Third Text
Issues
Volume 37, 2023
Issue 4
Number 183, July 2023
New Thai Cinema and the Poetics of Resistance: Unforgetting the Thammasat University Massacre in Anocha Suwichakornpong’s ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’ (2016) 431–448
Duncan Caillard
Throughout its history, Thai cinema has been entangled with institutions of state power. Through invasive systems of censorship and discursive regulation, the state not only regulates public expressions but also sculpts particular forms of national identity, silencing other forms of remembrance and identification. Against these pressures, independent filmmakers in Thailand creatively negotiate the boundaries of state censorship through silences, narrative discontinuities and elliptical plot structures to simultaneously evade state censorship and renegotiate national systems of memorialisation under military rule. This paper investigates how the Thammasat University Massacre is remediated through Anocha Suwichakornpong’s 2016 film ‘Dao khanong (By the Time It Gets Dark)’, and finds that the film intentionally evades direct representation of the massacre to instead disarticulate national memory cultures and reimagine unconsolidated futures disentangled from institutions of authoritarian power.
Standing Rock and its Ancestors: Filmic Interventions and Disruptions in ‘Taking Alcatraz’ (John Ferry, 2015) 449–466
Jack Rutherford
This article considers the documentary film, ‘Taking Alcatraz’ (John Ferry, 2015), in the context of US-Indigenous history. The documentary form presents alternative ideas and futures beyond those dominant in the US imagination and run counter to stereotypical representations of Native Americans found in the Western genre. The 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz can be seen as part of a history of political dissent by Indigenous peoples whilst the (mediated) nature of film reinvigorate and reanimate ideas such as those employed at Alcatraz – perceived dormant since the closure of the prison, save for the eighteen months of Indigenous occupation, commencing in 1969. At the heart of this analysis is the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty which returned all unused land to Native peoples, prompting the Occupation, and how this event is offered continued context and urgency whilst opening previously closed dialogues of Indigenous history, stressing the power of the (moving) image.
Mary Kelly’s ‘Gloria Patri’ and Negative Narcissism 467–486
Ivan Knapp
This article revisits Mary Kelly’s 1992 installation ‘Gloria Patri’after the spectacle of masculine violence at the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. Whilst ‘Gloria Patri’ has received less art historical attention that the major works that immediately preceded it, I argue that Kelly’s sophisticated handling of the interactions between masculinity and military technologies in the televisual coverage of the First Gulf War resonates strongly with questions surrounding the digital mediation of gender in our present moment. Addressing a lacuna in ‘Gloria Patri’s critical reception, I introduce the French psychoanalyst André Green’s work on narcissism to explore how his conceptual vocabulary is activated by Kelly’s installation. The article concludes by considering how Kelly’s work creates a historical, aesthetic and theoretical context for the events of 6 January 2021 at the US Capitol building, which might enrich attempts to track the dynamic interrelations between masculinity, militarism and contemporary media.
Erasure: China’s Migrant Workers in Contemporary Visual Arts 487–507
Federica Mirra
Since 1978, Mainland China has transformed cities into attractive branding engines to satisfy political and economic agendas at an unprecedented speed and scale. However, what is often concealed is that China’s urban growth has been achieved thanks to the invaluable efforts of migrant workers. Treated as undesirable urban aspects and erased from the city due to their rural origins and low education, migrants’ labour has been crucial to the building of new cities and infrastructure. To shed light on these social dynamics, I investigate the representation of migrant workers through visual arts. Informed by semi-structured interviews with contemporary artists and visual analysis, this article offers an insight into the official narrative and the socio-spatial inequalities brought about by urbanisation. Lastly, it contributes to the contemporary visual art discourse, outlining different representational and creative strategies, from erasure to socially engaged works, which evoke migrant workers’ social and transformative potential.
Aural Resilience: Sonic Labour in Chen Ting-jung’s ‘You Are the Only One I Care About (Whisper)’ 509–524
Pei-chun Viola Hsieh
In 2018, the artist Chen Ting-Jung (b 1985) manufactured a sound installation that reclaimed the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan. Constructed in 1967, the wall’s seventeen loudspeakers broadcast political propaganda across a narrow stretch of water to the People’s Republic of China for three decades. In recognition of the sonic Cold War, Chen stripped down this fortress into its rudiments: a horizontal arc of speakers, playing one of Taiwanese cultural icon Teresa Teng’s famous solo pieces. She titled the installation ‘You Are the Only One I Care About (Whisper)’. This article explores this reclamation, where the questions about the exploitation of female labour and the aestheticisation of the female voice confront the aurality of the Cold War. I argue that the female voice became a specific site of production during the sonic combat between the Taiwan Strait. Most importantly, I investigate how Chen’s intervention is both a feminist critique and a form of sonic resilience that is open to different political possibilities.
‘We all came from Soros’: Continuities and Discontinuities in the Croatian Visual Arts Scene in the 1990s and 2000s 525–542
Sanja Sekelj and Željka Tonković
Focusing on the period between 1994 and 2006, this study of the Soros Foundation and its spin-offs employs a mixed-method approach to explore the structure of the visual arts scene in Croatia and the role of Soros Foundation organisations within it. Based on a quantitative analysis of network visualisations and a qualitative structural analysis of narrative interviews, which are theoretically framed around the notions of network and complexity, the article moves the research agenda away from assumptions about what Soros Foundation organisations were supposed to be, to a more embedded understanding of what they actually were in a specific space-time. The analysis foregrounds varying strategies and trajectories of Soros Foundation’s Croatia-based organisations. It demonstrates that they served mostly to maintain continuity with the socialist period during the 1990s, while real structural change, at least partially due to the Foundation’s influence, happened only after 1999 with the emergence of the independent cultural scene.
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