The Print Sales Gallery at the Photographers’ Gallery is a commercial operation. It hosts small displays of beautifully made prints of photographs by leading photographers, British and international, which are for sale at (eye-watering) prices (the cheapest print here is for sale at £3,400 plus VAT). But you don’t have to buy anything, the gallery is free to enter and walk around (it’s one fairly small room downstairs next to the shop). The Print Sales Gallery is currently displaying 11 works by acclaimed Lebanese photographer and film-maker Fouad Elkoury with the exhibition title ‘Fouad Elkoury: Preserving Time’.
Born in France in 1952 Elkoury spent his formative years in Beirut. In the late 1970s he studied architecture in London and, although he turned to photography soon after graduating, the shape and structure of the built environment often controls and defines his compositions.
Elkoury was 23 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975. It was to last 15 years and devastate the country, tearing communities apart and permanently undermining civil society. Some of his work captures the devastation of his home city, with bombed-out apartment blocks or civic buildings pockmarked by shellfire. His photos contrast the ruined cityscape with people getting on with their lives as best they can, enjoying food, company, sunshine and swimming.
The Football Match, Beirut by Fouad Elkoury (1980) £4,200 + VAT
This is an interesting photo because we are used to having the subject centre and front in a photo. Here the subject of the photo is the building, or the building material, presumably render over concrete. The slumping youth at bottom right and the dangling legs of the spectators emphasise the emptiness of the central space. Partly it reflects his interest in architecture and the built environment. Maybe it’s a reference to the arid emptiness of the desert in the interior of the Lebanon. it certainly radiates Mediterranean heat and laze.
Just as interested in architecture is this wonderfully carefree image of two young women sunbathing in the cool of a public fountain. In the distance are the nondescript concrete blocks which blight many Arab countries, and on the right some industrial towers letting off spumes of pollution. But for this moment the modernist pillar and cone waterfall creates the equivalent of an oasis in the desert, a space, shapes a space and moment of freedom and relaxation.
Portemillo by Fouad Elkoury (1980) £8,300 + VAT
In the 1980s the conflict eventually drove Elkoury to settle in Paris from where he made forays to other Mediterranean countries, including a project to follow in the footsteps of the famous French novelist Gustave Flaubert. But when the civil war finally ground to an end, in 1991 Elkoury returned to the home of his youth, tasked with recording the city where a uneasy peace now reigned, which resulted in his best known book, Beirut City Centre.
Whereas the joy-of-the-moment photos are always pinprick-clear, the wartorn city photos often use out of focus, ore often than not of the people, as if the ruined buildings will stand for thousands of years, like the ruins of Greece and Rome, while the people are blurred phantasms, passing through.
Man With A Radio, Beirut, 1995 by Fouad Elkoury. £3,400 + VAT
And yet next to the ruin photos are images whose frivolity or untroubled poetry harks back to a different world, to idyllic images which seem to come from the 1940s or 50s. A couple of these images reminded me of the great Mexican photographer Manual Alvarez Bravo. This jokey one is, apparently, of his own wife. It looks like a joke by Cartier-Bresson from the late 1940s but it’s from 1990.
Kuchuk Hanem, Cairo 1990 by Fouad Elkoury. £12,000 + VAT
As to the show’s title and ‘preserving time’, surely all photographers do that? But Elkoury is quoted as saying that passively recording what happens isn’t enough, not for him anyway; you have to make an extra effort to capture something meaningful:
‘If my images just show the event happening in front of me, the meaning of it will die when the event dies. For my pictures to be preserved in time, they had to be more symbolic.
You can see what he means. All his images, in whichever style, go beyond capturing the moment to convey something deeper: the more you look at the guy walking through the ruined city with a boogie box on his shoulder the more poignant, pregnant and subtly powerful it becomes. Each of these 11 photographs really do glow with what the curators describe as a ‘defiantly poetic sensibility’, testament to human endurance, sunbathing amid the slaughter.
The British historian Eric Hobsbawm popularised the idea of the ‘long nineteenth century’ in European history, the notion that starting historical accounts of the nineteenth century precisely at 1800 and ending them on the dot at 1900 is inadequate; you have to start at 1789 with the outbreak of the French Revolution to understand everything which followed, and you have to continue the era on until 1914 and the outbreak of the Great War, which marked the true end of the century and all its assumptions.
The curators of this sumptuous, fascinating and beautifully designed exhibition at the British Museum have done something similar to Chinese history, extending their definition of China’s long nineteenth century – what they’re calling ‘China’s Hidden Century’ – to start in 1796 and to end in 1912.
The dates
Why start at 1796? Because that’s the year a new emperor came to the throne, the Qianlong Emperor. It didn’t mark the start of a new dynasty; the Qianlong Emperor was the fourth in the well-established Qing dynasty which had started in 1644. But the start of his reign arguably marked a high tide mark of China’s power and confidence. In that year the empire contained over 300 million souls, an estimated third of humanity, and the total territory ruled by the emperor exceeded the area of Europe.
This map from his reign is a political map in the sense that it doesn’t strive for geographical accuracy but marks places by importance. So it’s amusing to learn that Europe is shown as a small border area at the top left and that Britain is one of the tiny insignificant islands indicated by white-lined blobs off the blue coast at the very top left.
Why end the period in 1912? Because that’s the year when, following the revolution of 1911, the last Qing emperor, the Xuantong Emperor, commonly known as Puyi, was forced to abdicate, bringing to an end over 2,000 years of imperial rule.
Why the ‘hidden’ century? Because the long century between these two dates has conventionally been seen by Western historians as an era of steady decline, a sunset period after the artistic glories of the 17th and 18th centuries, leading inexorably down to the empire’s final collapse at the start of the 20th century. The curators’ aim is to question and reverse this preconception, to rehabilitate China’s long nineteenth century.
Nineteenth century wars
When describing the nineteenth century in China, Western historians all too often focus on the series of wars which China fought and consistently lost, notably the two Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), the Sino-Franco War (1884 to 1885), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895), the Boxer Rebellion (1899 to 1901).
But despite these various disaster, in China, like everywhere else, people continued to live and love, marry, have families, make homes, work or run businesses, hustle for money or places in the bureaucracy, buy clothes and furniture and toys and household implements, shop and cook and eat, wear fine clothes and jewellery, write letters and contracts and wills and poems, decorate and draw and paint beautiful things.
And that is what this exhibition is about. Wars and emperors are covered, but what it’s really about is Chinese social history, about uncovering the lives and lifestyles of the widest possible range of Chinese people – a people steeped in tradition and religion and rituals and business and art – through a dazzling collection of objects.
The exhibition contains 300 objects brought from over 30 lenders, public and private, around the world. It’s taken four years to assemble and involved over 100 scholars from 14 countries. The result is not only the exhibition and the typically sumptuous catalogue which accompanies it, but a related book by a team of scholars which details the lives of 100 Chinese citizens chosen from all across ‘China’s Hidden Century’.
Seven rooms
The exhibition has been organised into seven rooms, each addressing an aspect of Chinese life, being:
Introduction
Court
Military
Artists
Urban life
Global China
Reformers and revolutionaries
Representative figures
Each room also features one particular individual who typifies or epitomises the theme under consideration. There are an unknown woman courtier; an empress; a soldier; an artist; a businessman’s wife; a merchant; and revolutionary poet.
In a lovely piece of design these personages are threaded through the show’s iconography by shadows, life-sized outlines of these fugitive figures from history. The Museum commissioned the London College of Fashion to create silhouettes of these figures, which are projected on delicate white fabric or gauze hangings throughout the beautifully laid-out show.
In fact the first thing you see when you enter the Sainsbury Wing where the exhibition is being held is an opaque screen with life-size silhouettes of 7 mysterious figures cast on it. These shadowy figures, from a distant country, from a vanished past, will hover over and guide the visitor through their treasure and marvels.
Shadows of the past – screen designed by the London College of fashion in ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum
1. Introduction – women’s voices
The map (above), a bilingual document in both Manchu (language of the ruling dynasty) and Chinese (language of the majority Han people), and an imperially commissioned dictionary indicate some of the scope and scale of the multilingual, multi-ethnic empire at the exhibition’s start point. But the most significant object here is a portrait of an unknown woman.
As Chairman Mao said a century later, ‘Women hold up half the sky’, but women’s lives were very circumscribed in traditional China. As well as bringing the story of a neglected century into the light, the exhibition is very committed to giving women’s stories and women’s experiences their due. This picture of an unknown woman from the Qing court sets the tone or announces this intent.
Accompanying the picture is a 1-minute audio of her imagined thoughts and feelings, read in both English and Chinese. All of the seven figures have an audioscript like this, in which they describe their lives and experiences.
On a more specific level, if you look very closely you can see that she has three earrings in each earlobe, something Manchu women did to as a marker of their ethnicity i.e. belonging to the ruling caste. Ethnicity was important. The introductory section also contains a map of Peking, which was sharply divided by ethnicity. The imperial palace complex and immediate environs were reserved for Manchus. Han residents lived to the south in the walled part of the city. Foreign diplomats and business people were confined to a quarter in the north-east.
2. The court
Six emperors ruled in succession between 1796 and 1912 and a lovely scroll on the wall gives their names and dates and a one-phrase description. They were:
1. Underestimated emperor: The Jiaqing emperor (ruled 1796 to 1820)
2. Emperor forced to open China: The Daoguang emperor (1821 to 1850)
3. Witness of Qing decline: The Xianfeng emperor (1851 to 1861)
[Power behind the throne: Empress Dowager Cixi (1835 to 1908)]
4. Puppet emperor: The Tongzhi emperor (1862 to 1874)
5. Reforming emperor: The Guangxu emperor (1875 to 1908)
6. Last emperor: The Xuantong emperor (Puyi) (1908 to 1912)
The last three of these came to the throne and their reigns were dominated by the great power behind the throne, the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of China from 1861 to 1908: her son became the Tongzhi emperor and her nephew ruled as the Guangxu emperor.
Cixi is centre stage here, the Representative Figure, a life-sized silhouette of her caught on a hanging gauze, while all around her are clothes and objects indicating the luxury of the imperial court. As with all the other representative figures, there’s an audio playing of some of the Empress Dowager’s words, in this case an amusingly immodest claim:
“I have often thought that I am the cleverest woman that ever lived… I have heard much about Queen Victoria…her life was not half as eventful as mine.”
Objects include a sumptuous imperial blue gown (above). This features a swooping phoenix amid lush chrysanthemums and wide sleeve bands and is a gorgeous combination of Manchu, Chinese and Japanese motifs, in purple, gold and turquoise. The Empress Dowager’s wardrobe contained hundreds of such dazzling items, which she would accessorise with grandiose, jewelled headpieces, some of which are on display.
But there’s also an abundance of other objects, from the sublime to the ridiculous. At the everyday life end of the scale there’s a collection of snuff boxes. Before 1860 snuff-taking was the preserve of high-status bannermen, government officials and wealthy merchants; after 1860 these stylish little boxes became more widespread as fashionable male accessories.
The most impressive display is of a huge monumental hanging. Dramatic textiles such as this are thought to have served as backdrops for operatic performances but originally derived from hangings for religious festivals or banners in ritual processions. In the centre of this one is a theatrical warrior figure with a yak hair beard and padded-out face. The colours and method of depicting the figures is similar to woodblock printed images of popular deities. In front of it is an elaborate theatrical costume.
Monumental hanging made from silk and metallic thread embroidery on plain-weave wool with animal fibres (nineteenth century) Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There are thumb-rings used by Manchu archers and cavalrymen, an informal robe made for the Guangxu emperor, ritual vessels used as part of state religion, the portrait of a Daoist priest and a Buddhist figure (Buddhism was an important component of the Qing court’s belief system, with Mongolian and Tibetan lamas (teachers) and monks conducting services at court). There’s a woman’s court vest and robe and a photo of court women wearing such clothes. There’s hairpins and fingernail guards; glassware and lacquerware. In short, a wealth of beautiful evocative objects.
Most incongruous objects is the pair of enormous, highly decorated cloisonné vases which were a diplomatic gift from the last Qing emperor Xuantong (also called Puyi) to King George V and Queen Mary for their coronation in June 1911.
Two Chinese vases, cloisonné enamel on copper with carved wooden stands (1908 to 1911) Lent by His Majesty The King
Photography
Something that’s always puzzled me about Chinese art from this period is the odd dysjunction between traditional forms and styles and hyper-realistic faces. The curators explain it was the advent of photography. Western photography, as it developed and spread throughout the nineteenth century, strongly influenced non-Western artistic traditions and in China led to a fashion for hyper-realistic faces, derived from photos, but embedded in traditional clothes, in traditional scroll format, with traditional writing still written on the painting – something we see striking examples of later in the show.
Film
Moving pictures were first publicly presented in 1895 and quickly spread as the technology developed at lightning pace. In an alcove to one side there’s rare, silent black and white film of a dancer, Yu Rongling, daughter of a Qing diplomat, who studied traditional dance in Japan, then, when her father was posted to Paris, studied Western dance and with the dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. She returned to China in 1903 and was asked to perform for the empress. This rare footage of her performing a sword dance is from 1926, after the exhibition’s time limit, but indicating the kind of performance which would have been staged for the last emperors. She is also, of course, part of the exhibition’s foregrounding of women’s achievements.
3. The military
As mentioned foreign and domestic wars ravaged Qing China throughout the 1800s. Civil conflicts including the White Lotus Insurrection (1796 to about 1806), the Xinjiang wars (1820s and 1860s) and the ruinous Taiping Civil War (1851 to 1864), and then wars with imperialist powers such as the two Opium Wars with Britain (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), the Sino-French War (1884 to 1885), the Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895) and the Boxer War (1899 to 1901).
This section is dominated by the impressive figure of a bannerman. We see an impressive soldier’s uniform from mid-century and hear an audio of General Mingliang (1735 to 1822), spoken in Manchu and English, recounting his life and experiences. What is a bannerman?
Bannermen were elite hereditary soldiers who commanded divisions called the Eight Banners, identified by eight coloured flags. They were mostly Manchus, Mongols and some Chinese whose ancestors fought against the Ming dynasty in 1644. Most bannermen lived in the region around Beijing. In provincial garrisons they lived apart from the local population, often in walled sections of major cities. Bannermen were paid a state salary and enjoyed preferential treatment under the law and in the national and regional exam system, success in which led to a government post.
Installation view of ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum, showing Qing army uniform, shield, musket and banner
Illustrating the role of the Chinese army during the long nineteenth century are an album recording the postings of an unknown military official; the diary of Wanyan Linqing, a Manchu bannerman and high-ranking official which contains lovely ink line drawings by contemporary artists. There’s examples of military uniforms and flags along with images of weapons such as double swords, trident, swallowtail shaped shield, infantry archery, sword with shield, long spear, long sword with curved blade and muskets.
From a naval perspective there’s a map of China’s coastline indicating islands, reefs and sandbars. Most poignantly or pointedly of all, there’s a physical copy of the actual Treaty of Nanjing which ended the First Opium War, signed on 29 August 1842. It was the first of the ‘unequal treaties’ which were imposed on the weak Qing Dynasty by arrogant Westerners and, as such, the source of burning resentment for over a century. Its provisions forcibly opened up coastal cities like Shanghai to European and American merchants.
The First Opium War
In the early 1800s, ships began smuggling opium (an illegal narcotic) from British India into south China. As opium consumption increased, the Daoguang emperor banned the trade. The British surrendered 20,283 chests of British-owned opium, promising compensation to the merchants concerned. Lin Zexu, the emperor’s special commissioner, confiscated and destroyed it all. The British government sent a fleet of ships to recoup compensation of lost opium profits.
By the treaty the Qing were ordered to pay an indemnity of $21 million over three years and relinquish Hong Kong to the British. There is absolutely nothing to redeem Britain’s bullying, extortionate and immoral behaviour. In ironic counterpoint to Britain’s bullying, there’s a delicate portrait of Queen Victoria made in 1842 by an unknown artist looking as if opium wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
The Second Opium War
Britain began the Second Opium War to force China to legalise the opium trade and to secure profits from it. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin opened 11 further ports to Western trade. In 1859, the Qing military defeated an Anglo-French fleet sent to Beijing to ratify the treaty. In 1860, more Anglo-French forces marched on Beijing. They looted the Summer Palace, home to the emperor. Prince Gong, the emperor’s brother, signed the Convention of Beijing, bringing the war to an end. Reformers subsequently began to strengthen and modernise Qing rule.
So the British burned the emperor’s summer palace to the ground as punishment for disobeying our imperial commands. Apparently, the brick and stone ruins have been left to become the defining symbol of European violence against 19th-century China. (Other areas of the site have been built on to form parts of the campuses of Peking University and Tsinghua University.) There are some sad relics from the palace on display, namely a couple of broken glazed turquoise architectural tiles.
The Taiping rebellion
One of the weirdest but at the same time most destructive conflicts in human history. Schoolteacher Hong Xiuquan (1814 to 1864), a small town schoolmaster exposed to Christian teachings through a missionary pamphlet, had a nervous breakdown as a result of which he became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ!
He appointed himself ‘Heavenly King’, first emperor of the new dynasty of Taiping. Mind-bogglingly he attracted hosts of followers, amassed an army and by the late 1850s his ’empire’, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, occupied much of China. With about 200 million people under its control, the Taiping had its own rulers, officials, civil service exams, calendar, currency and laws.
Qing dynasty forces fought back and the conflict turned into a full-blown civil war. Amazingly, it resulted in an estimated 20 million dead, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Western mercenaries fought on both sides. Foreigners protected their interests by supplying both the Qing and Taiping with weapons.
Relics or indicators of this vast catastrophe include an embroidered jacket from the Taiping court, a portrait of Hong, a notice to be placed on European’s homes sparing them from Taiping violence, Taiping coins and a seal, a hand-written letter from Hong and a copy of the Taiping Bible which was amended to insert Jesus Christ’s brother.
The Taiping made Nanjing their capital in 1853, fortifying the former Ming capital with an outer wall. This was where they made their last stand in summer 1864, surrounded and under siege by the Hunan army led by Zeng Guofan – as depicted in this contemporary woodcut.
Despite the disruption and huge death toll of China’s nineteenth century wars, life for most people carried on, with many people prepared to pay for luxury objects and works of art. The century saw continued production of China’s classic media and genres, landscape paintings, fans and albums and there are rare and beautiful examples here.
But the century saw the slow steady introduction of western techniques such as lithography, which was combined with traditional woodblock printing design. Cheaper printing technology allowed cheaper magazines and newspapers to be produced such as the weekly pictorial magazine, Dianshizhai huabao, on display here – which included western style images and spread a new Western aesthetic. New artistic and literary groups were set up. Artist Ren Xiong was a member of this new generation and is represented by this fine painting of his patron’s wife.
There are examples of works by other artists from the period including Xugu, Sun Mingqiu, practitioner of bapo art, as well as some beautiful examples of traditional calligraphy by Yi Bingshou and Huo Ziye.
The commonest and most impactful form of art was mass-produced religious art, especially images of gods and goddesses depicted in woodblock prints and there are striking examples here, notably a painting representing the Daoist goddess Magu, protector of women.
Women’s art tended to be exchanged within closed networks and so tends to be under-represented in modern collections. The exhibition tries to redress this by displaying works by Cao Zhenxiu and Ma Quan.
Album of Insects and Flowers by Ju Lian (1865) Lent by the Metropolitan Museum
5. Everyday urban life
This feels like the biggest and fullest room and, insofar as the exhibition’s aim is to show the continuity of everyday life during the period, is arguably at the core of its mission.
By the 1850s China’s population had reached a staggering 450 million. Average life expectancy was just forty years but despite this cities grew rapidly as people migrated from war-torn areas. A growing body of entrepreneurs developed businesses using new technologies and materials. Handicrafts were industrialised and commercialised. Wealthy people’s homes and fashion reflected these political, cultural, technological and environmental changes. Newspapers and magazines showed their readers middle class lifestyles to aspire to.
Installation view of the urban life room in ‘China’s Hidden Century’ @ the British Museum
This room is packed with stuff, with objects from everyday life, life on the street, ordinary people’s lifestyles. There’s a baker’s shop sign, a cook’s jacket and trousers, a picture of a weaver. There’s a great portrait of an itinerant dentist holding strings of teeth dangling from her advertising placard.
There’s carved portraits of gods, side-fastening jackets in eye-catching colours, brightly coloured leggings, silk and leather shoes, a child’s jacket and hat, examples of men’s fashion. There’s winter wear, a woman’s sleeveless jacket, an amazing hood decorated with dragons, detachable collars of different shapes and sizes, elaborate head dresses for wear on special occasions. Loads and loads of things.
Elaborate headdress with peacock and bee motifs (1800 to 1900) Lent by the Teresa Coleman Collection
There are everyday objects and tools, including sewing tools such as needles and thimbles, sleevebands and accessories. Earmuffs. Hair extensions. A mahjong set and objects from games and sports, cricket cages and a shuttlecock, glove puppets and marionettes. Traditional musical instruments such as a pipa (pear-shaped lute) and a dizi (transverse flute). A charming set of miniature furniture as for a doll’s house.
I didn’t know whether to be charmed or appalled when I learned that bannermen in Beijing often kept pigeons, releasing them into the sky twice a day to watch them fly and listen to the music created through their whistles. There are depictions of theatre and opera indicating popular and middle-class entertainments, a woodblock showing a troupe of jugglers, a watercolour depicting a wealthy merchant from Hangzhou surrounded by his courtesans.
There’s a bizarre-looking water-proof cape made entirely from stalks of straw for a street worker, farmer or fisherman. Conservators have painstakingly restored it to its former strangeness.
The Representative Person here is Madame Li. She was a Buddhist and married to Lu Xifu who ran a successful business in the Foshan area near Guangzhou (Canton). She and her husband are represented by ancestral portraits painted in the new realistic style inspired by photography and commissioned by their nephews. In their business success, in their bourgeois self-image, in their family piety, in their easy incorporation of Western styles into a traditional format, they epitomise the later Chinese nineteenth century. Like all the other representative figures, Madame Li has a one-minute audio describing her life, in English and Chinese.
Portraits of Lu Xifu and his wife, Mrs Lu by an unknown artist (about 1876) framed hanging scroll with ink, colours and gilding on paper. Lent by the Royal Ontario Museum
6. Global Qing
We’ve seen how foreigners triggered war with Qing China and how foreign styles influenced some artists. This section looks at the increasingly international nature of trade and the cosmopolitan nature of the objects being traded.
Until the 1840s, Guangzhou (Canton) was the only place in China where trade with Europe and the USA was legal and where foreigners could live and work. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 forced the government to open up more ports to foreign trade, which became known as ‘treaty ports’, most successful of which was to become Hong Kong.
With trade came new materials, styles and technologies. In the second half of the century modern technology revolutionised industry and changed people’s lives. Inventions such as electricity and the new postal system transformed the way people worked and communicated.
So this room contains a painting of the waterfront at Guangzhou; a portrait of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, a Bombay-born Parsi merchant and philanthropist who made a fortune trading with Qing China in commodities including opium; a portrait by a Qing artist named Lamqua of a British East India Company Midshipman; a book belonging to Silas Aaron Hardoon, once one of the richest men in Asia who made his pile in Shanghai selling opium, renting out properties and investing in the new stock exchange.
Luxury objects include a cream silk parasol with multicoloured knotted tassels; a carved ivory basket with handles carved like dragons; a beautiful painting of crabs done by a local Guangzhou artist; luxury objects such as a fan, a lacquer bracelet and a gaming chest.
There’s a set of ‘reverse glass paintings’ and a treaty port silver punch set made from ‘export silver’ and consisting of a punchbowl, six beakers, a sugar bowl and tongs. tongs. It has applied dragons, the initials of its British owner, John Penniall, and the date 1905.
There’s a folding screen which was exhibited at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris; a fashionable round fan with a map of the Eastern and Western hemispheres, a fan portraying the Tianjin incident.
It’s an old curiosity shop, a rummage sale, an Antiques Roadshow of all kinds of accoutrements and impedimenta. There’s a beautiful silk robe embroidered with images of the new steamships plying China’s rivers, a poster for a Shandong line train.
I especially liked the travelling medicine chest of Ida Kahn (1873 to 1931), a pioneering female doctor. Kahn was the adopted daughter of an American missionary in southeast China, studied medicine in the USA and England. Returning to China in 1896, she was hailed as a ‘modern woman’, gaining the support of the local gentry and foreign missionaries alike. But as well as Western medicine, Ida had knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Hence this travelling chest filled ointments, powdered plants, dried insects and written charms to speed recovery. I particularly liked the dried lizard.
Traditional Chinese Medicine chest (1890 to 1910) Lent by the Natural History Society of Northumbria
The Representative Person here is Lu Guangheng, also known as Mouqua (1792 to 1843) who organised trade with foreign merchants in Guangzhou, serving as head merchant of the ‘Hong’ – a guild with the exclusive right to trade with foreigners – from 1807 to 1811. He suffered severe financial losses in a fire in the city in 1822. In his portrait he is dressed in the robes of a high official which, however, he paid for rather than passing the difficult public exams. Mouqua was unusual for his time in speaking English.
Mouqua, also, has a one-minute audio-recording, telling his story in both Cantonese and English.
7. Reformers and revolutionaries
The last room concerns the political disruption which eventually led to the overthrow of the last emperor in 1912. A good deal of the final collapse was caused by foreign interventions. Qing China was shocked by its defeat to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895. In response to this humiliation Chinese patriots pressed for sweeping reform of the administration and the need to modernise all aspects of the country. The old Empress Dowager Cixi reluctantly permitted some reforms when the country was rocked by the Boxer War of 1899 to 1901.
The Boxer War
Anti-Christian militants supported by Qing troops against foreign residents of China and Chinese Christians. In summer 1900 Beijing’s foreign community was trapped in a 55-day siege in the capital’s walled diplomatic district. Qing and Boxer armies were eventually defeated by a joint expeditionary force from Austro-Hungary, the British empire, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the USA. The war is represented by a striking colour woodblock illustration. There’s a copy of the reformed military flag which was adopted by the Qing government.
North China was plundered by foreign troops and the foreign governments in yet another humiliation forced Qing China to pay reparations amounting to about £67 million over 39 years.
Intellectuals searched for ways to revive China’s administration after the 1895 defeat by Japan. In 1898 a reform movement to radically modernise China was launched, which came to be called the Hundred Days’ Reform movement because it was opposed by conservatives at court and shut down by the all-powerful Empress Dowager Cixi. Two leading reformers, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, were forced into exile where they wrote doleful poetry.
However, pressure for reform continued and in 1905 the imperial exam system which focused on knowledge of Confucian philosophy was abolished. A revised curriculum for schools was introduced, including new subjects such as Western sciences and languages. Across China, new universities were founded.
Revolution
Many educated men and a few women left China for Japan, where some were radicalised. Pockets of resistance were established across China, but ultimately an uprising in Hubei on 10 October 1911 was the catalyst for change. The last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in February 1912, bringing to an end 2,000 years of imperial rule.
Qiu Jin
The exhibition ends, as it started, with a woman’s voice. Qiu Jin (1875 to 1907) was a revolutionary, feminist and poet. Qui travelled to Japan where, like many of her generation, she was radicalised i.e. saw that an Asian country could modernise without losing its traditional values. She returned to China where she was involved in revolutionary movements. She was arrested on trumped-up charges and executed aged just 31.
Apparently, she remains a celebrated figure in China to this day. Not only a political figure, she was a noted poet. A line of her poetry is written over her display:
‘As my heart shatters with rage over my homeland’s troubles, how can I linger, a guest abroad, savouring spring winds?’
The exhibition ends with a whole wall devoted to a slowly rotating sequence of photos of Qiu and, in a striking achievement, a recording of a song written by Qiu Jin performed by the London Chinese Philharmonic Choir (!) And with this rousing performance, this remarkable, overwhelming, encyclopedic journey through an alien culture and distant time, comes to a vivid and moving conclusion.
Reflections by Qiu Jin
The sun and moon without light. Sky and earth in darkness.
Who can uplift the sinking world of women?
I pawned my jewels to sail across the open seas,
parting from my children as I left the border at Jade Gate.
Unbinding my feet to pour out a millennium’s poisons,
I arouse the spirit of women, hundreds of flowers, abloom.
Oh, this poor handkerchief made of merfolk-woven silk,
half stained with blood and half soaked in tears.
Summary
Everything about this exhibition is carefully considered. The design, with its hanging gauzes, is lovely. The structure feels logical and inexorable. The representative figures reach out from the past to speak to us. The objects are uniformly fascinating or exquisite.
And through it all Chinese culture and society, its mores and values, shimmer and hover on the brink of our understanding. At moments it veers into our frame of reference and understanding. I understand cups and plates and furniture. Business is business everywhere and war is universal. And yet just as you think you can relate to these distant people, the Chineseness of Chinese art and design and life and war arise as impenetrably other. Take the paintings: their concern with exquisite landscapes or photographic portraits obviously overlap with our interests, and yet derive from thousands of years of a completely different way of looking at the world and recording it, from a tradition it’s hard for us to relate to. We can really like it, but it’s always as outsiders.
At some moments the exhibition brings us really close to named individuals and their thoughts and concerns and, for a moment, we have the pleasing sensation that we understand these people. But the next moment the exhibition goes on to explain something about Chinese opera or art or poetry or politics or religion or social customs or traditions which seem utterly alien, and we are all at sea again.
I completely understand why the American Civil War was fought, the motives of the opposing sides and why it dragged on for so long. Whereas the Taiping Rebellion, which was ten times larger and one of the most catastrophic events in human history, remains incomprehensible.
I understand that Qiu Jin was a revolutionary, feminist and poet and yet, on closer examination, those very Western concepts don’t quite capture her, don’t quite map onto her actual words and concerns as recorded here. There’s something else. Something escapes. The fugitive Chinese quality of her thought and the lovely allusive quality of her poetry.
This feeling of shimmering closeness and then slipping out of reach, of the subject being wonderful and familiar yet utterly strange, and at the same time, is the delicious feeling this exhibition delivers.
This tiny little display is next door to the current ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ show – not worth making a pilgrimage to the Royal Academy just for itself, but worth popping into if you’re in the building (as is the small Emma Stibbon display which is right next to it). No rush: it’s on till the end of the year.
It’s a display of eight self-portraits by current and recent Royal Academicians from the last 50 years. They are (in alphabetical order) Anthony Green, Chantal Joffe, Hew Locke, Sidney Nolan, Patrick Procktor, Paula Rego, Gillian Wearing and Clare Woods.
Obviously the genre of the self-portrait raises multiple, many-levelled issues of intention, agency and identity: Who am I? How do I depict myself? How much do I compromise what I see with the medium I’m using? How much am I influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the vast tradition pressing down on me? How do I escape the weight of the past and develop my own voice and vision?
Here are the pictures in question, along with selected facts from the curators’ wall labels. Which ones do you like, and why?
Green’s humorous creations, cartoony paintings made in imaginative shapes, used to appear every year in the summer exhibition (he passed away in February of this year). Looking closely you realise there’s a whole narrative going on: for a start the curators tell us the thing is in the shape of a crown, which I didn’t immediately ‘get’. Spotlights shine down from the top right onto a full-length, fully clothed portrait of the artist standing on a sort of stage in front of a yellow stage curtain. And on the left are the stalls of a theatre, full of serried ranks of more self-portraits. The general idea is: Who is the artist performing for, creating for? Himself, copies f himself, clones of himself? I like Green’s works well enough when I see them but, well…
Here’s Joffe and her daughter on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-sea. According to the curators, the image catches a girl on the cusp of adolescence, turning away from her mother. Joffe is quoted as saying, the more intense the emotion, the more she is driven to simplify the image. Personally I find this a disturbing and upsetting painting. The lack of any effort to convey sand, sea or sky repels me, but not as much as the faces. Eyes are what we look at in the people that we meet or look at and both sets of eyes here are distorted and bent and speak very loudly of physical deformity and/or mental illness.
This is one of a series of eleven life-sized photographs from the series ‘How Do You Want Me?’ in which the artist adopts menacing personas. Here he is a sort of surrealist knight in an image saturated with colour and collages of unlikely images, not least the halo of machine guns and daggers which surrounds him. Locke says the series title ‘How Do You Want Me?’ is a satirical reference to the way the art world voraciously consumes the ‘latest thing’, especially the exotic or strange and – by implication – Black artists. So it’s by way of showing two fingers to the art world. Fair enough, but this rational explanation gets nowhere near conveying the over-coloured demented collage with a sword-wielding maniac at the centre.
Nolan’s dates are 1917 to 1992 i.e. he’s one of the older artists here. This may or may not be reflected in the fact that this is pretty much the weirdest and most abstract work here. According to the curators, as a young man Nolan worked with spray paint in a factory and, later in his career, returned to spray paint as a medium. The heavily distorted image and bars of colour down the left, in one mode make me think of raves and acid and hard-edged psychedelic drugs i.e. a positive image. But then, really looking at the head and deep damage that’s been done to it, the radioactive degrading of the image, make me think of Francis Bacon and all his heads turning into meat or screams. Scary.
I like stylised paintings but I don’t warm to this one. According to the curators he’s holding a thick paintbrush loaded with white paint in his right hand. I thought it was a mirror or a mobile phone glinting in the sun. I ought to like the plain orange background but I don’t. The curators think this is a very ‘intellectual’ image because he’s glancing up at the frame of the picture i.e. investigating the limits of art etc. The asymmetry of his face, the unevenness of his eyes, speaks to me of mental illness and unhappiness.
The curators point out how many artist’s self-portraits capture the artist holding a palette and brush and looking at the viewer in a pose which captures the moment of creation, as if we are there, with them, in that moment. They also shrewdly point out how the two most completed parts of this sketchy image are the face/eyes which see and the arm/hand which creates – as if the two most important parts of the act of creation are fuller, wholer, more complete, than the rest of the body, which fades away into irrelevance. So it’s an image about artistic force and power.
Apparently Wearing has ‘explored’ her identity with numerous self portraits playing with format and genre. The smoke is meant to be a reference to her place of birth, industrial Birmingham but made me think of a genii appearing from a lamp. The t short slogan, ‘HEAVY METAL’ is a reference to the disproportionate number of heavy metal rock bands who haled from Birmingham. The artist and curators may think of this as an experimental investigation of issues of identity and mortality, but it also looks very much like the cover of a certain kind of album depicting a rock chick fan of the band.
Apparently this painting is based on a photograph of the artist’s cat climbing over her, something which just about makes sense once it’s pointed out but I didn’t guess beforehand. Maybe I have a morbid imagination but I read it as the image of someone’s fact (blonde hair, eyes and nose) horribly melting into a great white blancmange. As paintings of cats go, it’s not a classic, is it? Neither is the mood exactly typical of most cat lovers: Woods explains that the title is from the Billy Bragg song of the same name, which captures the feeling of being present but detached, ‘a feeling of suffocation by responsibilities and expectations.’ All this puts into words the very negative response I had to this image. The glutinous melting effect is achieved by mixing thick oil paint directly onto the aluminium surface of the base, which maybe accounts for the powerful feeling of being asphyxiated.
Personal tastes
Personally, I like the Wearing and Rego, in that order. Wearing because it’s a photo/image which looks like a rock poster, could be on a billboard or a poster on the tube i.e which is very assimilable, not least because it makes her look very attractive in a rock chick kind of way.
The Rego I like because I like charcoal sketches, particularly if they’re unfinished (hence my veneration of Degas). I also like the strong female vibe, the aura of strength and indomitability about it. The obvious feature is the dark eyes which are about twice the size of an ordinary adult’s eyes. Decades ago I read some pop science which pointed out that the eyes are proportionately larger in babies than in adults and that, therefore, we humans are programmed to feel soft and sentimental and attracted by large eyes i.e. in order to warm to, and protect, babies. Obvious evolutionary advantage.
This apparently explains why we feel warmly towards Disney cartoons, from Mickey through hundreds of cartoon characters to Nemo or Frozen – they all have disproportionately large eyes and trigger a soppy sentimental feeling; certainly disarms our adult cynicism. If anything, the Rego portrait inverts the convention, because she looks not soft but spooky – not threatening exactly, but lowering and damaged. And the stumpy muscular right arm gives the image a dwarfish, freakish atmosphere, too. Don’t Look Now.
Reynolds
There’s a twist in the tail. This miniature display takes up only part of The Collection Gallery, the narrow corridor-shaped space at the start of the gallery. At the end of this corridor you can see the start of a completely separate exhibition, which is a selection of highlights from the Royal Academy’s Old Master collection, grand mythological themes, Biblical paintings and Renaissance statues. But the first work in that, completely separate display, is a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder and first President of the Royal Academy. So when you look away from the eight self-portraits I’ve just discussed, your eye passes over the lovely image of Reynolds at the end of the corridor.
The point is, the Reynolds portrait is clearly head and shoulders (pun intended) better than the eight works in this little display. It has class and dignity and gravitas. It reminds me of the umpteen histories of art which try and put into words the revolution in visual technology which the development of oil painting during the Renaissance brought about; how artists used the new medium of oil to portray depth and scale of subject, with true perspective etc, but then went on, as the centuries progressed, to focus on the conjuring of light and shade, in particular of dark shadow, to convey psychological and spiritual depths unlike any art which had gone before (Leonardo, Rembrandt).
In this picture Reynolds is clearly channelling Rembrandt and the sophisticated Old Master tradition of strong contrasts of light and shade which came to be referred to as chiaroscuro. It has a human dignity and depth and sensitivity which none of the eight modern images come close to matching.
This is a small but interesting, free display in The Collection Gallery at the Royal Academy (at the back of the building on the first floor). Its point of departure is an enormous woodcut engraving made by Emma Stibbon of a derelict whaling station in Antarctica. It was Stibbon’s Diploma piece, which she submitted along with related drawings and photos, to gain membership of the Academy.
Collapsed Whaling Station, Deception Island, Antarctica, 2006 by Emma Stibbon
It’s a big work – 1.17 meters tall by 2.38 meters wide. If you’re close up to it, you have to turn your head to take it all in, creating a panoramic effect. Up close you can see how the powerful grain of the woodcarving echoes and amplifies the heavy wooden beams of the structure itself.
Contexts
This mini exhibition also features about twenty other artefacts, which includes prints, drawings and photographs, chosen to expand and contextualise the image:
1. About a third of them deal directly with the whaling station including photos of it during its time as a research base in the 1950s; from just after the volcanic eruption and its abandonment in 1979; through to the photos Stibbon took on her visits to Antarctica, alongside related sketches and charcoal drawings.
2. Another set of images relate to Robert Scott’s ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition (1910 to 1913).
3. But the biggest amount, about half the display, consists of works by other Royal Academicians of either a) ruined buildings or b) extreme landscapes, which provide visual and conceptual accompaniment to the Stibbon piece.
Section 1. Stibbon
Stibbon is drawn to environments that have been shaped by both the elemental forces of nature and the impact of human endeavour, what she describes as ‘landscapes that have a tension between the natural forces and the manmade’. (So, if you go to her website, you’ll see folders of projects with titles like ‘Polar regions’, Wild lands’, ‘Volcanoes’.)
a) Collapsed Whaling Station
The main woodcut depicts Biscoe House, a large building erected in the early 20th century for the purposes of commercial whaling. In the 1930s it fell into disuse, before being taken over and renovated by the British military during the Second World War. In the 1960 it was damaged by a lava flow. Lava in the Antarctic? Yes, Deception Island itself is actually formed by the crater of a submerged volcano.
Nobody lives permanently on Deception Island though scientific stations run by different nations are visited periodically by scientists. Stibbon saw the building when she accompanied one of these scientific trips in 2006 as an artist in residence. The display includes photos of the station in its heyday, alongside photographs and sketches made by Stibbon on that first trip in 2006, and a subsequent one in 2013.
She tells us that she chose to depict the station in a woodcut because of the physicality of the medium, but also because of the size you can achieve. It’s a very big print, which creates a kind of cinematic, immersive experience.
Installation view of ‘Collapsed Whaling Station, Deception Island, Antarctica, 2006’ by Emma Stibbon
b) Lead
Beside the central woodcut are other works by Stibbon, notably a very striking piece titled ‘Lead’. She made this after her second visit to Deception Island, in 2013. Unlike the big wood carving, it’s an intaglio print. (‘Intaglio describes any printmaking technique in which the image is produced by incising into the printing plate – the incised line or area holds the ink and creates the image.’)
Obviously the central crack in the ice is the thing that catches the eye. It was created by the ice-breaking ship Stibbon was travelling on, and is, perhaps, a vivid symbol of the fragility and contingency of this, and indeed all, environments.
Lead by Emma Stibbon (2014)
But what I liked is the rough and ready finish given by the medium, e.g. the flotsam of white froth at the bottom of the jagged channel of open sea, the black dots in the sky, the strange lizard eye in the hill above the dwindling crack, and the vertical lines at the top left.
I doubt if any of these would appear in a photograph. It’s what art does; even at its most apparently naturalistic, art transforms and amplifies reality, feeding the eye and the mind with more meaning and possibility than we actually see.
Section 2. Scott
Stibbon travelled to Antarctica as artist-in-residence to the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. This, I presume, is why there’s some photos and information panels about Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. This photo shows five members of the British Antarctic Expedition (1910 to 1913) . After much trial and endurance the group reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 only to discover that the Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen had beaten them by 34 days. All five men in this photo perished on the journey back to their base camp.
But the display highlights some unexpected connections. First, it turns out that Dr Edward Wilson, seated on the right, was himself an artist. Among his belongings at base camp were discovered works he’d made before the expedition set out on the ill-fate final part of their journey. These included a watercolour of Mount Erebus, a volcano in Antarctica. After the expedition perished, a fundraiser was organised to raise money for the wives and children of the dead men, and the print on display here, based on the original watercolour, was sold for the cause.
Watercolour of Mount Erebus by Edward Wilson (1911)
And second, it turns out that the expedition itself was organised from an office in 6 Burlington Gardens, which is now itself part of the Royal Academy buildings! Huge empire but a small world, official London was.
Extreme weather and ruins
a) Extreme conditions
Extreme weather has fascinated artists for centuries and this little display includes some choice examples from the RA’s collection.
This is a print based on William Daniell’s painting of the Eddystone Lighthouse off Rame Head during the Great Storm that battered the south of England in 1824. Huge waves almost engulf the lighthouse, sea and sky are mingled in the tumult. From a compositional point of view the interest is in the light emanating from the vulnerable lamp room at the top of the building: if it wasn’t there you’d need the moon to achieve the same effect of luminous light shed on the towering waves and highlighting the turbulent clouds. It is also symbolic. Given the date, 1824, viewers would be invited to identify the fragile but persistent light as not only a navigational aid to ships in distress but of the resilience of Christian faith in even the most troubled times.
Hung next to it is a sort of modern equivalent, not a storm but what looks like a steady downpour onto remote rock stacks near St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. Norman Ackroyd has been producing prints like this for decades, they’re a familiar sight at the Academy’s summer exhibitions. The wall label tells us these two rock formations, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, the most remote of the thousands of British Isles, became an obsession of Ackroyd’s after his repeated attempts to visit them were defeated by bad weather.
Other extreme conditions images in the show include a study of waves by Anthony Gross, the print of Mount Erebus by Edward Wilson mentioned above, and three photographs of Mount Etna erupting by Ledru Mauro. All the images in this display (and tens of thousands more) can be found via the Royal Academy Search the Collection function.
b) Ruins
But ruins have fascinated artists, too. I remember Tate Britain’s 2014 exhibition devoted to the art of ruins. In that spirit, the most extreme ruin here is a photo of one of the galleries at Burlington House after a direct hit from a bomb during World War One, showing broken glass, plaster and stone scattered everywhere. But that’s, obviously enough, the result of human violence. Other images are more in line with Stibbon’s interest in the powerful forces of the natural world.
This is one of several sketches by George Clausen who did naturalistic and no doubt dated sketches and paintings of English rural life, especially in Essex, from the 1870s right through to the 1930s. This isn’t a ruin caused by enemy action or the violence of nature, but a much quieter image of slow decay and collapse. Natural entropy. It doesn’t reproduce as well as some of the other images, but in the flesh I found it reassuring and homely.
Study of a dilapidated cottage, Finchingfield, Essex, after 1907 by Sir George Clausen
Other ruin images in the exhibition include a ruin in Greece by Hugh Casson, a study of Dolbardern Castle Llanberis by George Clausen, and a collapsed gate by Norman Stevens. All the images in this display (and tens of thousands more) can be found via Royal Academy Search the Collection function.
The video
Thoughts
The whaling station woodcut is obviously a fine work in its own right. But this is a charming display because it is designed to lead the eye and the mind on journeys ravelling outwards from the central image. Its juxtapositions tease and inform and entertain. Some of the ancillary art works are as enchanting as the centrepiece. Sometimes the smallest exhibitions are the most enjoyable.
From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:
advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists
Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.
Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.
What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?
Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.
2. Outsider art
Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.
So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.
Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.
Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.
Raw materials
Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!
Anatomy by Archie Byron
Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).
Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.
Artists
The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.
Room 1. Friendships and family ties
The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.
The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)
I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.
Room 2. Personal stories, local sources
Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.
This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.
Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.
Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy
By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.
Paintings from room 2.
For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.
Paintings by Purvis Young
By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.
My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.
Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire
Room 3. The yard show
As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.
One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.
Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend
Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.
Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts
This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.
More Gee’s Bend quilts
I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.
Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.
Marfa Stance and quilts for sale
‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.
Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.
There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.
The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine. It was founded in London in 1896 and does what its title suggests, covering all aspects of the built environment.
Manplan
Just over 50 years ago, in 8 issues from September 1969 to September 1970, the Review ran a series of eight specially commissioned reports on the state of architecture at the end of the 1960s. It was to review not just architecture in the narrow sense but the entire state of town planning, in an age when old Victorian slums were being torn down to make way for gleaming new towns made of high-rise towers, medium-rise blocks characterised by lifts and concrete walkways, subways under sweeping new ring roads, nicely laid-out grassed areas and so on.
The Review’s editors called the series of articles ‘Manplan’ and hired leading photojournalists and street photographers to address a set of eight themes, being:
Frustration
Travel and communication (‘Society is its contacts’)
Town Workshop
Education (‘The continuing community’)
Religion
Health and Welfare
Local government
Housing
The result was a series of brilliant photos shot on a 35mm camera in a spirit of photo-reportage – vivid and dramatic black-and-white works which captured a nation in the midst of great social, cultural and environmental change. To the horror of some of its contributors and readers, the magazine turned its back on large-format, heroic photography of buildings and their details, instead embracing a grainy, 35mm black-and-white reportage aesthetic, where people were as, if not more, important than the places. In the words of The Royal Institute of British Architects, publishers of the Architecture Review:
The aim was to propose an alternative and more holistic approach to urban planning, which would look at all basic human needs as a whole. The photographs illustrating the issues were created in the spirit of photo reportage and often featured people inhabiting the spaces studied by the survey, thereby shifting the focus from the architecture itself to the human element within the built environment.
So it was intended to be polemical stuff. The photographers were:
Ian Berry
Tony Ray-Jones
Tim Street-Porter
Patrick Ward
Altogether the Architectural Review published about 80 photographs. Just 16 are on display here, but every single one of them is a masterpiece; there’s no slack. Each one is a densely packed, highly charged vignette. This exhibition isn’t big but it is packed with social history, with memories and nostalgia for a time within the living memory of many but feeling evermore distant.
Design and layout
On a separate wall is a display of the actual copies of the magazine which the photo-essays appeared in, along with the words and designs of ‘Manplan’ editor Tim Rock and designers Michael Reid and Peter Baistow. This section goes into detail about how the photographs were processed, reproduced and printed (using ‘special matt black ink’) along with analysis of the layout and typography. All a bit over my head but interesting for students of design.
The photographs
Private terraced houses on the Old Kent Road opposite Camelot Street Estate, London by Tony Ray-Jones (1970) part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Housing at New Ash Green, Kent by Tony Ray-Jones (1970), part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Low-rise housing, Tavy Bridge, Thamesmead, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones, part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Classroom windows in a school in Wales, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
High-rise flats and multi-storey car park, Birmingham, 1970 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Chatsworth Street school and high-rise housing block overlooking the cleared site, Liverpool, 1969 by Tom Smith, part of ‘Manplan 4: The Continuing Community (education)’ in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Salvation Army officers picnicking on the steps of the figure group Asia by J H Foley, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London, 1969 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Unidentified primary school, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Thamesmead film
To one side of the 16 framed photos on the wall, is a TV monitor showing a film from around the same time (in fact the year before the project, 1968). So far as I can tell it’s not directly connected with RIBA or the Manplan project except for the slender link that one of the 80 Manplan photos happens to cover the same subject as the film, namely the new estate being built at Thamesmead. So it wasn’t directly related to the Manplan project but gives context to the kind of architectural and town planning thinking which was going on at the time of the Manplan project.
Directed by Jack Saward, this 25-minute public education film gives an overview of the history and construction of Thamesmead, a sort of new model suburb built down the River Thames from London on the site of the old Royal Arsenal, a site that extended over Plumstead Marshes and Erith Marshes.
Alas, to quote the introduction to the video on YouTube:
The ambition is commendable but it didn’t quite work in practise, with Thamesmead becoming a notoriously problematic estate and its architects perceived as exhibiting many of the faults of post-war planning, with communities being tinkered with from above like a real-life experiment. This is where utopia meets authoritarianism.
Hard to believe, but the planners that designed the place provided insufficient transport links with London, no way of crossing the Thames for 5 or 6 miles in either direction and – best of all – an almost complete lack of shopping facilities and banks. Lots of pretty little lakes but…nowhere to buy food. According to the label in the exhibition, the estate ‘was soon plagued by social problems caused by lack of facilities and public transport’.
The half-built estate won an unwanted fame when American film director Stanley Kubrick used parts of it as the setting for his notoriously violent 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, a vision of an alienated, dystopian society. Here’s the photo of it taken by the brilliant Tony Ray-Jones which provides a sort of coincidental link between the Manplan series and the film.
Thamesmead under construction, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones in ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Which do you prefer? Which do you think is telling the truth, the film or the photo?
The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection
All the materials for the Manplan exhibition, photos and old copies of the AR magazine, come from the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection. This comprises around 1.5 million images from the earliest days of photography to the present day. The collection includes photographic archives of individual architects and practices, travel and topographic images from across the world, press photographs from major architectural journals, and large bodies of work by some of the best known architectural photographers of the 20th century. The collection includes prints, negatives, slides, transparencies, photographically illustrated books and digital files. It is itself part of the larger Royal Institute of British Architects collections.
Conclusion
Flicking through some of the text on the walls is a dispiriting experience. These 1970 writers were raging against the soulless design of modern cities, the daily struggle of commuting to work on overcrowded public transport, against air pollution, excess traffic and the destruction of the environment, against the dominance of the car over human-friendly spaces, against the dehumanising effects of modern technology, against social inequality and the lack of social housing, against the prioritising of profit over people.
It’s as if, 53 years later, nothing has changed except we all have smart phones to share our frustration about how things obstinately carry on being rubbish. The Manplan writers’ rage and frustration is captured by this, the last entry in the exhibition.
Double page spread from Manplan 1. ‘Frustration’
It’s a copy of the original magazine, open to a double page spread showing a traditional Pearly King and Queen standing in front of the typically sterile, barren waste ground surrounding a clutch of looming, threatening tower blocks. Up in the top right is a text reading: ‘The richness of East End life is replaced by monotony and inhumanity.’
Yep. that’s the world I grew up into and which punk rock, with its angry nihilism, was a direct response to. Eternal shame on England’s architects and town planners.
Related links
A Brief Revolution continues at the Photographers Gallery until 11 June 2023
‘The many men, so beautiful…’
(from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
A Hard Man is Good to Find! charts over 60 years of gay photography in London from the 1930s to the 1990s.
You don’t have to be naked to be butch, you don’t even have to be gay to be an object of gay attraction. Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, Spring/Summer 1957 edition, featuring model Sean Connery, photo by Bill Green. Courtesy the Alistair O’Neill Collection
Homosexuality illegal and legal
For the first half of the period homosexuality was a criminal activity which was severely punished, with the threat of exposure hanging over hundreds of thousands of gay men, and making them susceptible to blackmail and intimidation. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised gay sexual activity but left in place many forms of legal and social discrimination and so gave rise to the gay liberation movement which campaigned for full social equality.
Personal note: In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, enjoyed going on marches, signing petitions and spending time at Windsor’s only gay pub. Through all this I discovered that I am not gay but discovered a susceptibility to gorgeous men, hunky men, specially young working class men, the kind that you used to see doing labouring jobs with a wonderfully carefree physical exuberance, the kind of young bloke photographed in the 1960s by Anthony C. Burls (see below).
The Obscene Publication Act remained in force
Anyway, back at the exhibition: it brings together more than 100 photos of men’s bodies, taken with a distinctly gay or queer sensibility. The thing to really understand is that throughout the period, from the 1930s till well into the 1980s, despite the 1967 law about homosexual acts, risqué images of male nudity – taking them, owning them, distributing them, publishing them – remained a criminal offence under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
A lovely boy. John Hamill by John S Barrington (about 1966) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
The male nude as fine art. David Dulak by Angus McBean (1946) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
London locations
The exhibition takes an interesting approach which is to divide the photos, and the gay magazines and bookshops which distributed them, by area of London. Thus it’s divided into sections which deal with Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Marylebone, Portobello, the Serpentine and Euston.
Highgate
Apparently Hampstead Heath is London’s most renowned cruising spot for gay men. Young artist Keith Vaughan bought a Leica camera and set up a dark room in his bedroom. Aged just 21 he then made a n album of photos of gorgeous young men at Highgate Men’s Pond in the summer of 1933.
Highgate Men’s Pond Album by Keith Vaughan (1933) Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
John S. Barrington trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1938 he persuaded two men he’d met on the Charing Cross Road, dancer David Dulak and his friend Vik, to accompany him to Highgate Men’s Pond so he could photograph them nude – and thus began a long career as a ‘physique photographer’. Dulak was later photographed by Angus McBean, see two photographs above.
John Mckay made studies of ballet dancers and performers.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
In the 1950s Basil Clavering ran a cinema on the Charing Cross Road but he also built a photographic studio in the basement of his house on Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here they recruited military men to pose in genuine uniforms and also act out various scenarios, some kinky, some humorous. He and his partner John Charles Pankhurst, invented the ‘storyette’, a series of stills, as from a movie, which told a story, often saucy, sometimes featuring corporal punishment.
Just doing the housework. Storyette EX FJSS print, 1950s by Basil Clavering (aka Royale). Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
Spencer Churchill, 1951 by Paul Hawker. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Photo of Gervase Griffiths, titled ‘Narcissus of 1967’ by Cecil Beaton
Earl’s Court
This was the location of BDM publications, set up by Alexander McKenna and partners, which published a range of styles, from the lifestyle magazine ‘Jeffrey’ to more explicit titles such as ‘Hung Heavy’, ‘Taste of Beefcake’ and ‘Leather Studs’.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
One of the Portobello Boys, hopefully only fiddling with his zip. The Portobello Boys, early 1960s. Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Euston Road
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America. David Gwinnutt started taking photos of the post-punk gay scene as an art student. Patrick Prockter introduced him to his generation of artists.
Thomas Mervyn Horder (Baron Horder) was the chairman of Duckworths, the literary publisher in in the 1950s and 60s. He also had a sideline as a physique photographer under the pseudonym Larry Knight, publishing in specialist magazines with titles like ‘Grecian Guild Pictorial’ and ‘Der Kreis’.
History of the posing pouch
In line with the unwritten law that absolutely all exhibitions these days must either be about America or feature Americans, there’s a little annex off to the side of the main gallery which gives an amusing history of the posing pouch. In this version of the story this skimpy little piece of fabric, barely enough to cover a man’s meat and two veg with the thinnest of fabrics going round the waist, was invented in America.
It developed from the aim of American gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as legally possible. In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality.
Original 1955 posing pouch as sewn by Bob Mizener’s mum (or mom)
We are told that the shape and tan colour of the pouch was often lightly drawn on photos over the willy of nude models in order to avoid prosecution if the parcel they were distributed in was stopped and searched by the authorities; but that the happy recipient could then easily, in the safety of their own home, rub the little patch off and glory in the sight of total male nudity!
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow.
Mixed media
It’s not just photos. Within each part of London the curators identify gay photographers who lived and worked in that area, but also includes catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications to show how the photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. In the 1970s publishers of gay photos send out catalogue sheets like this one to customers, who then ordered full-sized body shorts and prints of the guys they fancied.
Which one would you send off for? 1970s catalogue sheet by John S Barrington. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre.
Back to John S. Barrington. In the later 70s he set up the 252 Gallery on Brixton Hill, which included photographs but also drawings and sculptures. He sent out catalogues listing his many gay models and categorising them by race as well as arranging them by head and masked torso. They’re included here as an interesting example of the taxonomy of desire.
Black Brixton
Rotimi Fani-Kayode lived in Brixton from 1983 to 1989. His work explores the paradoxes of the Black queer experience. He’s represented by a work called the Golden Phallus.
Guy Burch was director of the Brixton Art Gallery from 1985 to 1988. Artist, writer and curator, he’s represented by photo study drawings and collages.
Frank B came to prominence for his performances which involved blood letting, performed in the late 1980s in gay fetish clubs and is represented by photographic invitation cards to a private screening of a 6-minute art movie.
Ajamu X is an artist, curator, archivist and activist whose work explores ‘the nuances of intersectional experience as a Black British queer man’. He is represented by contact sheets which show him playfully wearing a white cotton bra and panties.
Thoughts
To be quite honest this exhibition wasn’t quite as sexsationally fabulous as I was expecting it to be. A lot of the images are quite small, many are only on contact sheets of 20 or 30 tiny, tiny images which I had to lean right up to in order to see properly. Take the contact sheet of 40 or so images of Black artist Ajanu X who is, unexpectedly, wearing a white bra and panties in various states of disarray. Funny and sexy but tiny, each image only an inch square or less.
I enjoyed the staggering physiques of some of the Greek athlete-style photos from the 1930s and 40s. I liked the couple of photos by Cecil Beaton of Gervase Griffiths lazing by a fountain or posing among cow parsley in some field, because they were so redolent of a kind of Pink Floyd 1960s.
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair.
There were several sequences of young men, obviously soldiers, in full uniform and then various stages of undress, hanging out together. There was a whole set of young blokes around the house, sitting, reading, smoking, half dressed or with their cocks hanging out their trousers, the Portobello Boys. Mildly interesting, but I went to an all-boys school and shared houses with blokes at university; admittedly we didn’t spend social time with our willies hanging out of our trousers – at least not when sober.
Overall, I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.
Two learnings
I don’t think I’d ever noticed the phrase ‘physique photography’ before, but here it kept recurring and being explained as a style of photography which goes beyond the passive idea of the ‘nude’ to celebrate a kind of effortful, muscular, athletic masculinity. Think body-building.
Stunning example of ‘physique photography’. Indian bodybuilder Monotosh Roy shot by Bill Green (Vince) in the 1950s
Related to it was a comment in a wall label right at the end making a simple but devastating point that, as LGBTQ+ culture gained confidence in the 1990s, photographers, publishers and consumers felt more confident in producing and consuming gay pornography.
The point being that the delicate balancing act, the hints and subtleties of the preceding decades, the self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s – all this tended to be swept away as gay art gained confidence in the 1990s. Now artists could depict explicit photos of erect penises and men doing all kinds of things with them to other men. Obviously delicacy and subtlety continue in a thousand flavours, but the era of constrained delicacy and obligatory subtlety came to an end with the arrival of explicit gay pornography.
Bodybuilder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990)
A note on nomenclature
The introduction explains that ‘queer’ is now the accepted academic term for non-normative sexualities but the curators acknowledge that it used to be a term of abuse (as it was when I was growing up) and so older visitors might be offended by its use. At the same time, they acknowledge that the more factual, legalistic term ‘homosexual’, which older visitors might be comfortable with, is ‘problematic’ for the younger generation.
The need for this note prompts the reflects the ongoing (and, I imagine, eternal) struggle human beings have to make sense of the disruptions, embarrassments and irrational instincts of sex which we find ourselves saddled with.
Willies
Having been to hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions curated by feminist curators and read thousands of wall labels written by feminist curators, I have had the notions of toxic masculinity, of the poisonous affect of the male gaze, of the evils of male sexual attention, of male sexual harassment, and the unspeakable terror of seeing a penis from which some women, apparently, never recover, drummed into me again and again and again. Even the shamefully biased mega-exhibition about so-called ‘Masculinities’ at the Barbican didn’t include one single image of a penis for fear of offending sensitive visitors.
It was, therefore, rather disorientating, gave me a sense of vertigo, to walk into a pair of rooms absolutely flooded with this object of terror and fear – showing a proliferation of penises, peckers and plonkers, willies and winkles and weenies, cocks and tools and todgers.
Like all the other ‘banned’ part of the human anatomy, like women’s breasts and, more so, vulvas, if images of penises are strictly rationed and you only occasionally see one, it can all too easily be overloaded with lust and desire. Whereas if you freely see scores, then hundreds of them, in all their variety and humanity and mundaneness, quite quickly you get used to the sight, and then a bit bored.
From a visual point of view penises obviously come in two states, flaccid and bored or aroused and erect. Presumably this is, or was, in the period under study, the threshold between images which could be justified as art or at least decorative (flaccid) and pornography (erect).
Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think there’s a single erect penis in the show. Maybe this is because the exhibition itself had to tread a fine line and the inclusion of erect penises would have crossed that line (? I don’t know the law on the matter). Maybe because pretty much all the photographers on show here used the flaccid/erect distinction as a simple rule of thumb (were there legal precedents under the Obscene Publications Act regarding the exact angle of arousal of the member? Again, not being a lawyer, I don’t know.)
For whatever reason, no erections at all are on display here and probably over half the images didn’t show penises at all (e.g. all the athletic, posing pouch-style photos; or a lot of the fully dressed soldiers or fairground workers; or just the many portraits which focused on faces) and all the ones that did include a penis showed it only as a slack, slumping, limp willy.
These kinds of images captured what I imagine is most men’s attitude to their penises; on rare and special occasions it may be roused and primed for action, but most of the time it’s just another part of the body which you barely think about unless you have to pee, or you inadvertently squash it while riding a bike or some such activity. Ouch!
In this respect a lot of the photos seemed (to me) to be surprisingly stripped of the urgency of sexual desire (lust) and instead conveyed quite a homely, almost domestic vibe of what it is to be a young man, to be naked and to lark around with other men. I’ve been to scores and scores of exhibitions making polemical points about women’s bodies, depicting them from every angle and analysing in immense detail the way women’s bodies are depicted in all sorts of media and the never-ending iniquity of the male gaze, as a matter of burning social and political importance.
This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look at scantily clad bodies without feeling a soupcon of guilt; and and space where the visitor can just accept and enjoy the sight of the male body, in all its variety, for what it is.
Catalogue sheet 3, 1949, by Bill Green (Vince). Stephen Cartwright collection
Last thought
This exhibition triggers nostalgia for an age before the internet: talk of photography as an activity restricted to a talented few, of hard copy magazines and subscriptions, of mail order catalogues, of the extraordinary lengths you had to go to to get sight of a photo of a naked man – all this consigns the entire exhibition to a past which is rapidly retreating.
For now we have 1) smartphones and 2) the internet. 1) More or less everyone has access not just to cameras, but to extremely high-quality cameras and amazingly sophisticated image manipulation softwares. Everyone’s a photographer these days. 2) And any image of anything, alive or dead or ever conceived, can now be accessed at the touch of a screen, including as many naked bodies, male, female or whatever, as your hard drive can cope with.
This entire exhibition bespeaks not just a world of repression and restraint, but of rarity and difficulty. Now nothing is rare and everything is available. Soon the subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact described in this exhibition will seem as dated and historical as the pictorial conventions of Georgian England.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is not an open competition which anyone can apply to, like the BP Portrait Award or the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exact opposite: the curators choose just four finalists from what they consider to have been the best photographic exhibitions staged by individual photographers, in Europe, in the previous 12 months. To be precise, the stated aim of the prize is to ‘reward artists and their projects considered to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.’
Therefore, if you visit the Photographers’ Gallery in the next few weeks you will find four rooms, each devoted to an in-depth display of work by just four international shortlisted artists. In alphabetical order these are Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa and Frida Orupabo. The winner of the prize was announced on 11 May and got a tidy sum of £30,000 (the other three entrants got £5,000 each). Who was the lucky winner? I’ll tell you at the end of this review.
I’m going to address the photographers in the order you actually encounter them in the gallery, rather than alphabetically.
1. Frida Orupabo
Frida Orupabo (born 1986) is a Norwegian of Nigerian heritage i.e. Black. She began posting photo collages on Instagram in the mid-2010s, cutting and pasting together images of Black bodies using historical and archive material; then in 2017 she took her approach into the real world (i.e. not just on a screen), creating the large collages you see here. All this led up to the exhibition which brought her to the curators’ attention, which was titled ‘I’ve seen a million pictures of my face and still have no idea’, which was held at the Photomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, February to May 2022.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
I immediately liked the results – very big, frameless, freestanding works which are more like sculptures hanging on walls than traditional photos. As far as I could tell, none of them had titles. Orupabo’s being Black and being a woman i.e. pressing contemporary art’s two big buttons of race and gender, sends the curators into a tizzy of artspeak:
The sculptural collages and digital works of Frida Orupabo are multi-layered formations, exploring questions of race, sexuality and identity. Orupabo, a Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist, grounds her inquiry in her own experience of cultural belonging. Utilising visual material circulating online, spanning colonial-era photographs and ethnographic relics to contemporary imagery, Orupabo’s hand-wrought works re-arrange and re-make the archive. The resulting images take the shape of fragmented Black, mostly female-bodied, figures.
These figures, first dislocated, are reassembled layer by layer in a complex and poetic manoeuvre that simultaneously denounces one-dimensional depictions of Black lives. Her collaged cutouts hold our gaze and invite various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are entirely absent from the archives. In this way Orupabo invites a consideration of how photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence.
Does photography ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Isn’t that like saying books ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ or laws ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Surely any technology can ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ if that’s how the people wielding it want to use it. Probably guns contributed quite a bit ‘to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’, probably quite a bit more than photography. In fact photographs of the atrocities carried out by the authorities in the Belgian Congo did as much to disgrace and discredit that authority, as the kind of photographs the curators have in mind, the kind used to measure and categorise the Indigenous peoples, did to define and control them. Photography is just a technology. I can be used for good or evil. Writing that ‘photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ is just art school boilerplate, modish rhetoric, smart-sounding swank (definition: ‘behaviour, talk, or display intended to impress others).
Anyway, as so often, the curators’ obsession with the twin shibboleths of race and gender blind them to the specificity of the actual art in front of them. Two things struck me. One was the way the deliberate crudeness of the artefacts is intentional: heads are pasted onto bodies at anatomically impossible angles, a pair of legs are completely separated from a body. She is highlighting the utter dysjunctive effect of her collages, their complete artificiality, and that reminded me of Dada, of the deliberately unsmooth, jagged photocollages of George Grosz or John Heartfield from 100 years ago.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
But something not at all hinted at in the curators’ commentary is the horror tropes. In the top photo you can see that the loosely female figures are, from left to right, 1) attended by two sort of flying rabbit demons; 2) sitting on a monster’s head; 3) is shaped like a mermaid; and 4) in the most striking image, is a human head cut and pasted onto the body of a bat. A whole lot of stuff is going on here, but what strikes me is the invocation of imagery of Gothic tales and horror stories; it’s the stuff of Goya nightmares. What? Why? In this respect she reminds me of the way Kara Walker’s silhouettes of Black people in ante-Bellum Deep South morph into nightmare, monster images.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
Anyway, it was the sheer weirdness of these big collages which grabbed me, not their alleged commentary on colonialist this, that or the other, and so I’ll tell you straightaway that, for the uncanny unexpected weirdness of her images, Orupabo was my favourite of the four artists: I wanted her to win.
2. Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter was born in 1986 in Belgium. She was selected for this prize on the basis of a 2022 exhibition titled ‘A Chance Encounter’, staged at C/O Berlin from April to September 2022. The display here consists of two parts, titled ‘Michael’ and ‘Agata’. Apparently:
In ‘Agata’, a first meeting [with Agata Kay] in a Parisian strip-club in 2017 evolves with complex tension into an intricate, changing narrative. The project explores questions of collaboration, the limits of a creative friendship, performance, boundaries and authorship.
I couldn’t find ‘Agata’. Possibly it amounted to one framed photo of a pink room, and maybe a collage of movie posters on one wall, but these weren’t labelled so I wasn’t sure. Going back to reread the introductory wall label more carefully I realised that the subject of Depoorter’s photos, the stripper Agata, eventually asked Depoorter to suspend their relationship and asked that all record of the photos, conversations and letters involved in it be erased. Maybe the Agata project is the absence of any materials about the Agata project. OK. That has a pleasing 1970s conceptual art feel about it.
But the reason I wasn’t too sad about not finding ‘Agata’ is because it was completely dwarfed by the other project displayed here, ‘Michael’. This is an epic, dense, absorbing and deeply unsettling work.
in 2015 Depoorter met a middle-aged, confused man named Michael on the streets of Portland, Oregon, USA. They got talking and Michael took her to his apartment which turned out to be covered from floor to ceiling with scrapbook-style cut-outs from magazines, books, newspapers, school reports, journals and diaries and all manner of bric-abrac.
As a result of this encounter Michael gave Depoorter three suitcases containing a trove of his personal items, sketchbooks and essays which she, for unexplained reasons, accepted. Then, presumably, she departed Portland, for the wall label explains that, at some point later on, she tried to contact him again and failed. When she flew back to Portland to find him she discovered his flat rented to someone else and that Michael had vanished, leaving no trace.
At which point Depoorter commenced what appears to have been months if not years of effort to track him down, the start of an obsessive quest to find Michael and to understand his life. As far as the labels tell us, to this day she still hasn’t found him, but along the way she has created the two big things which this darkened room is filled with. One is the way all the walls are even more covered in detritus and scraps of every kind than Michael’s apartment was, the records and ephemera of her hunt which Depoorter has acquired over the past 6 or 7 years.
Installation view of Michael by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
Post-its festoon multiple layers of documents and diaries and journals and magazine photos and contact sheets. Arrows connect different pieces of evidence. It’s exactly like the room of the crazed serial killer which the cops eventually break into in all those American psycho movies. She calls it ‘The investigation room’ and what we see here is just a fragment of the materials she’s accumulated in her obsessive, endless search. She has supplemented Michael’s own collection of ephemera with her own. The two sets of detritus are intimately interwoven. But spooky though this is, it isn’t the main thing: the main thing is the film.
Installation view of ‘Michael’ by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
It’s a 31-minute-long film detailing Depoorter’s obsessive quest so far. There are no moving segments. It consists entirely of still photos, so it’s by way of being a slideshow of places she’s been to and people she’s interviewed as she delves deeper into Michael’s life and past, her words and those of the interviewees appearing as captions on the screen.
So, in the sequence I watched, Depoorter spoke to some people who were at high school with Michael, who described his intense upbringing by nice but weird Mormons. We see stills of Michael’s high school yearbook with jagged, uneven hand-written notes scrawled across it. It has lots of overtones of serial killer movie, except Michael is no killer, just an oddball Depoorter bumped into and became slowly obsessed with.
If all this sounds weird (and it definitely is) after just a few minutes I found the pace and determination of Depoorter’s narrative drawing me into the film. Michael may have been just an insignificant nobody and yet, in Depoorter’s powerful telling, the memories of childhood friends and schoolmates become weirdly compelling. I realised I was being drawn into Depoorter’s own obsession. It’s contagious!
The curators comment that this work interrogates:
the complex ethical relationship and boundaries…between the photographer and their subject [and] questions the role and responsibilities of the photographer, the possibility or impossibility of truth in representation and grapples with personal and professional boundaries.
No doubt. But something deeper and weirder was also at work here. I was quite relieved to break away from the film and step back out into the light airy gallery space.
3. Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso was born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon. He was selected for the prize on the basis his exhibition ‘Samuel Fosso’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, from November 2021 to March 2022.
Since the mid-1970s Fosso has dedicated his artistic practice to self-portraits and performative photography. In vulgar language, he dresses up and photographs himself. At the tender age of 13 he set up a Studio Photo Nationale in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. Alongside commercial work, Fosso began a series of self-portraits, and has carried on to the present day, hence a nickname he picked up along the way, ‘the man of a thousand faces’.
More recently Fosso has created a series titled ‘African Spirits’ in which he dressed up as – and recreated famous photographs featuring – Black celebrities such as (the ones on display here) radical activist Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Haile Selassie and Tommie Smith, one of the African Americans who gave the Black Power clenched fist salute from the podium of the 1968 Olympics.
Installation view of ‘African Spirits’ by Samuel Fosso at the Photographers’ Gallery. Can you name all 6 of these famous Black figures?
According to the curators:
Playing the role of key historical figures and social archetypes in front of the camera, Fosso embodies a powerful way of existing in the world, and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.
There’s also a pair of huge colour photos of himself dressed as soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, tribute to the many African and Black soldiers who fought in those wars (see my blog post, Congolese soldiers in the world wars).
Compared to the previous two displays, photocollage sculptures and a weirdly compelling documentary film, Fosso’s exhibits – classic framed photographs – seemed, well, kind of obvious, kind of quaint.
4. Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa was born in 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi, USA. He is an artist and filmmaker. What is an American doing in an exhibition supposedly restricted to exhibitions in Europe?
Well, one answer is that art curators can’t stop themselves promoting the Great Yoonited States of America: after all, Depoorter’s ‘Michael’ project is about an American and entirely set in America and half of Fosso’s African Spirits are American. And now we have an actual American photographer. Three out of the four displays are heavily or entirely American.
Why do British curators love American art?
What can you do against the endless tide of American art and artists being promoted by British art curators and adding to the vast sea of American culture which floods all our channels? If Britain’s art curators are so hell-bent on promoting American culture and American values at every opportunity, all I can do is register my feeble protest and point out that there are, in fact, other countries in the world apart from America. Quite a few, actually.
Why do we rarely or never hear about them? Because America is easy, that’s why. American art comes pre-packaged with 1) fluent, articulate artists who are great in interviews 2) innumerable American critics who bubble over with rhetoric about race and gender and 3) political and cultural ‘issues’ which we all already know too much about about because they flood our TV, radio, movies, documentaries, newsfeeds, twitter and all the other American-run social media.
When an American artist gives an interview saying they’re addressing issues of #metoo or Black Lives Matter,everybody immediately knows what they’re talking about and nods in concerned sympathy because we’ve already seen and heard and read hundreds and hundreds of news items and newspaper stories and magazine features and documentaries interviews and tweets about just these ‘issues’.
American art is like McDonalds art. It’s smooth, pre-packaged, ready to consume, processed, pre-masticated, baby food. Just add water and you’re good to go. Compare and contrast the problems you’d encounter with the language barrier and with explaining all the little-known historical and cultural references if you tried to stage an exhibition of contemporary, say, Indonesian or Peruvian art. But another African American artist yakking about slavery or the institutional racism of American society – piece of cake, child’s play, no brainer, no mental effort required, just the appropriate amount of liberal sympathy.
Arthur Jafa
Anyway, Jafa is here despite not being European because his exhibition, ‘Live Evil’, was shown at Arles in the South of France i.e. a European venue, from April to November 2022.
There’s a video of an extended interview with Jafa. He’s very angry about racism, in America, Europe, everywhere. In the bit I watched he quoted Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. In a modern art gallery you’re never far away from the 1960s. My eyes glazed over because I have heard scores of Black artists complaining about racism in America and read hundreds of articles about racism in America. Black Lives Matter posters hang in the windows of concerned students round where I live.
The stories of Uyghurs Muslims locked up and tortured in Xinjiang, of the people dying and displaced in Yemen or Syria, of the 920,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, now as I write and you read? Are these packing the walls of the Barbican, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Photographers’ Gallery? No. Silence. Nada. Their stories will never be told. They might as well not exist. But another American artist doing another show about how racist America is? Take your pick.
One last obvious point about the ubiquity of American artists: America is rich. It has the wealth to support a huge class of artists who, if they play their cards right, can become very wealthy, successful, appear in all the right magazines, and generally enjoy a great lifestyle. Makes me feel a bit sick when artists from the richest country in the world complain about their suffering and oppression. Go and live in Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Afghanistan for a month then fly back to your air-conditioned studio in LA and tell me about the suffering of ‘your people’.
Anyway, according to the curators, Jafa’s work is another ‘extended meditation on the issues of race and the Black experience’. Just like Frida Orupabo’s display, then. I’d swear there are other ethnicities in the world apart from Black and White. There are quite a lot of Indians and not a few Chinese, for a start. But not in Curatorworld. Black, Black and more Black, preferably American Black, is the only experience, the only voice, the only art we are going to be shown. I’m not saying ‘the Black experience’ is not a thing to investigate. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not the only story in the entire world to be aware of, to listen to.
Anyway, to quote the curators:
Drawing from a rich collection of images, film footage and music, Arthur Jafa uncompromisingly articulates Black experience, providing us with an exercise in visual literacy, confronting us with a new Black aesthetic which avoids fixed hierarchies and linear storytelling
There are just six works in Jafa’s display, six very large photos. First, maybe a word of explanation about the tile. ‘Live Evil’ is the name of a Miles Davis album, released in 1971, a live recording of a concert performed in December 1970 in Washington DC. After the epoch-making ‘Bitches Brew’ of 1969, Miles was working with a large group of almost entirely electric instruments, producing a strange voodoo swamp sound, mashing up heavy funk grooves with Jimi Hendrix guitar, and his own trumpet heavily electronically distorted. During this period Miles cultivated a dark and brooding image. He revelled in the nickname ‘the Prince of Darkness’, in fact he released an album titled ‘The Prince of Darkness’ in 1971, same years as ‘Live Evil’. Anyway, ‘Live Evil’, which sounds like this:
Miles Davis (1926 to 1991) was without doubt one of the great musical artists, composers and performers of the twentieth century. In the show he is featured in a diptych (‘any object with two flat plates which form a pair’) alongside the godfather of the Delta Blues, acoustic guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911 to 1938), which looks like this:
Johnson died young leaving only 20 or so recordings behind which have, nonetheless, become legendary and inspired all the blues guitarists of the 1940s and since. Dying young, Johnson left a legend or urban myth about himself which is that, in order to play so amazingly, he had sold his soul to the Devil. This legend was fostered by tracks with titles like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ or ‘Hellhound on my trail’:
So what does Jafa’s juxtaposition of these two Black musical icons tell us? Well for a start, they both made smoking look cool. To consider their music, although only about 40 years separate the photos (1930 to 1970) they seem musically and technologically galaxies apart. Then again, maybe they’re linked by the common thread of their devilish reputations, hellhounds and princes of darkness. Finally, maybe it’s simpler than that: Robert and Miles were both outstanding musicians, embodiments of Black excellence.
Across the room is another, bigger and more dramatic juxtaposition:
On the face of it, this is a straight contrast between an image of innocence and one of scary threat. Yet some other visitors I got talking to explained to me that they’re both images of identity masquerade: apparently, the earliest iterations of Mickey were based on white entertainers who’d blacked up as minstrels; while the figure on the right is actually a white actor who has blacked up using scary voodoo imagery (I assume this photo was shot on a film set but I can’t find out which one. Do you know?). They’re both lies, or deceptions, or multi-layered images of Blackness. Is that it?
tackles the complexity of African-American cultural identity, as defined by an existential paradox that places the Black subject ‘in essential intimacy with death’, as Saidiya Hartman explains in Jafa’s documentary ‘Dreams are Colder than Death’ (2013).
The endlessness of American pop culture
I liked the clarity of these dyptychs and also the fact that they were much deeper than they first appeared to be. The trouble, though, with popular culture, especially American popular culture, is that it is endless. Like the Bible, you can find a passage or quotes to prove anything you want to. I can cut and paste Homer Simpson next to Superman and straightaway I’m making important statements about masculinity, or something. Given such a vast sea of pop ephemera it would be hard to splice together two random elements and not find yourself raising interesting cultural or semiotic issues.
American culture combines technological wizardry with super-refined commercial strategising. Look at the Marvel Comic Universe movies, which are spectacular viewing, rank as the highest-grossing film series of all time, having netted over $29.1 billion, and have a mental age of around 9.
And American artists are trapped within this culture, condemned to try and imbue meretricious trash with meaning – and Black American artists are doubly trapped, trapped in a sea of Americana from which they (apparently, if someone like Jafa is to be believed) feel profoundly alienated. So I understand Jafa when he says that Black American artists are they trying to create narratives of Blackness which will help them navigate the bottomless dumpster of American pop culture, and the complex matrix of racist laws, assumptions and culture. I assimilate this kind of message because I’ve heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It comes pre-packaged and ready to consume.
Anyway, the puzzling thing about the Arthur Jafa display is that the use of these two sly juxtapositions is not his only trick – only two of the six items use it; the other four items are single images and far more varied, not to say troubling.
One is a treated image of the Black singer of a rock band (HR of Bad Brains) jumping about onstage, which left me cold, having spent too much of my teenage year paying attention to images of rock performers to be impressed by one more.
But in a completely different tone from everything else, one entire wall is taken up with an enormous photo of what appears to be a room somewhere in Rwanda, empty of people, but filled with washing lines (?) from which hang the clothes and rags of people hacked to pieces in the terrible genocide.
Installation view of Arthur Jafa at the Photographers’ Gallery
Is this part of ‘the Black experience’? Or the African experience? Or the human experience? It was certainly part of this generation of Rwandans’ experience. Does it directly impact anyone who wasn’t there? If so, why more so than the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust or – the most disastrous civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion in China in which at least 20 million perished (which I’ve just been reading about at the new exhibition at the British Museum)? Or the Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962, in which anything up to 50 million Chinese starved to death? Or, during my lifetime, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea in which up to 2 million people, a quarter of the population, were murdered or starved to death, 1975 to 1978?
I carry the images and histories of all these atrocities in my head, which not only gives me a very dim view of human nature, but also appears to be where I differ from someone like Jafa, because I don’t categorise these atrocities by the skin colour of the victims. They’re all human to me, each one an individual who suffered more than I can imagine, died in misery and terror, mounting up to a vast weight of guilt on the conscience of mankind. The collected atrocities of mankind don’t respect colour or ethnicity, which is why I find the foregrounding or privileging of some massacres or genocides over others morally repugnant.
Anyway, back to Jafa. The last piece in his display is a partial sculpture, a kind of bas-relief hanging on the wall of the whip-scarred back of a Black slave, a very potent image of man’s grotesque inhumanity to man or the atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
I get it, the Black slave trade was a very, very bad thing and generations of white exploiters captured, bought, transported and treated their African slaves with unbearable savagery and brutality. But I happen to have just finished reading Robert Hughes’s epic history of transportation to Australia, The Fatal Shore, and it is packed to overflowing with the unspeakably sadistic treatment meted out to the transported white convicts, especially in the penal colonies of Port Moresby and Norfolk Island. For even slight misdemeanours like looking at an overseer the wrong way, a convict could get three hundred lashes till bystanders could see their spine and ribs through the remains of their butchered back and the bystanders had to pick gobbets of raw human flesh off their clothes. Hughes repeats descriptions of British or Irish convicts who were whipped to death. So this, for me, is the image of a whipped human.
Most of human history is an abattoir. To limit notions of suffering and injustice to just one ethnicity or to one group or one class seems to me historically and morally questionable. It’s a form of boasting – my grievance is bigger than your grievance. It’s very much part of the grievance and victim culture which America has perfected and exported to the rest of the developed world.
But billions have suffered abominably, in every continent, at the hands of all races. The génocidaires in Rwanda weren’t white. The killers in Cambodia weren’t white. The people who implemented the Great Leap forward weren’t white. The murderers of 1.5 million Armenians weren’t white. The administrators of the gulags weren’t Western imperialists.
If these seem disproportionately enormous ideas for a photography exhibition that’s because Jafa is aiming to trigger big ideas about history. It’s just that I happen to be, maybe, more knowledgeable about the history of atrocity than the average gallery goer and so my frame of reference is wider, maybe, than he intends. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve read more widely about atrocities throughout history than is good for anyone, and so this powerful object triggers a wider, deeper historical response than he was, maybe, expecting.
I’m reading Emma Sky’s book about Iraq. She mentions General David Petraeus raising Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue in conversation. This was written about the siege of Melos in 416 BC, part of the wider the Peloponnesian War. When the Athenians finally took the city of Melos they executed the entire male population and enslaved all the women and children. My year of reading Roman history and literature drummed into me that slavery was a universal institution throughout the ancient world, that the civilisations of ancient Athens, Rome and Egypt entirely depended on it and that the huge slave population was subjected to terrible, awful lives of unending labour and liable to whipping, cutting, maiming and torture for the slightest infraction.
That’s what I know, that’s what an image like this triggers; not the suffering of one particular group, but the universal horror of human history.
Anyway, back from these vast horizons to a small room in Soho containing half a dozen artworks by Arthur Jafa. The conclusion from this small display seems to be that Jafa has at least two modes of operation, one consisting of the canny juxtaposition of images from popular culture, an astute form of curating and darkling satire; the other mode, flat-out horrific memorials of ‘the Black experience’.
This latter is, as you can imagine, catnip to modern white curators, driven by the bottomless resource of white bourgeois guilt:
By placing one resonant cultural artefact next to another Jafa references and questions the universal and specific articulations of Black experience. Eschewing a linear narrative, Jafa organises his material through formal and affective associations, linking his images through visual resemblance or thematic resonance. In this way Jafa aspires to an art that harnesses ‘the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.’
That’s from the press release. On the introductory wall label the curators say:
Embracing slippage and dissonance Jafa creates art that is as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.
‘…as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.’ What I took from the four exhibits on show here is that ‘Blackness’ as an artistic, critical and curatorial concept is indeed so fluid and multidimensional that artists, critics and curators can say almost anything about it and sound convincing. It lends power and a sense of urgency and relevance to even the most anodyne exhibition. It adds the spice of the ‘radical’ to a medium which all curators are uneasily aware is overwhelmingly white and bourgeois. Along with Gender it is a power word and, more than that, a kind of ideological matrix or discursive machine, which will continue to generate works and words, art and discourse, with ever-proliferating effect, for the foreseeable future.
From one perspective, ‘the Black experience’ as an art category is not so much the product of Black people’s actual experiences (which I imagine are very varied and complex) as it is of the liberal guilt of the White art establishment.
Who won?
Who do you think should have won the prize? It was won by Samuel Fosso, ‘the man of a thousand faces’. Why? Shoair Mavlian, the (White, obvz) Director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Chair of the Jury said that Fosso’s:
‘sustained exploration of self-portraiture uses a traditional, studio-based approach steeped in history, while at the same time his work remains relevant and addresses contemporary political issues of today with humour and authenticity. His work has created an extraordinary platform for Black voices and artists throughout his career.’
It’s a difficult choice but I think I liked Frida Orupabo’s weird, Gothic photomontages more than Fosso’s dressing up; and, although I’ve just given him a hard time, actually the clarity and design of Arthur Jafa’s diptychs have stayed with me days later, but then that’s American art for you, as slick and efficient as a Spielberg movie.
How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?
How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?
How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.
The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.
Historical context – the War on Terror
It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.
Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:
expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges
The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,
Ignatieff’s approach
The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).
In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.
My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)
It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.
Contents
The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?
Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil
Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.
Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.
There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.
If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.
Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency
If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)
Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?
Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’
Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong
Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.
But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.
It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.
Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.
In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.
In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.
Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.
In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.
Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.
But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.
By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.
Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.
If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.
Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak
An examination of terrorism itself.
In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)
Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:
insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power
With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.
Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?
Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.
Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.
Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).
The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)
The Arab future
Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.
Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:
the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)
One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.
Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism
This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.
This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)
Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.
As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.
First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.
Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.
It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.
Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.
With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.
His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.
b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.
c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.
He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.
The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).
But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.
So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.
These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.
This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.
Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.
Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.
Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon
The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?
Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.
Other thoughts
1. Internecine killing
The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).
2. The threshold of repugnance
The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.
Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.
3. The world is watching
There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.
The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).
In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).
At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.
These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).
Notes and thoughts
This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.
I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.
I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.
This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.
Seven days later
Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).
The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.
What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.
Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.
Credit
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.
Books & Boots 