This is an exhibition of the 55 or so portrait photos which were shortlisted for this year’s Taylor Wessing photographic portrait exhibition. The organisers received 3,700 photographic portraits from 1,611 photographers in seventy countries around the world, whittled it down to these 55, and then, a month ago, the first, second and third prize winners were announced. As usual, there’s a large number of good, and some exceptional, photographic portraits. As usual, I have some familiar gripes, namely:
1. American cultural dominance
Why are so many – 25 of the show’s 55 photos, nearly half the total – from America? And not just from America, but specifically New York?
1. Take the series of young black women snapped on the streets of Brooklyn by Amy Touchette. Apparently Amy moved to the neighbourhood in 2015, and took to walking the same route every day in the same clothes to get to know the area, and slowly uncovering the relationships among the large Afro-American community. Fair enough. But there are other cities in the world beside New York.
2. Each year the exhibition includes In Focus display of works by a featured photographer, and this year this consists of seven photos by Ethan James Green. To paraphrase the blurb:
Green’s first monograph ‘Young New York’ was published by Aperture in March 2019. These striking black and white portraits were made between 2014 and 2018, focusing on the artist’s friends and community, many taken in Corlears Red Hook Park on the Lower East Side. His new series of portraits sees him continue to work with his own generation this time photographing couples. Green mixes personal projects with work as a high profile fashion photographer working for magazines including Arena Homme +, i-D, LOVE,Self Service, Vanity Fair, Vogue,Vogue Homme, Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Wand WSJ. Magazine.
I’m afraid I got a bit grumpy about this. I feel like I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of photos just like this, photos of fashionably thin, fashionably multiracial and fashionably street yoof. All these photos need is the GAP or FCUK logo at the bottom and they could be appearing on any hoarding anywhere in the Western world. I feel that, yet again, I am being sold an American product.
By contrast there were no photos at all from China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria – to list the half dozen most populous countries in the world. Presumably this is because photographers in those countries just haven’t heard of this competition, but it feels like a big gap for a prize which claims to be global in scope.
Imagine how interesting it would have been to have had an In Focus slot for a Chinese photographer who’d been snapping the protesters old and young in Hong Kong! Or faces from famine-stricken Zimbabwe, or from collapsing Venezuela, or from the riots in Iran, or…
But no. Instead – yet another fashionable New York photographer shooting New York’s fashionably diverse, fashionably thin, fashionable street people, in between doing spreads for oh-so-fashionable Vanity Fair and Vogue…
2. Gender and sexuality
Second big beef was about the disproportionate attention paid to every modern gallery curator’s favourite subject – gender and sexuality. The aforementioned New Yorker Ethan James Green turns out, with staggering unoriginality, to be interested in ‘gender and sexuality’, but the exhibition also includes:
Seamus Ryan’s portrait of Captain Hannah Graf, the highest-serving transgender woman serving in the British Army
the Australian Tristan Still’s photo of a transgender person named Raynen who refers to themselves as ‘they’
Reme Campos’s series Portraits of Transgender Teenagers
Dominick Sheldon’s series dealing with gender and identity. British-born Sheldon (b.1984) took these portraits over several days as part of a series ‘dealing with gender and personal constructs of identity’ in the hijra communities of New Delhi. Hijra has particular cultural overtones and is used to describe gender identities – including transgender. Sheldon (big sigh) now lives in New York.
Not a million miles away from the series made by Olivia Arthur (British, born 1980) documenting ‘the suppressed LGBT+ sexualities of India, specifically in the port city of Mumbai’ which I saw at the Science Museum in February of last year.
I suppose this photo is from India. But why did it have to be taken by a Brit? Once upon a time we sent our imperial administrators to run India. Now we send our photographers to document their sexual outsiders.
3. Ethnic minorities
Alongside gender, race and ethnicity is the other obvious, predictable and inevitable ‘issue’ much beloved of art curators – race and ethnicity. Thus the exhibition includes several series concerned with blacks – or People of Colour or Afro-Americans, such as the Amy Touchette series, above.
There’s also a rather touching series by American (of course) photographer Rory Doyle (b.1983) of African-American cowboys. Doyle moved to Mississippi in 2009 and came across the cowboys (and, presumably, cowgirls and cowpersons) who’d followed that lifestyle for generations. After all, up to a quarter of the people who worked in the Old West were black (person of colour, African-American), and his series depicting the community also won the Sony World Photography Awards. Good to see it go to an American.
Back in the sub-continent, there was a series by Jook Oosterhof (Dutch, based in Amsterdam) who was commissioned by a magazine to go and photograph child brides in Bangladesh, where a high proportion of girls are married before they’re 18, and a significant number before they’re 15. The series was made in co-operation with a Dutch charity called Girls Not Brides. There were five photos from the series. The idea is that the girls are veiled a) to hide their identities b) to symbolise the way they are muted and muzzled in a patriarchal society.
As with Dominick Sheldon going to New Delhi I wondered why rich white Europeans have to go and help people in developing countries.
Other themes
Stepping away from my grumpiness about American cultural domination and modern art’s obsession with gender and race, a number of other themes do emerge and are represented in the exhibition.
Poverty
Having been an old-style socialist, I tend to think that poverty, lack of work or money or food, the way so many people are on zero hours jobs, or work for minimum pay or need to have two or even three jobs to make ends meet, or the way visits to food banks have tripled in the last three years, for me, the spread of poverty is a much more pressing issue than gender fluidity.
Anyway, this explains why I heartily endorsed the fact that First Prize in the competition was awarded to Pat Martin for two works from his portrait series of his late mother, Goldie (Mother). These pictures capture the authentic look of the fat, ugly, uneducated, troubled, working class poor who you rarely see represented in any medium, but which I see all round me every day in the streets of inner-city Streatham or toxic Harlseden.
Martin is (inevitably) American (big sigh), from Los Angeles which makes a change, I suppose, from New York.
For him, the series represented a way of trying to engage with a mother who had many issues, not least substance abuse. It is, in other words, a deeply personal project. But for those of us who don’t know him or his mum, they are just more images bobbing along the vast tide of imagery we are bombarded with every day. But they stick out because a) the subject matter is so rarely seen b) they are genuinely well composed and shot portraits.
The eccentric
Martin Parr has revived the appetite for the quirks and peculiarities of English life and this photo – standing by itself, maybe because it didn’t have enough gender or race in it – is very much in the Martin Parr tradition – very brightly coloured, hyper-real and BIG photos of rather nostalgic locations or activities. In this instance the Hubbock family snapped in their Ford Cortina, taken by Garrod Kirkwood at Whitley Bay in England (not America).
If you go to galleries as regularly as I do, you get used to gallery curators thinking about ‘outsiders’ in the very narrow and over-familiar terms of LGBT+ or transgender people, or ethnic minorities.
It was a refreshing change to see images of genuinely under-represented outsiders – in this case, people with Down’s Syndrome. One in every 1000 babies born in the UK will have Down’s syndrome and there are approximately 40,000 people in the UK with the condition. As far as I could tell there were not one but two series depicting Downs Syndrome people in the show, one titled Meeting Sofie by Snezhana von Büdingen, and another set of three photos from The Rite by Evelyn Natalia Bencicova. She looks happy. The pictures made me happy, reminded me of a very vivacious woman with Down’s Syndrome who I danced the night away with at my best friend’s wedding many years ago.
Striking
Head and shoulders the most striking image in the exhibition, and so no surprise that it’s been used for much of the publicity, is this luminous portrait of her mother, Eha, by Sirli Raitma (b.1975) in Estonia. She began the series, dressing her mother in different outfits, arranging striking poses, as a way of distracting her from her late-life depression.
And that brings me to the last theme I’d like to highlight, which was that – balancing the large number of teenagers on the streets of New York (or, in Los Angeles in Shaq by Aline Simpson, or the streets of Dakar by Jermaine Francis from Birmingham) – balancing the teenage cool of a lot of the images, was an equal number of images of old age.
Raitma’s are probably the most striking, composed and beautiful – but there were other studies, more troubled and pensive, by the likes of:
Enda Bowe – Ron, a knackered old man lying back in an armchair
the grey-haired couple Mordechai and Aryeh by Oded Wagenstein
a confused-looking white-haired old man on the street by Alex Llopis Cardona
a glimpse of an old, old lady through a half-open door by Piotr Karpinski
a very old, very sick old person lying in what looks like a hospital bed by Maria Konstanse Bruun
a photo of an old Australian geezer who broke his neck falling down the stairs by Chris Hoare
Or this lady, who looks a little out on the edge, Mara, as photographed by Kovi Konowiecki (b.1992) whose series, Driftwood was shot in and around Riverside County, California. America. Obvz.
Most of the images seemed to me to be of teenagers or the elderly, which is odd as the average age in the UK is 40 and the USA 38. Maybe street kids are just very available and very photogenic – and the elderly often fall into the category of the artist’s own parents, or are accessible in care homes and hospitals.
Whereas the age groups in between, everyone from 30 to 60, young- and middle-aged parents, are just too busy holding down a job and looking after the kids, to find the time to be photographed. Maybe that explains their slightly uncanny absence from this selection of images, and the exhibition’s tendency to over-represent the poles of youth and age.
Making connections
Anyway, 55 excellent photographic portraits + the eight In Focus ones by Ethan James Green. A body of work picked almost at random, but which – as indicated – I, for one, immediately began to see themes and connections in.
I dare say other visitors might find themes and threads which I didn’t pick up on. One of the pleasures of any exhibition is dillying and dallying, making up your itinerary and having your own thoughts. Exhibitions are, after all, meant to be enjoyable as well as educational, fun as well as yet another channel for being bombarded by socially-approved messages about Diversity and Inclusion.
So other visitors might not notice the American domination or the gender and sexuality themes, and focus on something completely different. Or may just be struck by a few individual pieces here and there, since each photo is accompanied by thorough wall labels describing the photographer and their work and the issues or ideas they’re addressing.
So maybe others will respond to the project by Chris Hoare who, inspired by the old cliché describing Australia as ‘The Lucky Country’ set out to find and photograph people who had experienced extremes of either good or bad luck (such as the man who broke his neck falling downstairs).
Or the photos of laughing or earnestly posing schoolboys taken by Vikram Kushwah in his native India. or the young Sumo wrestler training in the Terelj National Park shot by Catherine Hyland (another Brit journeying to far-off locations).
Kader Attia is ‘one of today’s leading international artists’ and this exhibition is the first major survey of his work ever held in the UK.
Attia was born in 1970 France. His parents were of Algerian origin. He grew up in one of the banlieues or suburbs in north-east Paris, in a multicultural environment where Catholic, Jewish and Muslim religions mixed. Attia has dual nationality and has returned often to the family home in Algeria. In the mid-1990s he worked and travelled in the democratic republic of Congo where he held his first exhibition.
Since then he has gone on to forge a career as an exponent of deeply fashionable ‘post-colonial art’, working across a dazzling array of media to criticise western imperialism, western colonialism, western racism, western cultural appropriation of native lore and art, western control of its immigrant populations, and so on.
‘I try to trigger a political feeling in the viewer. My job is like all of us confronted with reality. What interests me is when a work poses a political question not only from a linguistic point of view, formal, but more from an ethical point of view.’
Political feelings. Political questions. Well, the show as a whole struck me as a sustained attack on western values, history, art and culture. The assault is sustained across six rooms on the ground floor of the Hayward gallery, plus the Heni Project space entered from the gallery lobby.
Transgender sex workers
When I learned that one of his earliest successes was a project to photograph and ‘document’ the lives of a community of Algerian transgender sex workers, and that a slideshow of 160 of these images won him international recognition when displayed at the 50th Venice Biennale, my heart sank.
What could be more crushingly obvious, inevitable and clichéd? Is there any other subject as fashionably outré and yet as well trodden? I immediately thought of:
diane arbus: in the beginning currently the sister exhibition to Attia, upstairs in the Hayward, which features a ton of male female impersonators and performers from the 1950s and 60s
the well documented life of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born a male in Algeria, who became a famous French transsexual entertainer with the stage name of ‘Bambi’
The photos taken by Olivia Arthur of the suppressed LGBT+ sexualities in India which featured in the Illuminating India exhibition at the Science Museum
Identity and ‘trangressive’ sexuality are the fashionable subject of our age and yet curators and artists conspire to imagine they are still hugely taboo subjects which you have to whisper about and which an artist is oh-so brave to address. Instead of a boringly predictable subject which has been comprehensively ‘explored’ by every art gallery in London.
This set the tone for my reception of Attia: he and his supporters think he is a grand rebel, an incisive critic of western historical narratives and norms – but all of his critiques seemed to me extremely old and over-familiar and passé.
When I went to the Sensation exhibition of young British Artists in 1997 I was genuinely bowled over by their dazzling new approaches to an amazing new range of subject matters. This guy is retreading ideas and approaches I got bored with decades ago.
Room 1. Modern architecture
Room one is dominated by an awesome projection which covers one entire wall of a camera very slowly moving up the facade of one of the shitty council housing blocks which make up the dreaded banlieues of Paris, the post-war sink estates where Paris sent all its working class and immigrant population to live and which, more or less every summer, erupt in rioting and car burning.
Post-war concrete high-rise council estates are crap. Not a new idea, is it?
Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by Linda Nylind
The wall label tells us Attia is drawing attention to the way these blocks were built around principles of surveillance and control similar to those used to subdue colonial populations.
As it happens a) I grew up on the edge of one of Britain’s all-concrete post-war new towns and b) I’ve been reading a lot recently about post-war town planning and architecture in the social histories of David Kynaston:
Austerity Britain, 1945 to 1951 (2007) comprising:
Although the subject of post-war town planning was fraught with controversy and disagreement I’ve nowhere read anything suggesting that the new estates were designed in order to monitor and control their inhabitants.
Sounds like Attia has swallowed his Michel Foucault whole. (Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic whose theories address the relationship between power and knowledge and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. He died in 1984. Foucault was awesomely fashionable in the early 1980s when I went to university and read half a dozen of his books. It was when I found myself reading an interview from the mid-70s in which Foucault explained how ‘we’ [the radical student movement] could use Maoist concepts to battle against the fascist French police, that I began to realise that Foucault had little or nothing to offer me in the actual political and cultural situation of Thatcherite Britain that I found myself in.)
The mistakes the planners made had nothing whatever to do with surveillance and control. In knocking down the old slums and rehousing people, they decided that, instead of rehousing them on the same locations, they would move them out to clean new locations which had no historic restrictions on design. All the architects were fans of the fashionable Le Corbusier who promoted cities in the sky and also adopted high rise builds as solutions to shortages of space.
It was only as tenants moved into these gleaming and fashionable new blocks that the drawbacks became clear: very often the planners had forgotten to build in shops and facilities, pubs and churches and you centres and the miscellaneous kinds of places where people meet and hang out. Public transport into the city centres was poor and irregular, and they were too far way to walk to.
More importantly it turned out that various elements needed expensive maintenance, especially the lifts without which people couldn’t get to their flats. Getting rubbish out of people’s flats down to collective rubbish collection points didn’t always work and anyway resulted in overflowing bins which bred rats.
Most subtly, it was discovered that traditional communities are self-policing. Where you had an old-fashioned street you had windows on the street and, in any kind of good weather, people sitting out on stoops and steps watching, generally congeries of mums watching their kids playing, or owners of the various small shops in a neighbourhood similarly watching what was going on.
These acted as an informal and highly informed police. If fights broke out, if kids did something dodgy or rude or bullying and so on, there were scores of eyes watching and people could intervene, often mums who knew the mother of the wrong-doer. Thus communities were able to police themselves with little or no intervention from the authorities. This is something I’ve seen described in Somerset Maugham’s novel Lisa of Lambeth, have read about in 2,000 pages of David Kynaston’s histories, and was really emphasised by a recent BBC 4 documentary about Janet Jacobs who wrote the classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) describing how over-intellectual architects and planners, dazzled by the futuristic designs of le Corbusier and other fashionable European architects, were destroying the neighbourhoods of old Manhattan, replacing rundown but friendly and self-policing communities, with windswept high ‘projects’ – just like the French banlieues. Into the projects American planners decanted a lot of their cities’ poorest which tended to include lots of blacks, just as Paris decanted its poorest, which included lots of Algerian immigrants, into its banlieues.
The result? Vast expanses of concrete high rise buildings where ‘community’ has been destroyed, and the public spaces belong to the worst kind of tearaway teenagers who patrol in gangs, peddle drugs, stab rivals and erupt in violence if the police try to intervene.
In everything I’ve read and watched on this subject, no-one has mentioned the idea these wretched estates were built to to monitor and control their inhabitants. A far simpler explanation is that they were the disastrous result of planners and architects falling under the spell of fashionable French and German theorists with sweeping intellectual attitudes: demolish the old, build the shiny gleaming new cities of the future.
This is what went through my mind as I stood in this first room looking at the awesome film of a camera slowly moving up the side of just such a concrete high rise building, next to a model of such a building.
My conclusion was that Attia is deliberately and wilfully ignoring the real motivations and the complex social history of these places, in order to turn them into a cheap and obvious jibe at the police and authorities. The claim that these places were built solely so the authorites could control their inhabitants is 1. factually incorrect 2. a deliberate distortion which allows Attia to quote Foucault and so sound wondrously intellectual and clever and 3. 40 years out of date.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, who is surveilling and controlling the inhabitants of these horrible slums if it isn’t the owners of multinational American corporations, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and twitter to name but a few? But the internet is a bit too up to date for Attia. He is still lost in the 1970s when it was cool and path-breaking to take photos of transgender people (wow) and use new Left Bank ideas to deconstruct notions of power and control (“have you read Foucault, man, he’s just soooo cool”).
Away from the leather-jacketed student politics, I liked some of Attia’s more allusive pieces, such as this piece of minimalism, although I still found it weird that he made it some forty years after minimalism had become well established as a style in America.
Narcissus (2012) by Kader Attia. Concrete block, mirror and wire
Room 2. Joy, fear and humiliation
This is a massive room devoted to scores of big prints of his photos of 1990s Algerian transgender sex workers, capturing ‘moments of elation experienced in the course of an otherwise precarious and difficult existence’.
Attia is obviously yet another artist who subscribes to the view that prostitutes and sex workers are privy to a kind of special knowledge and insight concealed to the rest of us, that photographing hookers reveals a ‘secret world’, that the mere act of photographing them ‘breaks taboos’ and ‘transgresses’ conventional bourgeois values. Really?
I wanted to present the whole picture of their lives, to show that even illegal immigrants working as transgender prostitutes have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope.
‘Even illegal immigrants have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope’. How patronising. How patronising to his subjects to treat them like some kind of remote tribe in New Guinea, instead of people like you or me. Aand how patronising to us, the viewers, that he feels he has to explain that prostitutes are people who have feelings too. Really? You think?
As to the transgender issue, some of us have been totally comfortable with, not to say bored by, the whole idea of cross-dressing and transgender for nearly fifty years. (‘But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head…’ as Lou Reed sang in 1972 i.e. 50 years ago.)
Like the room criticising soulless concrete housing estates, this took me right back to the 1970s.
The opposite wall displays a number of black-and-white press and publicity photos of world famous politicians and popular singers, entitled Field of Emotion. Apparently, this work
explores the ambivalent role that emotion plays in all areas of our lives… Attia asks us to consider how and whether powerful emotions might help heal rather than create conflict.
Emotions play a role in our lives. Hmm. Really. Do you see why I felt I was being patronised?
Anyway, what struck me about the display was how very dated all of the images were. Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Edith Piaf, Moshe Dayan, Lenin, Mussolini, Ella Fitzgerald. It looks like the wall of a radical student on the Left Bank circa 1974. “Right on, baby. Have you heard Lou Reed’s new album? And what about Foucault’s new book?” Dated dated dated.
Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery
Room 3. Chaos + Repair
I liked this big ball made out of fragments of fabric, broken mirrors and wire. Apparently it is an attempt to capture the ambivalence most people feel about aspects of their cultural, political or personal identity. Is that how it makes you feel? Do you feel ambivalent about aspects of your cultural, political or personal identity?
I just liked it as another example of the minimalist thread in his thinking and creating.
Chaos + Repair = Universe, 2014 by Kader Attia. Photo by the author
Room 4. Joy, fear and humiliation
Attia is, apparently, critical of
the museological impulse to classify and categorise [because it] is part of a much broader and more problematic system of control. In many of his sculptures and installations, he typically invokes the display methods and subject matter of a typical 19th-century natural history or ethnographic museum… in order to explore the ways in which colonialism continues to shape how western societies represent and engage with non-western cultures.
I profoundly disagree with this on all kinds of levels.
Abandoning all the achievements of science
All western science is based on the collection and sorting of data. Medicine is based on a vast array of anatomical, chemical, biochemical and medical information which has been painstakingly collected, sorted and categorised over the last 200 years. Does Attia really think the inhabitants of Algeria would be better off without antibiotics, anaesthetics, innoculations and vaccinations which European scientists devised after years of collecting samples, experimenting and cataloguing? If so, he is an idiot.
Valorising voodoo
His work, he says, is looking for a way we can escape from ‘the obsession of the Western modern mind to organise the universe’, which sounds very cool and Foucauldian. “Let’s smash the system, man.”
But just really, really think for a moment what it would be like to live in a world where there was no organising, classifying impulse, where knowledge was not recorded, and collated, in which each generation was born into the same old ignorance and fear. The world of the illiterate wode-painted heath-dwellers who the Romans found in ancient Britain, performing human sacrifices to placate the anger of the gods. Is that the kind of world you’d like to live in, ruled by shamans and witch doctors. Don’t think the transgender prostitutes would last long in that world. Or any woman who defies tribal customs.
Luckily Attia with his irresponsible views and the entire class of dilettantish modern artists to which he belongs, has absolutely no effect whatsoever on politics, economics, medicine, science or technology.
Classifying and categorising
A few years ago I went through every room in the British Museum and discovered that the five dark, dusty, wooden-cabinet-lined rooms on the east side of the central courtyard are devoted to showing how everything we know today had its origins in the impulse of all sorts of people, from the Holy Roman Emperor to English parish vicars, to collect all manner of weird and wonderful objects, and to sort and organise their collections.
These rooms look boring but turn out to be full of quirky and highly personal collections of everything from bones and fossils to Roman antiquities, types of rock to the shape of clouds.
All human knowledge is based on the impulse to collect and categorise. The impulse to collect is a fundamental human attribute. Everyone does it. I arrange my books into categories. My daughter puts her photos into different Instagram albums. My son organises his music into different spotify playlists. Who doesn’t ‘curate’ their own content on social media and the web?
Well then, it turns out you are in the grip of the Western world’s sick and dubious ‘museological impulse to classify and categorise’. It turns out you employ ‘problematic system of control’.
Of course some of this classifying and categorising can be used for evil purposes, as the Nazis categorised humans into different races, starting with the distinction between Jews and Aryans, and imperial authorities may well have categorised people into ‘white’ and ‘native’ for all kinds of bureaucratic reasons. And it is very much this tradition of classifying people and in particular the inhabitants of the colonised nations of Africa and Asia which Attia has in mind.
But to say that the impulse to collect and categorise is in itself evil and to devote your work to finding ways ‘to escape this’ impulse is like deciding to abolish language because Hitler used language in his speeches and imperialists used language in their racist laws.
Hypocrisy
And, it barely seems worth pointing out that all these works which are devoted to critiquing the wicked Western habit of wanting to organise and classify and categorise are being displayed in an art gallery where… they are being organised and classified and categorised :).
The walls of this exhibition abound in labels precisely dating each piece, carefully explaining the materials they’re made from, categorising them as photographs, sculptures, installations and soon.
The works are divided into rooms each of which has been organised around a central theme or concept.
And there is, of course, a big expensive catalogue of the works on sale in the gallery shop, ‘a fully-illustrated catalogue with an extensive interview between Kader Attia and Ralph Rugoff’, Director, Hayward Gallery, no less.
In other words, this exhibition itself demonstrates the very compulsion to categorise and organise which Attia claims to have devoted a career to trying to deconstruct.
When I was younger and experiencing the first heady rush of reading Foucault and Barthes and Adorno and Benjamin I might have interpreted this as sophisticated irony, or as ‘a playful deconstruction of the normative values which underlie the western historical narrative’, or some such.
Now I’m older and more impatient, I just see it as idiotic hypocrisy.
Technology
Is Attia at any point using traditional tribal native-people’s media to create his art with? No. He uses digital photography, digital video, film, light shows and minimalist sculpture. All the hallmarks and media of the most technically advanced, post-industrial, post-modern Western art.
Ethnography
But of course Attia isn’t really referring to the impulse to collect and categorise as a whole, whatever he might say. He is speaking much more personally about the West’s history of collecting and categorising the artefacts (and indeed peoples) of the non-Western, ‘developing’ world which he has taken it upon himself to be a post-colonial mouthpiece for.
No prizes then, for guessing that there might well be a room devoted to showing how Western culture has ripped off and appropriated non-western art and artefacts.
As long ago as the 1920s left-wing critics were criticising Picasso for ripping off African tribal masks. This accusation became a standard part of Marxist art criticism in the 1960s and 70s. Now it is entirely accepted, it is the utterly conventional wisdom of our time, that early 20th century artistic Modernism wouldn’t have existed if Picasso and Matisse hadn’t been able to see African and Oceanic tribal masks in the Paris Ethnography Museum. Which exhibition of Picasso and Matisse does not point it out?
Thus the Royal Academy’s exhibition on Matisse and his studio was at pains to prove how up to date and politically correct it was by ‘calling out’ Matisse for his ‘cultural appropriation’ of tribal artifacts, as well as his ‘orientalism’ for painting odalisques.
So – as with Attia’s pieces of minimalism, or his insight that concrete high-rise estates are horrible, or his oh-so-risqué photos of transgender prozzies – what really struck me about his western-modern-art-ripped-off-African-art pieces was how very, very, very old, clichéd and totally acceptable this fact is.
How he presents this is so glaringly obvious I thought it was funny, Here is one of his ‘artworks’ where he has placed a book with a cover illustration of Munch’s notorious painting The Scream next to a ‘Pende sickness mask’. Yes, Kader, I do get it. Munch would never have painted like this if it he hadn’t had sight of the African masks collected by wicked imperialists, and therefore his painting is a wicked wicked piece of cultural appropriation.
Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Naughty, naughty Western artists. Pablo and Henri and Edvard, you must all go and sit on the naughty step. Don’t you know that art must never copy ideas from other cultures. Only Europeans are this wicked. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians never copied art, writing or religions from of other people’s cultures. And even if they did, it’s alright, because they aren’t white.
What I found literally impossible to believe was the wall label for this work which explained that:
Several works in this room, including The Scream and Mirrors and Masks point to the still under-acknowledged influence of African art on the trajectory of Western art history.
Still under-acknowledged? By whom? This point of view has been knocking around for ages. I found it in full cry in an art history book from 25 years ago which I reviewed last year.
Do you really think this is news to anyone who regularly attends art galleries or knows anything about modern art? It is one of the clichés, one of the absolute bedrock certainties, of modern art history. Anybody who studies modern art will hear about it.
Room 5. The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures
The biggest room in the gallery is given over to this massive installation.
Installation view of The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind
The fundamental concept is ‘repair’. Attia, as a self-declared expert on Western and non-Western societies, confidently proclaims:
While Western societies seek to erase marks left by injury or trauma, ‘in traditional societies it’s the opposite: they have ways to fix an injury that also keeps it visible.’
Hence this collection of twenty or so metal warehouse shelf units as well as three vitrines which display hundreds of objects including African masks, vintage photographs, books, newspapers and a series of decorative, functional or devotional objects constructed by soldiers during the First World War.
In among all these objects are mingled busts which Attia commissioned from craftsmen in Carrara, Italy and Senegal, which depict members of an African ethnic group known for body modification including facial scarring – juxtaposed with busts of First World War soldiers with severe facial injuries.
The whole thing, then, is an ‘investigation’ into contrasting Western and non-Western attitudes to scarring and healing, repairing and fixing.
Another part of the display is a slideshow juxtaposing photos of First World War soldiers undergoing early and rudimentary plastic surgery, with African masks showing obvious signs of repair:
an unsettling series of juxtapositions that challenges our conventional ideas about wholeness, injury, beauty and otherness.
Ah. ‘Otherness’. Surprised it’s taken this long to get round to this worn-out cliché of cultural studies and critical theory. The premise is that Western cultures try to cover, repair and occlude physical scars and injuries, whereas non-Western cultures don’t and often wear them with pride.
OK. I’ll buy that.
Room 6. Shifting Borders
The most recent work in the exhibition is a set of three videos being shown on three big monitors with benches in front of them, and headphones for you to put on so you can listen to the talking heads.
Each of the videos features Attia interviewing mental health professionals, academics and survivors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in which more than 600 people, most of them students, were killed.
Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind
In one of the videos a Vietnamese spiritualist describes holding a ceremony for the spirit of an American soldier who had possessed her brother-in-law. In another a professional doctor declares ‘I don’t think a psychiatrist is the only one who can heal.’ In other words:
Through the spoken testimonies that make up the video element of Shifting Borders, Attia addresses different forms of healing and in particular the therapeutic role played by shamanistic and spiritualist practices in non-Western societies.
West bad. Non-West good.
Thoughts
The first impact is the scale and variety of the work, sculptures, photos, installations, videos on display – Attia is covering the whole waterfront of contemporary media.
Next I was struck by how very out of date so much of it seemed – finding 70s housing estates crappy, oh-so-edgy photos of transgender prostitutes, the claim that European modern art ripped off African masks, the claim that traditional non-western ‘healers’ know things Western scientists don’t understand, a wall of political and jazz icons from the 1950s – all of these struck me as old, old, old ideas and images. Claiming that non-western medicine might have alternative ways of healing is a new idea? Really?
Attia wanted a political response and so I have responded politically to the ideas on show and I find them thin, deliberately misleading, superficial and, although dressed up in fashionable curator-speak, actually dated and old.
The one big theme which I did find thought-provoking or interesting was this idea of ‘repair’ which runs through many of the works. Thus in the room of African masks placed next to western books to prove how wicked wicked Europeans ripped off African culture, there was suddenly a big hole in the wall, apparently unconnected to the grim lecturing of the other pieces.
Untitled (2014) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
I liked this. Like the ball made of fabric and broken mirror, I just found this an arresting artefact, object, thing. Not something you see every day.
I get so bored by hectoring, lecturing, dogmatic, ideological modern art. It’s a refreshing change to come across something which just… is. Which connects with you at some inexplicable level… Which gives you a funny feeling about space, and secrets, and interiors and wrecks and rubble.
It reminded me of some of the works of Anish Kapoor which play with the integrity of the surface of the gallery i.e. disappear into the walls and ceilings.
Something similar could be said of this hypnotic jumble of sheep horns, that it creates an eerie and uncanny sensation in the viewer, a kind of discomforting sensation in your mind as you imagine running your hands over its sharp surfaces.
Schizophrenic Melancholia (2018) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
Unfortunately the wall label then goes on to give a lengthy explanation which does its best to eliminate all of the mystery and surprise from the piece, and convert it into another part of the heavy-handed anti-western lecture.
In this sculptural work, Attia elaborates on the relationship between contemporary Western medicine and traditional healing practices, in particular those that deal with mental illness. Attia’s research in this area – a key subject for the artist – took him to Dakar, Senegal, where he witnessed an ancient healing ceremony called ‘Ndeup’, in which the horns of sacrificial goats and sheep form the centrepiece of a ritual that involves the whole community. According to the Lebu people, by the ceremony’s end these horns would hold all the ‘bad energy’ that had been forced out of the afflicted individual during the ritual.
“Yeah, man, western society has lost its way, it’s like traditional peoples, man, they’re like so much more in touch with nature and their true selves, man. I’ve seen stuff on my trips, man, things you people can’t understand, stuff which defies western medicine, man.” Neil the hippy.
It was only on leaving the gallery that I realised that the enormous poster / hanging / digital print opposite the main entrance is also by Attia.
Rochers Carrés (2008) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
It’s a striking composition although, like everything else in the exhibition, it cannot be allowed to simply be: it must immediately be stuffed full of progressive moralising and curatorial meaning-making.
It has to be categorised and defined and described, to be titled and dated and explained and interpreted, in just the kind of way which Attia has made a career out of saying he is trying to run away from. So:
Kader Attia is interested in boundaries – ‘geographical, cultural, sexual, religious’ – and the way they function as in-between spaces. the son of Algerian immigrants, Attia grew up in Paris but spent his summer holidays in Algiers where he spent hours smoking, fishing and – like the teenagers in this photograph – watching the ships going back and forth between Algeria and Europe.
Rochers Carrés – in English ‘square rocks’ – is one of a series of images that Attia made of this breakwater ‘beach’ in the Algiers neighbourhood of Bab El Oued. In Attia’s words, this beach is ‘the ultimate boundary’ that separates these young people from their dreams of a better life.
Really? Is it really that much of a boundary to youths like Attia who could take a cab to the airport, get on a plane and fly back to their homes in Paris, secure in the heart of the scientific, economic, technological and artistic bosom of the West?
Summary
The world is much more perforated and mixed up and heterogenous and immigrated than Attia’s simplistic binary definitions (West bad, non-West good) allow.
And this big poster is a classic example of the constricting, strangulating way in which every single piece in the show has to be dated and defined, contextualised and interpreted, labelled and explained to death.
If Attia is sincerely trying to ‘escape’ from the European obsession with collecting and categorising, then this exhibition shows his efforts to have been a self-defeating failure. It’s one of the most intensively collected and categorised exhibitions I’ve ever been to.
‘Illuminating India’ is a season of exhibitions and events being held at London’s Science Museum to celebrate India’s contribution to science, technology and mathematics.
At its heart are two FREE major exhibitions: 5,000 Years of Scienceand Innovation and Photography 1857–2017. The first consists of one large room presenting a history of scientific breakthroughs in India; the second consists of three exhibition spaces presenting a selection of photography from its arrival in India in the 1830s through to the present day.
In addition to the exhibitions there’s a season of India-themed events, including film screenings, music and dance performances, conversations with experts and more.
(I am often struck by how exhibitions and books about the arts must have alliterative titles cf. the Passion, Power and Politics exhibition just across the road at the Victoria and Albert Museum).
1. Power and Performance
Shortly after its invention in Britain in 1839, photography arrived in India. It was used to document the people and places of the vast sub-continent and as a record of colonial conflicts, particularly of the great Mutiny of 1857. It’s this the show opens with, presenting photographs of the ruined garrisons at some of the key battlefields of the Uprising, such as Cawnpore and Delhi. There’s a map and history briefly explaining the background and course of the Uprising.
Photos were taken by British officers like John Murray, but I was struck to learn that some were taken by Felice Beato, who I came across for his photos of the First Opium War. He was one of the first war photographers and generally staged his photos to conform to artistic conventions.
There are photos of Bahadur Shah Zafar who was rather forced into becoming a figurehead for the rebels which meant that, when the Uprising was finally quelled, members of his family were executed and he the last descendant of the Mughal emperors – was deposed.
The heyday of imperial control of India was from about 1860 to 1900 and this is reflected in the work of British photographers like Samuel Bourne and Maurice Vidal Portman. Bourne accompanied expeditions up into the Himalayas where he took breath-taking panoramas of the spectacular views, some of which were made up into books and sold to armchair explorers. Photos and bound books of them are on display here.
Portman was a fascinating character, a naval officer who was put in charge of the Andaman Islands and their inhabitants at the age of 19! He was tasked with managing the islands and their inhabitants at a time when several prison camps were established for those imprisoned by the Raj in India. Over the next twenty years he took numerous photos of the native Andamanese, for the British Government and the British Museum.
Portman got to know the natives well and wrote two books on their languages as well as building up a significant collection of ethnographic objects during his time on the Andaman Islands which are now in the British Museum. The selection of his work here emphasises the sinister application of photography, used to photograph islanders from the front and side on, alongside measuring their facial features, skull shape and size and so on, all part of the late 19th century obsession with race.
Ilech, girl of the Ta-Yeri tribe by Maurice Vidal Portman
Meanwhile, a completely different genre grew up which adapted the colour palette of traditional Indian painting to the new technology: basically, photographs of Indians which were then extensively touched up or painted over to create a distinctive hybrid form.
There are lots of examples of this kind of thing, depicting many of India’s 700 or so ‘princes’, images which were made for them as portraits but also reversioned in books, used in family ‘cabinets’ or made into postcards for their subjects to buy. The style carried on well into the 20th century as the example at the top of this review demonstrates.
2. Art and Independence
As cameras got smaller and cheaper more Indians were able to set up as commercial and even art photographers. This second section is sub-divided into two: examples of native photographers (Art) and a roomful of photos devoted to portraying Gandhi and Indian Independence (Independence).
The photographer Shapoor N. Bhedwar is represented by a suite of photographs depicting middle-class Indian life at the turn of the century. His studied compositions clearly borrow from the conventions of late Victorian painting.
A wall is devoted to works by a photographer called Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II who developed an approach based on self-portraits taken over many years, in a variety of guises and Indian costumes.
The second part of this section is devoted to photographs depicting the very end of the career of Mahatma Gandhi, including his funeral, along with photos of the independence on India in 1947 and of the ruinous partition of the sub-continent.
Gandhi was well aware of the importance of imagery in the ‘modern’ world (of the 1930s and 40s). As the curators point out, it’s no mistake that at the end of his life he was being accompanied by not one but two of the pre-eminent photojournalists of the day, Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose works are liberally represented.
The curators take the opportunity to juxtapose these two super well-known westerners with works by India’s first female photojournalist Homai Vyarawalla.
The next space is also sub-divided. The first room contains lots of images from the 1950s and 60s. Gandhi had campaigned on a platform of returning India to its spiritual roots and to an economy based on self-sufficiency and village crafts. But the first prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru (PM from 1947 to 1964) took diametrically the opposite view and set about transforming India into a modern industrialised economy, along with nuclear power and its own space programme.
Hence a wall of wonderful black-and-white photos taken by Werner Bischof and Madan Mahatta of industrial landscapes, building sites, railroad sidings, power plants. A kind of sub-set of these was a couple of b&w photos taken Lucien Hervé. Looking him up on Wikipedia I discover he was French but of Hungarian origin, and I wonder if that accounts for the highly constructivist style of the photos, which remind me of the Bauhaus style of his great compatriot, László Moholy-Nagy.
In the next room we come to big colour photos from the 1980s onwards. Two names stand out, Rajhibir Singh and an American called Mitch Epstein. Epstein worked in films and took a cinematic approach to staging and lighting his large, bold compositions. He was, apparently, part of a movement called American New Colour.
Shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India 1981 by Mitch Epstein. Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
New Indian Photography
In the final room was a generous selection from the work of three contemporary Indian photographers. As with most art nowadays, it’s not enough to just paint a painting or take a photo, you have to devise a project.
Sohrab Hura (Indian b.1981)
Hura worked on a ‘two-chapter’ personal project called Sweet Life from 2005 to 2014. Chapter 1, Life Is Elsewhere (2005 to 2011), focuses on his relationship with his mother who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A second chapter, Look, It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2008 to 2014) chronicles the improvement of her mental health. An extensive selection from both works is shown on a video screen, along with accompanying commentary.
Represented by a wall of photos which represent, or hint at, the suppressed LGBT+ sexualities of India, specifically in the port city of Mumbai. At one time India’s ‘city of dreams’, according to the wall label an increasingly reactionary political movement in Mumbai has led to the recriminalisation of homosexuality. Hence Arthur’s photos try to capture marginal places and private moments where this now-subterranean sub-culture can be seen, or at least inferred.
Had the bright idea of retelling the ancient Hindu epic poem the Ramayana through contemporary photos, and titling the (ongoing) series, A Myth of Two Souls. Thus two walls of large colour photos by him show images which are completely contemporary in feel, but which have captions quoting from key moments in the ancient story.
Cricket Match, Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India (2013) from the series A Myth of Two Souls by Vasantha Yogananthan
As a set, these were probably the most consistently interesting and stimulating photographs in the exhibition. Yogananthan’s photos are simultaneously modest, homely, undramatic but wonderfully composed and atmospheric. Which is why I’ve included two.
Rama Combing His Hair, Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India, 2015 from the series A Myth of Two Souls by Vasantha Yogananthan
If you like India, and you like photography, what are you waiting for? It’s a terrific show and it’s ABSOLUTELY FREE.
Books & Boots 