WangShui

Paul Pfeiffer

If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

(2023), the epic showdown between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao finds Mayweather erased from the footage, a ghost the mind wraps around. Pacquiao ducks and sways before an etched collective memory. His gloves cover his head. He quivers with hits from a figure we might easily fill in, or have to find a reminder of. I try to watch as many times as possible, holding off from watching the original fight. As I do so, I pay more attention instead to where my eyes tend to focus when the central drama is cut and drained from the scene. I look at the eyes of the crowd, which move together, tracking the two’s dance, narrowing at each hit. The viewer shapes her mind around a void, strays to the MOTOLITE on Pacquiao’s waistband, the blue of the MGM GRAND across the mat.

Fights of the century like this are cited as media tipping points, offering a rare convergence: dense layers of sensory, political and quasi-spiritual spectacle. This fight was wildly anticipated for years, hotly covered, watched by many millions and then debated for the decade after. Many felt the fight was five years too late past each boxer’s prime, and that Pacquiao’s technical proficiency and number of blows should have secured the win. Pacquiao – the people’s hero – sustained a shoulder injury. Any clean opposition became less clear. This was one of the few fights in which Mayweather was forced to move, duck, and run around the ring. It was unusual to see Pacquaio in as many defensive postures as offensive, ducking, stepping back, pushed, even thrown against the ropes, which the artist’s edit highlights. In this edit, 

 gets as much credit for his defensive skill, taking serious hits in the face and head that would send most to the ground. Finished. We can admire Mayweather’s ghost’s technical precision. He was strategic and bided his time, even if he was less of a showman.

The sheer weight of expectation bearing down on this fight heightens the drama of what’s unseen, namely, all the puppeteering hands pulling on lines of tension, orchestrating the scene. The dance of the two was on a set before an audience both real and imagined, against a backdrop diamond-sharp in its symbolism. Pfeiffer’s choreographed edit nudges us to hold all that is off-screen as we watch. The interruption between the image and what is expected turns us to what is not there, what is outside the frame. We orient towards what might be working beyond view. A body in motion, seen through the filter of absence, through the language of speculation, betting, through the crowd’s gaze, through our imagining and our memory of his opponent in this lucrative spectacle. We watch Pacquiao’s squints, mouthed deep breaths, his expressions of grim determination. Muscles move in waves across his back and arms with each heavier punch. The camera flips views, second to second. We drift to the crowd, to the god’s-eye view, the isometric view, to the ring mat, to the back, to the shoulders of Pacquiao. 

The whole place is silent, allowing us to concentrate. We can note the improvisational, emergent aspects of the fight; there are brief smiles, moments of acknowledgement, hugs right before the final round. There is begrudging and mutual respect, if totally different styles. And there is a deep understanding on the part of each athlete that their image, and their performance in the game, is all. Pfeiffer notes in a recent interview that he was riveted to find Mayweather owns the rights to the fight, and so likely has the highest-resolution footage.

 A direct feed into the minds of the watching.

Watching Pacquiao dodge before the ghost memory figure of Mayweather, caught from every camera angle, I am reminded of Jena Osman’s challenging book 

(2019). Osman looks so closely at the details of how cameras evolved across human history that we feel her prose start to move with the cameras. As the power of visual capture accelerates, becomes more wily and tied to technological systems that are themselves more difficult to see (beyond the interface, at work through computation, or quite literally concealed), Osman argues that we must think as fluidly, deftly, with as much skilful movement. Motion technologies have their poetry, and our best possible role given their increasing speed, scale and power is to develop a critique of the moving image that lyrically moves with cameras, asking and answering the questions their movement makes possible.

, along with other videos in the long-running 

 suite, Pfeiffer uses spatially responsive and deft, fluid editing techniques to ask for a thinking and thought that meets them in flux, cutting and moving with the eye. These works blend jump cuts, speculation and documentary not just to ‘speak to’ how oversaturation, surveillance, and economic and cultural power are managed and mediated through these spectacles. The works, through what’s in absentia, ask the viewer to turn their eye and mind beyond the frame, to poke into what is unseen and what sits right beyond. Why did we see what we saw, in this way, framed in these terms?

Collective cultural memories, like the endlessly proliferated media of a great fight, are continually reworked much like individual memories. New theories, more critical analyses of digital media and sophisticated technical systems, more savvy media literacy attuned to algorithmic orchestration attune us more to what is not seen. There’s an understanding that we need to be as much critical visual readers as readers of what is beyond the frame, as power now primarily unfolds and operates beneath or beyond the visual realm, even as visual evidence provides many sigils and clues. Our collective memories are partial, contingent and far more malleable than our externalized prostheses of artificial memory, our media storehouses, might suggest. Despite computational logic’s insistence, memories are not like files stored on hard drives, retrieved simply at will through a database, sorted in a table of contents. They necessitate retrieval, prompted by association or a trigger (a madeleine, a scent), and story and context to activate them, and active retelling. ‘We’ are collectively prone to embellishment and error in remembering, to selectively forgetting, to blocking.

As we consider the diverse dislocating formal techniques Pfeiffer deploys, I turn to the artist WangShui’s 

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances 

(2019). In this 13-minute film, we coast in a continual motion, as though on the nose or head of a dragon, through the Dragon Gate, a famous type of square-and-curved void in massive, absolutely overwhelming high-rises in Hong Kong that dizzy the mind with their density and spectacle. Such Dragon Gates are built so ‘spirit dragons’, carrying good 

, positive, auspicious, fortunate energy, can flow easily from the tops of the hills to the sea, to drink from the sea, and return in the evening. The dragons are mythological, spiritually significant, and ‘real’ in the sense that many demigods and mythical beings are ‘alive’ in the collective imagination.

Each building’s gate implies a connection of the man-made to the sky, sea and mountains around. We listen to the artist describe themselves and collaborator Hercules, aiming their drone towards Bel-Air, a complex on the sea. We look at three dragon gates and hear the narrator: ‘Hercules launches the drone, and we watch it fly towards the first hole.’ The architectural respect for this type of urban feng shui is evident in skyscrapers across the city. Further, as we learn in the film’s story, many practitioners of feng shui – banned in the PRC in 1949 – fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the late 1960s to escape persecution. Tied to geomancy techniques, we learn, the buildings embed an ecological understanding that may not be immediately apparent but is essential to consider. A building will respond to wind, to movement in the ground, and can hardly be built well without consideration of the natural and artificial systems in motion all around.

In the film, we move along a smooth, rigorously focused motion right through the centre of one dragon gate. These gate-voids, WangShui describes, refuse monumentalism and resist ideology. We are ourselves as viewers possibly coasting on the unseen energy that would lead dragons from the mountains out into the sea. As we edge closer to the first dragon gate, we see the sea, the pink and purple and blue soft sky above it, framed by the garden walkway of the gate, which residents ostensibly can step out onto. We see tankers and huge ships on the sea. We are told the drones will likely lose reception as they pass through, so we are refused the passing through; the scene changes to a new drone shot, approaching another dragon gate. Because we never quite know if the drone, the dragon, ever passes through, a void forms further in the narrative and the imagined flow of an ancient or future dragon we might be simulating.

As we course on towards the second gate, our sense of our ‘eye’ and view, and what vantage we are looking from, and what we are, destabilizes narratively and, perhaps, mentally. WangShui describes the dragon they ‘have in mind’, which takes on their name, has no body, and is perhaps a kind of camera-like eye, shuttering, shifting between endless vantage points, generating ‘an infinite live image’ of the artist. A tired voice on the final, third drone journey expresses a mournful desire to escape the tyranny of positive images, to find an escape from fixed identity. We hear: ‘If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.’ And indeed, this ghostly camera, impossible to see, implied and hidden away, is mythic, mythologized, the roving, hidden eye of our time. WangShui’s intentional edits turn our gaze towards what is out of frame.

As Margot Norton argues, we find that ‘the unseen, the “void,” the shifting, formless, inexplicable, and otherworldly [are] often exalted in WangShui’s work – the immaterial as primary material’.

 By speaking of the immaterial as we move towards a void, we think on myth, history, persecution, urban architecture, yes: all lenses we can read the work through. But just as important as the legible and clear ‘reasons’ for the void, WangShui argues for our consideration of system mechanics and movements beyond sight. In fact, they insist on the otherworldly, the void, that is at the centre of our own knowing, at the centre of any frantic neoliberal search to pin down identity, narrative, as a fixed set of factors. No, the artist and this work seem to say: the void and the abyss are the point, turning our thinking outward, towards the edge, towards what needs consideration.

The void, in both these works, allows us to consider other tellings, and consider the illegible, hard to narrate aspects of spectacles of power, the non-visual aspects, found around the edges of the void, in the approach 

the void. Both works refuse an omniscient and single camera gaze, moving us as viewers towards the collective nature of watching, while refusing any single, seductive ritualized viewing. In looking at each artist’s formal strategies of dislocation, roving and destabilization, we can respect their respective approaches to showing what’s just beyond the frame – politically, socially, culturally – and all we learn in absentia.

Focusing on the void, we find the disembodied, watching power right at the edge of its frame. At the edge of the void is collection, management, organized stories, coherent narratives, clear power binaries. The state, the corporation, the algorithmic media life world, the surveillant, the entire topography of power shifts in the present, a many-eyed dragon impossible to see, above the ring, coursing above the crowd. In erasing the fighter, refusing the pleasure of passing through, repeated, each time, we learn how to recognize how power – its ideology – roots in the mind. Who won, and why. The void refuses the closed story, opening up dynamic paths beyond the frame and showing the cost of ignoring what is there, waiting to be read. 

Notes

Biographies 

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Extract from From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances, 2019

In Absentia

screening

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

(2023) considers Black Queer interiority and erotics through an astral exploration of the mouth as portal. Extending their multidisciplinary practice to moving image, this surreal, cinematic portrait by Jonathan Lyndon Chase suggests the overlapping and simultaneous narratives active within psychic space, and the tensions between these potential storylines. Across scenes that layer imagery of domestic intimacies and public spaces in their hometown of Philadelphia – a playground, a pool hall, the supermarket, church – the artist remembers and reconstructs, opening windows on to the erotic and pleasurable counternarratives at play within constrained, anxious or straight-presenting settings. Musing on infinity plays and memory as a fallible loop structure, 

expands Black Queer storytelling and teases what time can do to disentangle us from our own cycles. 



I’m a huge fan of your work, so it’s amazing to have this conversation.



I’m excited. It’s been busy. We just moved our studio to a bigger space.



It’s rare to see the studio looking a certain way for longer than two months. There’s a balance of intuition, chaos and order. I’m very much into interior design and thinking of the space as being alive, a living document.



(2023) again, together. What’s the story behind it?



My first jump into video work was around grad school, and I made my first public video in 2018. I’m always thinking of different ways to communicate symbols in my work, like poetry. My work in film started with animating my drawings, but that didn’t quite work for me, and I wanted to use more of my archival material. For the show where 

, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023), I wanted the film to be a focal point containing different symbols that show up in my larger body of work. 

is an attempt to figure out a way to make these symbols work in motion or moving image format. Making the archive of my practice accessible in different ways is important to me.

I don’t have lots of formal training with film – I’ve taken maybe one film theory class and a moving pictures class – but I love movies so very much. Also, as my work is expanding and growing, I always have the thing I’m very sure of, the thing I’m less sure of, and the thing that’s more experimental, working through the different mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, sound. Making 

was also a great learning experience and helped me to understand how all my artworks inform each other.



, but also generally, I go out in Philly (where I’m from), or wherever I am, and I take pictures of things that I find. I always have my digital camera and phone with me. Sourcing images from this found archive, I try to collage them together in a way that has a narrative but is also very open-ended, dreamlike or poetic.

is narrative-driven in that you’re seeing these everyday environments or public spaces, and then there’s another lens or framing with a person’s mouth, which is both erotic and, for some people, maybe even humorous. But I mostly equate that humour to discomfort. I’ve been reading Marlon Riggs. I also studied his film work in grad school, along with other Black Queer theorists and writers on Black interiority like Isaac Julien and Barbara Hammer, a filmmaker and photographer who made these amazing videos of queer life. While her spaces are kind of non-specific, her frame is very much focused on the body. I’m really interested in the mundaneness of what the frame can capture and also in being unapologetic.

For me, there’s an erotic component to 

 that I think is very necessary in terms of us seeing that in the world. I make my work for Black Queer people; that’s my audience and my main concern. 

is really about the interiority of the body; the corporeal, spiritual, mental and also political, these multiple functions of what a mouth can represent and can do. It gets weird in a fantastical or dreamlike way because I’m trying to channel nuanced poetics. These objects, these items come out of the body – the world that’s inside the body – and function maybe as a gag.

. I probably have 100,000 images on my phone and PC, and generally I make binders where I’ll classify things: as footballs or shoes or blue T-shirts, or people at nighttime, people in daytime, that sort of thing. Then I use all these weird and interesting apps on my phone to manipulate them and move parts around. I’m really interested in using what I would consider low or humble tech. Then I use Photoshop to layer and blend things together. In my paintings, there’s also a fair amount of layering.



I’m curious about the phone-like frame. We have many windows open at all times; these collaged compositions that we exist within are so interesting. Something super intimate can be happening on your phone while you’re in public.



I think the framing had a lot to do with knowing that I was going to show this work inside a bedroom-style installation – a very intimate, private space. 

was also shown on a television screen because I think a lot about the different ways queer people have found ways to communicate with each other over time: letters, secret meeting places, the telephone. I also remember Myspace, Xanga and other web clubs and chat rooms. I wanted the installation to have a digital but painterly feel.

The horizontal-vertical compositions allow this – like you’re holding your phone or sitting at a monitor. For lots of us, that’s how we’re able to access so much about the world and other people. We spend so much time seeing the world in this manner. It felt like the right way to depict these elements. I’m also very interested in what rectangles and squares, also in a gender-binary way, tell us information-wise, paying attention especially to the softness of the flesh versus the harder angles. Part of the fun and challenge for me is to play with formal qualities. But I also consider these compositions closely tied to my poetry and writing practice in the way that I always say: I don’t consider myself a poet; I’m a painter that makes poetry.



I’m more interested in working across mediums. It’s a love for the uncertain and experimental. I think of my videos as collage. I try to maintain an aesthetic familiar to my work, but it’s very different at the same time.



I actually do have a poem about a mouth that acted as source inspiration. I might have it … I’ll be right back.

Locked. Salt.

This poem really helped me think about how to compose the visuals for the video. It was something that I’d been sitting on for a really long time, because this stuff incubates, and I like for things to kind of spill out of the frame.



, the video, gave another form to these thoughts?



The mouth is a pleasure point and a power zone. We use our voices for great change, and it’s one of the ways we affect the world haptically. I think of people and political activists like James Baldwin or Marlon Riggs, this idea of song or chant, and these items we see in the film like eggs and carrots – things from the safe place of the domestic, where we can be vulnerable, just ourselves, and unguarded in a very tender way. These items are coming through this portal that’s within the body, that’s a pleasure point. For 

, I decided to focus on the mouth as a zone of possibility.



And yet it feels like an unexplored or lesser-appreciated zone, culturally speaking.



I agree. People get uncomfortable. That response isn’t new to me. Actually, I kind of like it because it asks the viewer to question their discomfort.

The people in the film are friends of mine, and they told me that filming it felt cathartic, relaxing and a little adventurous for them. It felt like something they should and shouldn’t be doing at the same time. There’s tension.

I think the key is to be unapologetic in showing these sorts of visuals. But of course, that’s what makes people uncomfortable. Partly I think we’re simply not used to seeing imagery like this, made by a Queer Black person. It catches people off guard. For me, making this work is also about a need and desire to have a rich and complex visual canon and the possibility of what else might be birthed from that. This idea of birth, too, is like an opening orifice. I often talk about how the skin of our lips is the same kind as our anus, and I think we also must remind ourselves that our bodies are flesh. What does that mean for how we look at reality?



Let’s look at some of the scenes in more detail.



Together, the compositions in the film exhibit a pattern or revisiting of tensions that I’m trying to push up against each other, to make something of a simultaneity where more than one thing is happening.


In the carrot scene, the drilling noise is the engine sound of motorbikes. There’s an element of freedom, danger and romance in being on a motorbike, and then that’s paired with these very sharp or phallic things being packed into the mouth. This is something that might happen where these people are going, maybe a sex party. Again, this mix of something that’s uncomfortable and pleasurable at the same time.
The candle scene talks about religion specifically. I was raised in a Baptist household, and though I haven’t been to church in years, it still sticks with me in my memory. I wanted this composition to be more vertical, echoing this idea of heaven and hell, up and down. This scene is part erotic, with the candles in the mouth, but it also relates to experiences of being silenced because of who I am as a person. This is one of my favourite scenes because it touched me in coming to terms with what spirituality meant for me at the time, and what it looks like for me now.



There’s significant labour in constructing each composition, too: going to get the eggs, sourcing the stained glass, putting things in the mouth.



Thank you for mentioning that, because increasingly through my works I’m shaping my practice as a form of ritual. It’s a process. I also consult with the performers about how the objects feel and fit in their mouth. I’ll give the object to them to get to know it. That’s part of it; the objects that are in play, and then the space that’s being charged with memory.

The basketball court scene is set in a playground in North Philly, and there’s a small, rubber American football inside the mouth. It’s a kind of surreal play on balls and masculine sport. I’m interested in archetypes and roles that are considered very macho or masculine, and the historical erasure and policing of these spaces. Especially with athletes and what’s going on in current events with trans athletes, queer athletes. There’s also this homoeroticism that comes into play with sports that I wanted to challenge. You have all these macho men playing with balls, and this is supposed to be a safe space for everyone, but unfortunately, sporting culture really promotes homophobia. There are so many people who are lovers of sports but who are alienated. Again, there’s a level of silencing regarding what sports culture could be doing to someone.

I’m also thinking about cultural conditioning or brainwashing. It starts very early, the way you’re expected to function, look and navigate through space, what’s ‘culturally appropriate’. This reflection on childhood is also why I used a toy football in this composition. I collect lots of miniatures and kids’ toys.

Also, identity and intersectionality. For many young Black people, sport is a site of power, pride and respect that goes hand in hand with ideas of masculinity. I remember growing up – and even still now – with some of my friends, the pressure or policing of certain aspects of their personality. It’s strange and violent.



We’re talking about truth and fiction, in a way – the scripts and performances that we repeat in our everyday lives versus what our interior reality or story might be at any moment. One of the defining characteristics of 

I like loops, especially because I think of memory that way. Not necessarily related to trauma, but also to happy or pleasurable thoughts that stick in your mind. That’s the mental, emotional landscape I’m talking about. Making 

, I was thinking a lot about the memory of sound, how it stays with you, which goes back to the loop. I wanted a set number of sequences and then for it to just sort of repeat. How does sound take up a space in our mind along with how something looks? I like to call it ‘being sticky’ – you hear a few quick seconds of something and then it just keeps going in your mind.



But the second repeat is slightly different. Does 

propose an undoing? In the sense that the more you repeat a pattern, the more you can register, understand and perhaps halt it. 



I really love our talk right now. When my work leaves me, or the studio, it takes on its own life and I start figuring out and learning other things about it. There’s always this question of ‘the intent’: what’s going to come across, and how much you want to direct or inform the viewer. But it mostly brings me back to the idea of bringing new possibilities to the canon of Black Queer storytelling and image-making.



 the most. I’m a huge nerd. A lot of people don’t know that about me, but comic books gave me my introduction to fantasy, science fiction and horror stories. I love how they give you so much information through panels and windows.

I think about thresholds, windows; liminal moments when you’re going from point A to point B; the transition. With the idea of the threshold, I’m very much thinking about the lens and perspective of a person or people: whose window we’re looking through and how that matters. It’s kind of my way of going inside what we’re holding internally. The mouth itself is definitely a door or a window in that sense, like what we might be seeing inside this person. When you’re being as vulnerable as I try to be, and there’s vulnerability in seeing how a person thinks, there’s also a need for protection that I’m very conscious of and am always trying to think about. Although I make work for our community, there are other people interacting with and looking at it as well.



What do you think about the relationship between interiority and technology, our increased ability to record, reflect and share our interior worlds?



We look to platforms like Instagram and TikTok to enrich our lives and help us connect with one another. They’re great tools, but they’re also doing something very weird. I’ve been reading about how our physical third spaces are shrinking (home, work, and then social space, or ‘third space’) because people are more interested or more comfortable spending time interacting via the screen. I’m wary of what it could be doing to our psyche, especially with people who might struggle with insecurity or anxiety; how it interferes with how we perceive ourselves.

I’m interested in archiving and preserving certain memories, and then, because I’m more of an introvert and pretty private, being able to use that archive as a tool to reach out to people. People also have a very short attention span now; music isn’t as long, we have clips, memes, shorts. You’re dealing with the element of time in a different way. For me, it made sense to edit the film to the most important parts, and then use loops with slight variations. But I’m very excited to explore this medium of time. Really, I think that’s the major player in investigating this work.



The ouroboros has been on my mind these past months. The snake that eats its own tail …



This is amazing. I'm very interested in the infinity symbol. The bodies in the Sadie Coles HQ exhibition where I exhibited 

I called ‘number eight bodies’, or the snake eating itself. For me, the idea of this collapsed body, or I just call it a number eight body, is really in relationship to 

. When I’m thinking about an abstract body, and focusing on these pleasure points like the mouth, which are thresholds and entrances, it’s also about entering another world or liminal space.

I’m just homing in on one entrance to this timeless zone. I think a lot about liminality, and then it starts getting more spiritual or astral because you’re going inside the interior. I have one of these bodies tattooed on me. I think it has a lot to do with our bodies only being here for a certain amount of time, and thinking of how our bodies interact with space. They’re changing rapidly, but we’re slow at the same time.

Someone I really admire is the artist Wangechi Mutu. I’ve been thinking more lately about timelessness, and science fiction. I’ve also been really interested in learning more about African folklore, but I won’t give too much away …



Thank you so much. It’s been amazing to spend this time with you.



Thank you so much, this has been amazing.

Biographies

1 min clip from Mouth 1

Mouth 1

Mark Leckey

(1999) in my friend’s Hackney Wick apartment. It might have been the afternoon after a party. The atmosphere was dazed, blinds were drawn, beers circulated, the beam of the projector picked out interweaving curlicues of smoke. Watching it now, 

conjures the only vivid memories to survive from that period of my life: not of working bad jobs and struggling to meet shared rents but of sitting by the canal as the sun rose, talking shit in mysterious apartments, night buses, tempting fate, seeking out love and revelation in spaces like those in which the film’s unwitting protagonists gather to dance. 

And these fragmentary memories are woven into the broader nostalgia that it inspired for the world into which I was born, at more or less the midpoint of this potted history of rave culture (seven-and-a-half minutes into the film, it pauses on a VHS still with the time stamp 19:84). And it seems to me self-evident – though this might be egotism – that these scenes were shot in the North, that geographically indeterminate region of England defined by a popular culture with which I identified. If you’re English, you know a northerner from a southerner in the same ways that a classmate learns to distinguish identical twins: not only through accent but by an accumulation of characteristics – the way that they hold themselves when standing, small mannerisms of dress – of which you are individually unconscious and could never articulate.

In much the same way, I can present no real evidence that this is also a history of the North. Earlier scenes take place in working men’s clubs, a predominantly if not exclusively northern cultural phenomenon, but the locations are mostly the dark, undistinguished rooms in which music is played late at night. There are Brutalist estates that call to my mind the suburbs of Leeds or Manchester but which could equally be London. Perhaps it is the sensibility of the artist that infuses the work with this feeling, as if the edit communicates the aggression and spark that I associate with the North. But it seems more likely that it is my desire to identify with the film’s narrative that means I have always thought of it this way, because the film is profoundly nostalgic and I am nostalgic for the place to which I once claimed to belong but long ago left. A place that I betrayed, as you betray a class.

, whatever it is that identifies its characters is passed through the generations by inherited gestures, so when one dancer drops a shoulder, another – through Leckey’s jump cuts ­– completes it. That ‘something’ (a wary abandonment, an aggressive insouciance?) is intrinsic to what I learned in my childhood to identify as 

, meaning something to be admired and copied. The first half of this film reminds me of case studies in an aesthetic self-education, like the photographs of Ian Curtis or Jarvis Cocker that I would cut out of the 

 and stick to the wall, hoping to learn something from them.

, I anticipated reflecting on the sense of home it inspires in me and the unfamiliar experience of identifying with the protagonists of a work of art. This was the culture into which I grew up. Had anyone had a camera at the club nights to which I went as a teenager, the footage could seamlessly be stitched in. I can read these gestures, I understand these contexts, the level of actionable aggression connoted by that look. And yet, as I watched in preparing to write this, it came more and more to seem to me that 

 belonging to a culture. Of being separated from the community by which we hope to be accepted (isn’t it strange that we feel belonging most acutely through nostalgia, a kind of homesickness in time?).

Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port, about half an hour’s drive from the border town of Oswestry, where I was living when 

was released. The thing about Ellesmere Port – besides the important fact that it neighbours Eastham, from which my name derives – is that it is 

 Liverpool, but not quite. To anyone who is not from the northwest, it is Liverpool, and so its native sons might in London or New York claim kinship with the Beatles, the ‘famous sense of humour’, the psychedelic tendency and other keystones in the Scouse identity. And yet to someone from Anfield, they will always be a plastic Scouser, a denizen, a wannabe who might at any point be given away by an idiomatic phrase, the wrong trainers, and if not these then – the biggest giveaway of all – the too-perfect simulation of one who is trying too hard to be what they are not.

Of course, I am not so much speculating on the artist’s experience here as talking about my own, as this work compels me to do: as someone whose father is from Preston (halfway between Liverpool and Manchester), whose mother is west Irish, who grew up in the Midlands (not even really the North), who has lived most of his adult life in Dublin and London and Athens and now Rome, in voluntary exile from a culture to which I never really belonged, however much I wanted to, however hard I studied its grammars and however many times I rehearsed its pronunciations. 

reminds me of being outside and looking in.

Early in the filmwe hear a distorted clip of Shirley Bassey – Black, Welsh, icon of Northern soul – singing the phrase ‘Tonight, I gave the greatest performance of my life’. And it strikes me now that the joy I associate with raving was at least in part relief at being able for the duration of an evening to feel the barriers between self and performance dissolve. It is a paradox of subcultures that it is only by investing a lot of time and energy into the performance of being someone else that you reach the point at which it is possible, for a few hours, to be absolutely yourself. Where so much of the commentary on 

centres on how ‘liberated’ its protagonists seem, I see the workaday desperation that fuels lost weekends and, lurking beneath everything, anxiety. 

At one point, the artist recites a litany of those fashion brands to which kids in late twentieth-century northern towns would pledge their allegiance (it was Adidas or Kappa where I lived) over footage of young men. Here I remember the agonies of deciding what brand of trainer is appropriate to the identity you are jerry-building out of whatever fragments of popular culture you can pick up in the park or from magazines, and which must be expressed in everything from the type of collar you wear to the deodorant in which you must cover yourself.

suggests, identity is not inherent, nor is it constructed by the individual. It is generated by details of dress and behaviour external to the individual, not the least of which is the brand of jeans you wear. ‘There is much’, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.’

These are not identities that can be slipped on and off like a selection of jackets. They change you. ‘He can’t be a man,’ sang Mick Jagger, ‘because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.’ The jeans 

such a startling work of art – and the reason that I have watched it dozens of times in the years since I first saw it in my friend’s apartment, in contexts ranging from museums to afterparties – is not only that it brilliantly describes the individual’s relationship to a collective culture, or that it illuminates the cut-and-paste, appropriative methodologies through which we construct the identities that then shape our characters forever, and the means by which they are transmitted across generations. It is also that, having shown how we are moulded to a type, the work offers brief glimpses of their transcendence. 

These are moments that might arrive only after a long series of identifications and frustrations and anxieties. Moments in which, through whatever musical or chemical assistance, it is possible to glimpse something far greater and stranger than any jeremiad about lost subcultures can ever approach. It is a feeling that is only accessible when you are dancing, when you are out of your mind, when everything outside the space in which you are listening to music is oppressive, in the company of friends who are also strangers and strangers who are also friends, filled with loud music, very late at night. It is at the same time to be absolutely at home and as far away from home as it is possible to be. 

Southerners don’t have style, by the way. Or not what I recognize as style. That’s just for the record.

What Makes a Man

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

Kenneth Tam

In 2011, I went to a group exhibition somewhere in Los Angeles, at a space whose name I can’t recall and which no longer exists. The only work I remember seeing that night was Kenneth Tam’s video 

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force

, and I’ve never forgotten it. In my memory, it played in its own room, upstairs in a house, and I sat on a bench and watched the whole thing several times. In the video, Kenneth Tam, an Asian American man wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, walks around a large cardboard box on the carpeted floor of a room. There is a man in the box who speaks in a flinty voice. They met on Craigslist. The Man in the Box negotiates with Tam: 

Take your clothes off, come closer, let me touch your butt, I want to grasp your genitalia

. We see only his arms, which he puts through holes he cuts in the box. Tam circles, hesitates, gets close to the outstretched hand, then backs up. He becomes naked below the waist, then puts his underwear back on. The Man in the Box makes a forced laugh whenever Tam says no to a request, which Tam does often. You can feel the Man in the Box’s pervy frustration through the cardboard.

You worry a little bit for Tam as the Man in the Box pokes his finger in between Tam’s butt-cheeks, reaches out to hold his junk. It’s at once threatening and cringe, menacing and pathetic. The intimacy, the reach for intimacy, only unshadows the bare alienation and unwieldy distance between the two men. You tell yourself that Tam is in control – it’s his camera, his situation, his art – and you wonder at the kink of it, at who is getting off more. How do these kinks feed on each other? About the work, Tam writes on his website: ‘After repeated discussions [on Craigslist], we ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of our respective needs. His frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with my own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time my prerogatives as an artist required me to compromise my position and meet him halfway.’

The acutely uncomfortable vibe that pervades this video, as it does all of Tam’s work, has to do with this sticky point of collapse between refusal and acquiescence, of desires as demands, of satisfaction measured through tension, of the mild but oppressive suffering that lives in between awkward pauses, what lurks in what is not said.

In a word, it’s the ick that is the negotiation of masculine sociality. No other artist does this ick better. As his work has progressed since that early video of 2011 – moving from staged, performative videos like tone-poems suffused with sumptuous awkwardness, to more cinematic pieces that use edits and exquisitely coloured mise-en-scène to propel a muscular logic of storytelling – Tam has become his generation’s most fearless documentarian of the fact that masculinity structures our very world through this ick. It is the ick of how the softest, most hesitant parts of individuality are squashed and shaped through forceful, even brutal, concessions of socialization; and that this is not a side effect but the most necessary function of how masculine sociality is constituted at all. The ick comes from how one’s willingness to participate in this concession is the badge of honour with which masculinity rewards all of us forced to live under its regime. It’s the system that funnels everyone into hierarchical types, and then commends those whom it deems to fall into the type at the top (the leader, the alpha). In Tam’s work, we watch this negotiation of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, of leader and follower – whose hesitation or vulnerability can be steamrolled by someone more certain, more ruthless – and this plays out in situations Tam has pointedly constructed to always put the body on the line. The vulnerability of his male performers is enacted through various stages of nudity, or close proximity, or prompts to be tender and open towards each other. It is so visceral, it thumps in your throat while you watch. You feel as if insecurity is how men know they have bodies at all: there’s the embarrassment of having to live inside the body, the uneasiness of where to put one’s hands, how to hang one’s arms, how to stand in such a way as to appear – but never actually to 

Tam has always asked the question: How do men become men? Each Tam video work focuses on rituals that produce specific masculinities: father–son bonding (s

, 2020, originally a performance), male social clubs of the kind that gather in suburban basements (

, 2016). Throughout these works, he lets the question move from how much of this loss of autonomy is one’s choice, to how much it is the result of an individual bending and breaking under external pressures. From there, the question becomes how and why these external pressures came to be. Does anyone enjoy them? Who needs them? What do they cost us? How, and why, is this price not the same for each of us? How is it determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality? The fact of this price means that there is always the threat of violence, and Tam’s work is atmosphered with it, producing the fog of the question: Why does masculinity invest in rituals of violence as a way to get to intimacy?

Tam’s work does not offer declarative answers to any of these questions. Instead, he creates situations, images, and symbols that show how masculinity builds itself atop a foundation of boundaries being breached, or in danger of being breached. I think of how the idea of the boundary itself – a wall, a barrier, a membrane – feels especially constitutive of the masculine, insofar as the boundary functions as a thing to be destroyed, the thing towards which a penetrative force is aimed and propelled. Forgive my cis-heterosexual gender essentialism but, when I watch Tam’s work, I cannot stop thinking of how, when individual identity is constantly repressed for the benefit of the group – so that the group 

 the group – it produces a world where any moment of gentleness, trust, and connection is predicated on the awkward. Such moments function as wayward instances of consensual penetration; tender, shy emotion allowed to spurt through. Tam is a master at revealing the expression of this awkwardness, how risky anything sensitive, anything careful, is in this world. When the men in his videos are asked to compliment each other, you feel as though you’re watching someone carve out his own heart with a blunt blade and then ask if anyone might want to hold it.

When I watch Tam’s work, I think, ‘Is this gay?’ And then I realize that this is the exact question masculinity asks itself all the time. The threat of queerness is everywhere in a Tam piece, like an id, an elephant in the room, a Higgs boson particle that holds everything together but is unseen and can’t be measured with normative instruments. All of his male performers – who are unrehearsed, unscripted, and who, Tam makes a point to note, participate in the work not only for the money but because of their own interests and curiosities – seem very straight and very cis, but not necessarily by choice or desire. This sits on their frames just as awkwardly as tenderness does. It recalls the strings attached to puppets: the puppet master’s hands loom above, enacting the choreography of the patriarchy, and it’s the gracelessness as such of the puppets’ movements that gives them grace. The straight-cisness of these men is simply another aspect of their masculinity that seems to have been forged in the furnace of patriarchy’s hegemonic machinations – they’ve been burned by it, branded. When one man in 

, the video work about the high school prom, admits to wishing his prom date had been the girl’s best friend, who was a boy, it comes as a shock. There you are! I said to the screen.

, a two-channel video work from 2022, is Tam’s most cinematically accomplished video and also the most overtly queer in its symbolism. It proposes the figure of the Asian cowboy, what he might look and be like, what he might mean. Possibly the most redolent archetype of straight-cis masculinity, the cowboy can never not be camp – there is his colossal chin carved as if from stone, the legs splayed around a heaving animal, that walk that is all pelvis! – and Tam’s Asian cowboys are outlandishly camp. The dudes in the video are dressed like the Marlboro Man, though the costume seems ill-fitting against their non-white skins. They ride a mechanical bull in front of a fuchsia sound-stage sunset, and it made me think of how utterly unnecessary but very, very fun bull-riding must be. Their wavering voices speak towards prompts Tam has given them to describe sensuality, and again, we watch moments of tenderness ejaculate onto the scene in smears of gawky unease. These are interspliced with a long tracking shot through a mining tunnel, and then there are cuts to an Asian male dancer, deftly moving his body in the street.

, and pushes it into new territory for Tam in its engagement with a historical event, is a voiceover of a fictional text Tam wrote trying to imagine the first-person perspective of a Chinese labourer during the Transcontinental Railroad strike of 1867.

This text is fiction because, as Tam has noted in talks about the work, there are no first-person accounts from the Chinese workers themselves. There are only accounts from the rail company or white laborers, and Tam wanted to feel into this invisible history, let it hover in the air of those fuchsia sunsets that glow behind some of our most primary myths. By setting up this juxtaposition of the mythic Asian cowboy next to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American dream that is always powered by racialized slave labour, 

 brings us again to a close, squirming encounter with that primary mechanism of how any individual’s assimilation into a group is always an index of how much of themselves they must lose – but here it reveals the site of this encounter as a place of fiction, a storytelling device, a mythos of the fantastical speculation that is the spine of society’s most intractable beliefs.

What I mean is: Men aren’t platonically real, born that way, determinedly pure quintessences, no matter how much they insist they are. They are formed – we form them – as much as any identity. For all its taciturn silence, refusal to emote, and smothering of expression, masculinity is one of the loudest storytellers that’s ever been, and its favourite subject is itself. In fact, what masculinity as storyteller does best is to make every character, every subject, every scene, every trope become a reflection, either affirmative or negative, of its own function, secondary to the telling of its own tale. This is why identity is always defined by its relationship and proximity to the myth masculinity tells about itself: You’re either one of us, or you are Other.

What Tam’s work has made me understand, though, is that masculinity gets off the most on declaring that no one has guaranteed entry into its club. It is the kink of masculinity that a huge entry fee must be exacted from 

 trying to get in, and masculinity as such is the enforcement of this entry fee at every door – even, or especially, at sites that were never doors to begin with. Masculinity is the telling of its own story in such a way that every site of encounter, of possible connection, has been transformed into a threshold to be crossed, a boundary to be breached, an innocent to be conquered, a door with a lock and a price. The preferred method of payment is the currency of ick. How much of yourself are you willing to sell to get in? How much of your soft neck are you willing to let be crushed by the heavy boot of the group? Through Tam’s work, I understand that we are never only the soft neck being crushed, nor are we only the line of boots bearing down upon it – we are all of us the fact of masculinity making us become the meeting place of these two. What happens there, what is produced under that terrible pressure, what we tell ourselves it means: this is society as men have written it. Ick!

Ick! How Men Become Men: On Kenneth Tam

Silent Spikes

Kang Seung Lee

Multidisciplinary artist Kang Seung Lee has long been concerned with the creation of various rituals of celebration and mourning, largely of queer past lives. Though the material form that these rituals have taken has shifted over time – from painstakingly rendered drawings to delicateembroideries, and, most recently, performance, sound and moving image – a core intention has always remained throughout Lee’s works: to enact a practice of caretaking and recovery.

Delving into the lives of artists and cultural makers who have all sadly – and prematurely – passed away, Lee pushes against the limits of the archive by forming, in his own words, ‘relationships with the living and with the dead’

 These relational, affective and spiritual encounters imbue his artworks with an air of reverence and a feeling of loss, while also inviting us into a space of yearning and possibility.

(2023), a small group of contemporary collaborators embody the legacy of a dancer and choreographer from another place and time, and all of them cross paths with other artists at Lee’s invitation. Like in many of his other works, Lee here performs a sort of resuscitation, not of a personhood but of the essence of their life’s work, simultaneously merging different historical, geographical and cultural scenes through a process of fabulation and visual storytelling.

Eliel Jones:
Though I have always recognized a sort of performativity present throughout your practice, I was really excited to see dance appear in 

. You sought to bring back to life the practice of Goh Choo San (1948–1987), a pioneering Singaporean-born choreographer who, despite having choreographed and performed for prominent ballet companies throughout the world, is little known in dance and cultural history. How did you come across him?

Kang Seung Lee:
The way I learned about his life actually speaks to the core of my work. I first encountered Goh Choo San’s work through someone else’s, which was a documentary about Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Baryshnikov was principal dancer and artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York City. And because he was one of the most important figures in dance at that time, a British TV channel made a documentary about him. On the other hand, in the early 1980s, Goh was an emerging choreographer, though he was quickly considered to be doing things very differently, particularly because of his focus on hand gestures; he worked with his dancers to use their hands to express emotions. Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre commissioned a work by Goh in 1981, titled 

. At that time, Baryshnikov and the dancers of ABT were doing a lot of rehearsals with Goh, and so he appears briefly in the documentary. I first watched the documentary maybe fifteen years ago, and saw this incredibly flamboyant Asian person – in fact, the only Asian person in the whole documentary – talking about the piece and how he’s trying to use the male body as a focus of the work, which was also quite different from classical ballets at the time.

After watching the film, I tried to do some further research but I couldn’t find much more than a Wikipedia page. It wasn’t until 2019, when I connected with Singaporean curator and writer Binghao Wong, that I was able to get a better sense of the dance and cultural sphere in Singapore and make additional findings. During the pandemic, I was able to get in touch with Goh’s family and his best friend, Janek Schergen, who’s now creative director of the Singapore Ballet. Goh’s family is large: he had nine siblings, including his sister Goh Soo Khim, who is only a couple of years older and who’ss also a ballet dancer and co-founder of Singapore Dance Theatre (now Singapore Ballet). She’s been actively pushing to keep his legacy alive, partly through the creation of the Singapore Ballet but also by dancing Goh’s works posthumously with other dancers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Soon after, I visited Singapore to do further research at the Singapore National Archive, and I also received materials from the family and Janek. What I learned in the process is that Goh Choo San was very successful in the USA, particularly in the early and mid-1980s, so this made me really wonder why his legacy was non-existent, particularly in the queer context here in the USA today. He’s more celebrated back in Singapore, because of his family but also because of this nationalistic tendency to celebrate someone who has been successful in the West. I asked quite a few people why he might not be remembered better elsewhere, and one reason is obviously that he was this person in diaspora, so his work never really existed in one single country or place. But also, a lot of dancers, historians and critics of dance at that time were wiped out during the AIDS epidemic, so there weren’t a lot of people who were able to record and write about his work. This has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the historical citation of not only Goh’s work but also many of his peers in that generation.

EJ:
I’m interested in how you’ve approached this loss of citation as an opportunity to imagine how to cite 

you invited Brussels-based Filipina dancer and choreographer Joshua Serafin to respond to and embody Goh’s 

from 1981. You also collaborated with KIRARA, a composer and musician based in Seoul who produced the accompanying soundtrack for the piece. I find it very beautiful that the gesture of your invitation to these and other collaborators for the film is from a lens of responding to Goh’s life and practice, rather than from a desire to create a ‘straight’ re-enactment of 

as an existent piece. Your approach demands a different kind of involvement with hiswork; it calls for embodiment as a form of study. How did you approach working with your collaborators as an invitation to create their own relationships to Goh Choo San?


KSL:
From the beginning I wasn’t really interested in reperforming Goh’s works. For one thing, that’s already been done by other ballet companies. Also, I was very interested in the idea of queerness as something that is constantly in transformation, thinking here of José Esteban Muñoz and his theorizing of queer futurity as something that will always be changing. I really wanted to speak about Goh’s work in this way, in relation to queerness and how it’s constantly evolving. I felt that had to come from multiple perspectives other than my own, and by bringing in someone like Joshua, for instance – who is trained as a ballet dancer but is also a nonbinary person who is making work from that position and identity – it happened very organically. We did study Goh’s work and his process very intensely at some point. But always the invitation was towards asking ourselves, with the legacy of someone like Goh, what kind of future(s) do we want to imagine through the gestures of our bodies? I wanted to think through this question in the film as something of an embodied experience, while at the same time expressing a homage to Goh’s work as something that’s about the present and the future. In this way it became a sort of collective reimagining.

EJ:
This approach towards producing a collective reimagining of something or someone through interweaving different practices appears in your work in other ways. For 

,there are other artists with whom you collaborate outside the form of an invitation like the one you extended to Joshua and KIRARA. For instance, the title of the work itself is borrowed from a poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–1950), and verses from that same poem appear at the beginning of the film transcribed into artist Martin Wong’s (1946–1999) American Sign Language ‘font’, which you very carefully adapted from Wong’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. Again, to me these presences feel less like re-enactments of works and more like invocations; material and affective explorations that call the artists in question into the room, or in this case onto the screen or the stage. In the past, you’ve similarly introduced the work of other artists who never met each other in real life, and you make them correspond through your artworks in the most beautiful and poetic ways – such as in your other moving image piece in the Akeroyd Collection, 

(2018), where you bring together the work of Korean writer Joon-soo Oh (1964–1998) with that of British filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994). Could you talk a little bit about how you approach this process of introducing other artists’ work into your practice, and to each other?

KSL:
My collaborations have always been both with the dead and the living, because I revisit the works of artists who are no longer with us, but indeed, as you say, thinking of them as collaborators in my work. That perhaps does go back to Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and the invitation to visit that came from Keith Collins, who was Jarman’s partner (he himself died in 2018). What I was fascinated by at that time was how the garden, which is really beautiful, comes back every year despite almost all the plants having been first planted in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The roots are there, and the plants grow back every year or every other year, and they flower. They’re not exactly the same plant, but they come from these same roots and seeds, and they’re evolving all the time. So, I was thinking about how memories and histories are sort of in transformation and being written and rewritten; how they’re moving all the time.

Similarly, I’ve always understood that our thinking or art making is influenced by people who came before us. Even when we try and make something that people call ‘original’, it actually comes from all the education we received, the books we’ve read, the knowledge that was created before us. So, it’s never just our ‘own’ in that way, it really is heavily influenced. I think I wanted to speak to that in my work, particularly in relation to queer histories. Also, histories that are not from one place: a lot of the time they’re transnational, so I’m always trying to talk about more than one person from different continents, cities, locations and how their legacies are connected through history and through people in the next generations, including myself. I think the idea of creating genealogy has always been really important, whether they’re of my generation or the ones before me; this concern has continued over different projects and collaborations.

EJ:
How do these fabulated encounters take shape?

KSL:
In a way, they often happen through a series of accidents. I’m interested in many people, and I’m doing research constantly. But they happen mostly through relationships that develop in the process. In many cases I reach out to estates, or family members or friends of the departed, and I try to establish a relationship with them and let them know what I’m trying to do. In some cases, there is trust instantly, in others it takes time to create that. It’s similar with my collaborations. Sometimes I have very strong connections; other times it takes longer.

EJ:
I think it’s possible to draw out some specific threads here. What all these artists have in common is that their work has faced or risked possible erasure due to their various marginalized positions, with the common experience among them all being that they’re all queer; many also contracted HIV and died of AIDS-related complications. In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman reflects on her work of narrating counter-histories of slavery as having always been ‘inseparable from writing a history of present’.

This came to my mind in relation to your own work, which is not only concerned with acts of revisiting or restaging but with a desire to reflect on what’s stake in invoking these lives now. What does it mean to you to write these histories into the present?

KSL:
On the one hand, there are some functions to my work that are very practical. I always think about my own research process as a personal learning process. I do research, and I meet with these people, and I learn about people who are not with us. I’m literally learning the histories, bringing the memories out, and in some ways writing about them in the form of visual art. Because almost all my works have references to someone else’s work, whether images, writings or other forms of production, it can also introduce their work to new viewers: some people definitely learn about these other artists’ work through my work, and that’s actually a very important function that I’m aware of. There are so many artists who we think are well known but are in fact new to a lot of people. Goh Choo San is one example. For some people it’s their first encounter with his work, which I take very seriously.

I also want my work to go beyond the introduction. I want to talk about how we can turn to these artists’ practices as an invitation to imagine something – and in many ways somewhere – else. I’m interested in talking about these artists’ work as part of a conversation about the present, about the politics of our time. In this way, by rewriting and rethinking these pasts and our histories, there’s also a possibility and potentiality to create a different future. My work exists within that conceptual framework, particularly one that insists on not forgetting. Because my works take visual form, rather than being purely historical or social, I’m also asking for a different type of encounter. It’s an invitation through the visual, the poetic and, in this film, through movements made by different bodies to interrogate how and what we feel, which to me is as important as the histories that I’m bringing in. How do we live with this feeling? Sometimes this feeling can be about mourning and loss; at others it can be the feeling of different possibilities for the future. I believe both of these have the potential to change something about the future, or at least bring forth an urge to do that.

EJ:
Indeed, aside from the importance of introducing these artists to a new audience, you also ask us to think about what their loss means to us and others. How do we mourn those whom we do not know and whose experience is entirely different from ours? How do we react and respond to realities that are not immediately happening to us or the people we know, or the geographies that we’re familiar with? Who gets to be commemorated, memorialized and remembered within an affective space, and who doesn’t? I find these questions to be deeply political and urgently rooted in your work as well as our present moment. Palestine is a painful example of this right now – certainly of the starkly different standards that are applied to commiserating the loss of human life.

KSL:
Something like the AIDS epidemic really defined a generation at a particular time. I strongly believe what’s happening in Palestine is going to define us, and the ways that we are complicit now are going to be like generational trauma. I think about the unknown, the erased through my practice all the time. Even when I’m bringing in images of people who are more familiar to us, I introduce them also as an invitation to look at the others who have been less seen; the erased, the unknown, the bodies that we do not recognize or know. It’s about creating an entry point to really think about who is not actually remembered, and to ask now: who will not be remembered? But also, it’s about suggesting new possibilities and ways to remember as well. My work is an invitation to start a conversation and create that possibility. I think this is ultimately the most important process in my work for me: how we can collectively think about the unknown.

Notes 

The Heart of A Hand

Maeve Brennan

Lydia Ourahmane

I


Revolt against the sun, 
our desert of the sky.


If land is an image, landscape is a film,
a sea shell collection of single images, letters


From, light. To, night.


Twenty-four frames per second of a thousand and
one nights, one night, light spliced a dark cave, cinema.


Celluloid of silver halide crystals
and the glittering of sun on the sea.


Desert eyes longing for wet images
of the sea, see on screen:


a scale that only landscapes can conjure, films
lengthen time, which we call slow cinema, slow sentences,
commas, until we can’t spot the difference in the same scene:
landscape edited slowly over centuries, at the speed of detail.


Stretching time across landscape like a canvas.


Stillness is deceptive, moving images into a political
movement, from Tassili n’Ajjer to the Beqaa Valley
to a film, mapped for those who measure scale, who
move against the measures we are forced to live by.


That air blows,
That air blows,


Leave with a grain of sand, or
remain an inner-city citation.




II


Two films are rugged landscapes tracing methods
of colonial-era archaeology, of oral histories,


Two landscapes are chasing traces of local phantoms 
of knowledge, mapping the spirits of art histories.




where is the physical boundary, of the edge
of possibility, of a metaphysical geography?


The spiritual dimension of film

l-encompassing landscapes.
They are all so myst

, our experiments


are visible our myths are visible, our experiments


slipping from rock to land to landscape, filming 
an image factory of the unknowable.


Night vision in 16mm, a strict choreography 
of resource management, of camera movements.


Seeing is an act of physical endurance, look:


at the glint of paint in caves 
that art history never wanted us to see.




III




 of the Beqaa Valley
between arid and arable, human and BMW car,
drifting around and around and around and around
dusty contradictions that we hold close to our chest.


The custodians of ruins, the gleaners of history
who care, so we do not. The filmic landscape of
desert guardians from Niha in 

 who remember so we


do not have to do anything, only forget,
just drift, what car enthusiasts call drifting,
car tracks are a souvenir of the city.


Repair and restoration is a labour of land,
we grip onto land using the soles of our feet and
the wheels of our car, afraid that it will disappear
or shift in to another gear, another political car crash.


Wait in the differences between human and land
Write in the landscapes about an embodied pain
Whisper in the film about the plain disembodied
Parts of car and of limb and of sand.

The Drift

Tassili

Landscape Studies

James Richards

Trance or transmission, so James Richards’s irradiating film operates, at once some signal and some spell. A lyric, forensic account of a homebound body and its transient unconscious – optical, of course, per Walter Benjamin, but not only – 

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

 (2022) offers recent epidemic-era reportage streaked with the glitchy panic of the paranoiac, the ardent refrains of the romantic. (That is, those figures who insist on patterns where, perhaps, there are none.) If the delivered intelligence is both abject and pleasurable – in its deep carnal levity, in its spectral belief in bodily knowledges and the enigmatic messages of their attendant objects and images – what is such a signal or spell meant to summon, communicate, incur? Why this strange employ of surveillance genres and rituals, more self-survey here, but still? What quality of life is this?

Endoscopies and MRIs, pills and masks, pale and reddened hands and feet, stained toilet bowls and cracked sinks, diagnostic tests and sex toys, dirty slides and tubes, aesthetic inheritance and viral speculations, fears and patterns, stories of gendered ant colonies and bees, all poor images and aching songs: the manipulated images fall down the screen like some glitching waterfall. The forms and colours are pulled like candy, mirrored like nature. The images secrete colour or form, suggesting flows: of blood, semen, piss, images, sounds, light, thought, feeling. Objects and images that are scanned, panned, glitched, montaged. Loops of breath and lyric and some humid sound, the dry clicking of delay, pricking then settling then opening the nerves.

Rhythm makes the man, I kept thinking, lulled into seeing patterns where there were none, hearing loops, lyrics, auditory illusions where there were. ‘The cinematic apparatus produces a special kind of trance,’ Ute Holl writes. 

Cinema is aligned with the nervous functions as a series of impulses. If

we view cinema as a psycho-physical machine, this not only shows

images to be rhythmic impulses, it also shows that certain brain 

functions can be triggered by means of cinematic tricks.

Under what sign has Richards made this eros-laden film? What tricks, what triggers? I think about apocalypse. I think about apocalypse in its original sense, as the excavation and revealing of secret knowledges via language itself. ‘On my mind, apocalypse’, Bill Callahan sings, ludically, laconically, feverishly, across one of Richards’s spectral sequences. (He’s riding for a feeling, Bill is.) In this passage of 

, a black sky fills the screen – dark ground of the scanner evoking zero gravity – studded with buoyant, floating objects of indifferent beauty and current ruin: Q-tips, electronic thermometers, iPhone photos of white young men and their animal slaughter, cables, condoms, scissors, Euros, a green foil mask, black leather-daddy belts, postcards, shots, keys, more blue pills, a photo of a man dressed as Dracula in the wine aisle of a bodega, a broken red splat at his feet. Iconic images and objects of ritual all.

Elsewhere in the film, as Richards literally and figuratively tunnels into and among bodies, objects, rooms, materials, images, songs, sets, constructed worlds at once pharmacological and domestic, sacred and aesthetic, apparatuses both technological and tedious, his research takes him to the closest field. Is this, then, I wonder, an autoethnography of the dissembling corpus and its psychic and built environs, employing a new formulation of the ciné-trance – some filmed possession phenomenon à la Maya Deren and Jean Rouch? Or is it an auto-sacrifice for present pandemics and autofictive anti-aesthetics? To what gods is the artist trying to appeal? What is he trying to coax, to summon into existence?

‘Cinema belongs to the trance techniques of our culture because it systematically treats and shifts the normative and imaginary time frames, in which we remain subject to conscious daily production, in all the disciplines of our bodily knowledge,’Holl notes. Discipline, nervous functions, and the hyper vigilance they betray and manifest, seem to strobe and structure 

. Shot through with feeling (flooded with it, as we say), the film works by additive processes that run on parallel tracks of eros and anxiety, topical in its subject and applications. So much skin, so many surfaces (to inspect, to pan, to glitch, to suture together). If the artist appears to be in his atelier, not quite sheltering, he also seems to be in his feelings, making use. I am reminded of the advice William Godwin apparently once offered Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness “out of a set of materials within her reach.”

 (Advice that makes me laugh, wince, work. Maybe Richards too.) Holl writes:

What we call our own feelings can be objectified and adapted to the

technological state of time in cinema. Camera and editing techniques

accelerate our bodies’ own frequencies of shivering, vibrating, and

flickering. … The technology of montage lies at the border between

conscious and unconscious transmission in cinema.

The possibility of transmission – of signals of sound and image, of illness and language, of love and violence – incurs an alertness in its possible transmitter and receiver. Such vigilance might make one tunnel deep. Indeed, like so many of our possessed, with their cults and rites, their exalted objects and icons and imaginaries, Richards uses the material world, with all its highly visual orders, at once rough-hewn and brilliant, to invoke the immaterial world of our spectral doubles. That is, our psychic orders, our invisible feelings. An unconscious world of connections at once spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, brought into view (well) by some apparatus (entangled, as always, with us).

So his film goes. Scanning, panning, tunnelling, breathing, singing, washing, pissing, worrying, convalescing, dissembling, blurring, streaking, glitching, mirroring, seizing, smearing, fucking, talking, writing, making. The illusion and disillusion of movement, of transitioning from one state (of material or being) to another, a transience that can feel static, pure stasis, propels Richards’s film, collating its myriad ideas and images, not quite cleanly. The digital threads and edges come loose, stutter across the screen. The movement, shuddering then soothing then back again, feels embodied, projecting its hallucinatory, elliptical feelings back onto the viewer, making her – that is, me – shiver and calm. An ecstatic self-soothing, almost narcotic. Tricks and triggers of all kinds, indeed.


*

Entranced, lulled, and under the sign of transmission, of technological tunnelling into some forensic poetics, I decide to compile my own report on this film. Prose does not match the poetics ‘at work’ here; I need a more fragmentary form, nonlinear. I need to see the words like shards (floating across the pale field of the page). So I make a list of what I see:

All irradiating images, pill-strewn, glitching and seizing and mirroring.

Skin and porcelain, equally pale and broken, stained and smearing across