Third Text

28 August 2023

Paul O’ Kane

Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Our Mountains are Painted On Glass’, South London Gallery, London, 31 March – 18 June 2023, travelling to DCA, Dundee (9 December 2023 – 24 March 2024), and the Bluecoat, Liverpool (dates to be determined)

Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Our Mountains are Painted On Glass’, 2023, installation view, courtesy of the artist and South London Gallery, photo by Jo Underhill

How can we write critically about a show that we like so much that it makes us feel as though we are having our belly rubbed? Michelle Williams Gamaker’s ‘Our Mountains are Painted On Glass’ at London’s South London Gallery (SLG) just happened to tick all of this particular writer’s pleasure boxes and coincided with my own research into history in contemporary art. It made me feel as though others understand my own passionate interest in contemporary art’s relationship with cinema and with history.

Star of the SLG show was a short film (27 mins) titled Thieves that looks as though it was shot on a 16mm or 35 mm film camera. The image comes in an anachronistic square format and the corners of the picture seem slightly ragged sometimes. The content or narrative of the film focuses on and fictionalises two real stars from cinema history, Anna May Wong and Sabu. Both were abused by Hollywood to create and enforce racial cultural stereotypes about Chinese and Indian people respectively. But here the artist uses her own box of cinematic tricks to provide Wong and Sabu with a tale of liberation from their plight as characters imprisoned within Hollywood’s powerful Euro-American cinematic gaze.

Williams Gamaker crams layered and nuanced issues into this short film, whose relatively low-budget, lo-fi and ‘amateurish’ (a term used on this occasion as a positive compliment) attributes not only add to its charm (which might sound condescending) but come to increase its potent political power as well as its aesthetic conviction. We are ingratiated and drawn into empathy, and even conspiracy with the characters, precisely because of their slightly naive and therefore more ‘real’ representations. After all, these are clearly real people who are acting, and Williams Gamaker makes a perhaps Brechtian virtue of this as it becomes evidence of a work of fine art, whereas a Hollywood movie might tend towards actors who act so professionally that we forget they are actors.

Nevertheless, if this lovingly (noting here that the ‘am’ in amateur relates to the ‘am’ in amour, and thus ‘love’) crafted work of fine art encourages its audience to revisit some of the old movies that it references (most notably the 1940 version of The Thief of Baghdad, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by, among others, Michael Powell), they will soon see that those so-called professionals, wielding relatively enormous budgets and sets, and supposedly at the top of their game, were often guilty of what looks to us today like amateurism of the most negative kind, as their own painted backdrops fall far short of any convincing illusion, and their hammy dialogues and scripts make us wonder quite what our parents saw in such movies.

Willams Gamaker has developed a successful way of making critical contemporary art by delving into history, the history of cinema, of culture and of the twentieth century. This is an artist who clearly sees history as a resource for informing and expanding contemporary art and of pursuing contemporary politics. Williams Gamaker’s practice is not a postmodern eclecticism in which anything, any time and any value goes but, rather, is a creative, contemporary response to a history of image technologies recently relativised by the hyper-modern onset of the digital age (Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988–1998, and Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, 2011, are useful referents here). While awarding us a new day-to-day futurity, the digital has simultaneously enwrapped us in an age of the archive. Williams Gamaker’s film unlocks that vault and invites the images, characters, tropes and ideas that she finds therein to renew their own stories, giving them futures that had previously been disallowed, hidden or repressed by the power of established cinema history’s scopic regime.

While investing plenty of noble politics in her work, Williams Gamaker also makes us smile, cry and laugh, as all good moviemakers should. The script provides the story of a revolution or ‘mutiny’ in which the Asian stars refuse their plight, rise up and rebel against crude serial abuses by white, male, Euro-American directors and writers. Here, Anna May Wong has been stereotyped so often in a narrow range of roles, preserved only for a beautiful, young Chinese woman, that she has become permanently rendered as black and white (reminiscent of the character played by Robin Williams in Woody Allen’s 1997 movie Deconstructing Harry, who is permanently out of focus). This disturbing condition symbolises Wong’s immersion and imprisonment within the cinematic restrictions that have been applied to her, including the fact, as things stand, that she cannot qualify for inclusion in the gaudy realm of technicolour (again, see Korda’s The Thief of Baghdad) looming on the horizon of cinema history.

Sabu, who unlike May Wong makes the technicolour cut, nevertheless complains that he is tired of being repeatedly asked to perform the roles of a ‘prince or a thief’. With these volatile political themes and energies carefully concertinaed within Williams Gamaker’s concise production, Anna May Wong and Sabu contrive a revolution aided by a crowd of hastily enlisted ‘extras’ (cleverly titled the ‘Annamaytons’). They are further helped by previously dutiful set assistants now turned against the English director and American writer who have thus far been running the show. Together they murder a leading white man (who has been using brown-face and a prosthetic nose to play an Asian part), and then tie up the director and the writer.

Williams Gamaker impressively covers numerous urgent and current concerns of twenty-first-century contemporary art and politics, delivering a model of how a just cultural revenge might come about and be most effective. By both celebrating and critiquing cinema history as an infinitely rich resource, the artist empowers herself to supplant the white, male, Euro-American cinematic regime and demonstrates a willingness to acquire the necessary power and skills with which to develop her own cinema – or ‘our own’ we might say, as Williams Gamaker is clearly making a popular, political and potent new cinematic form that a huge, mis- or un- represented potential audience are surely ready to welcome, endorse and enjoy.

Having enjoyed the pleasure of watching Williams Gamaker’s movie, there was still time, space and appetite to explore a sprawling archive laid out in the South London Gallery space. This included dioramas and sketches, costumes and props, all recognisable as objects used in the film or possibly deployed in its planning. And this was a good way to complete a visit to the gallery as it shows or reminds us that all of this is made – this movie, this gallery, this cultural world. It is not imposed by transcendent, remote or virtual external forces, nor fuelled by furiously streaming algorithms or cynically calculating uber creators wielding mega-budgets.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Our Mountains are Painted On Glass’, 2023, installation view, courtesy of the artist and South London Gallery, photo by Jo Underhill

Correspondingly, Williams Gamaker’s own invention, imagination, critical and political motives and aim – along with all the pleasure she provides – take up cinema history, transform it and deliver it into our own hands. She thereby reminds us that this world and its illusions are all and always made, and that we therefore can and should make, unmake and remake it for ourselves.

Williams Gamaker subtly or implicitly assures us that we, too, can and ultimately must write and produce our own narratives out of the remainder of those imposed upon and bequeathed to us by history. Williams Gamaker inspires us to make those narratives and those characters do what we want them to do, thus taking pleasure in our own cultural revenge.

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). He also teaches at SOAS, University of London. His book, History in Contemporary Art and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2023. He has also published numerous professional pieces, including articles, essays, reviews, and a group of artists' self-published books. His writings have appeared in Third Text's refereed journal, as well as Third Text Online and numerous other platforms, including Art Monthly. His long-running seminars ‘Technologies of Romance’ and ‘A Thing of the Past?’ (on history in contemporary art) contextualise the impact of today's ‘new’ technologies on art, life and culture, while attempting to use history to see, interpret and theorise our times.