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ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger (2015)

Asymmetrical warfare is defined by asymmetry. Any terrorist ideology that can attract five recruits and the contents of their bank accounts can make headlines for months. A terrorist group with twenty recruits and half a million dollars can make headlines for years.
(ISIS: State of Terror, page 191)

ISIS is the crack cocaine of violent extremism, all of the elements that make it so alluring and addictive purified into crystal form. (p.235)

This book comes highly recommended as ‘a timely account’ and ‘the most important account’ of ISIS, but suffers from the same shortcoming as half the other books I’ve been reading about the Iraq-Afghanistan-al Qaeda turmoil, which is that it’s way out of date. My fault, obviously, not theirs.

It contains an admirably detailed chronology but it only goes up to November 2014. At many points, the authors say things like, ‘At the time of writing it looks like ISIS will…’, ‘It looks like ISIS might…’ expand and hold more territory, or maybe buckle after sustained attack by the US and its allies…they don’t know.

This is irritating because, in a sense, the most interesting thing about ISIS was the international campaign to extirpate it which only got underway in 2014/15 as this book was being finalised and published. Well, more fool me for buying a book which is nearly ten years old, although I can’t find anything more recent on Amazon.

ISIS

As usual, it’s easiest to go to Wikipedia for the basic facts:

The Islamic State (IS; as of 2014), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; in 2013) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a transnational militant Islamist terrorist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar massacre. The organization significantly influenced the course of the Syrian civil war when it announced its expansion into Syria in mid-2013 and began conducting ground attacks against both Syrian government forces and Syrian opposition militias. By the end of 2015, it held an area that contained an estimated eight to twelve million people and stretched from western Iraq to eastern Syria, where it enforced its interpretation of Islamic law. ISIL was estimated at the time to have an annual budget of more than US$1 billion (much derived from control of oil revenue from captured refineries) and more than 30,000 fighters.

The authors start by giving a straightforward chronological account of the rise of Islamic State out of its predecessor organisation, al Qaeda in Iraq (up to the time of writing, in late 2014). Then they go back and retread the same path or narrative but focusing on particular themes, such as the role of foreign fighters and of women; chapters on ISIS’s use of promotional videos and social media; on the complicated struggle to win over followers of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, not only in the Arab heartland but further afield in the Maghreb and North Africa. They have a chapter on the long-term psychological aims of ISIS, which they consider is to produce a society of dehumanised psychopaths, which partly explains their conscious policy of training child soldiers, forcing them to witness beheadings and whip or shoot prisoners. There is a very interesting chapter about how ISIS’s belief that it is operating in the end time before an apocalyptic Final Battle underpins all aspects of its worldview. And the book concludes with some suggestions about how we in ‘the West’ should manage and contain ISIS.

Names

The group grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). When it formally asserted its independence in 2013 it was under an Arabic name which can be translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS was the version picked up by most western media outlets, maybe because it has a certain zip and cachet as a word.

In June 2014 the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate, a restoration of transnational Islamic rule, and began referring to itself as the Islamic State (IS) and this is the position and the name it retains to the present day. However, the authors, after some discussion, decided to use the earlier name, ISIS for two reasons: a) it is familiar from lots of press coverage b) it is challenging, and silly, in English, to continually write sentences which include ‘IS is…’ ISIS is an easier acronym to manage: ‘ISIS is, ISIS was’ etc.

ISIS leaders

1. ISIS was ‘founded’ by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and led by him until his death in an American air strike in 2006. In fact this history is deeply contested, as the group Zarqawi founds was called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and, in 2004, after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, he was appointed chief of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In other words, he was killed before an organisation specifically named ISIS came into being. It is analysts and commentators who claim that the doctrines he practiced in AQI and its extremist policies of a) attacking other Muslims b) in particular attacking Shia Muslims and shrines c) attacking Western operations previously all considered off-limits e.g the United Nations and aid charities – these policies were disapproved of by bin Laden and others in al Qaeda Central but proved attractive and mobilising for the cadres of extremist Sunni jihadists who went on to form ISIS.

2. Zarqawi’s role was taken by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the militant groups Mujahideen Shura Council and its successor, the Islamic State of Iraq, until he, too, was killed in an American missile strike in 2010.

3. He was succeeded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is recorded as the second Emir or prince of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2010 to 2013. In 2014 ISIS declared the existence of an actual state, the Caliphate, which governed a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and Baghdadi was declared first caliph of this Islamic State, which he ruled until he blew himself up during an American raid in October 2019.

4. A week later IS’s media outlets announced that the new caliph was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. For a while there was debate about whether this person actually existed or was a fictional front man hurriedly invented by IS leadership. Having lost almost all the territory they held at their maximum reach, in 2016, ISIS were reduced to traditional insurgent attacks, but made significant advances through partner groups in Africa; new branches were opened in Congo and Mozambique. On 3 February 2022, al-Qurashi killed himself and members of his family by triggering a large bomb during a raid by the US Joint Special Operations Command.

In May 2022 ISIL’s West Africa Province said that it had killed 20 Nigerian Christian men in Borno State in a mass execution as a retaliation for al-Qurashi’s assassination. And so it goes on forever, the ideology of massacre, murder and vengeance.

5. Replaced by the third caliph of Islamic State, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, as confirmed by Al-Furqan Media foundation, Islamic State’s primary media outlet, 10 March 2022. As usual there was a lot of mystery about his true name and identity. In November 2022 it was confirmed that he killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during an operation carried out by former Free Syrian Army rebels.

6. He was replaced in November 2022 by the fourth caliph, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi. There are now some 40 IS provinces i.e. regional operations, throughout the Middle East and far into Africa. On 30 April 2023 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization had tracked down and killed Abu al-Hussein the previous day, on 29 April, but this has not been confirmed by the US, who we tend to trust more, nor confirmed by ISIS itself. Schrödinger’s caliph…

The differences between al Qaeda and ISIS

According to the authors the fundamental difference with al Qaeda was that the latter was an elite intellectual movement (pages 55, 192), whereas ISIS set out to be a popular mass movement. Al Qaeda was a sect or cult; they made joining it very difficult, starting with being difficult to track it down or contact it, then you had to go through tests or proofs of fitness. ISIS’s approach was diametrically opposite: it set out to create a utopian new society and advertised for as many members and volunteers  as possible (p.73). ISIS made promotional videos and posted messages on twitter and Instagram. Muslim equivalents of the old Lord Kitchener poster, ‘Your country needs you’. The ISIS message was:

You have a place here, if you want it, and we’ll put you to work on this exciting project just as soon as you show up (p.73)

ISIS’s brand, its offering, was a unique combination of extreme violence – horror violence – with promises of a new life and a new world. al Qaeda had a lofty spiritual goal of eventually reaching a new Islamic world at some point far over the horizon. In this respect, its entire worldview was fundamentally defeatist (p.195). ISIS, in its blunt and practical way, declared the brave new world was here and now (pages 118, 195).

Al Qaeda worked on the premise, familiar to us from the revolutionary Marxist terrorists of the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades in Italy) that the masses are slumbering in a sleep of ignorance (p.55). If only you can wake them from their conformist slumber with acts of sufficient outrage and transgression, they would suddenly wake from their slumber, realise that the terrorists were right and that they need to throw off the shallow western consumer capitalist culture which exploits them, overcome their oppressors and institute a new communist/Islamic utopia.

Same here. al Qaeda thought the right kind of terrorist outrage would trigger a mass awakening of the Muslim masses who would suddenly realise that Osama bin Laden was right, the infidel needed to be kicked out of Muslim lands and a new, purified Islamic rule established. But ISIS thought they had achieved that, in the huge swathe of territory they captured 2014 to 2016.

Stern and Berger have a fascinating chapter describing the development of ISIS’s management of traditional and social media. Again, they contrast the very different subject matter and tone between al Qaeda and ISIS productions. al Qaeda’s rhetoric was all about Muslim powerlessness and victimhood. bin Laden lamented how Muslim lands were crushed and downtrodden, in the grip of corrupt leaders in hock to Western powers, the infidel. It was a discourse stemming from the apparently complete grip Western-backed leaders held over the Muslim world, and al Qaeda’s embattled, isolated resistance to that grip (p.108).

By complete contrast, ISIS came to prominence on the waves of chaos and social collapse triggered by the Arab Spring. Suddenly all these immoveable old regimes were collapsing like dominoes. Anything seemed possible. So ISIS’s rhetoric, messaging, videos and social media all reflect exuberant confidence that the world is changing and this is their moment (p.114). The overarching theme of ISIS propaganda was: ‘We are strong and we are winning’ (p.112).

The multiple appeals of ISIS

There are multiple appeals to this way of thinking. One of the most practical is the reality that the transformative event the organisation promises is never actually going to happen and so membership of then organisation is, in a sense, a job for life. The naive utopian dream of transforming the world is the gift that keeps on giving; since the transformed world will never arrive, you’ll just have to keep organising, fund raising and carrying out atrocities. Forever.

This leads to the second appeal, which is that such crusades obviously provide its members with a number of psychological rewards and comforts. Your life acquires a messianic meaning. You acquire a family, the brothers you never had and a wise and all-seeing father figure. You are among like-minded people whose clarity and conviction answers all your anxieties about life (p.82).

And you are working towards a Better World. If, in order to get to this Just, Fair and Peaceful World, you have to kidnap, rape, torture, murder and behead some people, well a) the boss told you to b) the extremity of the acts reinforces the high stakes you’re playing for: the future of the world is in your hands. Also c) such extreme acts bond you with the people you carried them out with; once you’ve beheaded someone with your own hands there’s no going back. And d) such acts show the world that you’re serious, this is the real thing, you’re not backing down until you have built The New World.

All this goes to explain why a disproportionate number of ISIS fighters are foreign i.e. don’t come from its heartlands in Iraq and then Syria. It’s been known for thousands of years that a convert to a religion or cause is usually more zealous and committed than someone born and bred into it. Same here. According to researcher Thomas Hegghammer a) the atrocities recorded on videos which are then distributed i.e. ritual beheadings, are disproportionately carried out by foreign fighters. The text mentions ‘Jihadi John’, real name Mohammed Emwazi, born in Kuwait but raised in London. He became such a notorious figure that he has his own, surprisingly long Wikipedia entry, and was hunted by both the US and UK governments until assassinated in a drone strike.

Plus another, simpler explanation – toxic masculinity:

The ultraviolence served multiple purposes. In addition to intimidating its enemies on the ground… ultraviolence sold well with the target demographic of foreign fighters – angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates. (p.72)

Some young men just like fighting. Some yearn for the thrill of killing and risking being killed. Others want the trappings of being a ‘warrior’, not least the sex slaves ISIS took wherever it captured, particularly among Iraq’s Yazidi minority (p.194). Some are criminals looking for opportunities for loot. Some are just psychopaths.

So Stern and Berger’s account fits ISIS neatly not only into the matrix of Islamic terror groups, but also among the wider context of terrorist groups around the world over the last 50 years or so. They define terrorism as having two aspects:

1. Terrorism is deliberately aimed at civilians or non-combatants; this puts it outside all definitions of ‘just war’ in most religious traditions, starting with the Islamic tradition itself.

2. Terrorism is designed to be dramatic in order to achieve propaganda ends; in the case of Islamic terrorism in order to:

a) create fear and dread in the wider target population (‘the hostages should be liquidated in the most terrifying manner which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy’, p.122)

b) wake passive Muslim communities in their host nations from their slumber; to ignite ‘the deadly tinderbox fizzing just beneath the surface of every western country’ (p.97)

Internecine Muslim killing

Mainstream Islam seeks to live in peace with non-believers. Radical or jihadist sects take a more binary approach, believing all infidels or unbelievers can be freely tortured and murdered, for exemplary and propaganda purposes.

But the authors also tell us that recent Islamic theorists have developed the handy notion of takfir which is the pronouncement that a Muslim is no longer a Muslim but an unbeliever i.e. any Muslims who don’t agree with your beliefs aren’t, in fact, real Muslims, and so can also be killed.

This conceptualisation feels like a rationalisation, or extension of, something which already existed in the sweaty world of Islamic jihadi / insurgency / radical politics, which is the notable tendency of Islamic radicals to kill each other. ISIS’s beheadings of Western hostages received a lot of publicity because they were intended to; they were well-produced videos of the killings, very effectively distributed them across social media and the internet, and Western media picked them up and rebroadcast them, exactly as ISIS intended.

Less well known was the time, effort and expense Islamic radicals have devoted to murdering each other. It’s one of the main revelations of this book. In the field, different Islamic fighters attack each other and fight battles. Individual Islamic leaders are targeted and assassinated and sometimes entire meetings of senior leaders. In this respect, many Islamic radical groups do the West’s work for them, which is nice.

Seen from another angle, the internecine bloodshed of these squabbling jihadist groups is just another version of the sectarian violence which erupted all across Iraq after the American invasion, above all of the profound and poisonous enmity between Shia and Sunni Muslims which emerged from the shadow of Saddam to wreck Iraq. And these are both examples of the tendency of Muslim, certainly Arab Muslim countries, to contain seething sectarian animosities just waiting to boil over into civil war: before our modern tribulations came the prolonged civil war in Lebanon and the murderous civil war in Algeria. Now we have social collapse and civil war in Libya, the terrible conflict in Syria, and the under-reported war in Yemen. How these Muslims hate each other.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni movements. ISIS follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. This appears to mean that, in order to create their Islamic paradise, they have to intimidate, terrorise and kill as many Shi’a Muslims as possible, as well as carrying out attacks on their mosques and holy places, witness the 2006 ISIS attacks on the Al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi’a Islam, in Samarra, 80 miles from Baghdad (p.25). This succeeded in triggering reprisal attacks by Sunnis and helping to precipitate the Iraqi civil war (p.25). ISIS propaganda films included accounts of Shi’a death squads killing Sunni Muslims, turncoats from ISIS tell stories of being brainwashed with endless stories of Shi’a evil-doing…which, of course, then justified massacring as many Shi’as as possible. (p.107)

In its publications and in countless videos ISIS extolled the virtues of killing the rafidah (a derogatory term for Shi’a Muslims) and nusayri (a derogatory term for Alawites, members of a sect of Shi’a Islam practiced by members of the Syrian regime). (p.116)

Paradise can, it appears, only be attained by wiping out most of humanity – the whole of ‘the West’, obviously; all other countries or cultures which practice any religion apart from Islam, natch; all Shi’a Muslims, of course, (p.230), all other minority Muslim groups (Alawites, Sufis), plus any Sunni Muslims who disagree with anything ISIS say and can now be rendered unmuslim by the simple process of takfir.

ISIS aims to cleanse the world of all that disagree with its ideology. (p.233)

It is, then, standard genocidal millenarianism. Set out to kill almost the entire world population in order to make the world ‘pure’. And when, as a result of your indiscriminate use of barbaric violence, you’ve alienated the entire world against you – not to worry, the very fact that everyone rallies against you fact is one more proof that you and your brothers alone possess The Truth and are part of a small elite of Truth-knowers and Holy Warriors which the entire world wants to smother.

And so it is that these people become trapped in the paranoid, self-confirming death spiral of the millenarian cult.

The end of the world

Most educated people know that our word Armageddon derives from its use in the Bible’s Book of Revelations and is supposed to be the site of the Last Battle before the End of the World. The word is a Latinisation of the Hebrew‎ Har Məgīddō where Har means mountain and Megiddo means place of crowds.

But I hadn’t heard about Dabiq. Dabiq is a small town in northern Syria near the border with Turkey. It features heavily in traditional Islamic end-times prophecy which predicts that it is here that Muslim forces will defeat ‘Rome’, which modern interpreters take to be ‘the West’, before going on to conquer Constantinople (p.220). Like the Book of Revelation, conceived and written millennia ago, when the configuration of forces and powers was drastically different, but twisted by modern interpreters to suit their current policies.

Anyway, so central was the place and concept and resonance of Dabiq to ISIS that when they established a multi-language magazine to promote their cause, they called it Dabiq (p.119). The authors not only mention this but quote from various editions of Dabiq. And the magazine was first published just a month or so after ISIS captured the actual town of Dabiq (p.224).

This leads into an entire chapter explaining the various Islamic prophecies about the end of the world. Some of these include the institution of slavery, especially sexual slavery, as well as intensified war between the Muslim sects. Seen in this light ISIS’s deliberate inflammation of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq has an eschatological purpose i.e. it is consciously designed to bring about the End Times.

All of which is set against the over-heated and hysterical atmosphere created by 9/11 and then the American invasion of Iraq. Both the al Qaeda and ISIS leadership have paid close attention to end time prophecies and, of course, their propagandists proudly claim to be striking the first blows in the Final Battle which will lead up to the arrival of the Mahdi and the End of Days.

Except that none of this will happen. The jihadists will just carry on beheading Western hostages, carrying out random atrocities in Africa and, above all, killing lots of Muslims in the name of their common God.

The authors make one important point. Because these warriors are living in the End Times and fighting the Final Battle between cosmic forces of Good and Evil normal moral rules do not apply. Millenarian groups are the most likely to carry out acts of barbarity because they have passed beyond the realms of normal human morality (p.225).

This chapter, Chapter 10: The Coming Final Battle, is arguably the most enjoyable of the book. It presents a useful summary of modern thinking about apocalyptic and millenarian movements, listing their attributes, quoting experts on the subject on the appeal of their psychology, and then assessing how many of these attributes apply to either al Qaeda or ISIS.

For example, it offers fascinating interpretations of the beheading videos which brought ISIS notoriety in the West. There are at least three motives or meanings:

  1. The beheadings are designed to create fear and terror in western countries out of all proportion to ISIS’s actual capacities.
  2. The beheadings are meant to goad western powers i.e. America, into another invasion, this time of Syria, which will a) spread even more chaos across the region, thus allowing ISIS to flourish b) comply with millenarian prophecies that the ‘crusaders’ will return to Muslim lands once again and be finally, definitively defeated.
  3. Then there’s just the simple explanation that the people carrying out the beheadings really are psychopaths and sadists.

But towards the end of the book, they offer a fourth interpretation: this is that the beheadings enact the great psychological simplification that the beheaders have undergone: they now live in an End Time world of extreme black and white, us and them, good and evil. So the videos are designed to trigger an equally simplistic response in their viewers, making viewers so angry that they themselves resort to the same psychologically basic binary of good and evil.

In other words, they were designed to erase the sophistication and complexity of modern western thought, to trigger the same simple-minded binary good guys-bad guys dichotomy that characterised Bush and Blair’s response to 9/11.

But, the authors warn, we shouldn’t let ourselves be brought down to their level, not just of barbarism, but of simple-mindedness. The world is a complex place, societies are complex thing, people are complex animals and multi-levelled complex problems like Iraq or Syria require immensely subtle, complex and thought-through solutions.

Using good guy-bad guy rhetoric like Bush and Blair did is a failure of the sophistication and intellect we pride ourselves on, but this isn’t just a rhetorical analysis. It led us into simplistic thinking (invade – overthrow dictator – install democracy – leave grateful nation) which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the immense complexity of the situation on the ground. ISIS want us to do that again. We mustn’t.

ISIS and social media

Immensely knowledgeable though the book is, it has, in my opinion, a central weakness. The longest chapter in the book (Chapter 7: The Electronic Brigades) is a detailed analysis of al Qaeda and ISIS’s use of social media, particularly Facebook but especially Twitter. I found this very tedious – ISIS use social media much like everyone else, to publish videos and share propaganda material, no real surprise – but the chapter is clearly so long because one of the authors, J.M. Berger is, apparently, a real expert in this area and, they tell us, was commissioned by Google Ideas to carry out research into ISIS supporters and Twitter (p.171).

So this explains why this chapter is so long and contains so many detailed stats about ISIS social media users and followers. But the thirty pages of this account boil down to a repetitive and boring iteration of the basic problem facing the owners of Twitter which is how far the principle of free speech should let Twitter users publish highly inflammatory and homicidal content. The chapter includes lots of really boring facts about al Qaeda and ISIS’s twitter accounts and social media stars and how many accounts were suspended or cancelled and the various strategies jihadis resorted to to try and hang onto accounts etc etc. It feels exactly like an academic report prepared for a big corporation which has been tweaked and re-versioned to become the chapter of a book.

Then, at the very end of the main body of the book, is a chapter which offers the authors’ thoughts about the way forward for the West in tackling ISIS and this also is mainly concerned with a detailed look at how to counter ISIS’s messaging on social media, repeating many of the ideas already laid out at boring length in chapter 7. They list five goals ISIS have in their social media strategy and how we in the West can counter all five.

Anyway, my point is that, all this focus on the minutiae of ISIS’s twitter accounts comes at the expense of a military analysis of ISIS. There is nothing anywhere in the book about how ISIS came to be such a successful military operation. ISIS didn’t manage to overrun a large part of Syria and Iraq, eventually controlling a third of Iraq’s territory and seizing the hugely important city of Mosul, just by being good at social media.

This book is very interesting on what you could call the cultural aspects of ISIS, about jihadi psychology, the psychology of terrorism and millenarian cults, good at giving extended comparisons of its radical worldview with that of its progenitor al Qaeda, and much more.

But it is a complete blank when it comes to explaining how this ragtag outfit of extremists and sadists was transformed into such a very effective fighting machine. There is nothing about its military campaigns, no analysis of its military strategy or tactics, no account of any battle or fighting at all.

And, having been published in 2015, no account at all of the military campaign undertaken by the US and other Western allies to extirpate it. For the entire military side of the story you’ll have to look elsewhere.

American comedy

The United States had invested $25 billion in training and equipping the Iraqi army over the course of eight years. That investment evaporated in the blink of an eye as Iraqi soldiers turned tail and fled in the face of ISIS’s assault on Mosul. (p.45)

Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, fell soon after Mosul. At many stops along its march, ISIS captured US-supplied military equipment from fleeing Iraqi soldiers, which they trumpeted with photos on social media. (p.46)

Money well spent, then.

American chaos

The American invasion of Iraq created chaos, insurgency, ethnic division and civil war throughout Iraq, which then spilled into neighbouring Syria when it experienced its failed Arab Spring rebellion in 2011.

This catastrophic environment, the collapse of these two societies into chaotic violence, also explains the difference between al Qaeda and ISIS because it made the apocalyptic, millenarian, end-time beliefs espoused by the latter seem much more plausible.

Wikipedia quotes from William McCants’ book, ‘The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State’:

‘References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today [Iraq and Syria] lend credibility to the prophecies. The Islamic State has stoked the apocalyptic fire…For Bin Laden’s generation, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense than before.’

So… America is directly responsible for creating the super-chaos which raged across Iraq and amid which new types of extreme jihadi terrorism were able to develop and flourish. Also from Wikipedia:

According to Iraqis, Syrians, and analysts who study the group, almost all of ISIL’s leaders – including the members of its military and security committees and the majority of its emirs and princes – are former Iraqi military and intelligence officers, specifically former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government who lost their jobs and pensions in the de-Ba’athification process after that regime was overthrown.

The former Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the US State Department, David Kilcullen, has said that: ‘There undeniably would be no Isis if we had not invaded Iraq.’ (Wikipedia)

Or as Stern and Berger put it:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (p.238)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, with fine moral ideals and high-sounding rhetoric about freedom and justice and democracy (see the speeches of George Bush and Tony Blair). Stern and Berger sum up the message of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan in one pithy sentence:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all (p.237)

Or Islamic State.

Credit

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger was published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition, with an additional afterword.

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Posted by Simon on November 1, 2023

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) – 1

SPQR is a long book – including the notes and index, it totals a chunky 606 pages. I picked it up at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition, my mind fired up by a couple of hours looking at exhibits illustrating all aspects of ancient Roman life in the first century AD.

Mary Beard’s ubiquity

By the bottom of page one I was disappointed. Dame Mary Beard DBE FSA FBA FRSL is a tiresomely ubiquitous presence across all media:

  • she has a regular column in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘A Don’s Life’, columns which have been gathered into not one but two books
  • she has fronted seven TV documentary series – Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town (BBC 2), Meet the Romans with Mary Beard (BBC 2), Caligula with Mary Beard (BBC 2), Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard (BBC 1), Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit (BBC 2), Julius Caesar Revealed (BBC 1), she wrote and presented two of the nine episodes in Civilisations (BBC 2) and she hosts a new BBC arts programme Lockdown Culture
  • she regularly appears on Question Time and other BBC panel shows
  • she is very ‘vocal’ on her twitter account and has been ‘controversial’ enough to trigger a number of twitterstorms
  • she’s written nineteen books and countless articles and reviews

To churn out this huge volume of content requires compromises in style and content, especially when making TV documentaries which have to be lucid and simple enough to appeal to everyone. Listing her enormous output is relevant because it helps to explain why this book is so disappointingly mediocre. What I mean is, SPQR is a readable jog through all the key events and people of ancient Rome – and God knows, there are thousands of them. But it contains few if any ideas worth the name and is written in a jolly, chatty, empty magazine style.

Compare and contrast with Richard Miles’s book about Carthage which combines scholarly scrupulousness with teasingly subtle interpretations of ancient history, propounding interesting and unusual ideas about the cultural struggle waged between Rome and Carthage. Well, there’s nothing like that here.

On the back cover there’s a positive review from the Daily Mail:

‘If they’d had Mary Beard on their side back then, the Romans would still have an empire!’

and this jolly knockabout attitude accurately captures the tone of the book. Beard is the Daily Mail‘s idea of an intellectual i.e. she’s at Cambridge, she knows about a fairly obscure subject, and she can speak a foreign language. She must be brainy!

And she’s outspoken, too. She’s what TV producers call ‘good value’. She can be relied on to start a twitterstorm by being outspokenly ‘controversial’ on statues or black lives matter or #metoo or any of the usual hot topics. Indeed Beard first came to public notice when she wrote in the London Review of Books in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that America ‘had it coming’, an off the cuff remark which prompted a storm of abuse. More recently she sparked ‘controversy’ through with her apparent defence of Oxfam workers practising sexual exploitation in Haiti, and so on.

Like so many other people on social media, Beard mistakes being provocative for actually having anything interesting to say; in which respect she is like thousands of other provocateurs and shock jocks and arguers on social media, all of whom think they are ‘martyrs to the truth’ and ‘saying the unsayable’ and ‘refusing to be silenced’, exactly the kind of rhetoric used by Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. She is the Piers Morgan of academia.

Mary Beard’s reasons to study ancient Rome

The superficiality of her thinking becomes horribly clear on page one of SPQR where Beard gives us her reasons why ancient Rome is still relevant to the present day, why it is important for us all to know more about the history of ancient Rome.

As a lifelong specialist in Classics you’d hope these would be pretty thoughtful and persuasive, right? Here are her reasons, with my comments:

1. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world, and think about ourselves.

No it doesn’t. I imagine you could study economics and international politics, biology and geography, climate science and sociology and psychology without ever needing to refer to ancient Rome. Marx, Darwin and Freud go a long way to defining how we understand the world. Cicero a lot less so.

2. After 2,000 years, Rome continues to underpin Western culture and politics.

No, it doesn’t. Brexit, Boris Johnson’s current problems, Trump’s popularity, modern music, art and design; all these can be perfectly well understood without any knowledge whatsoever of Roman history.

3. The assassination of Julius Caesar… has provided the template… for the killing of tyrants ever since.

Has it?

4. The layout of the Roman imperial territory underlies the political geography of modern Europe and beyond.

Well, yes and no. Italy and France and Spain are undoubtedly similar to the Roman territories of the same name and many cities in western Europe have Roman origins – but everywhere north of the Rhine or Danube was untouched by the Romans, so the borders and cities of modern-day Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Czech republic, Slovak republic, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Croatia have bugger-all to do with ancient Rome. It’s a tendentious fib to say ‘modern Europe’ owes its political geography to Rome.

5. The main reason London is the capital of the United Kingdom is that the Romans made it the capital of their province of Britannia.

Well a) after the Romans left in 410 London, like all other British cities, fell into disrepair. The reason London slowly rose again as a trading centre during the early Middle Ages has more to do with the fact that it is the logical place to build a major city in England, being close to the continent and at the lowest fordable point of a major river which reaches into the heart of the country and is thus a vital transport hub; b) London is capital of the United Kingdom because of political developments vis-a-vis Wales, Scotland and Ireland which took place a thousand years after the Romans left.

6. Rome has bequeathed us the ideas of liberty and citizenship.

This is true, up to a point, although these ideas were developed and debated in ancient Greece well before the Romans came along, and have undergone 1,500 years of evolution and development since.

7. Rome has loaned us catchphrases such as ‘fearing Greeks bearing gifts’.

It was when I read this sentence that I began to doubt Mary Beard’s grasp on reality. Is she claiming that ‘fearing Greeks bearing gifts’ is by any stretch of the imagination a ‘catchphrase’ which anyone in Britain would recognise, who hadn’t had a classical education?

She’s closer to the mark when she goes on to mention a couple of other catchphrases like ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ or ‘bread and circuses’, which I imagine a large number of people would recognise if they read them in a magazine or newspaper.

But lots of people have given us comparable quotes and catchphrases, from Shakespeare to the Fonz. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes over 20,000 quotations. Citing just three quotations as the basis for persuading people to study an entirely new subject is far from persuasive. If the number of quotations which a subject has produced is taken as a good reason for studying it, then Shakespeare would be a hugely better relevant subject for everyone to study, to understand where the hundreds of quotations which float around the language deriving from him come from (Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? To be or not to be? Is this a dagger I see before me? All that glitters is not gold. The be-all and end-all. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.)

And then came Beard’s showstopper claim:

8. Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were.

Is Mary Beard seriously claiming that ‘Ancient Rome is important’ (the first sentence in the book) because ‘Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were’? Let’s ponder this sentence and this argument for a moment.

Can Beard possibly be saying that actual gladiators, trained professional warriors who fight each other or wild beasts to the death in front of huge live audiences, ‘are as big box office now as they ever were’? I wish she was. I’d definitely pay to see that. But of course she isn’t she must be referring to the entertainment industry. I’m guessing it’s a throwaway reference to any one of three possible items: the television show Gladiators, which started broadcasting in 1992, some of whose expressions became jokey catchphrases (‘Contender ready! Gladiator ready!!’); to the 2000 movie Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe, that was very successful and won five Oscars; and possibly to the 2010 American TV series Spartacus. Two TV shows and a movie about gladiators in 30 years. Hardly a deluge, is it?

Beard’s argument appears to be that, because a successful game show, movie and TV series have been made on the subject of ‘gladiators’ that is a sufficient reason for everyone to drop everything and study ancient Rome.

a) That’s obviously a rubbish argument on its own terms, but b) it ignores the wider context of modern media, of the entertainment industry, namely that there is a huge, an enormous output of product by film and TV companies, all the time, on every subject under the sun. If your argument is that, because a subject has been chosen as the topic of immensely popular movies or TV shows this proves that we must study that subject, then we should all be studying the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The reality of modern media is that it chews up and spits out any subject which it thinks will make money. In the last twenty years I have been dazed by the enormous explosion in the number of science fiction movies and TV shows, about alien invasions and artificial intelligence and robots and androids, which have hit our screens. Does this mean we should all study artificial intelligence and robotics? No. These are just entertainment products which we may or may not choose to watch.

Placed in the broadest context of western cultural products, then, gladiators, or even the overall subject of ancient Rome, pale into insignificance. Ancient Rome is just one of half a dozen hackneyed historical settings which TV and film producers return to from time to time to see if there’s some more profit to be squeezed from them, up there with Arthur of the Britons, Henry VIII and the Tudors, Regency-era dramas like Bridgerton, Dickens adaptations, the Wild West, not to mention the perennial subject of the two world wars which never go out of fashion.

If you base your case for studying an academic subject on its TV and movie ratings (‘Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were’) then it follows that a) subjects with higher ratings are even more necessary to study (the Edwardian society of Downton Abbey, say) and b) low ratings for the subject you’re promoting undermine your argument. My son told me about an HBO series titled simply ‘Rome’ which only ran for two series (2005 to 2007) before it was pulled due to huge expense and disappointing ratings. Maybe ancient Rome isn’t as popular a subject as a professor of Classics likes to think.

Summary

Anyway, the eight sentences I’ve listed above constitute the list of the reasons given by ‘Britain’s leading Classicist’ for studying ancient Rome.

Not very persuasive, are they? Every one of these instances sounds plausible enough at a first glance, if you read it quickly, skimming over it as you skim over a magazine on a plane flight or listen to the script of a big budget documentary about Pompeii you’re half paying attention to.

But stop and ponder any of the eight arguments for more than a moment and they disintegrate in your hands. They are all either factually incorrect or laughably superficial, and they strongly indicate the fluent but facile nature of the mind which selected and wrote them.

Missing obvious arguments

In passing, it’s odd that Beard misses several obvious arguments from her list.

Because I’m interested in language, I’d say a good reason for studying Classics is because Latin forms the basis of a lot of contemporary English words. If you grasp a relatively small number of principles about Latin (such as the prefixes e- for ‘out of’ and in- for ‘into’ and ab- for ‘from’) it can help you recognise and understand a surprising number of English words.

Easily as important as Rome’s impact on political geography is the obvious fact that three major European languages are descended from it, namely Italian, French and Spanish. That’s a really massive lasting impact and people often say that studying Latin helps you learn Italian, French or Spanish.

In fact, having studied Latin, French and Spanish I don’t think it’s true. The main benefit of studying Latin is that it forces you to get clear in your head the logical structure of (western) language, understanding the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, the arrangement of adjectives and adverbs – in other words, it gives you a kind of mental map of the basic logic of western languages, a mental structure which then helps you understand the structure of other languages, including English.

My son studied Latin at school and remembers his teacher trying to persuade his class that Latin was a ‘cool’ subject by telling them that the Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard had studied it. Beard’s efforts t opersuade us all to take ancient Rome more seriously are on about the same level.

But maybe I’m missing the point because Beard is talking about history and I’m talking about languages.

Once we got chatting about it, my son went on to suggest that arguably the most obvious legacy of ancient Rome is its architecture. All over the western world monumental buildings fronted by columns and porticos, sporting arches and architraves, reference and repeat the Architecture of Power which Rome perfected and exported around the Mediterranean and which architects copy to this day.

But again maybe I’m missing the point talking about architecture when Beard is determined to focus very narrowly on the history, on the events and personalities of ancient Rome.

Then again, having discussed it with my son made me realise that how narrow that focus is. If we agree that the biggest legacy of Rome was its political geography, the founding of important towns and cities in western Europe, its ancestry of widely spoken languages, and its hugely influential style of architecture, then this places the actual history of events, long and colourful though they may have been, in a relatively minor role – in terms of direct enduring influence on our lives, now.

Feminists can be boring old farts, too

Just because she makes a point of not wearing make-up and makes a big deal on the radio, on TV, in the TLS, in countless reviews and in all her books about being a ‘feminist’ doesn’t make Mary Beard any less of a privileged, out of touch, Oxbridge academic than hundreds of fusty old men before her. She attended a girls private school, then the all-women Newnham college Cambridge, and went onto a long and successful academic career at Cambridge, rising to become Professor of Classics.

This is all relevant to a book review because I am trying to convey the powerful impression the book gives of someone who is fantastically pleased with themselves and how jolly ‘radical’ and ‘subversive’ and ‘outspoken’ they are and yet:

a) who is apparently blind to the fact that they are exactly the kind of out-of-touch, white privileged media figure they themselves have expended such effort in books and articles criticising and lambasting

More importantly:

b) who mistakes sometimes dated references to popular culture or trivial ‘provocations’ about gender or race on twitter, for thought, for real thought, for real deep thinking which sheds new light on a subject and changes readers’ minds and understanding. As the Richard Miles’ book on Carthage regularly does; as this book never does.

Facebubble

A Facebubble is what is created among groups of friends or colleagues on Facebook who all befriend each other, share the same kinds of values, are interested in the same kind of subjects and choose the same kinds of items from their newsfeeds. Over time, Facebook’s algorithms serve them what they want to read, suggesting links to articles and documentaries which reinforce what they already know and like. After a while people become trapped in self-confirming facebubbles.

It is a form of confirmation bias, where we only register or remember facts or ideas which confirm our existing opinions (or prejudices).

Again and again Beard’s book confirms your sense that, despite her rhetoric about making the subject more accessible and open, she is in fact addressing a relatively small cohort of readers who are already interested in the history of the ancient world. The oddity is how she again and again gives the impression of thinking that these already knowledgeable readers are somehow representative of the broader UK population.

Of course this is true of more or less any factual book which addresses a specific audience for a specialised subject – it assumes a tone of general interest. What makes Beard’s book irritating is the references to the notion that ‘we’ are ‘all’ still fascinated by ancient Rome, that ‘everyone’ ‘needs’ to be engaged with the subject. That ancient Rome ‘demands’ our attention. Those are the words she uses.

But no, ancient Rome does not ‘demand’ our attention and no ‘we’ are not ‘all’ fascinated by ancient Rome. My Chinese postman, the three Albanians who put up my new fence, the Irish labourers who took away the wreckage of the old fence, the Asian woman on the checkout at Tesco, the Jamaican guy who blows leaves out the road for the council, the Turkish family who run the delicatessen round the corner – are they ‘all’ fascinated by ancient Rome? Does it ‘demand’ their attention? It feels as if she’s writing for a white, middle class, university educated Radio 4-listening public and badly mistaking them for representing the big, complex, very diverse population of modern Britain.

On page two she tells us how:

SPQR takes its title from another famous catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus (p.16)

Is this a famous catchphrase, though? Roughly how many people know what SPQR stands for? What percentage of the population do you think could translate Senatus PopulusQue Romanus? Maybe people with degrees in the humanities, particularly in the arts and literature, probably ought to. And anybody who’s been to Rome as a tourist might have noticed the letters SPQR appearing on letter boxes and manhole covers. I know what it stands for and what the Latin means because I happen to study Latin at my state school and went on to do a history-based degree, which is precisely why I bought and am reading this book. But I have the self awareness to know that I represent a fairly small, self-selectingly bookish percentage of the total population.

Myth busting

On page 3 of the introduction, Beard says her book will set out to smash some of the ‘myths’ which ‘she, like many’ grew up with’ (p.17). These are:

  1. that the Romans started out with a plan for world domination
  2. that in acquiring their empire the Romans trampled over peace-loving peoples
  3. that Rome was the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece

Are these myths which you grew up with? Is it very important that ‘we’, the British people, have these ‘dangerous’ myths corrected? No, not really. They are only remotely important in the mind of someone who specialises in the subject.

All this rhetoric of ‘need’ and ‘must’ and ‘demand’ builds up an impression of special pleading, defined as when someone ‘tries to persuade you of something by only telling you the facts that support their case’. Beard is a Professor of Classics. Her job is to teach students Classics. She has taken it upon herself to make Classics more ‘accessible’ to a wider public, which may well be admirable. She tries to persuade us that everybody ought to know more about the history of ancient Rome.

But the arguments she uses to do so are weak and unconvincing.

I am not attacking Beard or her subject. I am critiquing the poor quality of her arguments.

First impressions

All these arguments and my responses to them occurred in the first few pages of the book. I hope you can see why, before the end of the 5-page introduction to SPQR, I realised that this was not going to be a scholarly book, and was not going to show much intellectual depth. It is a long, thorough and competent Sunday supplement-level account of its subject, stuffed with interesting facts, with some novel spins on things I thought I knew about (for example, the latest thinking about the legend of Romulus and Remus).

But it is disappointingly magaziney, features article-y, lacking in real depth. Instead of really unsettling and disrupting your ideas, of opening new vistas of understanding, as Richard Miles’s book does, Beard’s ideas of ‘controversy’ are on a disappointing twitter level – telling us that ancient Rome was a very sexist society, that its political debates about freedom versus security are very like our own, that there’s a lot we still don’t understand about its origins, that the archaeology is still much debated.

These are all ideas you could have predicted before you opened the book. That’s what I mean by comparing it to a very long magazine article which is packed with the latest knowledge and hundreds of dates and historical personages, but doesn’t really change your opinion about anything.

Very disappointing.

Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

3 Comments
by Simon on January 26, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, History
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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/spqr-a-history-of-ancient-rome-mary-beard-1/

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ by Trevor Paglen @ the Barbican

Listen up! Listen up! American artist, geographer, and author Trevor Paglen has big news for everyone! He is here to tell us that artificial intelligence may not be a totally wonderful, life-enhancing, fair and just invention after all! He is an American so he has special insight into the interweb and he is here to explain.

AI networks

Trev takes as his starting point the way Artificial Intelligence networks are taught how to ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘perceive’ the world by engineers who feed them vast ‘training sets’.

Standard ‘training sets’ consist of images, video and sound libraries that depict objects, faces, facial expressions, gestures, actions, speech commands, eye movements and more. The point is that the way these objects are categorised, labelled and interpreted are not value-free. In other words, the human categorisers have to bring in all kinds of subjective and value judgements – and that this subjective element can lead to all kinds of wonky outcomes.

Thus Trev wants to point out that the ongoing development of artificial intelligence is rife with hidden prejudices, biases, stereotypes and just wrong assumptions. And that this process starts (in some iterations) with the scanning of vast reservoirs of images. Such as the one he’s created here.

Machine-seeing-for-machines is a ubiquitous phenomenon, encompassing everything from facial-recognition systems conducting automated biometric surveillance at airports to department stores intercepting customers’ mobile phone pings to create intricate maps of movements through the aisles. But all this seeing, all of these images, are essentially invisible to human eyes. These images aren’t meant for us; they’re meant to do things in the world; human eyes aren’t in the loop.

From apple to anomaly

So where’s the work of art?

Well, the Curve is the long tall curving exhibition space at the Barbican which is so uniquely shaped that the curators commission works of art specifically for its shape and structure.

For his Curve work Trevor has had the bright idea of plastering the long curving wall with 35,000 (!) individually printed photographs pinned in a complex mosaic of images along the immense length of the curve. It has an awesome impact. That’s a lot of photos.

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ by Trevor Paglen © Tim P. Whitby / Getty Images

As the core of his research and preparation, Trev spent some time at ImageNet. This is one of the most widely shared, publicly available collection of images out there – and it is also used to train artificial intelligence networks. It’s available online, so you can have a go searching its huge image bank:

Apparently, ImageNet contains more than fourteen million images organised into more than 21,000 categories or ‘classes’.

In most cases, the connotations of image categories and names are uncontroversial i.e. a ‘strawberry’ or ‘orange’ but many others are ambiguous and/or a question of judgement – such as ‘debtors’, ‘alcoholics’ and ‘bad people’.

As the old computer programming cliché has it: ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ If artificial intelligence programs are being taught to teach themselves based on highly questionable and subjective premises, we shouldn’t be surprised if they start developing all kinds of errors, extrapolating and exaggerating all kinds of initial biases into wild stereotypes and misjudgements.

So the purpose of From Apple to Anomaly is to ‘questions the content of the images which are chosen for machine learning’. These are just some of the kinds of images which researchers are currently using to teach machines about ‘the world’.

Conceptually, it seemed to me that the work doesn’t really go much further than that.

It has a structure of sorts which is that, when you enter, the first images are of the uncontroversial ‘factual’ type – specifically, the first images you come to are of the simple concept ‘apple’.

Nothing can go wrong with images of an apple, right? Then as you walk along it, the mosaic of images widens like a funnel with a steady increase of other categories of all sorts, until the entire wall is covered and you are being bombarded by images arranged according to (what looks like) a fairly random collection of themes. (The themes are identified by black cards with clear white text, as in ‘apple’ below, which are placed at the centre of each cluster of images.)

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ by Trevor Paglen © Tim P. Whitby / Getty Images

Having read the blurb about the way words, and AI interpretation of words, becomes increasingly problematic as the words become increasingly abstract, I expected that the concepts would start simple and become increasingly vague. But the work is not, in fact like that – it’s much more random, so that quite specific categories – like paleontologist’ – can be found at the end while quite vague ones crop up very early on.

There was a big cluster of images around the word pizza. These looked revolting, but it was getting close to lunchtime and I found myself mysteriously attracted to the 40 or 50 images which showed fifty or so depictions of ‘ham and eggs’. Mmmm. Ham and eggs, yummy.

Conclusions

Most people are aware that Facebook harvests their data, just like Google and all the other big computer giants, twitter, Instagram blah blah. The disappointing reality for deep thinkers like Trev is that most people, quite obviously, don’t care. As long as they can instant message their mates or post photos of their cats for the world to see, most people don’t appear to give a monkeys what these huge American corporations do with the incalculably vast tracts of date they harvest and hold about us.

I think the same is true of artificial intelligence. Most people don’t care because they don’t think it affects them now or is likely to affect them in the future. Personally, I’m inclined to agree. When I read articles about artificial intelligence, particularly articles about the possible stereotyping of women and blacks i.e. the usual victims

1. American bias

The books are written by Americans and feature examples from America. And when you dig deep you tend to find that AI, insofar as it is applied in the real world, tends to exacerbate inequalities and prejudices which already exist. In America. The examples about America’s treatment of its black citizens, or the poor, or the potentially dreadful implications of computerised programmes on healthcare, specifically for the poor – all these examples tend to be taken from America, which is a deeply and distinctively screwed-up country. My point is a lot of the scarifying about AI turns out, on investigation, really to reflect the scary nature of American society, its gross injustices and inequalities.

2. Britain is not America

Britain is a different country, with different values, run in different ways. I take the London Underground or sometimes the overground train service every day. Every day I see the chaos and confusion as large-scale systems fail at any number of pressure points. The idea that learning machines are going to make any difference to the basic mismanagement and bad running of most of our organisations seems to me laughable. From time to time I see headlines about self-driving or driverless cars, sometimes taken as an example of artificial intelligence. OK. At what date in the future would you say that the majority of London’s traffic will be driverless cars, lorries, taxis, buses and Deliveroo scooters? In ten years? Twenty years?

3. The triviality of much AI

There’s also a problem with the triviality of much AI research. After visiting the exhibition I read a few articles about AI and quickly got bored of reading how supercomputers can now beat grand chessmasters or world champions at the complex game of Go. I can hardly think of anything more irrelevant to the real world. Last year the Barbican itself hosted an exhibition about AI – AI: More Than Human – but the net result of the scores of exhibits and interactive doo-dahs was how trivial and pointless most of them were.

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ by Trevor Paglen © Tim P. Whitby / Getty Images

4. No machine will ever ‘think’

And this brings us to the core of the case against AI, which is that it’s impossible. Creating any kind of computer programme which ‘thinks’ like a human is, quite obviously impossible. This is because people don’t actually ‘think’ in any narrowly definable sense of the word. People reach decisions, or just do things, based on thousands of cumulated impulses and experiences, unique to each individual, and so complicated and, in general, so irrational, that no programs or models can ever capture it. The long detailed Wikipedia article about artificial intelligence includes this:

Moravec’s paradox generalizes that low-level sensorimotor skills that humans take for granted are, counter-intuitively, difficult to program into a robot. The paradox is named after Hans Moravec, who stated in 1988 that ‘it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility’.

Intelligence tests, playing chess or Go – tasks with finite rules of the kinds computer programmers understand — are relatively easy to programme. The infinitely complex billions of interactions which characterise human behaviour – impossible.

5. People are irrational

I’ve been studying art and literature and history for 40 years or so and if there’s one thing that comes over it is how irrational, perverse, weird and unpredictable people can be, as individuals and in crowds (because the behaviour of people is the subject matter of novels, plays, poems and countless art works; the really profound, bottomless irrationality of human beings is – arguably – the subject matter of the arts).

People smoke and drink and get addicted to drugs (and computer games and smart phones), people follow charismatic leaders like Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic or Donald Trump. People, in other words, are semi-rational animals first and only a long long way afterwards, rational, thinking beings and even then, only rational in limited ways, around specific goals set by their life experiences or jobs or current situations.

Hardly any of this can be factored into any computer program. I am currently working in the IT department of a large American corporation, and what I see every day, repeatedly, throughout the day, is what I’ve seen in all my other jobs in IT and websites and data, which is that the ‘users’, damn their eyes, keep coming up with queer and unpredicted ways of using the system which none of the program managers and project managers and designers and programmers had anticipated.

People keep outwitting and outflanking the computer systems because that’s what people do, not because any individual person is particularly clever but because, taken as a whole, people here, there and across the range, stumble across flaws, errors, glitches, bugs, unexpected combinations, don’t do what ultra-rational computer scientists and data analysts expect them to, Dammit!

6. It doesn’t work

The most obvious thing about tech, is that it’s always breaking. I am currently working in the IT department of a large American corporation. This means being on the receiving end of a never-ending tide of complaints and queries about why this, that or the other functionality has broken. Same was true of all the other website jobs I’ve had. The biggest eye-opener for me working in this sector was to learn that things are always broken; there are always bugs and glitches and sometimes quite large structural problems, all of which have to be ranked and prioritised and then we get round to fixing them when we have a) developer time b) budget.

As a tiny confirmation, I have been trying to access Imagenet, the online image bank at the core of this work of art, and guess what? For two days in a row it hasn’t been working, I’ve got the message: ImageNet is under maintenance. Only ILSVRC synsets are included in the search results. Exactly. QED.

7. Big government, dumb data

I have worked for UK government departments and big government agencies for 14 years and my takeaway from the experience is that it isn’t artificial intelligence we should be frightened of – it is human stupidity.

Working inside the civil service was a terrifying insight into how naturally people in groups fall into a kind of bureaucratic mindset, setting up meetings and committees with minutes and notes and spreadsheets and presentations and how, slowly but steadily, the ability to change anything or get anything is strangled to death. No amount of prejudicing or stereotyping in, to take the anti-AI campaigners’ biggest worries, image recognition, will ever compete with the straightforward bad, dumb, badly thought out, terribly implemented and often cack-handedly horrible decisions which governments and their bureaucracies take.

Take Theresa May’s campaign of sending vans round the UK telling unwanted migrants to go home. Or the vast IT catastrophe which is Universal Credit. For me, any remote and highly speculative threat about the possibility that some AI programs may or may not be compromised by partial judgements and bias is dwarfed by the bad judgements and stereotyping which characterise our society and, in particular our governments, in the present, in the here-and-now.

8. Destroying the world

Following this line of thought to its conclusion, it isn’t artificial intelligence which is opening a new coal-fired power stations every two weeks, and building a 100 new airports and manufacturing 75 million new cars and burning down tracts of the rainforest the size of Belgium every year. The meaningful application of artificial intelligence is decades away, whereas good old-fashioned human stupidity is destroying the world here and now in front of our eyes, and nobody cares very much.

Summary

So. I liked this piece not because of the supposed warning it makes about artificial intelligence – and the obvious criticism or comment about From apple to anomaly is that, apart from a few paragraphs on one wall label, it doesn’t really give you very much background information to get your teeth into or ponder – no, I liked it because:

  1. it is huge and awesome and an impressive thing to walk along – so American! so big!
  2. and because its stomach-churning glut of imagery is testimony to the vast, unstoppable, planet-wasting machine which is humanity

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ by Trevor Paglen © Tim P. Whitby / Getty Images

Related links

Other Barbican reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on December 10, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on December 10, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/from-apple-to-anomaly-trevor-paglen-barbican/

Lee Bul: Crashing @ Hayward Gallery

This is a major retrospective of the art of the (female) Korean artist Lee Bul, born in 1964 and still going strong, so something of a mid-career snapshot. It brings together over 100 works in the five enormous exhibition rooms of Hayward Gallery, plus some work located outside.

Installation view of Lee Bul: Crashing at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

Installation view of Lee Bul: Crashing showing Monster Pink (left) and Civitas Solis II (in the background) © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

Oh for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

As you walk into room one, you immediately realise that much of Lee’s art is big, involving costumes, installations, mannequins and dummies.

You also realise that it is done to a high degree of finish. Everything looks very professional and seamless. It comes as no surprise to learn that much of her recent work is conceived by her but created by a studio of craftspeople and technicians.

I’m always a little envious of my teenage kids. When they come to art exhibitions like this, they roam at will, attracted by whatever is big and brash, rarely bothering with the boring wall labels or grown-up ‘issues’, enjoying things purely for what they look like and how much fun they are. They would certainly find lots to admire here, from the point of view of the spectacular and dramatic.

Monster Pink, pictured above, is accompanied by Monster White both of which look like assemblages of wriggling worms, like some mutant aliens from Dr Who. The same sci-fi vibe attaches to what look like fragments of space suits dangling from the ceiling. On closer examination you can see that these are life-size depictions of the human body in the style of Japanese manga comics, in which both men and women have sleek, perfect bodies, often encased in futuristic body armour.

Lee has produced dismembered versions of these, half a sleek, armoured torso, or combinations of limbs and extremities, moulded into striking but disconcerting fragments of mannequins. Soft pink sacks hang next to sleek machine-tooled silhouettes.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Cyborg WI on the left (photo by the author)

Up the concrete ramp, in room three, there’s what seems to be a model of a futuristic city, held up by thin scaffolding, some kind of hyper-freeway emerging from a tall plastic mountain, complete with a massive neon sign clicking on and off.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… (2005) Photo by the author

Nearby is a big ‘cave’ made of shiny plastic, with a ‘door’ to go in through, a ‘window’ to look out of, and walls decorated with a mosaic of mirror fragments.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (photo by the author)

Best of all, from an excitable teenager’s point of view, are two big transport machines.

Downstairs in long, low room two, is what appears to be a space-age hovercar not unlike the one Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi use to go to the city of Mos Eisley to look for Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Live Forever III (photo by the author)

To my amazement, visitors are actually encouraged to get into this device (once they’ve slipped on some protective plastic bags to go over their shoes). As I was saying to myself the immortal line ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for’, the gallery assistant lowered the roof and sealed me in.

You’re forced to lie quite low in the beautifully upholstered leather chair and watch a TV monitor placed right in front of you. If only I could have flicked the ignition, heard the engine roar, made a secret tunnel door open up and slid down a chute into the nearby River Thames to begin a high-speed boat chase against the baddies who’d just blown up the MI6 building.

Alas, all that actually happens is that the screen hanging in front of your face plays tacky Korean karaoke videos. You’re invited to put on headphones, pick up the handy microphone and join in which I was far too intimidated to do.

Finally, up the Hayward’s heavy concrete stairwell to gallery four where a) the entire floor has been covered in futuristic reflective silver plastic, giving it a Dr Who-TV set appearance, and b) and in which floats one of Lee Bul’s most iconic works, a huge model of a zeppelin made from shiny reflective silver foil.

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon (2015-2016) at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo: Linda Nylind

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Willing To Be Vulnerable: Metalized Balloon (2015 to 2016) at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…

My son, a big fan of manga, animé, graphic novels and sci-fi, would have loved all this, consumed purely as spectacle, as weird and wonderful objects of fantasy and imagination.

However, art is rarely this simple or free. The artists themselves, and certainly their curators and critics, are all too ready to catch the butterfly of fantasy in a net of explanations, drag it back down to earth, and pin it to a board next to all the other specimens in their collection. For example, when you look up the Wikipedia article about Lee, it begins:

Lee’s work questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women by revealing ideologies that permeate our cultural and political spheres

firmly dragging Lee’s art into contemporary art discourse with its all-too-familiar obsessions of gender, race, ideology and politics.

The free exhibition handout and the wall labels are where you go for more information about Lee, and they certainly are extremely informative and illuminating. In addition, there are two timelines printed on walls – one telling the history of South Korea since the 1950-53 war to the present, and one describing the development of modern art in Korea from the time of Lee’s birth (1964) to the present day, with a special emphasis on women’s art and issues.

All very interesting, but the more you read, the more you become weighed down by interpretations of art which see it all in terms of ponderous ‘issues’ – of ‘challenges’ and ‘subversions’ and ‘questionings’ – the more it feels like you are sitting through a dreary two-hour-long sociology lecture.

Korea

The South Korea Lee was born into was ruled by a right-wing dictator who had come to power in a military coup, General Park Chung-hee, who ruled with an iron fist from 1963 to 1979. Park inaugurated a series of five year plans designed to modernise Korean society and the economy at breakneck speed.

But Lee’s parents were left-wing dissidents and, although they weren’t arrested, were subjected to harassment, periodic house searches, banned from government employment and hassled into keeping on the move, never settling long in one place.

Thus Lee’s childhood memories are of often cold and bleak makeshift homes and the oppressiveness of the authorities set against a vista of brave new towns, cities, motorways and buildings built quickly of shoddy cement, destined soon to crumble and become seedy and derelict.

The failure of utopias

Amidst all the other ‘issues’ addressed in the art, it was this latter notion – the failure of utopianism – which interested me most. It seems to me that we are currently living through just such an epoch of failure, the slow-motion failure of the dream of a digital future.

Having worked in four British government departments or agencies on their websites and IT projects for the past eight years I have seen all manner of cock-ups and mismanagement – the collapse of the unified NHS project, the likely failure of the system for Universal Credit which was launched in 2010 and still doesn’t work properly, let alone the regular bank failures like the recent TSB collapse. All this before you consider the sinister implications of the recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica-U.S. Presidential elections debacle.

I have also observed the negative impact of phones and laptops on my own children i.e. they have both become phone addicts. As a result of all this I have very strong, and generally negative, opinions about ‘the Digital Future’.

That’s why I warmed to this aspect of the work of Chinese art superstar, Ai Weiwei, as displayed at the 2015 Royal Academy retrospective of his work. Twitter, Facebook and all the rest of them sell themselves as agents of ‘liberation’ whereas they are, quite obviously in my opinion, implements of a new kind of surveillance society, instruments of turbo-charged consumerism, and the tools of Russian hackers and any number of other unknown forces.

Yet people love them, ignore the scandals, can’t give up their phones or Facebook accounts, and big corporation, banks and governments carry on piling all their services online as if nothing could possibly go wrong with this technology.

With all this in mind I was surprised that there was no mention anywhere of the digital utopia, of digital technology, of phones and screens and big data anywhere in this big exhibition. Instead the utopias Lee Bul is concerned with seemed to me very dated. People wearing futuristic (manga) outfits or living in futuristic cities – this all seemed very Flash Gordon to me, very old tech, a very 1950s and 60s definition of what the future is going to look like.

This feeling that her art is very retro in its vision was crystallised by one of her most iconic works, which was a star feature of the 20th Sydney Biennale in 2016 – the enormous foil zeppelin – Willing To Be Vulnerable: Metalized Balloon.

I’m perfectly aware that the Hindenburg Zeppelin is an enduring symbol of technological hubris and disaster – that it burst into flames and crashed to the ground in 1937. I’ve seen the black and white film footage many times, I’ve even watched the terrible 1975 disaster movie they made about it.

Willing To Be Vulnerable is one of Lee’s most recent works and yet… isn’t it a very old reference to a long-ago event. It would be like discussing the rise of right-wing populism by reference to Adolf Hitler (German Chancellor when the Hindenburg crashed). It’s a plausible reference, sort of, but it’s not very up to date, is it? It’s not where we are now.

And then again, it isn’t even a detailed or accurate model of the Hindenburg. It’s just a big shiny balloon. An awesomely big shiny balloon. My kids would love it. I couldn’t really see it interrogating or questioning anything.

Architecture

The grandiose rhetoric of Korean President Park Chung-hee’s regime, and its relative failure to build the utopia it promised, also explain the strong theme of architecture throughout the exhibition.

When you look closer, you realise that the big model of the kind-of super highway emerging from a phallic mountain – Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… – pictured above, is accompanied by a series of paintings and sketches on the walls showing aspects of architecture, visions and fantasies of architecture which come to ruin.

They are subtler, quieter work which would be easy to overlook in the first impact of all the big models and installations. I particularly liked one collage painting which gives an impression of some kind of disaster involving a glass and chrome skyscraper. The idea – urban apocalypse, skyscrapers in ruins – has been done thousands of times – but I admired the layout and design of it, the shape of the main image with its ‘feeler’-like hairs at the left, and the way the small fragment floats freely above it.

Untitled (Willing to be vulnerable - Velvet #6 DDRG240C) 2017 by Lee Bul

Untitled (Willing to be vulnerable: Velvet #6 DDRG240C) 2017 by Lee Bul

Political criticism

Again, it’s only if you read the wall labels and exhibition guide quite carefully that you realise there is a thread of political satire running through the show. In room one, in between the more striking cyborgs hanging from the ceiling, are a couple of small mannequin models of President Park, naked, in full anatomical detail (reminiscent in the way they’re less than life size and so somehow feeble and vulnerable, of Ron Mueck’s mannequins of his naked dead dad, back in the 1997 Sensation exhibition).

Next to the ‘bat cave’ installation (Bunker), which I described above, is what at first seems like an enormous ‘rock’, made out of some kind of plastic. It’s titled Thaw and if you look closer you just about see another model of President Park, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, as if he’s been frozen in ice in some alternative science fiction history, and is only waiting to thaw out and rise again…

Thaw (2007) by Lee Bul

Thaw (2007) by Lee Bul

Next to this is a very big installation of a bath. Unusually, you are allowed to walk across the tiled floor which makes up a good part of the installation, towards the bath itself – a big rectangular affair as if in a sauna or maybe in the bath rooms of some kind of collective housing – to discover that it is ringed with what looks like white meringue tips, and that the bath itself is full of black ink.

This is Heaven and Hell and without the exhibition guide there’s no way you’d be able to guess that it commemorates Park Jong-chul, a student protester who was tortured and killed by the South Korean security services in a bathtub in 1987.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Heaven and Hell (1987) Photo by the author

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Heaven and Hell (1987) Photo by the author

Thinking about political art, Peter Kennard’s blistering photomontages flaying political leaders such as Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair come to mind, for example the enormous photomontage of Tony Blair plastered with images of atrocities from the Iraq War which was on display at the recent Age of Terror exhibition at the Imperial war Museum.

Installation view of Age of Terror at Imperial War Museum London showing Head of State by Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard, with a marble sculpture of a CCTV camera by Ai Weiwei

Installation view of Age of Terror at Imperial War Museum London showing Head of State, a photomontage by Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard, and a marble sculpture of a CCTV camera by Ai Weiwei

There is nothing that overt or emotional here. Everything is much more controlled, inflected, allusive. Given that Lee Bul is sometimes referred to as a ‘political’ artist, there’s nothing at all that – for me anyway – packed any kind of real political punch.

Women’s bodies / desire

With a certain inevitability, what the exhibition probably showcases most consistently is Lee Bul’s identity as a woman artist coming from a society which was extremely repressive, not only of political dissent, but of any form of feminism or gender politics.

The historical timeline tells us that a women’s movement only got going in Korea in the later 1980s and that Lee Bul was an enthusiastic part of it. It tells us that her earliest work went beyond sculpture to explore the possibilities of performance art.

Thus room two contains six screens on which we see some of Lee’s performances – ‘provocative performance works involving her own body’, as the commentary describes them – which she carried out between 1989 and 1996.

In Abortion (1989) she suspended herself from the ceiling of an auditorium for two hours and entertained the audience with lines from poems and pop songs as well as a description of her own abortion, a medical procedure which is still, to this day, apparently, illegal in South Korea.

The Monsters at the start of the show, the wriggly worm creations, turn out to be costumes which Lee wore either writhing around on the ground or walking the streets in order to question received ideas about X and subvert assumptions about Y.

Throughout the exhibition the ‘issue’ of gender and the ‘problematics’ of the female body are reiterated. For example, the timeline of women in Korean society describes ‘the rise of a generation of artists concerned with the representation of the female body‘ who also began ‘subverting the way that women are depicted in the media’.

The guide explains that

at the core of Lee’s recent work is an investigation into landscape, which for the artist includes the intimate landscape of the body…

It turns out the her interest in the manga-style cyborgs comes less from a feeling for science fiction tropes or ideas around artificial intelligence and the possibility of improving human bodies by combining them with machine parts (from pacemakers to prosthetic limbs), no, she

is interested in what the figure of the cyborg – a transhuman hybrid of flesh and machine – can tell us about desire, our relationship to technology, and cultural attitudes towards the female body.

Or, as the press release puts it:

Shaped by her experience of growing up in South Korea during a period of political upheaval, much of Lee Bul’s work is concerned with trauma, and the way that idealism or the pursuit of perfection – bodily, political or aesthetic – might lead to failure, or disaster. Questioning women’s place in society, particularly Korean society, she also addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of ‘feminine’ beauty.

Actually, rather like the so-called ‘political’ works (Thaw and Heaven and Hell) I only discovered that Lee was addressing the ways popular culture shapes our idea of femininity or questions cultural attitudes towards the female body by reading the guidebook. It really wasn’t that obvious from just seeing the works themselves. The three or four cyborg fragments hanging from the ceiling are probably, but not very obviously, female. They could belong to any gender, and be about anything.

Later on there are a couple of ‘busts’ made of lurid plastic of human thoraxes encased in cyber-armour but they aren’t very obviously female. The fact that they’re made of garish pink plastic and the design of the manga-style armour is the striking thing about them.

In one or two of the videos, the artist is seen naked or semi-naked, which even I picked up on as probably a reference to the female body, although I’ve never understood how young, nubile women artists stripping off is meant to subvert anything. To me it plays directly to society’s expectation that the most important or interesting thing about nubile young women is their nubile young bodies.

But if you hadn’t been told by the exhibition website, press release, guide and wall labels that her work ‘questions ideas of femininity’ I’m not sure you’d particularly notice.

I was, for example, surprised to learn that the silver zeppelin ‘addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of feminine beauty’. Really?

Willing To Be Vulnerable by Lee Bul (photo by the author)

Willing To Be Vulnerable by Lee Bul (photo by the author)

Via Negativa II

I haven’t yet mentioned another of the really impressive installations, Via Negativa II (2014) which is a maze made out of metal sheets suspended on stands, a bit like the stands you get at conferences but arranged to create an entrance into a convoluted labyrinth of shiny metal plates.

It’s not a very big maze – only three people are allowed in at a time. The ‘justification’ or ‘idea’ behind it? Well, the walls are covered with a text by an American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, in which he argued that early humans experienced a split consciousness when messages from one hemisphere of the brain to the other were experienced as auditory hallucinations. To make it art, the text is printed in a mirror image of itself i.e you can’t actually read it. You’d need to hold up a mirror to the text to see it printed properly.

I suppose this small metal maze is designed to recreate that sense of mild hallucination that Jaynes describes. At its heart there is certainly a great experience when you find yourself in a cubicle dominated by grids of yellow lights reflected to infinity in parallel mirrors. The other two visitors and I all jostled for the best position to take photos from. Maybe it’s meant to make you think about something, but it’s also just a great tourist photo opportunity.

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Via Negativa II (2014) (interior detail) © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Mark Blower

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Via Negativa II (2014) (interior detail) © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Mark Blower

This is all great fun, but is it ‘questioning the limits of the human’ or ‘interrogating cultural ideas of the female’? Not really.

The international language of art

In fact, you don’t learn very much about the art or culture or history of Korea from this exhibition nor even – surprisingly – about feminism.

What comes over loud and clear is that this is now the international language of art – the same kind of brash, confident, well-manufactured, high concept work which you also see being produced by (the workshops of) Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, and numerous other superstars.

(Hirst sprang to mind as soon as I saw Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendour, a work consisting of rows of decomposing fish with sequins on, from 1997 which, of course, echoes Hirst’s A Thousand Years, a vitrine containing a cow’s decomposing head which he displayed in 1990. Great minds think alike.)

Not long ago I visited the fascinating exhibition of everyday products from North Korea held at the House of Illustration behind King’s Cross station. There I learned about the unique political system, the Cult of the Leader and the special economic policy (Juche) of North Korea. I learned about the importance of opera, theatre and enormous public performance in their culture, about the way the Korean language lends itself to blocky futuristic design, and about their fondness for a much brighter, more acid colour palette than we in the West are used to.

In Lee Bul’s exhibition I don’t think I learned anything at all about South Korea apart from being reminded of the name of its military dictator, and that its repressive military dictatorship was, well, repressive.

For me this exhibition shows that whatever her origins, whatever her personal biography may have been (the difficult childhood, the early anti-establishment and feminist performances), Lee Bul is now – in 2018 – on a par with Ai and Hirst in creating aroma-less, origin-free, international objets d’art for the delectation of equally rootless, cosmopolitan art critics, and for transnational buyers and billionaire investors.

I went to the press launch where the show was introduced by the director of Hayward Gallery – the American Ralph Rugoff – and the show’s curator – the German Stephanie Rosenthal. As they spoke I was struck by how all three of the people behind the microphones were members of an international art élite, a cosmopolitan, transnational art world which seems impossibly glamorous to those of us forced to earn our livings in the country of our birth and unable to jet off to international biennales in Venice and Sydney, to visit art shows at the Met in New York or the Foundation Cartier in Paris or the Mori Gallery in Tokyo or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (all places where Lee has exhibited). Wow. What a glamorous jet-setting life!

Summary

This is a very well-put together overview of the career to date of one of the world’s most successful and distinctive artists. It’s packed with big, bold, funky, cool objects and installations.

If you think art needs to be ‘about’ something, then you will enjoy the way the commentary invokes issues around the female body, around social utopias, about architecture and landscape, about the interface of technology and humans, to explain Lee’s work.

Or, like me, you may come to the conclusion that these issues, ideas and texts may well be important to motivate and inspire the artist, to get her juices flowing – but that most of the works can just be enjoyed in and of themselves, as highly inventive three-dimensional objects – fun, strange, colourful, jokey – without requiring any sort of ‘meaning’ or ‘interpretation’.

Related links

Related reviews

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

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by Simon on May 30, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 30, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/05/30/lee-bul-crashing-hayward-gallery/