height of the Algerian War of Independence, Garanger produced nearly two thousand identity photographs of those displaced by the French army from villages to detention camps. The photographs of women are some of the most cited images from the war, having been popularised through Garanger’s own photobooks. They are either read as strictly exploitative or, following Garanger’s narrative, as bearing witness to Algerian suffering. The article departs from attempts to fix the ‘true’ meaning of these images and examines their afterlives, while reflecting upon the hyper-visibility of women as images. It discusses newly recovered archival material, alongside Garanger’s decision to return to Algeria in 2004, revealing inconsistencies in Garanger’s carefully crafted narrative and reflecting upon the speculative futures of these contested images.
Cosmos, Fiction and Transcendence: Photography and Conceptual Art in Communist Bratislava 61–86
Paula Gortázar
This article analyses the development of Conceptual Art in Bratislava during the communist period, with specific emphasis on the practices produced throughout the so-called ‘Normalisation’ (1968–1989). The text starts by introducing the functioning mechanisms of the Czechoslovakian artistic scene of the time. It then moves on to analyse the work of Július Koller, Rudolf Sikora and Ĺubomír Ďurček. It is argued that, despite the difficult conditions for art production present in Bratislava during Normalisation years, Conceptual Art served its precursors as an escape valve for their political convictions, which they manifested through the use of puns, parody, irony, metaphors and the design of elaborate cosmological fictions through utopian and dystopian projections of their own political and cultural reality. In doing so, the unique properties of photography, such as its reduced size, low cost and indexical qualities, turned the medium into the most suitable form to materialise their conceptual practice.
Transformation of Political Discourse in Turkish Cinema from the 1960s to the 1990s 87–98
F Nesrin Yarar Aksoy
Socialist realist and political films which expressed oppositional views to the economic and political environment were produced in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. The political turmoil and the transformation in the political economy as a result of the 1980 military coup have deepened the crisis of Turkish cinema that began in the 1970s. As with the country, that entered a new period in the 1990s, Turkish cinema has also found itself in a new political discourse. The same years have coincided with a time when film theory was undergoing fundamental transformations. This study aims to discuss the change in the political discourse of Turkish cinema from the 1960s to the 1990s within the framework of socio-political, socio-economical transformation and film theory. In the 1990s, while social theory moved from class politics to identity politics, the political discourse of Turkish cinema has also transformed into themes such as ethnicity, sexual freedom, the individual, miscommunication and multiculturalism.
Doors, Windows and the Notebook of Solidarity: Rethinking Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Where Is the Friend’s House?’ (1987) 99–115
Farshad Zahedi
The widespread acknowledgement of Kiarostami as a global auteur provides us with a background against which to reconsider one of his most local films as well as one of the most important representations of children in Iranian cinema. When interpreting ‘Where Is the Friend’s House?’, many critics and scholars see metaphysical references in the simple act of a child attempting to overcome obstacles put in his way by adults. But any mystical reading of the film runs the risk of closing off consideration of Kiarostami’s endeavour to offer a cognitive map of a crucial moment in Iranian history. This study aims to rethink the film, focusing on Kiarostami’s depiction of social conflicts through an exploration of quotidian spaces and a portrayal of simple objects such as doors, windows and homework notebooks. Abbas Kiarostami, in creating such a microcosmic space, was following great Iranian thinkers and poets such as Hafez in expressing his contestation of the dominant ideologies of post-1979 Iran.
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