Variant 27 | Winter 2006

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Variant, issue 27, Winter 2006 Contents Putting Dada Flesh on the Bone John Beagles Get a Fucking Job: The Truth about Begging New Social Art School Chemical-Cocktail-Fruit Jan Nimmo Rose Coloured Spectacles Tom Jennings Competing Narratives Exposed Rena Bivens Blairism on the walls at Kelvingrove Stephen Dawber Academies, Religion and Private Philanthropy Peter Vlachos Louis – The Round The World Rug Race Metaphrog Rebel Alliances Interview with Ben Franks Ahmadinejad: Myth and Reality Yassamine Mather From Self to Structure: Challenging the ‘Happiness Industry’ Colin Clark Telling the Truth About Neo-liberalism Alex Law Turkey’s US-backed War On Terror: A Cause For Concern? Desmond Fernandes The Chinese Challenge: Hallucinations for Other Futures Think Art Lab ___________________________________________________ Putting Dada Fleshon theBone John Beagles ‘Don’t forget that polemics always played a big part in Dada’¹ The signs of Dada and Surrealism’s resurgence are manifold. Quirky, playful juxtapositions of incongruous elements fill many a contemporary gallery,² A belief that an absurdist, irrational, anarchic spirit of Dadaist and Surrealist revolt can be conjured up as a potent form of resistance to the venal tendencies of administered culture, is one source for this infatuation. Meanwhile an all more predictable and professional reason lurks; some of this has the desiccated³ flavour of Ikea Dada and Surrealism – studied, polite, saleable drawing room madness for urbane sophisticates. Either way, historical Dada and Surrealism has found itself reassessed, revised and repackaged in numerous recent exhibitions (Undercover Surrealism at the Hayward Gallery, London being the most obvious), while the popularity of a litany of artists referencing, name checking and stealing from both movements is undeniable. I’m not especially interested in the plurality of reasons for this rediscovered artistic fascination, more the manner in which artists and ideas, especially from Dada, have been institutionally and academically re-appraised. Specifically, how the anti-art impulse or the “desire for art to have an operation” (founding Dada poet and essayist Tristan Tzara’s remark) has been managed or neutered. The contrasting aims of two recent projects to revise accepted ideas about the nature and legacy of New York Dada – Amelia Jones’ book Irrational Modernism : A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, and David Hopkins’ publication and exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery Dada’s Boys, are revealing in this respect. Both represent absorbing, subtly distinct reassessments of this era, offering cogent reasons for the period’s ongoing influence within contemporary culture. The differing methodologies of the two projects are equally illuminating. Jones’ combines exhaustive scholarly research with a ‘hot’, personal, subjective voice, which guiltlessly reveals its partisan connection with the subject – “sometimes reading about the Baroness [...] I feel attached to [her] by a hot, electrified wire of neurosis across the decades”.⁴ Her intention in doing this is for the “lines between fact and fiction, between art history and storytelling, between biography and autobiography”⁵ to be blurred in such a way as to expose the interestedness of all history writing. This kind of passion and connection perhaps underpinned Hopkins’ Dada’s Boys, but his catalogue and exhibition was far cooler, more Duchampian in its suppression of subjectivity and its sublimation of heat. Dada Woman As noted, of the two, Jones’ work is the lengthier, more evolved and scholarly,⁶ offering as it does a convincing revisionist, unashamedly feminist reappraisal of the neglected role of Dada provocateur Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Within the New York art world of European émigrés, sitting out the First World War in narcotic intoxication⁷ brought on by the psychological trauma of the war (hence her use of the early psychiatry term neurasthenia⁸), the Baroness was, even by the standards of this most self-consciously arch-wild avant garde, excessive and eccentric. As Jones remarks, “there was something unnerving, otherworldly, irrational about the Baroness, even in the context of the supposedly radical Bohemian and avant garde circles of the day”.⁹ The artist George Biddle’s description of the Baroness gives a brief idea of how her revolt superficially manifested itself: "She stood before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tinned tomato cans, fastened with a green string around her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small birdcage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamakers. She removed her hat, which had been trimmed with carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermilion^."10 As New York’s premier kleptomaniac, part time poet, professional scavenger, unofficial performance artist, polemicist,¹¹ sexual predator, lesbian icon and all round transgressor, this Teutonic force of nature cut a startlingly irregular shape within the modernist grid of New York City. Part of Jones’ project is then to delineate how the Baroness’ unbound, visceral embodiment of Dada (“She is the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.”¹²) was a challenge to the avant garde men of the New York scene. As Jones highlights, the treatment she received at the hands of many male artists (the poet William Carlos Williams, whom she sexually intimidated, called her a “dirty old bitch”) pointed to the gap between the rhetoric and reality – “She was thus a figure who pointed to the limitations of avant gardism.”¹³ Recounting an inability and resistance amongst some, though not all, of the Dada Boys¹⁴ to cope with the Baroness’ sexual appetite and absence of “respectable avant garde behavior”¹⁵, is then one counter-intuitive aspect of the book. As Jones recounts, the Baroness shamelessly “performed herself in dramatically unglued personifications [that] unhinged the European masculinity [of the New York Dada Boys club, revealing] men whose aesthetic radicality was often mitigated by their conservatism in the face of actual gender or social excess.”¹⁶ The picture that emerges of New York Dada in the book is then one where the established secure identities of many leading Dadaists somewhat disintegrate. Characters such as Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray and the poet William Carlos Williams, patently damaged by the psychological impact of the First World War, are revealed to be more complex, flawed ‘avant gardists’ than the popular mythology. There’s certainly a sense of them being respectable bourgeois men playing at being transgressors. The Baroness’ curt remark about William Carlos, “he only attacks art – when he has the time”, and her complaints about the manner in which Duchamp “prostitutes himself” are astute in this context. No doubt Jones’ exhaustive recounting of this ‘gap’ between the talk and the action, and the numerous revelations of misogyny, will resonant for some contemporary women artists similarly surrounded by professional ‘bad boys’. The other more pointed aspect is a critique of art historical institutions and their similar inability and resistance to locating the Baroness within the canon of Dada. Along with Arthur Craven – another figure who until recently was critically marginalised – the Baroness has largely been historically invisible because of an inability to successfully classify her. While her gender was the primary reason for this ‘oversight’, an important dimension of her neglect, like Craven’s, was her relative ‘failure’ to produce autonomous art objects.¹⁷ As noted she “lived avant gardism”, embodying and personifying Dada ‘revolt’ through her actions and on her body. Her eccentric street attire of scavenged junk, stolen trinkets and vermilion scalp, was as potent a ‘popular’ act of cultural and social insurrection as the pantomime of a Dada ball. Within art movements exclusively concerned with the production of autonomous objects it’s common to find figures who spark aesthetic insurrections, but who themselves fail to realize the potential of their iconic rupturing of practice, ultimately becoming mere footnotes in history. Indeed, David Hopkins in his otherwise excellent ‘A Very Short Introduction to Dada and Surrealism’, frames his mention of the Baroness precisely within these terms (she gets a paragraph and one further brief mention). In his book Hopkins describes her, instructively, as a Dada mascot, whose artworks (classified and understood solely as objects) were relatively minor. Marginalisation of these iconoclasts or mascots, who could be credited with embodying a spirit or operating as a ‘muse’ is common within more conventional, aesthetic, ‘formal’ movements is perhaps ‘acceptable’. However within the context of Dada, a movement rhetorically concerned with anti-art, where testing the ontological securities of cultural, social, sexual categories and borders was everything, it’s a substantial historical flaw. In this movement all actions, ephemeral or permanent, official or unofficial, art or non-art are as essential as historical ‘matter’. The Baroness, like Arthur Craven, may have been an insubstantial or minor contribution to Dada objects, but as instigators of a revolution of the mind and body, they were as effective as many. Such an historical and institutional sleight of hand which demotes this kind of ‘influence’ to the margins, by virtue of the difficulties of picturing it within the gallery or museum (a challenge which should perhaps be faced rather than conveniently ignored), is as problematic with Dada as it has been with the repackaging and managing of conceptualism – another rupture that sought to give art and operation. Jones’ book is then a timely focus on a figure who in her actions offers a much needed corrective to the lop-sided representation of the history of Dada. All too often Dada and Surrealism returns as a skeletal disembodiment: something the recent Undercover Surrealism show was guilty of in its rather too desiccated presentation of Bataille and his followers. An inability to bring back to life the more vulgar, excessive, irrational, anti-aesthetic moments in Dada is then firstly a misrepresentation of history. After all, the importance of figures like Craven and the Baroness on the Dada ‘scene’ was well documented at the time. As Hans Richter noted, “Craven was greatly admired, because he succeeded in tearing Bourgeois existence apart at the seams. He carried out to the letter all the deeds of anarchy he promised in his writings.”¹⁸ Jones’ reprinting of a hilarious extract from the Baroness’ diary, detailing her inability to hold in a fart while attempting to seduce a young man and the frosty response her flatulence receives, strangely says as much about the ‘air’ of rebellion in New York Dada as any readymade. Consequently, treating the performances, actions and opinions of an historical figure as culturally significant as the ‘left-behind’ artifacts is important. Jones’ book is then in its concentration on the Baroness, a principled commitment to not siding with one of the winners of art history. She makes this explicit in an edited version of her text, reprinted in the recent ‘Dada Seminars’ publication: "There’s a tendency in art history to privilege the cultural victors and those artists whose reputation has already been solidified or whose work in one way or another serves the purposes of the discourse that comprise the discipline and its institutional support structures.^"19 The obvious example of the victor in the story of New York Dada is Duchamp. Despite being a self confessed ‘fan’ of Duchamp, Jones’ book unavoidably questions, both implicitly and explicitly the mythology and centrality of Duchamp and co. in the official story of Dada. As such, it is a timely and welcome puncturing of the sacred cult of Marcel – especially as an unquestioning acceptance of Duchamp’s ‘genius’ and ‘radicalism’ has become rather too entrenched and academic.²⁰ There is something patently absurd in the institutional and critical lionizing of Duchamp as the arch-strategist who debunked institutional authorial power – as Jones calls it, the “oxymoronic codification [of] the Duchampian ‘tradition’.”²¹ Increasingly in Jones’ narrative the picture of Duchamp that emerges, while suitably intriguing, does highlight how it’s perhaps more useful to think of him as representing what Hans Richter called a “sublime compromise” as opposed to ‘successful’ subversion. While not believing that the Baroness represents some romantic outsider example of ‘liberation’ (she died in abject poverty, alone and forgotten), such a reading does muddy the waters regarding Duchamp’s centrality in the story of Dada and by extension art history. Perhaps as T.J. Clark remarked, “Duchamp is the figure of what our century has allowed in the way of radical critique.”²² The emphasis on ‘allowed’ is obviously significant. Irrational Modernism, is then, a timely reassessment of this entrenched approach to Dada and attending ideas about the nature of the avant-garde. As Jones’ writes: "In art history we are far too attached to a simplistic notion of the avant garde as a group of heroic (almost always white male) individuals fighting unequivocally against the evils of capitalism and the dumbed down values of its mass bourgeois culture." The book does an excellent job of revealing how historical denial of inconvenient figures like the Baroness in the history of Dada has resulted in this streamlined mono-history. Contrary to such a methodology, Jones’ argument "for a model that is equally critical, but that functions by returning the skull to life – giving it flesh – through the very identificatory processes that art history has long labored to suppress in order to sustain its illusion of objectivity.^"23 succeeds in bringing history into close proximity as well as challenging the (fictional) coherence of much art historical writing on the period. Just as she highlights how the Baroness represented an irrational, bodily subjectivity that polluted stable categories, so Jones similarly offers an infestation of the ‘neutral’ position of the professional art historian. Dispensing with the fiction of objectivity she aims "to promote a kind of neurasthenic art history – one that acknowledges rather than suppresses the confusing projections and identifications through which we art historians give meaning to works of art, movements, and the artists who make and sustain them both."²⁴ Dada’s Boys Curated by art historian David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys was an intelligent and timely exhibition which, as with Jones’ book, aimed to take as its original focus the fecund world of New York Dada. However, while Jones’ subject was the proto-feminist provocateur the Baroness, Hopkins’ exhibition and book was concerned with evoking “Dada’s [...] paternalistic role for a lineage of predominantly male artists concerned with developing themes of male identity.” Hopkins’ shift of attention towards the reverberations of Dada’s interrogation of masculinity appeared to be an astute curatorial means of avoiding the difficulties of trying to represent and re-animate the stereotypical mythic notion of Dada. Those expecting to be assaulted by a Dada riot would have been disappointed; Dada’s Boys functioned as a soberly constructed, formally balanced exhibition and an accessible, engaging catalogue and text. However, the extent to which the air of sobriety in the Fruitmarket Gallery was maintained was a point of contention. On one level, the switch of interpretation towards Dada’s picturing of a poetics of masculinity, and its echoes in contemporary practice, was a judicious act of Dada revisionism that corrected an evident lag between curatorial and institutional analysis and artistic practice. As was borne out by the show, numerous artists in the last thirty years have acknowledged a debt to Dada’s examination of the exploded “hole at the center of masculinity.”²⁵ While some critics have picked up on the continuing influence of Dada, few have offered as comprehensive an overview as Dada’s Boys. Uncovering this hidden tradition, Hopkins’ aim then was to counter the standard readings of key artists such as Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger and Paul McCarthy. Alongside this desire to correct an art historical blind spot, Dada’s Boys, as the catalogue revealed, was also driven by a sense of underlying frustration on Hopkins’ part with a perceived absence of a broader critical examination of heterosexual male identity. However Hopkins, unlike Jones, was more typically ‘masculine’ in not acknowledging his personal investment and motivation for this project. A perhaps well grounded fear that it would jeopardise his credentials as a ‘professional’ art historian prompted his relative invisibility in the text. This resistance to ‘voicing’ his involvement was slightly amusing considering the topic. In his catalogue essay Hopkins remarked that “the literature on heterosexual masculinity is formidably large, but frustratingly repetitive.”²⁶ Part of his argument was that the arena of male subjectivity has been somewhat colonized by psychological, queer and feminist theory. For Hopkins, the need for a contemporary reassessment of Dada and its historical reverberations resides in precisely how it offers a corrective to the absence in theoretical texts of heterosexual masculinity; of any substantive discussion of how masculinity is lived and experienced on a daily basis. Discussing the dominant theories of masculinity, he noted a lack of understanding of “patterns of friendship, the dynamics of group identification and loyalty, structures of humour and self reflexivity”,²⁷ which has resulted in the standard assessment being somewhat superficial (though he is slightly vague about who he means in this context). Consequently for Hopkins, the tendency towards deconstructing and dissecting the heterosexual male through feminist and queer lenses has reduced him to a state of self-abnegation. As a result there has been a notable failure to grapple with the complexities of heterosexual masculinity, especially those darker more uncomfortable areas of what Homi Bhabha called masculinity’s “prosthetic reality”. There was then, within this art historical illumination of a largely ignored facet of Dada, also a programmatic attempt to inject some self-confidence to the beleaguered male. While there was a whiff of an anti-PC backlash in this, Hopkins patently grasped the paradoxes of the situation. After all, (heterosexual) “men may be the threatened sex but they are also still the threatening sex.” Theoretically the show’s and the catalogue’s ground was clearly laid out, however how it manifested itself aesthetically in the Fruitmarket space was a source of critical tension. The Sublime Compromise "Because he is so frightfully cold. You see all his heat flows into his art."²⁸ On entering the Fruitmarket space, Duchamp, the fount of Hopkins’ theses, was represented by familiar images as ‘Rrose Sélavy’, and a more surprising photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp covered in shaving foam. Nearby, Picabia’s schematic parodies of mechanized femininity sat vitrine-entombed next to his heretical bodily spurt of ‘La Sainte Vierge’. For Hopkins, both artists bonded through their contempt for the dominant male stereotypes of the time (the stereotypes who were being slaughtered in the trenches, while they drank cocktails in Manhattan), as well a more anxious sense of their own passive, feminized self. Experiencing gender vertigo, they embraced a fluid sense of self and used an adolescent form of humour to bullishly protect themselves. The aim for Hopkins the curator was to illuminate how their complex, paradoxical grasp of the ‘troubled’ self has been mirrored in more recent work. The selection of international artists following in Duchamp’s and Picabia’s tracks, in this Scottish context, represented something of a welcome coup, but was still slightly hampered by precisely the kind of fondness for the ‘victors’ that Jones had remarked upon.²⁹ The presence of Matthew Barney was perhaps the most obvious example of this tendency. Canonised on the international art circuit, with Cremaster globally colonising every space the Guggenheim can muscle in on, his appearance was unnecessary. It also offered a reminder of how the kind of programmatic surrealism favoured by Breton (for that is surely what Barney’s work really retails as) emptied the anti-art out of Dada. This aside, Hopkins’ interest in Dada’s neglected examination of the “poetics of masculinity” seemed to result in a certain partitioning or removal of an integral aspect of the ethos of the Dada Boys. In concentrating on illuminating the poetics he neglected the anti-art polemics, as well as shying away from the more confrontational and ambiguous aspects of heterosexual male identity. In the catalogue essay Hopkins referred to the Boys as an “unruly group of male artists who have little truck with the conformism of Mammy’s boys”,³⁰ and who delve into the murkier areas of male subjectivity. Unfortunately the signs of this weren’t always there, instead there was a sense of bringing the Dada Boys into proportion. This was odd, as Dada, and many of the artists following in the bastardised parental lineage, often deliberately failed or were strategically incompetent in ‘properly’ sublimating irrational desires into art and culture. Letting irrational desires out, letting the work slip and slide and operate in flux was a recurring aspect of Dada and its followers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the base, excessive work Paul McCarthy has produced for the last thirty years. In this context McCarthy could have delivered a more excessive performance of the “hole at the centre of masculinity”, but the chosen exhibition work (‘Cultural Soup’) was an atypical, minor piece, far more in the intellectually respectable mould of Mike Kelley and his sociological uncovering of power. This absence of precisely the kind of evidence of the irrational, unclassifiable, and visceral body embodied by the Baroness was significant. As it was, there was a nagging sense of aesthetic propriety, somewhat out of keeping with the subject and the catalogue’s claims (as noted, on the whole the signs of aesthetic transgression, of snubbing decorum, were mild). I’m not arguing here for a raucous, tokenistic, cacophony of ‘noise’, the now conventional, superficial, formal signs of white cube rebranding, rather evidence of a more substantive rethinking of the cognitive and aesthetic base of artistic communication. While Keith Farqhuar’s installation and painting did at least reference the Dada tendency to tartly bite the hand that feeds, the exhibition as a whole was largely devoid of this kind of questioning of the aesthetics of gallery spectatorship, and the unraveling of the category ‘artist’ that was central to Dada. There was a real opportunity to reveal this with the inclusion of Jeff Koons. Koons is admittedly one of the ‘victors’ in recent art history, but I’m inclined to argue the grounds for his ‘victory’ are erroneous. Unfortunately the choice of one of Koons’ basketballs squarely and safely placed him in the “oxymoronic Duchampian tradition” of producing readymade sculptures that are institutionally lauded as exposing institutions’ power to confer value. Contrary to this, it could be argued that Koons’ more substantial, ‘troubling’ challenge to the authority of art institutions lay not with the Duchamp influenced, respectable ready-mades,³¹ but the overtly sexualized sculptures, performances and photographs he lovingly produced (partly with Cicolina – a reincarnated Baroness?) and exhibited in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Koons is perhaps one artist who, at least then, walked in the tracks of his Dada precursors – albeit in a perverse tangential, pseudo evangelical manner. The work he produced between 1988-1992 definitively infected the sphere of art with illegitimate ‘responses’ (affection for trash, seduction), tested its ontological boundaries, and troubled the foundations of gallery spectatorship. This assault on the dominant aesthetics of art consumption went alongside, as Hopkins rightly discusses, an overlooked complex, ambiguous grasp of the intersections of class, sexuality and gender that deserves greater critical attention. However these were not distinct aspects of his practice; form and content were intimately linked. Increasingly, however, the reading of Koons, as with the Dadaists, has focused on the formal category status of his objects (trinkets from the world of low-end consumerism). I’d argue that what was really subversive about his work was not the tired ‘trafficking’ of exotic objects into art (a standard ruse to liven up the ‘academy’ with some ‘rough’), but his transportation of cognitive forms of attention from outside art (his love for these objects being the most pronounced subversion of critical distance). In this way he questioned the ontological securities of art consumption and spectatorship just as the Dadaists had some 70 years before. One of Jones’ remarks regarding the Baroness and Duchamp seems applicable in this context: "I argue that these artists’ confusion of gender and overt sexualisations of the artist/ viewer relationship challenged post-Enlightenment subjectivity and aesthetics far more pointedly than did Dadaist paintings and drawings, which only partially addressed the divisions that privileged art as separate from life.^"32 Footnotes 1 Recounted in Richter’s book (Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Thames and Hudson, 1978, p.7 ) when he visits Tristan Tzara – it’s Tzara’s parting shot. 2 Too numerous to mention, but especially hot in Scotland – wander into anyone of the Glasgow’s contemporary galleries right now and you’re likely to find outsized mundane objects, heads with chair legs. 3 I am indebted to Graham Ramsay for informing me of the writer Robert Garnet’s liberal use of this word in relation to some members of the art community. 4 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism : A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press 2004) p. 28. 5 Ibid. p. 25 6 I think this is mainly due to the differing nature of the two publications, as opposed to any failing on Hopkins part. His book and exhibition is obviously aimed at a pseudo-populist gallery clientele, while Jones’ book is squarely aimed at the university. 7 Jones’ book features a fantastic photography of Duchamp, not looking his ‘normal’ composed self, but resolutely ‘bombed’, slumped in a bathroom overtaken by booze and chemicals 8 Neurasthenia described a collection of psychological and physical symptoms including chronic fatigue. Initially associated with the stresses of urbanization on the intellectual class, it was an increasingly common War diagnosis. 9 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 5 10 Ibid. 11 Her polemics could often be anti-Semitic, something Jones doesn’t dodge. 12 John Rodker’s remark in the Little Review quoted in Naumann, F. M. New York Dada 1915-23 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Jan 1998), p. 168. 13 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 14 The Baroness’ relationship with Duchamp is especially intriguing. Jones teasingly hints at the Baroness’ possible authorship of Duchamp’s urinal. 15 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, pg.10 16 Jones, A, The Dada Seminars, (volume of 12 essays published by The National Gallery of Art, Washington) pg 160. 17 This is not to say she didn’t, just that few of them have survived or become ‘official’ Dada art. 18 Richter, H, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, p. 85. 19 The October group infatuation with all things Duchampian is rather worryingly revealed in The Duchamp Effect edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (MIT 1996). Reading it I was reminded of the exasperated tone of Terry Atkinson in his 1980’s Open University television program, where he took one of the early pot-shots at the Duchampian myth – “too sophisticated a bourgeois mind not to sense the grip which modern art’s ideologies had on him, instead of finding an alternative he extended the limits of what he was seemingly trying to get away from – so for all its assumed intellectual rigour and order Étant donnés is for me the ultimate act of incoherence. Duchamp’s last bourgeois, hollow smile…and his reputation rolls on endlessly…” 20 Jones, A, The Dada Seminars 21 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, pg.22 22 Clark, T.J., ‘All the things I said about Duchamp: A response to Benjamin Buchloh’, in The Duchamp Effect edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (MIT 1996)p.g - 23 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 239 24 Ibid. p. 172 25 Ibid. p. 44 26 Hopkins, D, Dada’s Boys (Fruitmarket 2006), p. 16 27 Ibid., p. 18 28 The Baroness on Duchamp. She goes on, “For that reasons, although he loves me, he would never even touch the hem of my red oilskin slicker. Something of his dynamic warmth – electrically – would be dissipated by the contact.” Quoted in Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 102 29 Paul McCarthy, John Bock, Keith Farquhar, Sarah Lucas, Jeff Koons, Roderick Buchanan, Knut Asdam, Martin Kippenberger, Richard Prince, Francis Picabia, Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Lee Miller, Douglas Gordon and Matthew Barney. 30 Hopkins, D, Dada’s Boys, p. 15 31 There is a well documented snob value in professing an admiration for Duchamp – after all. 32 Jones, A, Eros, That’s Life, or the Baroness’ Penis in making Mischief: Dada invades New York (Whitney Museum of American Art 1996) pp. 23 back to top ____________________________________________________ Get a Fucking Job: The Truth about Begging A critical, but solidary review by a member of New Social Art School Aberdeen is one of the wealthiest cities in Scotland with an average income 5% above the national.¹ This however hides the greater disparity in income and circumstances on the ground – a happy few are better off than a large number can even begin to imagine. Conversely, some are more destitute than we like to acknowledge. According to the same data, provided on the Aberdeen City Council homepage from a survey of 2005, 18% of households are living below the poverty line.² Investigating the situation of beggars in the city, Danish artist Eva Merz’s book ‘Get a Fucking Job’ explores the lives of some of those on the have-not side of this great divide. Ban the Beggars The result of a year-long, slow and considered approach to many of the people on the streets, the book ‘Get a Fucking Job: The Truth About Begging’ consists of a collection of conversations with 13 beggars, former beggars, relatives and support workers. The starting point for the project was a campaign carried predominantly by the region’s two main newspapers, The Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Evening Express, calling for a ban of begging in late 2004 – about a year after begging had become an offence in England. While the media purported to speak for Aberdeen citizens, their outcry supported ongoing ambitions within Aberdeen City Council. In September 2004 at the City’s Community Services Committee a report on Street Begging by the Council’s Safer Aberdeen task group recommended, among other measures to be undertaken in a 12-month pilot scheme, the introduction of a byelaw which would make street begging unlawful in the city. This was a response to a “perceived increase in the levels of overall street begging and aggressive begging”.³ Following the launch of this pilot a ‘Safer Aberdeen Sub-group on Street Begging’ was formed. The group is made up of staff from various Social Works departments of the City Council, the local voluntary organisation Aberdeen Cyrenians, Grampian Police, and NHS Grampian. In a progress report on the Pilot Street Begging Initiative in January 2006, after the scheme had run for 12 months, an extension of 6 months was recommended. The overarching goal of these measures is the absence of any beggars in the streets, although it is acknowledged that “there is evidence to suggest that where individuals give up street begging, others will take their place.” The group’s own report goes on to acknowledge that there is a lack of resources both to administrate the scheme and to provide support to beggars. The report also returns to the proposed byelaw and the negative response from the Scottish Executive in June 2005, which recommends the use of existing legal force in the form of Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOS). Interestingly, the restated need for the byelaw in the 2006 report, responding to the Executive, now argues for the need to make begging unlawful in the following terms: "The reason for seeking approval for the Byelaw was to establish a means that could be used as an added incentive for people who have complex needs, who tend not to engage in aggressive begging and who are unwilling to engage with support services."⁴ The definition of aggressive begging given later in the report includes activities such as sitting in the proximity of a cash dispenser while asking for money. As Aberdeen City Councillor Neil Fletcher clarified in comments to the BBC: “We think a by-law is the only way we can remove these people from the centre of town.”⁵ In contrast with the above-mentioned ‘perceived increase’ cited as the justification for criminalising begging, Grampian Police, as mentioned in the January 2006 report itself, estimate, based on CCTV footage, that a relatively constant number of about 25 people beg in the city, mainly on the main shopping street and in its immediate vicinity. In the months following this progress report by the Council, the Scottish Executive has agreed to reconsider the proposed byelaw. Speaking for Themselves When confronted with the demands for a ‘begging ban’ in the local press in autumn 2004, Merz decided to investigate the issue in an art project that clearly came down on the side of the beggars, and in particular countered claims made regarding their perceived wealth. As stated in the book’s introduction, she wanted to find out what was really going on from the beggars’ position and at the same time to allow them to speak for themselves. Merz founded The New Social Art School in 2004 as a framework for her work with others who then become ‘members’. The ‘school’ is conceived as an open group for collective, informal learning through communication in various artistic projects focused on social issues. In this project Merz collaborated with Bob Steadman, an artist who had experienced homelessness himself. Interviews with both Merz and Steadman by Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi aim to make the positions and relationships of the authors clear. In addition to Steadman’s support, initial contact with beggars was provided through the voluntary organisation Aberdeen Cyrenians. Merz also approached beggars directly in the street, and went on to develop further contacts through them. The main underlying motive in the work emerges as that of understanding their perspective through an exploration of their position as they tell and live it. The appeal to the reader is that they develop their position, as it were, in retracing the experience of the artist into increasing understanding of the beggars’ positions. The underlying aim of the project is to create empathy. Based on Merz’s own identification with the viewpoints and experiences of those she speaks to, the reader is encouraged to feel what it is like to be a beggar. Merz’s interviews are interspersed with a series of black and white pencil drawings by Steadman, her collaborator on the project. Steadman’s illustrations were made some time before his work with Merz, while living on the streets himself. In addition, he also made one print for the project. As an approach to art practice and in their visual imagery, the drawings are in tension with, while integrated into, the wider project. They represent a nightmarish, emotional and individual vision – fused shapes encompassing faces, figures, body parts. In contrast to the overall dialogic structure and focus on social interaction between people, theirs is an inner, isolated world. His new work for the book, an etching, represents the social world in symbols as a closed, impersonal system. His explanatory text – handwritten, underlining the authentic, personal expressiveness of his work – is a decoding of his personal inner world-view. In the publication, the drawings are also interpreted through an interview with Steadman. Their meaning emerges in their creation by someone who has himself been homeless as embodying his authentic expression and ultimate identity. Unlike her questions to Merz, in her discussion with Steadman, Rodriguez-Remedi remains caught up in a fascination with his background and creative expression is seen exclusively in relation to this. However, in the process of proximity, friendship and collaboration, Steadman’s representation is – as far as anyone can be in control of this – based on his own intentions. Within the publication, his drawings stand in conflict with the publication’s dominant mode of art practice – the research-based, conceptual work with our attendant aesthetic and ethical expectations. Whereas Merz develops an almost neutral, self-effacing visual presence, yet remains in control with her life beyond the project is not exposed, Steadman’s drawings are pushed to represent his ‘real’ being as a ‘street person.’ Representing his unmediated, true expression, they also claim to reveal and stand for ‘the truth about begging’. The Truth about Begging The claim to a truthful portrayal of the authentic experience of the beggars is at the heart of the project. On a very basic level the book gives the beggars a voice to counter the media claims. Contrary to the claims of council and media, the beggars speaking in the book know plenty about support systems and have plenty of reasons why they are not adequate for them. The truth emerging in this respect is one of extremely limited resources offered, and those are in decline. The most salient example is the fate of the homeless shelters in Aberdeen, some of which were closed some years ago, but not replaced with other facilities, a situation that continues. Reprinted clippings from local newspapers and references to a critical report on the shortcomings of housing services in Aberdeen by Communities Scotland⁶ lend further support to the claims of the beggars. The goal of ‘Get a Fucking Job’ is, however, not primarily the countering of data used by press and council with other facts, but to investigate the meaning of begging and what it is like to beg for those doing it. This is for Merz the truth of the beggars’ perspectives, in their differences and individual struggles. Yet the notion of ‘speaking the truth’ is obviously complex, as, on a basic level, the conversation develops in relation to the immediate situation, the relationship, including the respective social positions of those involved and their respective goals.⁷ Hence Merz’s efforts, to create a more equal situation, to meet the beggars as much as possible in the spaces of their choice and on their terms. In the range of printed interviews – all were agreed with those interviewed before publication – some clearly take pleasure in telling adventures while others are eager to present a ‘reformed’ identity. Many endeavour to set themselves apart from other beggars in the particularity of their own situation. It seems safe to assume that both Merz’s own conjecture – which she attempts to clarify through the interviews and the conversation with Rodriguez-Remedi recounted in the book – and the roles beggars share when undertaking their activity, influenced the truth stated in ‘Get a Fucking Job’. Merz’s focus on individuals’ perspectives produces room for understanding, rather than the focus on immediate solutions that dominate institutional surveys. As pointed out in Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘La misère du monde’ such surveys, commissioned by government and voluntary agencies, fail to account for the complexity of their subjects’ lived realities as the questions and manner of enquiry reduce the potential answers.⁸ Their scope of enquiry is based on what is already pre-empted as worth knowing by the commissioning body, thus reducing the existence of the interview subjects as well as the scope for what can be said, and hence recorded and revealed. Singing with one Voice The main focus of the interviews is the beggars’ present existence. Their histories, as remembered and told by them, are as fragmented and individual as is their daily life and their struggle to get by. As Merz asks questions and enters the sphere of the beggars, her knowledge of their lives increases and similarities emerge between their stories. Rather than being outside of society, ‘excluded’, they very much play a role, they engage, however different their initial situations, personal tragedies, aspirations, and views are. Begging very much emerges as a job in itself. One of those portrayed, Zoe, significantly, describes the people who give money as “customers”. All have a clear notion of the skills, the self-presentation required to attract money from passers-by. Begging clearly is part of public, even economic, life rather than outside of it. In this way, the ‘truth’ that emerges in their personal, daily experiences, reveals a reality of hard work and relationships with others that are suppressed in the official accounts of street begging as a threatening and alien presence in public space. The main shopping street of Aberdeen, Union Street, and the adjacent shopping centre, is punctuated with banners spanning the width of the street displaying official images of the city. For the last few months, the message has been “Aberdeen – City and Shire. A Brighter Outlook”. This new city brand cost the Council £150,000 from London-based consultant Corporate Edge. Although documents about the branding state its goal is to sell the region to consumers and business elsewhere, the dominating presence of the logo and message in the city centre can only reach local people. As with previous banner series in the same location, the message both labels the surrounding area and the people passing through, prescribing the correct vision of the city. Both this branding exercise and the desire to remove beggars from the streets are highly visible symptoms of the control of public space and the authorities’ vision of their ideal city and citizen – Freedom Of Information requests reveal almost £5m over the past three years has been spent by the Council on external consultants. Documents in support of those two ostensibly very different measures both evoke economic benefit and unity amongst (ideal) members of the community.⁹ In his study of contemporary conflicts over urban spaces in the USA, the criminologist Jeff Ferrell describes the underlying issues in such measures: "In such landscapes [the public spaces of contemporary cities]…occupants know each other primarily as threats, understand each other mostly as objects of mutual distrust and surveillance – and so, with the social shut down, the expansion of control, the presence of a protective police state seems a reasonable and necessary option for ensuring ‘community’. In such landscapes, the aesthetics of exclusion becomes aesthetics of authority; the policing of public space spawns a parallel policing of perception.^"10 Eva Merz’s efforts to see her project featured in the local press or commented upon by Councillors have, so far, met with determined silence. The book, however, has been selling well in local stores. With the imminent review of the begging ban and Merz’s continuing relationships with beggars, the project of New Social Art School in Aberdeen is very much ongoing. Their next project, a film about the lives of those Merz and Steadman call the street people of Aberdeen, will aim to shift those limitations that keep us and the beggar in our professional roles by focusing on the imagination, dreams and hopes as well as the daily realities of her subjects, who are also, very often, her friends. ‘Get a Fucking Job’ by New Social Art School (ISBN 0-9543574-6) is available at various booksellers such as Fop and Waterstone’s, Aberdeen; Wordpower, Edinburgh; and online at amazon.co.uk Footnotes 1 ‘Low Income Households in Aberdeen,’ Aberdeen City Council, November 2005 www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acci/web/files/Stats_Facts/LowIncome_aberdeen.pdf While this is obviously a reductive use of data, the scope of this article lies not in the evaluation of statistics, with their differing provenance, aim, methodology and changing criteria. 2 ‘Low Income Households in Aberdeen,’ Aberdeen City Council, November 2005 www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acci/web/files/Stats_Facts/LowIncome_aberdeen.pdf 3 ‘Pilot Street Begging Initiative – Progress Report’, Community Services Committee, Aberdeen City Council, 31 January 2006, www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf 4 See above www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf 5 Aberdeen beg-ban law reconsidered, BBC News, Wednesday, 26 July 2006,http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/5216032.stm 6 The report found homelessness provision in the city to be “poor”. See ‘Communities Scotland Inspection report. Aberdeen City Council. November 2005’, Communities Scotland, www.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/stellent/groups/public/documents/webpages/ripcs_011493.pdf 7 In ‘La misère du monde’, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1993, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu sets out a methodology for interview situations based on an awareness of social hierarchies and the preconceptions of those involved, which raise issues relevant to the interview format of ‘Get a Fucking Job’. 8 Pierre Bourdieu and others, ‘La misère du monde’, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1993, p. 928 9 See ‘Why Brand Aberdeen City and Shire?’, Aberdeenshire Council, www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/support/city_shire.asp (9 September 2006) and ‘Pilot Street Begging Initiative – Progress Report’, Community Services Committee, Aberdeen City Council, 31 January 2006, www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf 10 Jeff Ferrell. ‘Tearing Down the Streets. Adventures in Urban Anarchy’. Palgrave, New York 2001.p13-14 back to top ____________________________________________________ Chemical-Cocktail-Fruit Jan Nimmo A Glasgow-based artist, over the last 20 years I have worked on a wide range of creative projects from printmaking to filmmaking and facilitating for community groups. Since the early 1990s I have been a regular visitor to Latin America, carrying out research into popular arts and establishing links with community organisations. For almost 10 years I have worked on and off with Banana Link¹, which campaigns on banana trade issues and provides a voice in the UK and Europe for the banana and now pineapple workers’ trade unions. For 5 of these years I worked as Banana Link’s Scottish Worker, co-ordinating speaker tours with trade unions and campaign groups in Scotland. My work in Latin America is essentially about the lives that people lead, from earlier projects in Cuba and Mexico to more recent projects in Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador, where I have been working specifically with banana workers. I have become increasingly involved in labour rights and occupational health issues, through listening to the testimonies of the banana workers and interpreting for Latin American community activists visiting Glasgow. This has brought home to me the parallels with what has happened to workers in Scotland, with the experience of my own family and my father’s working life as a miner, shot-firer, driller and road-builder – all jobs which had a serious effect on his health. My father has recently received compensation for the emphysema that he now suffers from, though somehow this does not compensate for the loss of a comfortable retirement after a hard working life. In all of this I see my role as part of a bigger project –- that of building bridges between people and across cultures. To do this I need to keep my work simple, I don’t want to bamboozle, and I can’t diverge into the abstract and conceptual when I need to communicate with as wide an audience as possible. I see myself as a campaigner as much as an artist – I need to speak directly to get the message across, which may be complex but it cannot be ambiguous. Trouble in Paradise? Costa Rica is a country so rich in biodiversity – referred to by some as the Switzerland of Central America; “politically stable”, a country with no standing army – that it has been promoted as a destination for eco-tourists, and is widely seen as a tropical paradise in comparison to other Central American countries. But outside the boundaries of the country’s national parks there is another Costa Rica, one of cash crop monocultures and multinational fruit companies: here the picture is very different – environmental destruction and the blanket use of pesticides, chronic health problems and the repression of workers rights, suppression of trade unionists and the intimidation of those who speak out. I first met Carlos Arguedas eight years ago in Glasgow. While I was translating and playing host to him and a fellow trade unionist, I got to understand something about the situation in the banana-growing region of Costa Rica. I kept in touch with Carlos and, over the years, came to learn more about the history of the exploitation of the Atlantic Zone for banana production. This story begins over 100 years ago with the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and its domination of the economies of Central America, but through Carlos I learnt more about other struggles and the personal toll these had taken on him and the other people living and working on and around the banana plantations. In the 1970s, Carlos, like many other workers, was made sterile through exposure to the pesticide Nemagon (DBCP). Nemagon was already banned in the USA. Carlos was 27 years old at the time. He was imprisoned on numerous occasions for his trade union work and community activism, including land occupation. He also took part in organising action against Dole and Dow Chemicals, the manufacturer of Nemagon. After a two year campaign by the unions Costa Rica banned the use of Nemagon but the companies ignored the new laws and continued to use Nemagon for a further two years. One of the things which for me marks Carlos as someone special within the trade union movement is that as well as campaigning for trade union and labour rights he is also a passionate environmentalist. Almost half of the material costs on the average plantation are spent on a whole variety of agrochemicals used throughout the growing process. While working as Scottish Co-ordinator for Banana Link I met one of the few scientists prepared to speak out and not toe the company line (and that of the Costa Rican government) on the effects of agrochemicals on human health and on the environment. Dr Caterina Wesseling works for IRET, the department of toxicology at the University in San Jose and is also the Director of Central American occupational health programme, SALTRA. Dr Wesseling has carried out detailed investigations that show the extent to which pesticide and other chemical residues are present in homes and schools in the banana-producing areas. These chemicals come from the plantations and include allergens and carcinogens associated with a wide range of health problems. Much of the pesticide residue is airborne, coming from the aerial spraying which is carried out routinely but haphazardly, over the plantations and anything else in their proximity. There are various fungicides that are applied aerially, including Chlorothalonil and Mancozeb (both known carcinogens and allergens). The aerial spraying of these chemicals has had a huge impact on workers and communities living around the plantations: I have interviewed people with severe skin allergies and acute bronchial problems. The law in Costa Rica states that workers should be evacuated from the plantations while aerial spraying is taking place, but according to the testimonies of the workers, in reality this doesn’t always happen. I have also seen for myself how spraying is carried out and it is clear that there is no protection to the roads and smallholdings around the plantations. Other chemicals are associated with the bagging of bananas. The blue, Chlorpyrifos impregnated polythene bags are as common a sight as the banana plants themselves and discarded bags make up a significant and very visible proportion of the waste stream of commercial banana production. Most at risk are the baggers themselves (the bags have to be placed over the growing fruit by hand) but the chemical somehow finds its way into the bedrooms, kitchens and classrooms of the local community. Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate and a neurotoxin – associated with anorexia, suicides and depression (similar problems had been linked to exposure to sheep-dip in Scotland). Chlorpyrifos has already been banned on a number of plantations in Honduras – thanks to the pressure exerted by local trade unions and a study carried out by SALTRA. An international campaign is now building to ban the use of this chemical altogether, however its use remains widespread and global - Chlorpyrifos has even been found in bottled Coca Cola in India.² We may ask why bananas need such a cocktail of chemicals to grow healthily or to produce an economically viable crop. The Cavendish variety of banana grown universally for the world market is in fact a sterile hybrid, which while producing fruit that conform to the shape and colour the world expects, remains susceptible to disease in the warm and humid regions where it is grown. Reliance on chemicals continues in the washing and packing plants, where women workers are more exposed to the chronic effects of the pesticides and disinfectants. Protective gear such as rubber gloves create as many problems as they solve, as contaminated water and disinfectant become trapped inside. The results are clearly visible in the disfigured hands of some of the workers. I had seen that conditions in the banana industry were bad – but what about the other cash crops grown in the area? Since the market for bananas became saturated with cheap fruit from Ecuador, Costa Rican producers have taken the hint to diversify. Unfortunately this is not as positive as it sounds, as it means the substitution of one monoculture for another. These crops include melons and ornamental plants but the most damaging of all has been the pineapple – the production of which is both environmentally more destructive and more dependent on chemicals than the banana. Just like bananas, pineapples are grown in intensive conditions with the aid of a cocktail of chemicals. However, the pineapple is a short plant and lacks the ground cover and humus-producing leaves of the banana. The loss of ground cover has resulted in a massive increase in erosion and accelerated the run-off of pesticides into the once pristine lowland river systems. The pineapple plants also play host to a fly, which feeds off the blood of cattle in the neighbouring fields and can cause them each to lose a kilo in weight per day. As a result the cattle farmers are also using more pesticides to tackle the flies. I have spoken to smallholders forced off the land, their livestock poisoned, their livelihoods gone, leaving them with no option but to sell up to the fruit companies. I visited communities that depend on the river as a lifeline and which are now seriously affected by the poisoning of fish and the silting up of waterways. These communities rely on subterranean fresh watercourses as their only source of drinking water but these aquifers have also been affected by pesticides (such as Bromasil) and the wells are now contaminated. Both the trade unions and Caterina Wesseling are very damning about the certification of fruit production. Some of these framework agreements are voluntary internal standards, which lead us to believe that fruit is produced in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. External monitors do visit the plantations but they only see those workers who have been selected by the company and not the trade union representatives or the scientists involved in monitoring, so they do not get a clear and accurate picture of what happens day-to-day. In fact, many of the workers enjoy the days when inspections take place, since correct working procedures are more likely to be adhered to and they may get the chance to go home early! Dr Wesseling is particularly critical of Rainforest Alliance: “Yes, what a lovely name - it would lead you to believe this was paradise - but as far we are concerned they continue to certify conditions which are unacceptable.” I also saw that exposure to pesticides is by no means the only threat which the workers have to put up with. They work excessively long hours (12 hour shifts are common, up to 24 hours on pineapple plantations ) and have suffered from years of union repression. I wanted to know why the unions hadn’t done more to oppose these conditions. From Carlos I learnt about the history of Solidarismo – “yellow unions” set up by the banana companies with the support of the government and the right wing of the Catholic Church, supposedly to represent the workers but with the real intention of making it more difficult for them to form free trade unions of their own. In reality it is no better than a Christmas club. But the development of free trade unions has not been entirely suppressed by Solidarismo. I know one activist who joined the free trade union when he saw what Solidarismo was about – he has since visited Scotland, representing the banana workers during the G8 protests. The switch to pineapple production has also brought with it a change towards the “Ecuadorisation” of production. The fruit companies have learnt the lesson from Ecuador and we now see in Costa Rica the increased casualisation of the workforce and the adoption of more “flexible” working practices. This has allowed the situation to arise where workers are exposed to dangerous chemicals for still longer periods, without adequate protection or guidance. There is no possibility of forming trade unions or gaining access to their representatives. The position of women and children has been made more vulnerable, both through poorer working conditions and through the effects on family life of casualisation and a mobile workforce. There are now more single mothers on the plantations, forced to work and with no access to child care. In an environment where sexual harassment by foremen is rife this clearly brings with it other risks to the women workers. Pura Vida? The testimonies I have gathered from travelling around Costa Rica with Carlos and other trade unionists form the basis of my latest film, Pura Vida? Pura Vida? exposes the human and environmental damage caused by the expansion of big cash crop plantations and the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica. This is an entry level film aimed at raising awareness amongst consumers in the UK of the hidden costs behind the fruit we eat. I feel that this is especially relevant, given the position of the big supermarkets squeezing the producers in a “race to the bottom” to produce readily available and ever cheaper fruit for our tables. However, the supermarkets still manage to take up to 40% of cost to the consumer as profit, even while the commodity prices are falling. Pura Vida? will be premiered in Glasgow at this October’s Document 4 Human Rights Film Festival. My first film, Bonita: Ugly Bananas was first shown at the same festival two years ago (Document 2). Bonita told the story of the first free trade unions in twenty years to be established on the plantations of Ecuador – and what happened when they decided to go on strike. Those events took place four years ago and I had hoped that conditions would have improved since then – but the latest news from Ecuador is that the company owner who had so violently oppressed the workers has announced his last minute candidacy for the presidency – brandishing a bible and describing himself as a hero of God! Both Pura Vida? and Bonita form part of a larger project – Green Gold³ – which has given me the opportunity to use longer editions of the workers’ testimonies along with video installation from the plantations and packing plants and woodcut portraits of the workers themselves. Green Gold is a travelling exhibition that can be adapted to suit a variety of venues, events and organisations, from arts organisations and festivals to trade unions, shopping centres and community groups. The Green Gold website is also a source of information for consumers and campaigners. So please get in touch if you would like to host an event to help build a bridge between banana workers and consumers, to give a human face to their struggle. Footnotes 1 www.bananalink.org.uk 2 www.indiaresource.org/news/2006/1084.html 3 www.greengold.org.uk Contact, Jan Nimmo: jan@greengold.org.uk back to top ____________________________________________________ Rose Coloured Spectacles Tom Jennings Jonathan Demme’s anti-Bush broadside of a film The Manchurian Candidate (2004) effectively updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 conspiracy thriller – with Iraq rather than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and assassins by corporate, not KGB, agents. Given our familiarity with the amoral criminality of the military-industrial complex and government via mythology, mystification and spin, these revisions seem highly appropriate. The unfolding plot shows Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) grappling with Gulf War Syndrome zombification amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and sundry electoral, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and lickspittles. However, despite a very neat new denouement, much of the political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon is lost, wherein McCarthyism succeeded thanks to Kremlin plotters finding it thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims – a fascinating, if muddled, disentangling of the contradictions of Cold War politics. Unfortunately, the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace, plus honourable old-school patriotic patricians who have for years fought Party takeover bids by tycoons. In other words, the radical potential of a critique of the interdependency of the state and capitalism is squandered in favour of regressive conservative recuperation – much like, in fact, the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign itself. The changing contours of cinematic conspiracies can thus be interpreted as adjustments to what filmmakers and studios understand ‘politics’ to mean to themselves and viewers today – in a trajectory from stark Orwellian paranoia through nihilistic neo-noir to recent efforts such as Demme’s glossy pastiche, Traffic (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2001), The Quiet American (dir. Philip Noyce, 2002), Silver City (dir. John Sayles, 2004), The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Mereilles, 2005) and Syriana (dir. Andrew Gaghan, 2005). Moreover, the last few years have seen a growing tendency for supposedly progressive themes to be tackled in big-budget Hollywood fictions, along with the incorporation of originally marginal-aesthetic choices and strategies in the production of cinematic blockbusters, brands and franchises. This survey describes some of these phenomena and the critical response to them, and discusses their ambivalent implications and limitations. Shifting Perspective In their book A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Carl Boggs and Thomas Pollard match recent developments in cinema to the lived experiences of its audiences in the “globalizing, consumer-oriented capitalist order” constituted by “gross material inequalities, social polarization, possessive individualism, civic fragmentation, and impending chaos”.¹ Elements of classic Hollywood genres are combined and attenuated in many recent films so that their narratives depict incomprehensible and corrupt worlds where conventional rational understanding, collective organisation and public action have lost the capacity to offer explanations or effect political change – thanks in no small part to the saturation of our psyches with corporate media trivia. And although the book’s overly loose definition of postmodernism in films encompasses many long-established forms and styles, its proposition is surely plausible: that earlier representations of brutal, miserable, hopeless and confused lives in specific marginal, urban, criminal and/or nightmare milieux have been increasingly glossed and generalised to apply to society as a whole. Other treatments of significant trends in contemporary US films have no patience with such pessimistic and totalising assessments of the sector’s long-range value and significance. Bucking the tendency of major studio output in the 1990s to converge towards ever more inflated and repetitious replicas with little more than special effects enhancements and celebrity presence to recommend them, a diverse collection of creative film-making talents instead brought the sensitivities and dynamism of subcultural and cult media and genres to bear. The achievements of some of these in persuading major studios to part with substantial production budgets are celebrated by James Mottram in his study The Sundance Kids.² This title furnishes a spurious collectivity – when many, such as Soderbergh and Tarantino, had little or no truck with Robert Redford’s nursery and showcase at the Sundance Institute. It also encourages a strained intergenerational comparison with the 1970s New Hollywood of Scorcese, Spielberg and Coppola et al, who rose to prominence from the sixties countercultural demolition of outdated industry practices before subsequently finding themselves thoroughly tamed by what replaced them. Sharon Waxman’s anecdotal survey Rebels On The Backlot³ at least concentrates on detailing insider gossip and dissecting networking patterns in showing how an arbitrary selection of younger independent directors have combined personal entrepreneurial prowess and self-promotion with genuine artistic flair in advancing their careers. Conversely, rather than translating cinematic texts as sociocultural reflections, and with a much less sanguine approach to cultural commerce, Ben Dickenson’s Hollywood’s New Radicalism⁴, focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists involved in film production to reflect their social awareness in their work, charts the changing structure of an industry whose consolidation and profit-seeking agendas fluctuate according to wider political and economic trends. Recent generations of independent innovators gained arthouse footholds with regular box-office hits refreshing moribund blockbuster formulae – and now that niche marketing and diversification are prominent megastudio strategies, successful Hollywood progressives can juggle mainstream fare with personal commitment to lower-budget releases paid for with its proceeds. Moreover, after Clinton’s neoliberalism, Seattle’s protest revival, and post-9/11 Bush barbarism, many also vociferously criticise orthodox politics, publicly supporting grass-roots campaigns instead. By this account, subversive hope unexpectedly supplants cynical despair. Focusing on Power Obvious manifestations of these phenomena may be sought in film treatments of formal political processes themselves. Conventional 1990s satires centralised the network of PR spin and corporate and media influence on dodgy leaders, from the Machiavellian machinations of Bob Roberts (dir. Tim Robbins, 1992) to more sympathetic power-seekers led astray both by their own narcissism and the electoral farce. Primary Colors (dir. Mike Nichols, 1998) and Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson, 1998) were comically pertinent to the Clinton regime’s practice, but said nothing about either political consequences or ordinary viewers/voters beyond them being suckered (which might apply more to liberal filmmakers falling for Clinton’s progressive rhetoric). Meanwhile the historical revisionism of JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991) and LA Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997) had already applied film noir devices to national and local institutional and governmental structures, implying their utter moral bankruptcy. More complex and less conventional narratives followed suit, exploiting the flexibility of genre-crossover to link the lives of the citizenry into the degradations of politics. Most trenchantly, elite Democrat Senator Bulworth (dir. Warren Beatty, 1999) goes AWOL in South Central LA after a nervous breakdown on the campaign trail, emerging as a champion of the underclasses. Borrowing elements of ’90s ‘hood film’ style works here, thanks to immense respect shown for ghetto philosophy, intelligence and creativity, counterposed by Warren Beatty’s hysterical vanity and, crucially, laughably incompetent rapping.⁵ Other recent films also bridge the gap between culture and politics in diverse ways and with varying degrees of success. However, apart from Bamboozled’s (dir. Spike Lee, 2001) exposure of corporate media’s racism in colonising Black traditions, all invoke heroic individualism to drive history: Cradle Will Rock (dir. Tim Robbins, 2000) revisits the political context of the 1930s US Federal Theatre Project in a musical celebration of proletarian art served up by elite intellectuals like Orson Welles and John Housman; Good Night & Good Luck’s (dir. George Clooney, 2005) implied critique of modern media requires merely journalistic integrity to scupper McCarthyism; and 8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003) and Erin Brockovich (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2000) connect uplift from the constraints of working-class culture only with personal success in music and law respectively – reducing those represented (whether in the hip-hop or legal senses) to passivity. More ambitious is Silver City’s bitter denunciation of prevailing power. This crime thriller-cum-political conspiracy follows an ex-crusading journalist (Danny Huston) grappling with environmental destruction and the exploitation of migrant workers perpetrated by corporate greed – all fronted by cretinous mouthpieces elected through omnipresent soundbites and photo-ops. Although crippled by annoyingly patronising expositions (when the message emerges more effectively from the narrative), the film is effective in critiquing left, right and centre while still hinting at hope. So the right-on countercultural veteran does eventually uncover the ‘truth’ – but to no effect other than his own satisfaction (signalled by a successful romantic denouement), while his ‘concern’ for the plight of immigrants doesn’t extend to any regard for their welfare as he exploits their goodwill in helping him. The self-obsession of the ’60s generation thus neatly trashed, potential is nonetheless glimpsed in the lead character’s former associates – still committed, but now engaged in muckraking internet activism. Treatments of transnational political and corporate conspiracies themselves adopt more complex narratives – The Quiet American and The Constant Gardener show middle-ranking professional protagonists nudging toward an appreciation of the dirty institutional deeds they’re implicated in, and that they’ve somehow hitherto avoided awareness of – but they are helpless given their isolation. Traffic and Syriana claim to represent a global range of ‘stakeholder’ perspectives on the wars on drugs and terror respectively. But although no-one sees the bigger picture, and all subplots end more or less tragically, characters are given more depth the higher their social status – reflecting the possibility of meaningful agency, and hence some kind of redemption if only in noble failure. In the process, hierarchies are meticulously preserved along with the identification with middle class pathos required by the stereotypical rendering of everyone else. Even Lord of War’s (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2005) attempt to stitch together personal deployments of national mythology with the globalising sociopathy of capitalism (via the evils of the international arms trade) only acquires narrative drive – and thus purchase as metaphor – by shadowing Nicolas Cage’s crazed Ukrainian-American entrepreneur with Ethan Hawke’s ineptly idealistic Interpol authority-figure. The comforting banality of simple-minded redemptive aesthetics is taken to extremes in the treatment of war itself. Continuing Sam Mendes’ generic deconstructions of inadequate US existential masculinity begun in American Beauty (2000) and The Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) demonstrates the hysterical convolutions of redundant machismo among marines in the 1991 Gulf War. Unfortunately the film adopts the perspective of Jake Gyllenhaal’s pretentious nerd frustrated by the military’s failure to resolve his dysfunctional family coming-of-age drama – while most army recruits rationalise their positions after joining up to give their lives income, rather than meaning. At least here the adolescent ‘philosophising’ is bracketed as a defensive response to insane reality, whereas in Spielberg’s odious Munich (2006) it is privileged as ideological support for Israeli state terrorism.⁶ Much more interesting is the playfulness of Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell, 1998), with the first Iraq war cast as heist movie where heartfelt solidarity replaces the cynical self-interest of a US platoon once the malevolence of official policy becomes clearer during a surreal excursion in pursuit of buried treasure. Jarhead and Three Kings are also saturated with reference to cinematic precursors – in style, structure and the social and internal intercourse of their characters – and it’s precisely the dissolving of such boundaries that seems to give these films more chance of saying something interesting and original. Blurred Vision The mixing of genres resonates with viewers’ media and cultural biography and literacy, while simultaneously questioning the reliability of conventional patterns of knowledge and understanding of our own lives and the world.⁷ The apparently apolitical nihilism of postmodern cinema, especially in its treatment of transgression and excess – violence, crime, sexual and social – began to extend in the ‘90s away from the virtual solipsism of Lynchian fantasy, yuppie nightmares and neo-noir, as narratives became fractured in time and space as well as according to character psychodynamics. Tarantino’s exuberant comic book capers and Natural Born Killer’s (dir. Oliver Stone, 1994) venom against media opiates reflect the mundane madness and horror visible in contemporary society, finding echoes in later films tackling similar themes in highly original ways. Now it is commonplace for skewed perceptions and private fantasies to overflow and reverberate among participants in social networks, influencing or overdetermining prospects for the future of the self and others. In particular, the status of the ‘reality’ presented to viewers is unsettled when visual design and cinematography confuse perspective; with subjective states no longer conveniently tagged as ‘flashback’, ‘daydream’, ‘nightmare’, etc. Together with the unpredictable vicissitudes of the external world, its implacable material force and proclivity for coincidence, this hints at the open-endedness of history rather than closure – modulating the emotional rush traditional denouements aim for as ‘entertainment’. Then, when the juggling of genres leaves a narrative with no single obvious outcome, dissonant resolutions may be tacked on whatever the thrust of the foregoing would conventionally suggest. You’d think the indie rebels and radical mavericks purportedly populating Hollywood could exploit these profitable fashions as golden opportunities to represent political struggle in their work. But only very few films have shown public, collective action and conflicts of interest – involving varying forms and levels of explicit political ideology and motivation – to be suffused and surrounded with, and energised and confounded by, the misrecognition and desire both practical and cinematic experience suggest are inevitable. Based on the iconoclastic cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) drips with comic invective concerning the comfortable alienations of commodity fetishism and managed misery. Corporate bureaucrat Jack (Edward Norton) has a solipsistic private life of Ikea catalogue completism, filling the resulting spiritual vacuum with self-pitying voyeurism at self-help groups for cancer sufferers. This pathetic existence is blighted by escalating narcissistic insults and material disasters, until libidinal nihilist Tyler (Brad Pitt) rekindles his anguished masculinity in regular bareknuckle fistfights on city backstreets. Fascinated onlookers from all walks of life join in, mushrooming and coalescing as an underground movement to overthrow consumer society via unspoken male solidarity. Their plan to blow up finance companies’ headquarters proves too much for Jack, who shoots himself in the head – merely wounding himself physically but killing Tyler (revealed as schizoid personification of suppressed desire) – and the newly-integrated Jack finds heterosexual love as the bombs detonate. Even if dismissed as hermetic schoolboy fantasy – or worse, flirting with the fascistic appeal of cult violence powered by psychotic charisma – Fight Club at least foregrounds passionate bodily yearning as potential antidote to the poison of capitalism.8 David O. Russell’s I [Heart] Huckabees (2005) follows the more unthreatening route of surrrealism-lite (as favoured by global brand advertisers), sacrificing the urgency and emotional desperation conjured by Fincher. The gentler, screwball farce comedy is likewise enervating rather than energising – but both choices suit the film’s theme of the New Age reduction of politics to personal morality and lifestyle marketing. Here, Jason Schwartzman’s earnest environmentalist agonises over the ethics and efficacy of single issue campaign compromises with corporate interests. So troubled that he fears for his sanity, various counsellors and consultants are invited to compete in obsessing over his sense of identity, making suitably shallow interventions in his social and activist circle. ‘Finding himself’ quickly takes precedence over preserving wilderness – implying that the previous concern for ‘real’ nature merely externalised anxieties concerning his own self-indulgent whingeing human nature. Crowd Scenes Fight Club and Huckabees are unquestionably highly original films, with wildly inventive camerawork, editing and plotting, and complex characterisations and cultural reference points. And despite their considerable limitations – for instance depicting political action as, at best, misguided – both complicate the striving for commonality with the difficulties inherent in the uncertain status of knowledge and interpretation experienced by characters and viewers. More conventional ensemble dramas also emphasise the influence of randomness, shared fantasy, flashbacks and alternative versions in shaping local social contexts. The fractured stories and multiple perspectives pioneered by Robert Altman have been very influential among independent filmmakers – though rarely exploited to illuminate political themes.⁹ Moreover, other groundbreaking work – such as the ghettocentric cycle initiated by Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1990), films directed by Sean Penn (The Indian Runner, 1991; The Crossing Guard,1995; The Pledge, 2001) and those written by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 2001; 21 Grams, 2004; The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, 2006) – locate agency and potential most firmly within individual protagonists, who are always flawed, damaged and disruptive of simplistic solutions, and the ramifications of their normal or abnormal pathology ripple out into their social environments to highlight collective implications. Paul Haggis’ Crash (2005) focuses on the sickness of racism infecting all levels of US society in a tapestry of neatly interlocking and sharply scripted vignettes featuring a dozen-and-a half characters crossing fractious paths over two days in Los Angeles. Its manipulative conceit is to include only occasions dominated by racialising attributions, with scant contextualisation in deeper backstories and a fuller range of interactions. Despite consequently actively stereotyping those it accuses, the scenarios frequently overflow this constraint to reveal the bases of conflict in class distinction and economic inequality – with particularly acute detailing of the complicit hypocrisy of liberal elites and the fatal delusions of political correctness. But with the redress to racial prejudice artificially overdetermining the narrative ebbs and flows, acts of humility and humanity on the part of those towards the bottom of the cosmopolitan heap are isolated as exceptions to the rule rather than countervailing force. Crash thus embodies and exemplifies the organising power of racism yet, paradoxically, was lauded and awarded best film Oscar for its bravery in exposing it. But the film is much less honest than Short Cuts’ (dir. Robert Altman, 1993) pinpointing of the bitter pressure-points of the city’s downwardly-mobile trajectory, ultimately being just as distanced and melancholic as Magnolia’s (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) meandering meditation on the ineffable strangeness of LA life. Refusing the panoramic omnipotence of such efforts, Kathryn Bigelow’s magnificent Strange Days (1995) experiments viscerally with the phenomenology of simulation offered by new media, gradually expanding the significance of their alienating distraction for confused thrill-seekers out into the seething public sphere of a chaotic neo-noir 1999 LA under brutal martial law. The troubled pairing of ex-vice squad porn merchant Ralph Fiennes and streetwise action heroine Angela Bassett tangle with corrupt entrepreneurs and lowlives in a decadent cross-fertilising cultural milieu of hip-hop punk, blundering into a conspiracy to assassinate a Black revolutionary leader which threatens to tip the civic millennium festivities over the brink into grass-roots insurrection. Through an unprecedented synthesis of film and psychoanalytic theory, exploitation of cinema traditions and bravura design, editing and photography, it is far more nuanced than Crash in tackling the subjective and social significance of race, as well as of gender and class.¹⁰ The film also works hard to specify its historical contingency in the best traditions of science fiction as speculation on the present (for example by Stanislaw Lem, William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick) – rather than hysterical inflation into universal values, or the fashionably subversive adolescent hype which passes for philosophical resonance in the Wachowski brothers-produced V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, 2006), as in The Matrix (dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999) series.¹¹ Strange Days even excuses its major flaws (such as a deliberately implausible, if arguably utopian, central relationship) by managing to render its politically ultra-conservative resolution as dystopian recuperation – a final knowing flourish on the role of mass entertainment in taming desire in labyrinths of repressive desublimation. Changing Lenses The general timidity of dream factory visionaries in tackling political change may, then, be best conceived in terms of a wider disillusionment among the middle classes with social democracy as the handmaiden of capitalist progress in our strange days, given their failure to predict or comprehend the unravelling liberal consensus. 1980s and ’90s neo-noir, postmodern and ‘slacker’ stories appeal for their thoroughgoing refusal of traditional disciplines and delusions, which is partly also what makes new forms of collective mobilisation such as anti-globalization possible among those growing up without the benefits of 1960s naiveté and aristocratic modernist optimism. However, the recent spate of films translating oppositional attitudes into populist cinema use largely retrograde narrative conventions and characters, without the stylistic and technical experimentation elsewhere employed to reflect underlying malaises in Western society. The most obvious symptoms of war and corporate excess are thus presented as ultimate causes, to be adjusted by enlightened reform. Similarly, whereas the deeper colonisation of intimate life by the instrumental logic of commodification ironically has Hollywood at its vanguard, any cinematic response more robust than trivial lifestyle tinkering leads to shattered identities or social breakdown which only the desperate reassertion of established authority can resolve. While at least corruption and malpractice by government and business, environmental damage, and the effects of corporate imperialism on the poor at home and abroad are now gratifyingly familiar on the big screen, merely updating clichéd film formulae reproduces traditional resolutions revolving around heroes and leaders. The corresponding notion that suitably nimble strategies among liberal filmmakers guarantees progressive content does justice neither to contemporary political circumstances – where the intentions and interests of professional elites are so widely, thoroughly and understandably distrusted – nor to a media culture in which superficial appearance is fetishised to mask the depressing difficulties of real life. Negotiating prevailing tastes and engaging deeper desires while also offering genuine critique is much trickier than the voluntaristic idealism of celebrities suggests. So radical directors often skilfully portray middle class protagonists striving to maintain their positions entangled in complex local hierarchies and histories, with very mixed consequences for those with less room to manouevre. Regrettably, the latters’ rich social dynamic is usually homogenised into frozen victimised masses – either destined to be thawed by personal heroics and histrionics, or simply functioning as a reactive backdrop against which the stars shine. Conspiracy theories have long been fertile territory for cinema, with political thrillers sensing the world’s complexity while rendering historical phenomena in simplistically individual terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in desperate response and, given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity’s ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter exist, and create havoc, but the more difficult truth is that domination is sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies, societies and economies – conditioning the patterns of stratification, distinction and difference which constitute the texture of everyday life irrespective of whose interests can be said to be ultimately served. This is precisely the terrain which postmodern existential nightmares effectively excavate, albeit usually inside single isolated and tortured psyches. Furthermore, expansive dramas of community life are eminently capable of depicting the ways in which the interests, beliefs, actions and affiliations of friends and neighbours, lovers and strangers mingle subjectively and socially. When parallel storylines and biographies clash and intersect, this is as likely to yield collective synergy as the familiar cinematic staples of destructive conflict or sterile equilibrium. These tentative and emergent representational paradigms seem to offer the possibility of providing visions of the grounds for genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared purpose in circumstances in which business as usual is decisively threatened. However, it would be necessary to acknowledge the central role here of autonomous grass-roots activity or expression outside of the boundaries, preoccupations, conceptual frameworks, guidance and control of middle-class mediators. But this would entail the latter surrendering their recuperative power, and accordingly the privileged positions granted for loyal opposition to the status quo. Even the more challenging of the films referred to above can therefore be interpreted in terms of a reluctance to tackle such suffocating restraints in their makers’ own cultural practice – amounting to a wholesale failure of nerve as well as self-censorship. This helps explain why manifestations of conscious struggle, collective public dissent or mass action are so rarely properly explored, and certainly not celebrated – and, especially when their subjects lack social status, hasty negation and patronising contempt are the order of the day. Instead a regular refrain of self-important gestures by and about special ones creating history emanates from aspiring or actual cinema industry heavyweights and their (un)critical cheerleaders – whose rose-coloured spectacles conceal an inability to conceive of alternatives to the political coordinates of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk Notes 1. Carl Boggs & Thomas Pollard, A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p.249. 2. James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, Faber & Faber, 2006. 3. Sharon Waxman, Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System, HarperCollins, 2005. 4. Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush, I.B. Tauris, 2006. 5. See Paula J. Masood, ‘Ghetto Supastar: Warren Beatty’s Bulworth and the Politics of Race and Space’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No.4, 2002, pp.287-293. 6. The grounds for which, in this case, are presented as neutral historical record rather than falsified propaganda; for a corrective, see As’ad Abu-Khalil, ‘Spielberg on Munich: the Humanization of Israeli Killers, and the Dehumanization of Palestinian Civilians’, 2005, http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html. For a relevant discussion of the deeper relationship between media images and contemporary international government, see: Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews & Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, 2nd edition, Verso, 2006. 7. See my ‘Class-ifying Contemporary Cinema’, Variant, No. 10, 2000, pp.16-19. 8. As, in various contexts, Slavoj Zizek concludes re: Fight Club: “Liberation Hurts!” (Eric Dean Rasmussen, 2003, www.lacan.com/zizekillinois.htm). See also Zizek: ‘I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Doug Henwood’, Bad Subjects, No. 59, 2002, http://bad.eserver.org (and in Joel Schalit, ed., The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, Akashic Books, 2002); and ‘Art: The Talking Heads’, in Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge, 2004. For the director’s take on his film, and the controversy it spawned, see: James Swallow, ‘Hit Me’, in Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, Reynolds & Hearn, 2003. 9. Significant exceptions being City of Hope (dir. John Sayles, 1991), Lone Star (dir. John Sayles, 1996) and Sunshine State (dir. John Sayles, 2002) – like Silver City, financed by John Sayles’ journeyman scriptwriting and independently produced and distributed by his and partner Maggie Renzi’s company, The Anarchists’ Convention. 10. See: Christina Lane, ‘The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron’; and Steven Shaviro, ‘“Straight from the Cerebral Cortex”: Vision and Affect in Strange Days’; both in: Deborah Jermyn & Sean Redmond (eds.) The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, Wallflower Press, 2003. 11. See Robert Allen’s and my comments on V For Vendetta in Freedom magazine, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006. back to top ____________________________________________________ Competing Narratives Exposed: Did you hear that two Palestinians were captured the day before that Israeli soldier was? Rena Bivens As it turns out, journalists do not climb to the top of their respective headquarters each day and direct large, all-seeing mirrors towards each region of the globe before effortlessly broadcasting the most compelling images onto your television screen later that evening, complete with straightforward, de-politicized descriptions of their content. As soon as the newsroom directs its focus towards news items that involve war or conflict, particularly one that is as hotly disputed as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many more decisions are involved. As it turns out, the news that streams onto your television screens each night is no mirror of the world – it is the result of an actively manufactured version of reality. Many issues problematize the mainstream media’s coverage of conflict. Time constraints in television, word limits in newspapers, ideologically-laden yet politically-endorsed and relatively unquestioned terminology, a seemingly never-ending range of differing historical accounts that no two groups are likely to ever agree upon, and the influence of public relations and intense pressure by well-organised lobby groups are just a few. Still, reporting conflicts is one of the most important tasks of mainstream media, since the majority of the public will only receive information about foreign crises from this coverage. Television remains the main source of world news for the large majority of the UK population.¹ Therefore it is absolutely vital that television reporting of conflicts is analysed and broadcasters are pressured to maintain balance and a high standard of impartiality. If the news was just a reflection of images caught in a mirror, news agencies like Reuters and Associated Press would cease to exist. These organisations fuel the news that we receive and the consequence of this dependency is a lack of diversity between news outlets and, more crucially, a restricted and politicized information flow. While the domination by only a handful of news agencies can result in a selective representation of the globe and has the potential to advance only certain political and economic interests, news is still largely the result of public relations. It may appear as though news is spontaneous and investigative, but in fact the majority of content on mainstream television broadcasts is planned.² Certain events, like the World Cup and the Queen’s birthday are clearly known in advance, but much of the rest of news is a direct result of public relations management. Groups make statements to the media – from governments to corporations to scientists – and each maintain a vital interest in promoting a particular perspective of an event. Particularly when military conflict is involved, these groups share a fundamental concern that the resulting news coverage will be structured around a narrative that shows their exclusive group in a favourable light – often to the detriment of others. It is also often the case that one group involved in a conflict will be better resourced and therefore have superior public relations capabilities. With respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most journalists will acknowledge that Israel has a more efficient public relations machine.³ Therefore Israel’s ability to supply journalists with information that supports their favoured narrative is significantly increased. Also, most correspondents live in Israel when covering the conflict and the BBC is the only Western broadcaster that retains a permanent presence within Gaza.⁴ This fact alone disrupts the flow of information. Greg Philo and Mike Berry published a study in 2004 of content, audience reception, and production factors involved in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the oubreak of the Palestinian Intifada or uprising in September 2000. The following quotes are from journalists who have experienced the different nature of each side’s public relations management: "Palestinian spokesmen are their own worst enemy. They often come across as boorish, the message is often incoherent." (Interview, June 2002) "Palestinians don’t have a clear public relations approach. They [Palestinians] start from a reactive approach. I get 75-100 emails a day from official Israeli sources and organisations which support [Israel] (about 15 per cent from government, the rest lobbyists and supporters). I get perhaps five a week from Palestinian sources." (Interview, June 2002)⁵ These production factors influence the way in which events in the ongoing conflict will be covered – particularly how they will fit into a favourable narrative for one group or the other. The task of mainstream media organisations is to ensure that balance is maintained – that the full range of differing perspectives of events and overall narratives are featured in their reports regardless of any potential inequality on the public relations front. A brief illustration of US coverage of the 2006 Israeli-Gaza crisis The famed slogan of the United States’ leading news program, Fox News, reminds its audiences: “We Report. You Decide.”⁶ Below is one example of their coverage that occurred during the first few weeks of the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began at the end of June 2006: A Fox correspondent stands in Gaza, describing the empty scene in which Israel has reportedly ‘cut Gaza in half,’ when shots appear to be flying towards him and he is forced to end the report: Presenter A: Scary. Presenter B: But I just don’t understand. They have...it says ‘press’...that’s the colour, that’s international... Presenter A: Bad guys shoot at anything. Presenter B: Right...but it’s Israel. Presenter C: Uh…but it’s also...if, if he’s correct and again, we don’t know who exactly was shooting at him...but the other guys there are trying to protect themselves- Presenter A: Completely shifting gears, are you a rotten speller? (Fox News, 13th July 2006) Presenter A appears extremely confused and cannot comprehend the events he witnessed. Helpful Presenter B tries to ease his confusion by putting the situation into a dialectic that resembles President Bush’s rhetoric of good vs. evil – hence “Bad guys shoot at anything.” But this just baffles him even further since “it’s Israel” and therefore, it follows, Israel can not possibly be shooting since they are not the “bad guys”. Granted this example is not the result of an in-depth analysis of Fox News’ coverage of the most recent incursions into Gaza by the Israelis, nor is it meant to paint a definitive picture of their reporting. Still, it provides a demonstration of the construction of reality that takes place by presenters on behalf of the audience and the danger of neglecting contextualization in favour of what appears to be a preconceived narrative. UK coverage of the 2006 Israeli-Gaza crisis While not as explicit as the seemingly impulsive and simplified dialectic applied to coverage of Israel’s actions by Fox News, as presented above, coverage within the UK is fraught with a common narrative that is left almost entirely unquestioned. In every headline, in every teaser, in every opening remark, the 2006 Israeli attack on Gaza was narrated as a response to the captured Israeli solider, Cpl Gilad Shalit. It is certainly the case that hours after the capture of Cpl Shalit by the military wing of the ruling Palestinian Hamas party, Izzedine al-Qassam, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and the previously unknown Army of Islam, “dozens of Israeli tanks, backed by helicopter gunships, pushed into the Gaza strip” (BBC News online, World Edition, 25th June 2006).⁷ From that point forward the narrative was set: the ensuing conflict between Israel and Gaza began with the June 25th capture of Cpl Shalit by Palestinian militants. This narrative fits the common stereotypical scenario of action followed by response and retaliation. This scenario is inherently simplistic and lacks context, but more importantly it mimics the narrative pattern that has been consistently found in previous analyses of UK coverage of this conflict: precisely that the Palestinians perform an ‘act’ of aggression to which the Israeli’s must ‘respond.’⁸ By selectively concentrating on Palestinian action (here: the capture of Cpl Shalit), even though in this case it directly proceeds Israeli action, a cycle of violence is again solidified in the minds of the audience and blame inevitably falls on the Palestinians without consideration of the context nor any historical conditions. Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s audience research demonstrates how this narrative pattern is transferred⁹ to the audience and revealed in focus group discussions such as this conversation with a student group in Glasgow: Female Speaker: You always think of the Palestinians as being really aggressive because of the stories you hear on the news. I always put the blame on them in my own head. Moderator: Is it presented as if the Palestinians somehow start it and then the Israelis follow on? Female Speaker: Exactly, I always think the Israelis are fighting back against the bombings that have been done to them. (Philo and Berry 2004:222) The same narrative is also exposed within a news writing exercise where focus group members were given photographs from TV news coverage and asked to write a news item. Narrative-consistent phrases that continually arose within content analysis of TV coverage (following September 2000) appeared in the output: “Israeli army retaliates”, “[Israeli] government reaction”, “Israeli army retaliated”, “Israelis responded”, “In response to Palestinian attacks” (2004: 228-229, original italics). So why did this narrative damage public understanding of the conflict on this occasion? Because the context within which the apparent beginning of the conflict (Cpl Shalit’s capture) transpired is extremely relevant to an understanding of the crisis – particularly since significant Israeli actions against the Palestinians in Gaza occurred during the month leading up to Cpl Shalit’s capture. The following are excerpts from BBC News online articles that appeared during the month of June, leading up to Cpl Shalit’s capture on June 25th. Wanted militant dies in Gaza raid "A senior Palestinian official in the Gaza Strip has died in an Israeli air strike in the town of Rafah. Samhadana, a senior security chief in the Hamas-led government, was one of four killed in the attack on a training camp, which injured seven others. He was one of Israel’s most wanted men in Gaza, and was thought to be involved in a 2003 attack on a US convoy. A spokesman for the PRC vowed to “open the gates of hell” in response. They fired their weapons in the air and swore that they would strike back at Israel, our correspondent says." (BBC News online, World Edition, 8th June 2006, added italics )¹⁰ Palestinians killed on Gaza beach "Seven people, including three children, have been killed by Israeli shells which hit a beach in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials say. At least 30 people were wounded in the shelling, they say. In a statement, the military wing of Hamas threatened to resume attacks on Israel in the wake of “massacres”. The group has been observing a self-imposed ceasefire for more than a year. 'What the Israeli occupation forces are doing in the Gaza Strip constitutes a war of extermination and bloody massacres against our people,' Mr Abbas said." (BBC News online, World Edition, 9th June 2006, added italics)¹¹ Israel captures pair in Gaza raid "Israeli soldiers have seized two Palestinian men in an overnight raid into the southern Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said the two brothers were members of the militant group Hamas and were planning attacks on Israel. Hamas said they were sons of a member but were not involved in Hamas. It called the abduction a crime." (BBC News online, World Edition, 24th June 2006, added italics)¹² Before exploring this context, it is critical to note that Israel also has grievances of their own, even though no articles detailing them occurred during the month prior to Cpl Shalit’s capture. While suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians are extremely poignant events that should be categorically condemned, Hamas renounced suicide bombing as a strategy of resistance against Israeli occupation and entered into an unofficial ceasefire in the spring of 2005.¹³ But Islamic Jihad rejected Hamas’ ceasefire and has continued this strategy. Also, Qassam rocket fire has become a mounting concern for the Israelis as this Palestinian militant activity of firing what many media outlets refer to as “crude missiles” began to increase in June 2006. Still, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 8 Israeli civilians have been killed by Qassam gunfire during a 25 month period of June 2004 to July 2006 while Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) actions within Gaza claiming to be an attempt to stop these Qassam rockets during a much shorter 4 week period of 26th June to 24th July resulted in the deaths of 126 Palestinians.¹⁴ Although a comparison of casualty figures lacks important context, it is still valid to note that according to B’Tselem, between 29th September 2000 and 15th September 2006, 3,824 Palestinians were killed by Israelis while 1011 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. Included in these figures are 764 Palestinian minors and 119 Israeli minors. This is particularly important in light of the general public’s lack of understanding of this conflict, which finds beliefs among many British, German, and American students that more Israelis have been killed than Palestinians or that both sides have suffered equally in terms of casualties.¹⁵ Many more issues are involved in this conflict that are too complex to discuss within the space available here (Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, water, restrictions on Palestinian movement, residency, destruction of property, detainees and prisoners, east Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, the separation barrier, to name a few). To explore the missing context that is implied by the inclusion of the above BBC online articles, it is important that UK television news reporting¹⁶ of these events that preceded Cpl Shalit’s capture during the month of June 2006 as well as the coverage of the first few days following his capture is analysed (up to and including 29th June¹⁷). The first story found on BBC News online regarding the death of senior Palestinian official Jamal Abu Samhadana on 8th June 2006 was not covered except when mentioned the following day in relation to the “Gaza beach violence”. For this report, all news outlets showed the gripping footage of the young girl Huda Ghalia wailing for her father on the beach as she discovered her dead family members. Of course good pictures are a prerequisite for television news and Huda’s exasperation was highlighted. Blame for Israel appeared to be the running headline but within each report, with the exception of ITV,¹⁸ Israel’s responsibility was questioned in some manner. Since this time the Israeli army’s investigation has unequivocally concluded that they should bear no blame since they did not even fire any shells at the beach that day. Opposing this, Human Rights Watch military expert Mark Garlasco claimed that Israeli shelling was the cause after an examination of forensic evidence at the scene, doctor’s reports, and witness statements which he claims were unavailable for the Israeli investigation. Also, each station’s coverage is more defiant than BBC online reports regarding the end of Hamas’ ceasefire.¹⁹ This is significant since the end of Hamas’ self-imposed ceasefire and vows to attack Israel could have later been used as reference points when Cpl Shalit was captured in order for the audience to gain a greater understanding of the context within which this operation occurred. Samhadana’s death is also mentioned²⁰ as well as the deaths of 3 more Palestinians by Israeli air strikes that same day (9th June).²¹ These references create a climate in which the public might expect a “response” by Palestinian militant groups, a “retaliation” against Israeli “actions” – yet references to these events are nearly imperceptible once Cpl Shalit is captured and the crisis appears to, according to the narrative, officially begin. Lastly, on the same day of Gaza’s “beach violence”, Jeremy Bowen – the BBC’s Middle East editor whose role was “enhanced”²² in response to the BBC Governors Impartiality Review of BBC Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, published in April 2006²³ – sat in the BBC studio and rhetorically asked if Israel is acting disproportionately, and if this is the case, accusations of war crimes could occur under international law. He also likened the recent Israeli actions (that day’s killings and Samhadana’s death) to a “particular advantage” for the Palestinians since, for a while at least, “Palestinians internationally will have a sense of being on the moral high ground” (BBC1, evening news, 9th June 2006). The third story referenced above in the BBC online excerpts regarding the Israeli raid into the Gaza Strip (despite their withdrawal from the region last September 2005²⁴) and the seizure of two brothers on the day before Cpl Shalit’s capture by Palestinian militants was not reported on TV news. MIT Professor Noam Chomsky regards this Israeli action as a more severe issue under international humanitarian law than the Palestinian militants’ capture of Cpl Shalit since these acts took place under the context of a conflict wherein the Palestinian brothers are civilians yet Cpl Shalit is a soldier.²⁵ At the time of the incident Israelis claimed that the two brothers were members of the militant wing of Hamas, as quoted above in the BBC online news source, but no further Israeli comments have yet been found.²⁶ Once Cpl Shalit is captured on 25th June, statements from Hamas regarding reasons for this action appear on BBC News online but are rarely mentioned in any televised coverage.²⁷ The death of Samhadana, recent deaths of civilians, and targeted killings of militant leaders are quoted online as instigators for Hamas’ “response”. What is not revealed to viewers is that the termination of Hamas’ approximately year-long ceasefire in “response” to Israeli “actions” and hence the expectation that a “retaliation” (note the reversal of the traditional mainstream narrative) could occur, which might include this very incident of the capture of an Israeli soldier. The only references to Israeli actions that could have inflamed Palestinian militants are found deep within reports – generally in terms of “celebrations” inside Gaza following Cpl Shalit’s capture, said to likely be related to the “more than a dozen Palestinian civilians” recently killed by Israeli forces (BBC1, evening news, 26th June 2006). Most of the time the reports begin with descriptions of the continued “hunt for the soldier” – for instance, BBC correspondent James Reynolds says, “Somewhere here in Gaza, amidst the flames and the dark there is a kidnapped Israeli soldier. With bombs and shells Israel is trying to get him back.” (BBC1, evening news, 28th June 2006). Channel 4 News offers the most critical coverage by often fiercely questioning guests from both sides of the conflict. Presenter Jon Snow begins to make reference to the hidden context during an interview by mentioning the conditions under which citizens of the Gaza Strip have “not been safe ever since the [Israeli] pullout” since there has been “tremendous military activity above and from the land against them” (Channel 4 News, 26th June 2006). As well, Channel 4 refers to previous prisoner bargains that Israel has partaken in, thereby reflecting upon alternative options that may be available (27th June 2006) and goes so far as to mention that it “seems more like an exercise of retribution rather than a well-planned rescue mission” (28th June 2006). And finally, the most significant contextualization occurs again on Channel 4 when Jon Snow asks an Independent MP in the Palestinian Parliament, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, if “it wasn’t great timing” for the Palestinian militants to capture Cpl Shilat since a major breakthrough between Hamas and Fatah had just been occurring.²⁸ Dr. Barghouti responds with a list of grievances against Israeli actions that have occurred (air raids, artillery bombardments, large numbers of civilian deaths, etc.) and in so doing provides a context for the operation in which Cpl Shilat was captured that extends the narrative beyond the traditional media interpretation and allows for flexibility in the view that Palestinians have simply “started it again”. While Channel 4 News has provided the most instances of these types of revelations in comparison to the other news outlets examined, they are still buried within interviews and far removed from the headlines, teasers and opening lines that tend to receive the most vociferous attention and thereby are more likely to solidify the traditional stereotypical narrative that often accompanies coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a final note, the BBC Governors review of coverage of this conflict recommended that ‘a stronger editorial “Guiding Hand”’ be provided, which has come in the form of the newly “enhanced” role of BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, as well as encouragement that the BBC “be more proactive in explaining the complexities of the conflict.” It was suggested that the latter could be fulfilled through “directly linking broadcast programmes to related background available online.”²⁹ As the above analysis of the BBC’s online coverage demonstrates, there is certainly more information online and presenters on the evening news programme have directed viewers to the website on occasion – but the stereotypical narrative still remains. In fact, it is even enhanced when multiple stories are interrupted within the webpage by a “Gaza Crisis Timeline” that unambiguously reaffirms the traditional narrative associated with this conflict in that Palestinian “action” begins a crisis, inevitably to be followed by Israeli “response” and “retaliation”.³⁰ With respect to the former recommendation, Bowen appears regularly on BBC evening news programmes in addition to correspondents and offers deeper analysis of the conflict. While he does mention important issues such as the Geneva Convention which prohibits “attacks on objects indispensable to civilians” and “collective punishment”, they appear dislocated since they are vague references with only implicit reference to Israel (BBC1, evening news, 29th June 2006). If the intention is to maintain a safe distance from direct accusations against one party in the conflict, including more studio guests, akin to Channel 4, could provide more opportunity for deeper analysis of such issues. On another occasion Bowen gives an emotive, very detailed description of a suicide bombing from 9th August 2001 as a means of clarifying Israel’s stance towards Hamas,³¹ which provides appropriate context but unfortunately neglects to inform viewers – many of whom are already struggling to comprehend the situation – that Hamas has not been involved in suicide bombings since August 2004. However, the same style of emotive, very detailed descriptions of Israeli actions against Palestinians was not included when Bowen shifted his “balance” to the other foot (BBC1, evening news, 28th June 2006). Final remarks Even though mainstream media broadcasters assert their commitment to balance, fairness and impartiality, covering conflicts as politicized and hotly contested as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a challenging venture. It involves a difficult process of not only identifying the range of views that are present regardless of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the relative public relations machines involved, and ignoring the external pressure of well-organised lobby groups, but also a concerted attempt to fully represent this range of perspective. Also, since much of the public suffers from a lack of understanding, broadcasters should be encouraged to adopt new strategies to combat this problem in order to provide a more appropriate historical and contextual analysis. Advising viewers to “go to the website” for further information cannot be the only solution – particularly when a personal computer and availability of the internet is not accessible to everyone. Nevertheless, the existing factors that continue to push potentially well-intentioned broadcasters to embrace stereotypical patterns of narratives within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be further explored. Notes 1 As of 2005, 72% of people mention television as their main source of world news and 94% believe it is important for TV news to be impartial (compared to 90% for radio and 84% for newspapers). Source: Office of Communications (2006) The Communications Market 2006. London: Ofcom. 2 Of course accidents, natural disasters, and other such phenomena occur and are likely to be newsworthy enough to be covered. Yet even once they have happened – and the same holds true for an ongoing military conflict – a mainstream news organisation will assign someone to cover it and therefore planning begins immediately and staff will know that news relating to the event will be inco

Variant, issue 27, Winter 2006

Contents
Putting Dada Flesh on the Bone
John Beagles

Get a Fucking Job: The Truth about Begging
New Social Art School

Chemical-Cocktail-Fruit
Jan Nimmo

Rose Coloured Spectacles
Tom Jennings

Competing Narratives Exposed
Rena Bivens

Blairism on the walls at Kelvingrove
Stephen Dawber

Academies, Religion and Private Philanthropy
Peter Vlachos

Louis – The Round The World Rug Race
Metaphrog

Rebel Alliances
Interview with Ben Franks

Ahmadinejad: Myth and Reality
Yassamine Mather

From Self to Structure:
Challenging the ‘Happiness Industry’
Colin Clark

Telling the Truth About Neo-liberalism
Alex Law

Turkey’s US-backed War On Terror:
A Cause For Concern?
Desmond Fernandes

The Chinese Challenge:
Hallucinations for Other Futures
Think Art Lab

___________________________________________________

Putting Dada Fleshon theBone
John Beagles

‘Don’t forget that polemics always played a big part in Dada’¹

The signs of Dada and Surrealism’s resurgence are manifold. Quirky, playful juxtapositions of incongruous elements fill many a contemporary gallery,² A belief that an absurdist, irrational, anarchic spirit of Dadaist and Surrealist revolt can be conjured up as a potent form of resistance to the venal tendencies of administered culture, is one source for this infatuation. Meanwhile an all more predictable and professional reason lurks; some of this has the desiccated³ flavour of Ikea Dada and Surrealism – studied, polite, saleable drawing room madness for urbane sophisticates. Either way, historical Dada and Surrealism has found itself reassessed, revised and repackaged in numerous recent exhibitions (Undercover Surrealism at the Hayward Gallery, London being the most obvious), while the popularity of a litany of artists referencing, name checking and stealing from both movements is undeniable.
I’m not especially interested in the plurality of reasons for this rediscovered artistic fascination, more the manner in which artists and ideas, especially from Dada, have been institutionally and academically re-appraised. Specifically, how the anti-art impulse or the “desire for art to have an operation” (founding Dada poet and essayist Tristan Tzara’s remark) has been managed or neutered. The contrasting aims of two recent projects to revise accepted ideas about the nature and legacy of New York Dada – Amelia Jones’ book Irrational Modernism : A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, and David Hopkins’ publication and exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery Dada’s Boys, are revealing in this respect. Both represent absorbing, subtly distinct reassessments of this era, offering cogent reasons for the period’s ongoing influence within contemporary culture. The differing methodologies of the two projects are equally illuminating. Jones’ combines exhaustive scholarly research with a ‘hot’, personal, subjective voice, which guiltlessly reveals its partisan connection with the subject – “sometimes reading about the Baroness [...] I feel attached to [her] by a hot, electrified wire of neurosis across the decades”.⁴ Her intention in doing this is for the “lines between fact and fiction, between art history and storytelling, between biography and autobiography”⁵ to be blurred in such a way as to expose the interestedness of all history writing. This kind of passion and connection perhaps underpinned Hopkins’ Dada’s Boys, but his catalogue and exhibition was far cooler, more Duchampian in its suppression of subjectivity and its sublimation of heat.

Dada Woman

As noted, of the two, Jones’ work is the lengthier, more evolved and scholarly,⁶ offering as it does a convincing revisionist, unashamedly feminist reappraisal of the neglected role of Dada provocateur Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Within the New York art world of European émigrés, sitting out the First World War in narcotic intoxication⁷ brought on by the psychological trauma of the war (hence her use of the early psychiatry term neurasthenia⁸), the Baroness was, even by the standards of this most self-consciously arch-wild avant garde, excessive and eccentric. As Jones remarks, “there was something unnerving, otherworldly, irrational about the Baroness, even in the context of the supposedly radical Bohemian and avant garde circles of the day”.⁹ The artist George Biddle’s description of the Baroness gives a brief idea of how her revolt superficially manifested itself:
"She stood before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tinned tomato cans, fastened with a green string around her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small birdcage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamakers. She removed her hat, which had been trimmed with carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermilion^."10
As New York’s premier kleptomaniac, part time poet, professional scavenger, unofficial performance artist, polemicist,¹¹ sexual predator, lesbian icon and all round transgressor, this Teutonic force of nature cut a startlingly irregular shape within the modernist grid of New York City. Part of Jones’ project is then to delineate how the Baroness’ unbound, visceral embodiment of Dada (“She is the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.”¹²) was a challenge to the avant garde men of the New York scene. As Jones highlights, the treatment she received at the hands of many male artists (the poet William Carlos Williams, whom she sexually intimidated, called her a “dirty old bitch”) pointed to the gap between the rhetoric and reality – “She was thus a figure who pointed to the limitations of avant gardism.”¹³ Recounting an inability and resistance amongst some, though not all, of the Dada Boys¹⁴ to cope with the Baroness’ sexual appetite and absence of “respectable avant garde behavior”¹⁵, is then one counter-intuitive aspect of the book. As Jones recounts, the Baroness shamelessly “performed herself in dramatically unglued personifications [that] unhinged the European masculinity [of the New York Dada Boys club, revealing] men whose aesthetic radicality was often mitigated by their conservatism in the face of actual gender or social excess.”¹⁶ The picture that emerges of New York Dada in the book is then one where the established secure identities of many leading Dadaists somewhat disintegrate. Characters such as Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray and the poet William Carlos Williams, patently damaged by the psychological impact of the First World War, are revealed to be more complex, flawed ‘avant gardists’ than the popular mythology. There’s certainly a sense of them being respectable bourgeois men playing at being transgressors. The Baroness’ curt remark about William Carlos, “he only attacks art – when he has the time”, and her complaints about the manner in which Duchamp “prostitutes himself” are astute in this context. No doubt Jones’ exhaustive recounting of this ‘gap’ between the talk and the action, and the numerous revelations of misogyny, will resonant for some contemporary women artists similarly surrounded by professional ‘bad boys’.
The other more pointed aspect is a critique of art historical institutions and their similar inability and resistance to locating the Baroness within the canon of Dada. Along with Arthur Craven – another figure who until recently was critically marginalised – the Baroness has largely been historically invisible because of an inability to successfully classify her. While her gender was the primary reason for this ‘oversight’, an important dimension of her neglect, like Craven’s, was her relative ‘failure’ to produce autonomous art objects.¹⁷ As noted she “lived avant gardism”, embodying and personifying Dada ‘revolt’ through her actions and on her body. Her eccentric street attire of scavenged junk, stolen trinkets and vermilion scalp, was as potent a ‘popular’ act of cultural and social insurrection as the pantomime of a Dada ball.
Within art movements exclusively concerned with the production of autonomous objects it’s common to find figures who spark aesthetic insurrections, but who themselves fail to realize the potential of their iconic rupturing of practice, ultimately becoming mere footnotes in history. Indeed, David Hopkins in his otherwise excellent ‘A Very Short Introduction to Dada and Surrealism’, frames his mention of the Baroness precisely within these terms (she gets a paragraph and one further brief mention). In his book Hopkins describes her, instructively, as a Dada mascot, whose artworks (classified and understood solely as objects) were relatively minor. Marginalisation of these iconoclasts or mascots, who could be credited with embodying a spirit or operating as a ‘muse’ is common within more conventional, aesthetic, ‘formal’ movements is perhaps ‘acceptable’. However within the context of Dada, a movement rhetorically concerned with anti-art, where testing the ontological securities of cultural, social, sexual categories and borders was everything, it’s a substantial historical flaw. In this movement all actions, ephemeral or permanent, official or unofficial, art or non-art are as essential as historical ‘matter’. The Baroness, like Arthur Craven, may have been an insubstantial or minor contribution to Dada objects, but as instigators of a revolution of the mind and body, they were as effective as many. Such an historical and institutional sleight of hand which demotes this kind of ‘influence’ to the margins, by virtue of the difficulties of picturing it within the gallery or museum (a challenge which should perhaps be faced rather than conveniently ignored), is as problematic with Dada as it has been with the repackaging and managing of conceptualism – another rupture that sought to give art and operation.
Jones’ book is then a timely focus on a figure who in her actions offers a much needed corrective to the lop-sided representation of the history of Dada. All too often Dada and Surrealism returns as a skeletal disembodiment: something the recent Undercover Surrealism show was guilty of in its rather too desiccated presentation of Bataille and his followers. An inability to bring back to life the more vulgar, excessive, irrational, anti-aesthetic moments in Dada is then firstly a misrepresentation of history. After all, the importance of figures like Craven and the Baroness on the Dada ‘scene’ was well documented at the time. As Hans Richter noted, “Craven was greatly admired, because he succeeded in tearing Bourgeois existence apart at the seams. He carried out to the letter all the deeds of anarchy he promised in his writings.”¹⁸ Jones’ reprinting of a hilarious extract from the Baroness’ diary, detailing her inability to hold in a fart while attempting to seduce a young man and the frosty response her flatulence receives, strangely says as much about the ‘air’ of rebellion in New York Dada as any readymade.
Consequently, treating the performances, actions and opinions of an historical figure as culturally significant as the ‘left-behind’ artifacts is important. Jones’ book is then in its concentration on the Baroness, a principled commitment to not siding with one of the winners of art history. She makes this explicit in an edited version of her text, reprinted in the recent ‘Dada Seminars’ publication:
"There’s a tendency in art history to privilege the cultural victors and those artists whose reputation has already been solidified or whose work in one way or another serves the purposes of the discourse that comprise the discipline and its institutional support structures.^"19
The obvious example of the victor in the story of New York Dada is Duchamp. Despite being a self confessed ‘fan’ of Duchamp, Jones’ book unavoidably questions, both implicitly and explicitly the mythology and centrality of Duchamp and co. in the official story of Dada. As such, it is a timely and welcome puncturing of the sacred cult of Marcel – especially as an unquestioning acceptance of Duchamp’s ‘genius’ and ‘radicalism’ has become rather too entrenched and academic.²⁰ There is something patently absurd in the institutional and critical lionizing of Duchamp as the arch-strategist who debunked institutional authorial power – as Jones calls it, the “oxymoronic codification [of] the Duchampian ‘tradition’.”²¹ Increasingly in Jones’ narrative the picture of Duchamp that emerges, while suitably intriguing, does highlight how it’s perhaps more useful to think of him as representing what Hans Richter called a “sublime compromise” as opposed to ‘successful’ subversion. While not believing that the Baroness represents some romantic outsider example of ‘liberation’ (she died in abject poverty, alone and forgotten), such a reading does muddy the waters regarding Duchamp’s centrality in the story of Dada and by extension art history. Perhaps as T.J. Clark remarked, “Duchamp is the figure of what our century has allowed in the way of radical critique.”²² The emphasis on ‘allowed’ is obviously significant.
Irrational Modernism, is then, a timely reassessment of this entrenched approach to Dada and attending ideas about the nature of the avant-garde. As Jones’ writes:
"In art history we are far too attached to a simplistic notion of the avant garde as a group of heroic (almost always white male) individuals fighting unequivocally against the evils of capitalism and the dumbed down values of its mass bourgeois culture."
The book does an excellent job of revealing how historical denial of inconvenient figures like the Baroness in the history of Dada has resulted in this streamlined mono-history. Contrary to such a methodology, Jones’ argument
"for a model that is equally critical, but that functions by returning the skull to life – giving it flesh – through the very identificatory processes that art history has long labored to suppress in order to sustain its illusion of objectivity.^"23
succeeds in bringing history into close proximity as well as challenging the (fictional) coherence of much art historical writing on the period. Just as she highlights how the Baroness represented an irrational, bodily subjectivity that polluted stable categories, so Jones similarly offers an infestation of the ‘neutral’ position of the professional art historian. Dispensing with the fiction of objectivity she aims
"to promote a kind of neurasthenic art history – one that acknowledges rather than suppresses the confusing projections and identifications through which we art historians give meaning to works of art, movements, and the artists who make and sustain them both."²⁴
Dada’s Boys

Curated by art historian David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys was an intelligent and timely exhibition which, as with Jones’ book, aimed to take as its original focus the fecund world of New York Dada. However, while Jones’ subject was the proto-feminist provocateur the Baroness, Hopkins’ exhibition and book was concerned with evoking “Dada’s [...] paternalistic role for a lineage of predominantly male artists concerned with developing themes of male identity.”
Hopkins’ shift of attention towards the reverberations of Dada’s interrogation of masculinity appeared to be an astute curatorial means of avoiding the difficulties of trying to represent and re-animate the stereotypical mythic notion of Dada. Those expecting to be assaulted by a Dada riot would have been disappointed; Dada’s Boys functioned as a soberly constructed, formally balanced exhibition and an accessible, engaging catalogue and text. However, the extent to which the air of sobriety in the Fruitmarket Gallery was maintained was a point of contention.
On one level, the switch of interpretation towards Dada’s picturing of a poetics of masculinity, and its echoes in contemporary practice, was a judicious act of Dada revisionism that corrected an evident lag between curatorial and institutional analysis and artistic practice. As was borne out by the show, numerous artists in the last thirty years have acknowledged a debt to Dada’s examination of the exploded “hole at the center of masculinity.”²⁵ While some critics have picked up on the continuing influence of Dada, few have offered as comprehensive an overview as Dada’s Boys. Uncovering this hidden tradition, Hopkins’ aim then was to counter the standard readings of key artists such as Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger and Paul McCarthy.
Alongside this desire to correct an art historical blind spot, Dada’s Boys, as the catalogue revealed, was also driven by a sense of underlying frustration on Hopkins’ part with a perceived absence of a broader critical examination of heterosexual male identity. However Hopkins, unlike Jones, was more typically ‘masculine’ in not acknowledging his personal investment and motivation for this project. A perhaps well grounded fear that it would jeopardise his credentials as a ‘professional’ art historian prompted his relative invisibility in the text. This resistance to ‘voicing’ his involvement was slightly amusing considering the topic.
In his catalogue essay Hopkins remarked that “the literature on heterosexual masculinity is formidably large, but frustratingly repetitive.”²⁶ Part of his argument was that the arena of male subjectivity has been somewhat colonized by psychological, queer and feminist theory. For Hopkins, the need for a contemporary reassessment of Dada and its historical reverberations resides in precisely how it offers a corrective to the absence in theoretical texts of heterosexual masculinity; of any substantive discussion of how masculinity is lived and experienced on a daily basis. Discussing the dominant theories of masculinity, he noted a lack of understanding of “patterns of friendship, the dynamics of group identification and loyalty, structures of humour and self reflexivity”,²⁷ which has resulted in the standard assessment being somewhat superficial (though he is slightly vague about who he means in this context). Consequently for Hopkins, the tendency towards deconstructing and dissecting the heterosexual male through feminist and queer lenses has reduced him to a state of self-abnegation. As a result there has been a notable failure to grapple with the complexities of heterosexual masculinity, especially those darker more uncomfortable areas of what Homi Bhabha called masculinity’s “prosthetic reality”. There was then, within this art historical illumination of a largely ignored facet of Dada, also a programmatic attempt to inject some self-confidence to the beleaguered male. While there was a whiff of an anti-PC backlash in this, Hopkins patently grasped the paradoxes of the situation. After all, (heterosexual) “men may be the threatened sex but they are also still the threatening sex.” Theoretically the show’s and the catalogue’s ground was clearly laid out, however how it manifested itself aesthetically in the Fruitmarket space was a source of critical tension.

The Sublime Compromise

"Because he is so frightfully cold. You see all his heat flows into his art."²⁸
On entering the Fruitmarket space, Duchamp, the fount of Hopkins’ theses, was represented by familiar images as ‘Rrose Sélavy’, and a more surprising photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp covered in shaving foam. Nearby, Picabia’s schematic parodies of mechanized femininity sat vitrine-entombed next to his heretical bodily spurt of ‘La Sainte Vierge’. For Hopkins, both artists bonded through their contempt for the dominant male stereotypes of the time (the stereotypes who were being slaughtered in the trenches, while they drank cocktails in Manhattan), as well a more anxious sense of their own passive, feminized self. Experiencing gender vertigo, they embraced a fluid sense of self and used an adolescent form of humour to bullishly protect themselves. The aim for Hopkins the curator was to illuminate how their complex, paradoxical grasp of the ‘troubled’ self has been mirrored in more recent work.
The selection of international artists following in Duchamp’s and Picabia’s tracks, in this Scottish context, represented something of a welcome coup, but was still slightly hampered by precisely the kind of fondness for the ‘victors’ that Jones had remarked upon.²⁹ The presence of Matthew Barney was perhaps the most obvious example of this tendency. Canonised on the international art circuit, with Cremaster globally colonising every space the Guggenheim can muscle in on, his appearance was unnecessary. It also offered a reminder of how the kind of programmatic surrealism favoured by Breton (for that is surely what Barney’s work really retails as) emptied the anti-art out of Dada.
This aside, Hopkins’ interest in Dada’s neglected examination of the “poetics of masculinity” seemed to result in a certain partitioning or removal of an integral aspect of the ethos of the Dada Boys. In concentrating on illuminating the poetics he neglected the anti-art polemics, as well as shying away from the more confrontational and ambiguous aspects of heterosexual male identity. In the catalogue essay Hopkins referred to the Boys as an “unruly group of male artists who have little truck with the conformism of Mammy’s boys”,³⁰ and who delve into the murkier areas of male subjectivity. Unfortunately the signs of this weren’t always there, instead there was a sense of bringing the Dada Boys into proportion. This was odd, as Dada, and many of the artists following in the bastardised parental lineage, often deliberately failed or were strategically incompetent in ‘properly’ sublimating irrational desires into art and culture. Letting irrational desires out, letting the work slip and slide and operate in flux was a recurring aspect of Dada and its followers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the base, excessive work Paul McCarthy has produced for the last thirty years. In this context McCarthy could have delivered a more excessive performance of the “hole at the centre of masculinity”, but the chosen exhibition work (‘Cultural Soup’) was an atypical, minor piece, far more in the intellectually respectable mould of Mike Kelley and his sociological uncovering of power.
This absence of precisely the kind of evidence of the irrational, unclassifiable, and visceral body embodied by the Baroness was significant. As it was, there was a nagging sense of aesthetic propriety, somewhat out of keeping with the subject and the catalogue’s claims (as noted, on the whole the signs of aesthetic transgression, of snubbing decorum, were mild). I’m not arguing here for a raucous, tokenistic, cacophony of ‘noise’, the now conventional, superficial, formal signs of white cube rebranding, rather evidence of a more substantive rethinking of the cognitive and aesthetic base of artistic communication. While Keith Farqhuar’s installation and painting did at least reference the Dada tendency to tartly bite the hand that feeds, the exhibition as a whole was largely devoid of this kind of questioning of the aesthetics of gallery spectatorship, and the unraveling of the category ‘artist’ that was central to Dada.
There was a real opportunity to reveal this with the inclusion of Jeff Koons. Koons is admittedly one of the ‘victors’ in recent art history, but I’m inclined to argue the grounds for his ‘victory’ are erroneous. Unfortunately the choice of one of Koons’ basketballs squarely and safely placed him in the “oxymoronic Duchampian tradition” of producing readymade sculptures that are institutionally lauded as exposing institutions’ power to confer value. Contrary to this, it could be argued that Koons’ more substantial, ‘troubling’ challenge to the authority of art institutions lay not with the Duchamp influenced, respectable ready-mades,³¹ but the overtly sexualized sculptures, performances and photographs he lovingly produced (partly with Cicolina – a reincarnated Baroness?) and exhibited in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Koons is perhaps one artist who, at least then, walked in the tracks of his Dada precursors – albeit in a perverse tangential, pseudo evangelical manner. The work he produced between 1988-1992 definitively infected the sphere of art with illegitimate ‘responses’ (affection for trash, seduction), tested its ontological boundaries, and troubled the foundations of gallery spectatorship. This assault on the dominant aesthetics of art consumption went alongside, as Hopkins rightly discusses, an overlooked complex, ambiguous grasp of the intersections of class, sexuality and gender that deserves greater critical attention. However these were not distinct aspects of his practice; form and content were intimately linked.
Increasingly, however, the reading of Koons, as with the Dadaists, has focused on the formal category status of his objects (trinkets from the world of low-end consumerism). I’d argue that what was really subversive about his work was not the tired ‘trafficking’ of exotic objects into art (a standard ruse to liven up the ‘academy’ with some ‘rough’), but his transportation of cognitive forms of attention from outside art (his love for these objects being the most pronounced subversion of critical distance). In this way he questioned the ontological securities of art consumption and spectatorship just as the Dadaists had some 70 years before. One of Jones’ remarks regarding the Baroness and Duchamp seems applicable in this context:
"I argue that these artists’ confusion of gender and overt sexualisations of the artist/ viewer relationship challenged post-Enlightenment subjectivity and aesthetics far more pointedly than did Dadaist paintings and drawings, which only partially addressed the divisions that privileged art as separate from life.^"32

Footnotes
1 Recounted in Richter’s book (Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Thames and Hudson, 1978, p.7 ) when he visits Tristan Tzara – it’s Tzara’s parting shot.
2 Too numerous to mention, but especially hot in Scotland – wander into anyone of the Glasgow’s contemporary galleries right now and you’re likely to find outsized mundane objects, heads with chair legs.
3 I am indebted to Graham Ramsay for informing me of the writer Robert Garnet’s liberal use of this word in relation to some members of the art community.
4 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism : A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press 2004) p. 28.
5 Ibid. p. 25
6 I think this is mainly due to the differing nature of the two publications, as opposed to any failing on Hopkins part. His book and exhibition is obviously aimed at a pseudo-populist gallery clientele, while Jones’ book is squarely aimed at the university.
7 Jones’ book features a fantastic photography of Duchamp, not looking his ‘normal’ composed self, but resolutely ‘bombed’, slumped in a bathroom overtaken by booze and chemicals
8 Neurasthenia described a collection of psychological and physical symptoms including chronic fatigue. Initially associated with the stresses of urbanization on the intellectual class, it was an increasingly common War diagnosis.
9 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 5
10 Ibid.
11 Her polemics could often be anti-Semitic, something Jones doesn’t dodge.
12 John Rodker’s remark in the Little Review quoted in Naumann, F. M. New York Dada 1915-23 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Jan 1998), p. 168.
13 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p.
14 The Baroness’ relationship with Duchamp is especially intriguing. Jones teasingly hints at the Baroness’ possible authorship of Duchamp’s urinal.
15 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, pg.10
16 Jones, A, The Dada Seminars, (volume of 12 essays published by The National Gallery of Art, Washington) pg 160.
17 This is not to say she didn’t, just that few of them have survived or become ‘official’ Dada art.
18 Richter, H, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, p. 85.
19 The October group infatuation with all things Duchampian is rather worryingly revealed in The Duchamp Effect edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (MIT 1996). Reading it I was reminded of the exasperated tone of Terry Atkinson in his 1980’s Open University television program, where he took one of the early pot-shots at the Duchampian myth – “too sophisticated a bourgeois mind not to sense the grip which modern art’s ideologies had on him, instead of finding an alternative he extended the limits of what he was seemingly trying to get away from – so for all its assumed intellectual rigour and order Étant donnés is for me the ultimate act of incoherence. Duchamp’s last bourgeois, hollow smile…and his reputation rolls on endlessly…”
20 Jones, A, The Dada Seminars
21 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, pg.22
22 Clark, T.J., ‘All the things I said about Duchamp: A response to Benjamin Buchloh’, in The Duchamp Effect edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (MIT 1996)p.g -
23 Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 239
24 Ibid. p. 172
25 Ibid. p. 44
26 Hopkins, D, Dada’s Boys (Fruitmarket 2006), p. 16
27 Ibid., p. 18
28 The Baroness on Duchamp. She goes on, “For that reasons, although he loves me, he would never even touch the hem of my red oilskin slicker. Something of his dynamic warmth – electrically – would be dissipated by the contact.” Quoted in Jones, A, Irrational Modernism, p. 102
29 Paul McCarthy, John Bock, Keith Farquhar, Sarah Lucas, Jeff Koons, Roderick Buchanan, Knut Asdam, Martin Kippenberger, Richard Prince, Francis Picabia, Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Lee Miller, Douglas Gordon and Matthew Barney.
30 Hopkins, D, Dada’s Boys, p. 15
31 There is a well documented snob value in professing an admiration for Duchamp – after all.
32 Jones, A, Eros, That’s Life, or the Baroness’ Penis in making Mischief: Dada invades New York (Whitney Museum of American Art 1996) pp. 23

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Get a Fucking Job:
The Truth about Begging
A critical, but solidary review by a member of New Social Art School

Aberdeen is one of the wealthiest cities in Scotland with an average income 5% above the national.¹ This however hides the greater disparity in income and circumstances on the ground – a happy few are better off than a large number can even begin to imagine. Conversely, some are more destitute than we like to acknowledge. According to the same data, provided on the Aberdeen City Council homepage from a survey of 2005, 18% of households are living below the poverty line.² Investigating the situation of beggars in the city, Danish artist Eva Merz’s book ‘Get a Fucking Job’ explores the lives of some of those on the have-not side of this great divide.

Ban the Beggars

The result of a year-long, slow and considered approach to many of the people on the streets, the book ‘Get a Fucking Job: The Truth About Begging’ consists of a collection of conversations with 13 beggars, former beggars, relatives and support workers. The starting point for the project was a campaign carried predominantly by the region’s two main newspapers, The Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Evening Express, calling for a ban of begging in late 2004 – about a year after begging had become an offence in England. While the media purported to speak for Aberdeen citizens, their outcry supported ongoing ambitions within Aberdeen City Council. In September 2004 at the City’s Community Services Committee a report on Street Begging by the Council’s Safer Aberdeen task group recommended, among other measures to be undertaken in a 12-month pilot scheme, the introduction of a byelaw which would make street begging unlawful in the city. This was a response to a “perceived increase in the levels of overall street begging and aggressive begging”.³
Following the launch of this pilot a ‘Safer Aberdeen Sub-group on Street Begging’ was formed. The group is made up of staff from various Social Works departments of the City Council, the local voluntary organisation Aberdeen Cyrenians, Grampian Police, and NHS Grampian. In a progress report on the Pilot Street Begging Initiative in January 2006, after the scheme had run for 12 months, an extension of 6 months was recommended. The overarching goal of these measures is the absence of any beggars in the streets, although it is acknowledged that “there is evidence to suggest that where individuals give up street begging, others will take their place.” The group’s own report goes on to acknowledge that there is a lack of resources both to administrate the scheme and to provide support to beggars. The report also returns to the proposed byelaw and the negative response from the Scottish Executive in June 2005, which recommends the use of existing legal force in the form of Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOS). Interestingly, the restated need for the byelaw in the 2006 report, responding to the Executive, now argues for the need to make begging unlawful in the following terms:
"The reason for seeking approval for the Byelaw was to establish a means that could be used as an added incentive for people who have complex needs, who tend not to engage in aggressive begging and who are unwilling to engage with support services."⁴
The definition of aggressive begging given later in the report includes activities such as sitting in the proximity of a cash dispenser while asking for money. As Aberdeen City Councillor Neil Fletcher clarified in comments to the BBC: “We think a by-law is the only way we can remove these people from the centre of town.”⁵
In contrast with the above-mentioned ‘perceived increase’ cited as the justification for criminalising begging, Grampian Police, as mentioned in the January 2006 report itself, estimate, based on CCTV footage, that a relatively constant number of about 25 people beg in the city, mainly on the main shopping street and in its immediate vicinity. In the months following this progress report by the Council, the Scottish Executive has agreed to reconsider the proposed byelaw.

Speaking for Themselves

When confronted with the demands for a ‘begging ban’ in the local press in autumn 2004, Merz decided to investigate the issue in an art project that clearly came down on the side of the beggars, and in particular countered claims made regarding their perceived wealth. As stated in the book’s introduction, she wanted to find out what was really going on from the beggars’ position and at the same time to allow them to speak for themselves. Merz founded The New Social Art School in 2004 as a framework for her work with others who then become ‘members’. The ‘school’ is conceived as an open group for collective, informal learning through communication in various artistic projects focused on social issues. In this project Merz collaborated with Bob Steadman, an artist who had experienced homelessness himself. Interviews with both Merz and Steadman by Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi aim to make the positions and relationships of the authors clear. In addition to Steadman’s support, initial contact with beggars was provided through the voluntary organisation Aberdeen Cyrenians. Merz also approached beggars directly in the street, and went on to develop further contacts through them. The main underlying motive in the work emerges as that of understanding their perspective through an exploration of their position as they tell and live it. The appeal to the reader is that they develop their position, as it were, in retracing the experience of the artist into increasing understanding of the beggars’ positions. The underlying aim of the project is to create empathy. Based on Merz’s own identification with the viewpoints and experiences of those she speaks to, the reader is encouraged to feel what it is like to be a beggar.
Merz’s interviews are interspersed with a series of black and white pencil drawings by Steadman, her collaborator on the project. Steadman’s illustrations were made some time before his work with Merz, while living on the streets himself. In addition, he also made one print for the project. As an approach to art practice and in their visual imagery, the drawings are in tension with, while integrated into, the wider project. They represent a nightmarish, emotional and individual vision – fused shapes encompassing faces, figures, body parts. In contrast to the overall dialogic structure and focus on social interaction between people, theirs is an inner, isolated world. His new work for the book, an etching, represents the social world in symbols as a closed, impersonal system. His explanatory text – handwritten, underlining the authentic, personal expressiveness of his work – is a decoding of his personal inner world-view. In the publication, the drawings are also interpreted through an interview with Steadman. Their meaning emerges in their creation by someone who has himself been homeless as embodying his authentic expression and ultimate identity. Unlike her questions to Merz, in her discussion with Steadman, Rodriguez-Remedi remains caught up in a fascination with his background and creative expression is seen exclusively in relation to this. However, in the process of proximity, friendship and collaboration, Steadman’s representation is – as far as anyone can be in control of this – based on his own intentions. Within the publication, his drawings stand in conflict with the publication’s dominant mode of art practice – the research-based, conceptual work with our attendant aesthetic and ethical expectations. Whereas Merz develops an almost neutral, self-effacing visual presence, yet remains in control with her life beyond the project is not exposed, Steadman’s drawings are pushed to represent his ‘real’ being as a ‘street person.’ Representing his unmediated, true expression, they also claim to reveal and stand for ‘the truth about begging’.

The Truth about Begging

The claim to a truthful portrayal of the authentic experience of the beggars is at the heart of the project. On a very basic level the book gives the beggars a voice to counter the media claims. Contrary to the claims of council and media, the beggars speaking in the book know plenty about support systems and have plenty of reasons why they are not adequate for them. The truth emerging in this respect is one of extremely limited resources offered, and those are in decline. The most salient example is the fate of the homeless shelters in Aberdeen, some of which were closed some years ago, but not replaced with other facilities, a situation that continues. Reprinted clippings from local newspapers and references to a critical report on the shortcomings of housing services in Aberdeen by Communities Scotland⁶ lend further support to the claims of the beggars. The goal of ‘Get a Fucking Job’ is, however, not primarily the countering of data used by press and council with other facts, but to investigate the meaning of begging and what it is like to beg for those doing it. This is for Merz the truth of the beggars’ perspectives, in their differences and individual struggles.
Yet the notion of ‘speaking the truth’ is obviously complex, as, on a basic level, the conversation develops in relation to the immediate situation, the relationship, including the respective social positions of those involved and their respective goals.⁷ Hence Merz’s efforts, to create a more equal situation, to meet the beggars as much as possible in the spaces of their choice and on their terms. In the range of printed interviews – all were agreed with those interviewed before publication – some clearly take pleasure in telling adventures while others are eager to present a ‘reformed’ identity. Many endeavour to set themselves apart from other beggars in the particularity of their own situation. It seems safe to assume that both Merz’s own conjecture – which she attempts to clarify through the interviews and the conversation with Rodriguez-Remedi recounted in the book – and the roles beggars share when undertaking their activity, influenced the truth stated in ‘Get a Fucking Job’. Merz’s focus on individuals’ perspectives produces room for understanding, rather than the focus on immediate solutions that dominate institutional surveys. As pointed out in Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘La misère du monde’ such surveys, commissioned by government and voluntary agencies, fail to account for the complexity of their subjects’ lived realities as the questions and manner of enquiry reduce the potential answers.⁸ Their scope of enquiry is based on what is already pre-empted as worth knowing by the commissioning body, thus reducing the existence of the interview subjects as well as the scope for what can be said, and hence recorded and revealed.

Singing with one Voice

The main focus of the interviews is the beggars’ present existence. Their histories, as remembered and told by them, are as fragmented and individual as is their daily life and their struggle to get by. As Merz asks questions and enters the sphere of the beggars, her knowledge of their lives increases and similarities emerge between their stories. Rather than being outside of society, ‘excluded’, they very much play a role, they engage, however different their initial situations, personal tragedies, aspirations, and views are. Begging very much emerges as a job in itself. One of those portrayed, Zoe, significantly, describes the people who give money as “customers”. All have a clear notion of the skills, the self-presentation required to attract money from passers-by. Begging clearly is part of public, even economic, life rather than outside of it. In this way, the ‘truth’ that emerges in their personal, daily experiences, reveals a reality of hard work and relationships with others that are suppressed in the official accounts of street begging as a threatening and alien presence in public space.
The main shopping street of Aberdeen, Union Street, and the adjacent shopping centre, is punctuated with banners spanning the width of the street displaying official images of the city. For the last few months, the message has been “Aberdeen – City and Shire. A Brighter Outlook”. This new city brand cost the Council £150,000 from London-based consultant Corporate Edge. Although documents about the branding state its goal is to sell the region to consumers and business elsewhere, the dominating presence of the logo and message in the city centre can only reach local people. As with previous banner series in the same location, the message both labels the surrounding area and the people passing through, prescribing the correct vision of the city. Both this branding exercise and the desire to remove beggars from the streets are highly visible symptoms of the control of public space and the authorities’ vision of their ideal city and citizen – Freedom Of Information requests reveal almost £5m over the past three years has been spent by the Council on external consultants. Documents in support of those two ostensibly very different measures both evoke economic benefit and unity amongst (ideal) members of the community.⁹
In his study of contemporary conflicts over urban spaces in the USA, the criminologist Jeff Ferrell describes the underlying issues in such measures:
"In such landscapes [the public spaces of contemporary cities]…occupants know each other primarily as threats, understand each other mostly as objects of mutual distrust and surveillance – and so, with the social shut down, the expansion of control, the presence of a protective police state seems a reasonable and necessary option for ensuring ‘community’. In such landscapes, the aesthetics of exclusion becomes aesthetics of authority; the policing of public space spawns a parallel policing of perception.^"10
Eva Merz’s efforts to see her project featured in the local press or commented upon by Councillors have, so far, met with determined silence. The book, however, has been selling well in local stores. With the imminent review of the begging ban and Merz’s continuing relationships with beggars, the project of New Social Art School in Aberdeen is very much ongoing. Their next project, a film about the lives of those Merz and Steadman call the street people of Aberdeen, will aim to shift those limitations that keep us and the beggar in our professional roles by focusing on the imagination, dreams and hopes as well as the daily realities of her subjects, who are also, very often, her friends.

‘Get a Fucking Job’ by New Social Art School (ISBN 0-9543574-6) is available at various booksellers such as Fop and Waterstone’s, Aberdeen; Wordpower, Edinburgh; and online at amazon.co.uk

Footnotes
1 ‘Low Income Households in Aberdeen,’ Aberdeen City Council, November 2005
www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acci/web/files/Stats_Facts/LowIncome_aberdeen.pdf
While this is obviously a reductive use of data, the scope of this article lies not in the evaluation of statistics, with their differing provenance, aim, methodology and changing criteria.
2 ‘Low Income Households in Aberdeen,’ Aberdeen City Council, November 2005 www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acci/web/files/Stats_Facts/LowIncome_aberdeen.pdf
3 ‘Pilot Street Begging Initiative – Progress Report’, Community Services Committee, Aberdeen City Council, 31 January 2006, www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf
4 See above www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf
5 Aberdeen beg-ban law reconsidered, BBC News, Wednesday, 26 July 2006,http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/5216032.stm
6 The report found homelessness provision in the city to be “poor”. See ‘Communities Scotland Inspection report. Aberdeen City Council. November 2005’, Communities Scotland, www.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/stellent/groups/public/documents/webpages/ripcs_011493.pdf
7 In ‘La misère du monde’, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1993, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu sets out a methodology for interview situations based on an awareness of social hierarchies and the preconceptions of those involved, which raise issues relevant to the interview format of ‘Get a Fucking Job’.
8 Pierre Bourdieu and others, ‘La misère du monde’, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1993, p. 928
9 See ‘Why Brand Aberdeen City and Shire?’, Aberdeenshire Council, www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/support/city_shire.asp (9 September 2006) and ‘Pilot Street Begging Initiative – Progress Report’, Community Services Committee, Aberdeen City Council, 31 January 2006, www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/acc_data/committee%20reports/cs_com_r8_4_060131.pdf
10 Jeff Ferrell. ‘Tearing Down the Streets. Adventures in Urban Anarchy’. Palgrave, New York 2001.p13-14

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Chemical-Cocktail-Fruit
Jan Nimmo

A Glasgow-based artist, over the last 20 years I have worked on a wide range of creative projects from printmaking to filmmaking and facilitating for community groups. Since the early 1990s I have been a regular visitor to Latin America, carrying out research into popular arts and establishing links with community organisations.
For almost 10 years I have worked on and off with Banana Link¹, which campaigns on banana trade issues and provides a voice in the UK and Europe for the banana and now pineapple workers’ trade unions. For 5 of these years I worked as Banana Link’s Scottish Worker, co-ordinating speaker tours with trade unions and campaign groups in Scotland.
My work in Latin America is essentially about the lives that people lead, from earlier projects in Cuba and Mexico to more recent projects in Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador, where I have been working specifically with banana workers. I have become increasingly involved in labour rights and occupational health issues, through listening to the testimonies of the banana workers and interpreting for Latin American community activists visiting Glasgow. This has brought home to me the parallels with what has happened to workers in Scotland, with the experience of my own family and my father’s working life as a miner, shot-firer, driller and road-builder – all jobs which had a serious effect on his health. My father has recently received compensation for the emphysema that he now suffers from, though somehow this does not compensate for the loss of a comfortable retirement after a hard working life.
In all of this I see my role as part of a bigger project –- that of building bridges between people and across cultures. To do this I need to keep my work simple, I don’t want to bamboozle, and I can’t diverge into the abstract and conceptual when I need to communicate with as wide an audience as possible. I see myself as a campaigner as much as an artist – I need to speak directly to get the message across, which may be complex but it cannot be ambiguous.

Trouble in Paradise?

Costa Rica is a country so rich in biodiversity – referred to by some as the Switzerland of Central America; “politically stable”, a country with no standing army – that it has been promoted as a destination for eco-tourists, and is widely seen as a tropical paradise in comparison to other Central American countries. But outside the boundaries of the country’s national parks there is another Costa Rica, one of cash crop monocultures and multinational fruit companies: here the picture is very different – environmental destruction and the blanket use of pesticides, chronic health problems and the repression of workers rights, suppression of trade unionists and the intimidation of those who speak out.
I first met Carlos Arguedas eight years ago in Glasgow. While I was translating and playing host to him and a fellow trade unionist, I got to understand something about the situation in the banana-growing region of Costa Rica. I kept in touch with Carlos and, over the years, came to learn more about the history of the exploitation of the Atlantic Zone for banana production. This story begins over 100 years ago with the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and its domination of the economies of Central America, but through Carlos I learnt more about other struggles and the personal toll these had taken on him and the other people living and working on and around the banana plantations.
In the 1970s, Carlos, like many other workers, was made sterile through exposure to the pesticide Nemagon (DBCP). Nemagon was already banned in the USA. Carlos was 27 years old at the time. He was imprisoned on numerous occasions for his trade union work and community activism, including land occupation. He also took part in organising action against Dole and Dow Chemicals, the manufacturer of Nemagon. After a two year campaign by the unions Costa Rica banned the use of Nemagon but the companies ignored the new laws and continued to use Nemagon for a further two years.
One of the things which for me marks Carlos as someone special within the trade union movement is that as well as campaigning for trade union and labour rights he is also a passionate environmentalist.
Almost half of the material costs on the average plantation are spent on a whole variety of agrochemicals used throughout the growing process. While working as Scottish Co-ordinator for Banana Link I met one of the few scientists prepared to speak out and not toe the company line (and that of the Costa Rican government) on the effects of agrochemicals on human health and on the environment. Dr Caterina Wesseling works for IRET, the department of toxicology at the University in San Jose and is also the Director of Central American occupational health programme, SALTRA. Dr Wesseling has carried out detailed investigations that show the extent to which pesticide and other chemical residues are present in homes and schools in the banana-producing areas. These chemicals come from the plantations and include allergens and carcinogens associated with a wide range of health problems.
Much of the pesticide residue is airborne, coming from the aerial spraying which is carried out routinely but haphazardly, over the plantations and anything else in their proximity. There are various fungicides that are applied aerially, including Chlorothalonil and Mancozeb (both known carcinogens and allergens). The aerial spraying of these chemicals has had a huge impact on workers and communities living around the plantations: I have interviewed people with severe skin allergies and acute bronchial problems. The law in Costa Rica states that workers should be evacuated from the plantations while aerial spraying is taking place, but according to the testimonies of the workers, in reality this doesn’t always happen. I have also seen for myself how spraying is carried out and it is clear that there is no protection to the roads and smallholdings around the plantations.
Other chemicals are associated with the bagging of bananas. The blue, Chlorpyrifos impregnated polythene bags are as common a sight as the banana plants themselves and discarded bags make up a significant and very visible proportion of the waste stream of commercial banana production. Most at risk are the baggers themselves (the bags have to be placed over the growing fruit by hand) but the chemical somehow finds its way into the bedrooms, kitchens and classrooms of the local community. Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate and a neurotoxin – associated with anorexia, suicides and depression (similar problems had been linked to exposure to sheep-dip in Scotland). Chlorpyrifos has already been banned on a number of plantations in Honduras – thanks to the pressure exerted by local trade unions and a study carried out by SALTRA. An international campaign is now building to ban the use of this chemical altogether, however its use remains widespread and global - Chlorpyrifos has even been found in bottled Coca Cola in India.²
We may ask why bananas need such a cocktail of chemicals to grow healthily or to produce an economically viable crop. The Cavendish variety of banana grown universally for the world market is in fact a sterile hybrid, which while producing fruit that conform to the shape and colour the world expects, remains susceptible to disease in the warm and humid regions where it is grown.
Reliance on chemicals continues in the washing and packing plants, where women workers are more exposed to the chronic effects of the pesticides and disinfectants. Protective gear such as rubber gloves create as many problems as they solve, as contaminated water and disinfectant become trapped inside. The results are clearly visible in the disfigured hands of some of the workers.
I had seen that conditions in the banana industry were bad – but what about the other cash crops grown in the area? Since the market for bananas became saturated with cheap fruit from Ecuador, Costa Rican producers have taken the hint to diversify. Unfortunately this is not as positive as it sounds, as it means the substitution of one monoculture for another. These crops include melons and ornamental plants but the most damaging of all has been the pineapple – the production of which is both environmentally more destructive and more dependent on chemicals than the banana.
Just like bananas, pineapples are grown in intensive conditions with the aid of a cocktail of chemicals. However, the pineapple is a short plant and lacks the ground cover and humus-producing leaves of the banana. The loss of ground cover has resulted in a massive increase in erosion and accelerated the run-off of pesticides into the once pristine lowland river systems. The pineapple plants also play host to a fly, which feeds off the blood of cattle in the neighbouring fields and can cause them each to lose a kilo in weight per day. As a result the cattle farmers are also using more pesticides to tackle the flies. I have spoken to smallholders forced off the land, their livestock poisoned, their livelihoods gone, leaving them with no option but to sell up to the fruit companies. I visited communities that depend on the river as a lifeline and which are now seriously affected by the poisoning of fish and the silting up of waterways. These communities rely on subterranean fresh watercourses as their only source of drinking water but these aquifers have also been affected by pesticides (such as Bromasil) and the wells are now contaminated.
Both the trade unions and Caterina Wesseling are very damning about the certification of fruit production. Some of these framework agreements are voluntary internal standards, which lead us to believe that fruit is produced in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. External monitors do visit the plantations but they only see those workers who have been selected by the company and not the trade union representatives or the scientists involved in monitoring, so they do not get a clear and accurate picture of what happens day-to-day. In fact, many of the workers enjoy the days when inspections take place, since correct working procedures are more likely to be adhered to and they may get the chance to go home early! Dr Wesseling is particularly critical of Rainforest Alliance: “Yes, what a lovely name - it would lead you to believe this was paradise - but as far we are concerned they continue to certify conditions which are unacceptable.”
I also saw that exposure to pesticides is by no means the only threat which the workers have to put up with. They work excessively long hours (12 hour shifts are common, up to 24 hours on pineapple plantations ) and have suffered from years of union repression. I wanted to know why the unions hadn’t done more to oppose these conditions. From Carlos I learnt about the history of Solidarismo – “yellow unions” set up by the banana companies with the support of the government and the right wing of the Catholic Church, supposedly to represent the workers but with the real intention of making it more difficult for them to form free trade unions of their own. In reality it is no better than a Christmas club. But the development of free trade unions has not been entirely suppressed by Solidarismo. I know one activist who joined the free trade union when he saw what Solidarismo was about – he has since visited Scotland, representing the banana workers during the G8 protests.
The switch to pineapple production has also brought with it a change towards the “Ecuadorisation” of production. The fruit companies have learnt the lesson from Ecuador and we now see in Costa Rica the increased casualisation of the workforce and the adoption of more “flexible” working practices. This has allowed the situation to arise where workers are exposed to dangerous chemicals for still longer periods, without adequate protection or guidance. There is no possibility of forming trade unions or gaining access to their representatives. The position of women and children has been made more vulnerable, both through poorer working conditions and through the effects on family life of casualisation and a mobile workforce. There are now more single mothers on the plantations, forced to work and with no access to child care. In an environment where sexual harassment by foremen is rife this clearly brings with it other risks to the women workers.

Pura Vida?

The testimonies I have gathered from travelling around Costa Rica with Carlos and other trade unionists form the basis of my latest film, Pura Vida?
Pura Vida? exposes the human and environmental damage caused by the expansion of big cash crop plantations and the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica. This is an entry level film aimed at raising awareness amongst consumers in the UK of the hidden costs behind the fruit we eat. I feel that this is especially relevant, given the position of the big supermarkets squeezing the producers in a “race to the bottom” to produce readily available and ever cheaper fruit for our tables. However, the supermarkets still manage to take up to 40% of cost to the consumer as profit, even while the commodity prices are falling. Pura Vida? will be premiered in Glasgow at this October’s Document 4 Human Rights Film Festival. My first film, Bonita: Ugly Bananas was first shown at the same festival two years ago (Document 2).
Bonita told the story of the first free trade unions in twenty years to be established on the plantations of Ecuador – and what happened when they decided to go on strike. Those events took place four years ago and I had hoped that conditions would have improved since then – but the latest news from Ecuador is that the company owner who had so violently oppressed the workers has announced his last minute candidacy for the presidency – brandishing a bible and describing himself as a hero of God!
Both Pura Vida? and Bonita form part of a larger project – Green Gold³ – which has given me the opportunity to use longer editions of the workers’ testimonies along with video installation from the plantations and packing plants and woodcut portraits of the workers themselves. Green Gold is a travelling exhibition that can be adapted to suit a variety of venues, events and organisations, from arts organisations and festivals to trade unions, shopping centres and community groups. The Green Gold website is also a source of information for consumers and campaigners. So please get in touch if you would like to host an event to help build a bridge between banana workers and consumers, to give a human face to their struggle.

Footnotes
1 www.bananalink.org.uk
2 www.indiaresource.org/news/2006/1084.html
3 www.greengold.org.uk

Contact, Jan Nimmo: jan@greengold.org.uk

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Rose Coloured Spectacles
Tom Jennings
Jonathan Demme’s anti-Bush broadside of a film The Manchurian Candidate (2004) effectively updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 conspiracy thriller – with Iraq rather than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and assassins by corporate, not KGB, agents. Given our familiarity with the amoral criminality of the military-industrial complex and government via mythology, mystification and spin, these revisions seem highly appropriate. The unfolding plot shows Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) grappling with Gulf War Syndrome zombification amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and sundry electoral, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and lickspittles.
However, despite a very neat new denouement, much of the political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon is lost, wherein McCarthyism succeeded thanks to Kremlin plotters finding it thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims – a fascinating, if muddled, disentangling of the contradictions of Cold War politics. Unfortunately, the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace, plus honourable old-school patriotic patricians who have for years fought Party takeover bids by tycoons. In other words, the radical potential of a critique of the interdependency of the state and capitalism is squandered in favour of regressive conservative recuperation – much like, in fact, the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign itself.
The changing contours of cinematic conspiracies can thus be interpreted as adjustments to what filmmakers and studios understand ‘politics’ to mean to themselves and viewers today – in a trajectory from stark Orwellian paranoia through nihilistic neo-noir to recent efforts such as Demme’s glossy pastiche, Traffic (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2001), The Quiet American (dir. Philip Noyce, 2002), Silver City (dir. John Sayles, 2004), The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Mereilles, 2005) and Syriana (dir. Andrew Gaghan, 2005). Moreover, the last few years have seen a growing tendency for supposedly progressive themes to be tackled in big-budget Hollywood fictions, along with the incorporation of originally marginal-aesthetic choices and strategies in the production of cinematic blockbusters, brands and franchises. This survey describes some of these phenomena and the critical response to them, and discusses their ambivalent implications and limitations.

Shifting Perspective

In their book A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Carl Boggs and Thomas Pollard match recent developments in cinema to the lived experiences of its audiences in the “globalizing, consumer-oriented capitalist order” constituted by “gross material inequalities, social polarization, possessive individualism, civic fragmentation, and impending chaos”.¹ Elements of classic Hollywood genres are combined and attenuated in many recent films so that their narratives depict incomprehensible and corrupt worlds where conventional rational understanding, collective organisation and public action have lost the capacity to offer explanations or effect political change – thanks in no small part to the saturation of our psyches with corporate media trivia. And although the book’s overly loose definition of postmodernism in films encompasses many long-established forms and styles, its proposition is surely plausible: that earlier representations of brutal, miserable, hopeless and confused lives in specific marginal, urban, criminal and/or nightmare milieux have been increasingly glossed and generalised to apply to society as a whole.
Other treatments of significant trends in contemporary US films have no patience with such pessimistic and totalising assessments of the sector’s long-range value and significance. Bucking the tendency of major studio output in the 1990s to converge towards ever more inflated and repetitious replicas with little more than special effects enhancements and celebrity presence to recommend them, a diverse collection of creative film-making talents instead brought the sensitivities and dynamism of subcultural and cult media and genres to bear. The achievements of some of these in persuading major studios to part with substantial production budgets are celebrated by James Mottram in his study The Sundance Kids.² This title furnishes a spurious collectivity – when many, such as Soderbergh and Tarantino, had little or no truck with Robert Redford’s nursery and showcase at the Sundance Institute. It also encourages a strained intergenerational comparison with the 1970s New Hollywood of Scorcese, Spielberg and Coppola et al, who rose to prominence from the sixties countercultural demolition of outdated industry practices before subsequently finding themselves thoroughly tamed by what replaced them. Sharon Waxman’s anecdotal survey Rebels On The Backlot³ at least concentrates on detailing insider gossip and dissecting networking patterns in showing how an arbitrary selection of younger independent directors have combined personal entrepreneurial prowess and self-promotion with genuine artistic flair in advancing their careers.
Conversely, rather than translating cinematic texts as sociocultural reflections, and with a much less sanguine approach to cultural commerce, Ben Dickenson’s Hollywood’s New Radicalism⁴, focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists involved in film production to reflect their social awareness in their work, charts the changing structure of an industry whose consolidation and profit-seeking agendas fluctuate according to wider political and economic trends. Recent generations of independent innovators gained arthouse footholds with regular box-office hits refreshing moribund blockbuster formulae – and now that niche marketing and diversification are prominent megastudio strategies, successful Hollywood progressives can juggle mainstream fare with personal commitment to lower-budget releases paid for with its proceeds. Moreover, after Clinton’s neoliberalism, Seattle’s protest revival, and post-9/11 Bush barbarism, many also vociferously criticise orthodox politics, publicly supporting grass-roots campaigns instead. By this account, subversive hope unexpectedly supplants cynical despair.

Focusing on Power

Obvious manifestations of these phenomena may be sought in film treatments of formal political processes themselves. Conventional 1990s satires centralised the network of PR spin and corporate and media influence on dodgy leaders, from the Machiavellian machinations of Bob Roberts (dir. Tim Robbins, 1992) to more sympathetic power-seekers led astray both by their own narcissism and the electoral farce. Primary Colors (dir. Mike Nichols, 1998) and Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson, 1998) were comically pertinent to the Clinton regime’s practice, but said nothing about either political consequences or ordinary viewers/voters beyond them being suckered (which might apply more to liberal filmmakers falling for Clinton’s progressive rhetoric). Meanwhile the historical revisionism of JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991) and LA Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997) had already applied film noir devices to national and local institutional and governmental structures, implying their utter moral bankruptcy. More complex and less conventional narratives followed suit, exploiting the flexibility of genre-crossover to link the lives of the citizenry into the degradations of politics.
Most trenchantly, elite Democrat Senator Bulworth (dir. Warren Beatty, 1999) goes AWOL in South Central LA after a nervous breakdown on the campaign trail, emerging as a champion of the underclasses. Borrowing elements of ’90s ‘hood film’ style works here, thanks to immense respect shown for ghetto philosophy, intelligence and creativity, counterposed by Warren Beatty’s hysterical vanity and, crucially, laughably incompetent rapping.⁵ Other recent films also bridge the gap between culture and politics in diverse ways and with varying degrees of success. However, apart from Bamboozled’s (dir. Spike Lee, 2001) exposure of corporate media’s racism in colonising Black traditions, all invoke heroic individualism to drive history: Cradle Will Rock (dir. Tim Robbins, 2000) revisits the political context of the 1930s US Federal Theatre Project in a musical celebration of proletarian art served up by elite intellectuals like Orson Welles and John Housman; Good Night & Good Luck’s (dir. George Clooney, 2005) implied critique of modern media requires merely journalistic integrity to scupper McCarthyism; and 8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003) and Erin Brockovich (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2000) connect uplift from the constraints of working-class culture only with personal success in music and law respectively – reducing those represented (whether in the hip-hop or legal senses) to passivity.
More ambitious is Silver City’s bitter denunciation of prevailing power. This crime thriller-cum-political conspiracy follows an ex-crusading journalist (Danny Huston) grappling with environmental destruction and the exploitation of migrant workers perpetrated by corporate greed – all fronted by cretinous mouthpieces elected through omnipresent soundbites and photo-ops. Although crippled by annoyingly patronising expositions (when the message emerges more effectively from the narrative), the film is effective in critiquing left, right and centre while still hinting at hope. So the right-on countercultural veteran does eventually uncover the ‘truth’ – but to no effect other than his own satisfaction (signalled by a successful romantic denouement), while his ‘concern’ for the plight of immigrants doesn’t extend to any regard for their welfare as he exploits their goodwill in helping him. The self-obsession of the ’60s generation thus neatly trashed, potential is nonetheless glimpsed in the lead character’s former associates – still committed, but now engaged in muckraking internet activism.
Treatments of transnational political and corporate conspiracies themselves adopt more complex narratives – The Quiet American and The Constant Gardener show middle-ranking professional protagonists nudging toward an appreciation of the dirty institutional deeds they’re implicated in, and that they’ve somehow hitherto avoided awareness of – but they are helpless given their isolation. Traffic and Syriana claim to represent a global range of ‘stakeholder’ perspectives on the wars on drugs and terror respectively. But although no-one sees the bigger picture, and all subplots end more or less tragically, characters are given more depth the higher their social status – reflecting the possibility of meaningful agency, and hence some kind of redemption if only in noble failure. In the process, hierarchies are meticulously preserved along with the identification with middle class pathos required by the stereotypical rendering of everyone else. Even Lord of War’s (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2005) attempt to stitch together personal deployments of national mythology with the globalising sociopathy of capitalism (via the evils of the international arms trade) only acquires narrative drive – and thus purchase as metaphor – by shadowing Nicolas Cage’s crazed Ukrainian-American entrepreneur with Ethan Hawke’s ineptly idealistic Interpol authority-figure.
The comforting banality of simple-minded redemptive aesthetics is taken to extremes in the treatment of war itself. Continuing Sam Mendes’ generic deconstructions of inadequate US existential masculinity begun in American Beauty (2000) and The Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) demonstrates the hysterical convolutions of redundant machismo among marines in the 1991 Gulf War. Unfortunately the film adopts the perspective of Jake Gyllenhaal’s pretentious nerd frustrated by the military’s failure to resolve his dysfunctional family coming-of-age drama – while most army recruits rationalise their positions after joining up to give their lives income, rather than meaning. At least here the adolescent ‘philosophising’ is bracketed as a defensive response to insane reality, whereas in Spielberg’s odious Munich (2006) it is privileged as ideological support for Israeli state terrorism.⁶ Much more interesting is the playfulness of Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell, 1998), with the first Iraq war cast as heist movie where heartfelt solidarity replaces the cynical self-interest of a US platoon once the malevolence of official policy becomes clearer during a surreal excursion in pursuit of buried treasure. Jarhead and Three Kings are also saturated with reference to cinematic precursors – in style, structure and the social and internal intercourse of their characters – and it’s precisely the dissolving of such boundaries that seems to give these films more chance of saying something interesting and original.

Blurred Vision

The mixing of genres resonates with viewers’ media and cultural biography and literacy, while simultaneously questioning the reliability of conventional patterns of knowledge and understanding of our own lives and the world.⁷ The apparently apolitical nihilism of postmodern cinema, especially in its treatment of transgression and excess – violence, crime, sexual and social – began to extend in the ‘90s away from the virtual solipsism of Lynchian fantasy, yuppie nightmares and neo-noir, as narratives became fractured in time and space as well as according to character psychodynamics. Tarantino’s exuberant comic book capers and Natural Born Killer’s (dir. Oliver Stone, 1994) venom against media opiates reflect the mundane madness and horror visible in contemporary society, finding echoes in later films tackling similar themes in highly original ways. Now it is commonplace for skewed perceptions and private fantasies to overflow and reverberate among participants in social networks, influencing or overdetermining prospects for the future of the self and others.
In particular, the status of the ‘reality’ presented to viewers is unsettled when visual design and cinematography confuse perspective; with subjective states no longer conveniently tagged as ‘flashback’, ‘daydream’, ‘nightmare’, etc. Together with the unpredictable vicissitudes of the external world, its implacable material force and proclivity for coincidence, this hints at the open-endedness of history rather than closure – modulating the emotional rush traditional denouements aim for as ‘entertainment’. Then, when the juggling of genres leaves a narrative with no single obvious outcome, dissonant resolutions may be tacked on whatever the thrust of the foregoing would conventionally suggest. You’d think the indie rebels and radical mavericks purportedly populating Hollywood could exploit these profitable fashions as golden opportunities to represent political struggle in their work. But only very few films have shown public, collective action and conflicts of interest – involving varying forms and levels of explicit political ideology and motivation – to be suffused and surrounded with, and energised and confounded by, the misrecognition and desire both practical and cinematic experience suggest are inevitable.
Based on the iconoclastic cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) drips with comic invective concerning the comfortable alienations of commodity fetishism and managed misery. Corporate bureaucrat Jack (Edward Norton) has a solipsistic private life of Ikea catalogue completism, filling the resulting spiritual vacuum with self-pitying voyeurism at self-help groups for cancer sufferers. This pathetic existence is blighted by escalating narcissistic insults and material disasters, until libidinal nihilist Tyler (Brad Pitt) rekindles his anguished masculinity in regular bareknuckle fistfights on city backstreets. Fascinated onlookers from all walks of life join in, mushrooming and coalescing as an underground movement to overthrow consumer society via unspoken male solidarity. Their plan to blow up finance companies’ headquarters proves too much for Jack, who shoots himself in the head – merely wounding himself physically but killing Tyler (revealed as schizoid personification of suppressed desire) – and the newly-integrated Jack finds heterosexual love as the bombs detonate.
Even if dismissed as hermetic schoolboy fantasy – or worse, flirting with the fascistic appeal of cult violence powered by psychotic charisma – Fight Club at least foregrounds passionate bodily yearning as potential antidote to the poison of capitalism.8 David O. Russell’s I [Heart] Huckabees (2005) follows the more unthreatening route of surrrealism-lite (as favoured by global brand advertisers), sacrificing the urgency and emotional desperation conjured by Fincher. The gentler, screwball farce comedy is likewise enervating rather than energising – but both choices suit the film’s theme of the New Age reduction of politics to personal morality and lifestyle marketing. Here, Jason Schwartzman’s earnest environmentalist agonises over the ethics and efficacy of single issue campaign compromises with corporate interests. So troubled that he fears for his sanity, various counsellors and consultants are invited to compete in obsessing over his sense of identity, making suitably shallow interventions in his social and activist circle. ‘Finding himself’ quickly takes precedence over preserving wilderness – implying that the previous concern for ‘real’ nature merely externalised anxieties concerning his own self-indulgent whingeing human nature.

Crowd Scenes

Fight Club and Huckabees are unquestionably highly original films, with wildly inventive camerawork, editing and plotting, and complex characterisations and cultural reference points. And despite their considerable limitations – for instance depicting political action as, at best, misguided – both complicate the striving for commonality with the difficulties inherent in the uncertain status of knowledge and interpretation experienced by characters and viewers. More conventional ensemble dramas also emphasise the influence of randomness, shared fantasy, flashbacks and alternative versions in shaping local social contexts. The fractured stories and multiple perspectives pioneered by Robert Altman have been very influential among independent filmmakers – though rarely exploited to illuminate political themes.⁹ Moreover, other groundbreaking work – such as the ghettocentric cycle initiated by Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1990), films directed by Sean Penn (The Indian Runner, 1991; The Crossing Guard,1995; The Pledge, 2001) and those written by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 2001; 21 Grams, 2004; The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, 2006) – locate agency and potential most firmly within individual protagonists, who are always flawed, damaged and disruptive of simplistic solutions, and the ramifications of their normal or abnormal pathology ripple out into their social environments to highlight collective implications.
Paul Haggis’ Crash (2005) focuses on the sickness of racism infecting all levels of US society in a tapestry of neatly interlocking and sharply scripted vignettes featuring a dozen-and-a half characters crossing fractious paths over two days in Los Angeles. Its manipulative conceit is to include only occasions dominated by racialising attributions, with scant contextualisation in deeper backstories and a fuller range of interactions. Despite consequently actively stereotyping those it accuses, the scenarios frequently overflow this constraint to reveal the bases of conflict in class distinction and economic inequality – with particularly acute detailing of the complicit hypocrisy of liberal elites and the fatal delusions of political correctness. But with the redress to racial prejudice artificially overdetermining the narrative ebbs and flows, acts of humility and humanity on the part of those towards the bottom of the cosmopolitan heap are isolated as exceptions to the rule rather than countervailing force. Crash thus embodies and exemplifies the organising power of racism yet, paradoxically, was lauded and awarded best film Oscar for its bravery in exposing it. But the film is much less honest than Short Cuts’ (dir. Robert Altman, 1993) pinpointing of the bitter pressure-points of the city’s downwardly-mobile trajectory, ultimately being just as distanced and melancholic as Magnolia’s (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) meandering meditation on the ineffable strangeness of LA life.
Refusing the panoramic omnipotence of such efforts, Kathryn Bigelow’s magnificent Strange Days (1995) experiments viscerally with the phenomenology of simulation offered by new media, gradually expanding the significance of their alienating distraction for confused thrill-seekers out into the seething public sphere of a chaotic neo-noir 1999 LA under brutal martial law. The troubled pairing of ex-vice squad porn merchant Ralph Fiennes and streetwise action heroine Angela Bassett tangle with corrupt entrepreneurs and lowlives in a decadent cross-fertilising cultural milieu of hip-hop punk, blundering into a conspiracy to assassinate a Black revolutionary leader which threatens to tip the civic millennium festivities over the brink into grass-roots insurrection. Through an unprecedented synthesis of film and psychoanalytic theory, exploitation of cinema traditions and bravura design, editing and photography, it is far more nuanced than Crash in tackling the subjective and social significance of race, as well as of gender and class.¹⁰ The film also works hard to specify its historical contingency in the best traditions of science fiction as speculation on the present (for example by Stanislaw Lem, William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick) – rather than hysterical inflation into universal values, or the fashionably subversive adolescent hype which passes for philosophical resonance in the Wachowski brothers-produced V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, 2006), as in The Matrix (dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999) series.¹¹ Strange Days even excuses its major flaws (such as a deliberately implausible, if arguably utopian, central relationship) by managing to render its politically ultra-conservative resolution as dystopian recuperation – a final knowing flourish on the role of mass entertainment in taming desire in labyrinths of repressive desublimation.

Changing Lenses

The general timidity of dream factory visionaries in tackling political change may, then, be best conceived in terms of a wider disillusionment among the middle classes with social democracy as the handmaiden of capitalist progress in our strange days, given their failure to predict or comprehend the unravelling liberal consensus. 1980s and ’90s neo-noir, postmodern and ‘slacker’ stories appeal for their thoroughgoing refusal of traditional disciplines and delusions, which is partly also what makes new forms of collective mobilisation such as anti-globalization possible among those growing up without the benefits of 1960s naiveté and aristocratic modernist optimism. However, the recent spate of films translating oppositional attitudes into populist cinema use largely retrograde narrative conventions and characters, without the stylistic and technical experimentation elsewhere employed to reflect underlying malaises in Western society. The most obvious symptoms of war and corporate excess are thus presented as ultimate causes, to be adjusted by enlightened reform. Similarly, whereas the deeper colonisation of intimate life by the instrumental logic of commodification ironically has Hollywood at its vanguard, any cinematic response more robust than trivial lifestyle tinkering leads to shattered identities or social breakdown which only the desperate reassertion of established authority can resolve.
While at least corruption and malpractice by government and business, environmental damage, and the effects of corporate imperialism on the poor at home and abroad are now gratifyingly familiar on the big screen, merely updating clichéd film formulae reproduces traditional resolutions revolving around heroes and leaders. The corresponding notion that suitably nimble strategies among liberal filmmakers guarantees progressive content does justice neither to contemporary political circumstances – where the intentions and interests of professional elites are so widely, thoroughly and understandably distrusted – nor to a media culture in which superficial appearance is fetishised to mask the depressing difficulties of real life. Negotiating prevailing tastes and engaging deeper desires while also offering genuine critique is much trickier than the voluntaristic idealism of celebrities suggests. So radical directors often skilfully portray middle class protagonists striving to maintain their positions entangled in complex local hierarchies and histories, with very mixed consequences for those with less room to manouevre. Regrettably, the latters’ rich social dynamic is usually homogenised into frozen victimised masses – either destined to be thawed by personal heroics and histrionics, or simply functioning as a reactive backdrop against which the stars shine.
Conspiracy theories have long been fertile territory for cinema, with political thrillers sensing the world’s complexity while rendering historical phenomena in simplistically individual terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in desperate response and, given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity’s ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter exist, and create havoc, but the more difficult truth is that domination is sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies, societies and economies – conditioning the patterns of stratification, distinction and difference which constitute the texture of everyday life irrespective of whose interests can be said to be ultimately served. This is precisely the terrain which postmodern existential nightmares effectively excavate, albeit usually inside single isolated and tortured psyches. Furthermore, expansive dramas of community life are eminently capable of depicting the ways in which the interests, beliefs, actions and affiliations of friends and neighbours, lovers and strangers mingle subjectively and socially. When parallel storylines and biographies clash and intersect, this is as likely to yield collective synergy as the familiar cinematic staples of destructive conflict or sterile equilibrium.
These tentative and emergent representational paradigms seem to offer the possibility of providing visions of the grounds for genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared purpose in circumstances in which business as usual is decisively threatened. However, it would be necessary to acknowledge the central role here of autonomous grass-roots activity or expression outside of the boundaries, preoccupations, conceptual frameworks, guidance and control of middle-class mediators. But this would entail the latter surrendering their recuperative power, and accordingly the privileged positions granted for loyal opposition to the status quo. Even the more challenging of the films referred to above can therefore be interpreted in terms of a reluctance to tackle such suffocating restraints in their makers’ own cultural practice – amounting to a wholesale failure of nerve as well as self-censorship. This helps explain why manifestations of conscious struggle, collective public dissent or mass action are so rarely properly explored, and certainly not celebrated – and, especially when their subjects lack social status, hasty negation and patronising contempt are the order of the day. Instead a regular refrain of self-important gestures by and about special ones creating history emanates from aspiring or actual cinema industry heavyweights and their (un)critical cheerleaders – whose rose-coloured spectacles conceal an inability to conceive of alternatives to the political coordinates of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Notes
1. Carl Boggs & Thomas Pollard, A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p.249.
2. James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, Faber & Faber, 2006.
3. Sharon Waxman, Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System, HarperCollins, 2005.
4. Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush, I.B. Tauris, 2006.
5. See Paula J. Masood, ‘Ghetto Supastar: Warren Beatty’s Bulworth and the Politics of Race and Space’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No.4, 2002, pp.287-293.
6. The grounds for which, in this case, are presented as neutral historical record rather than falsified propaganda; for a corrective, see As’ad Abu-Khalil, ‘Spielberg on Munich: the Humanization of Israeli Killers, and the Dehumanization of Palestinian Civilians’, 2005, http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html. For a relevant discussion of the deeper relationship between media images and contemporary international government, see: Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews & Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, 2nd edition, Verso, 2006.
7. See my ‘Class-ifying Contemporary Cinema’, Variant, No. 10, 2000, pp.16-19.
8. As, in various contexts, Slavoj Zizek concludes re: Fight Club: “Liberation Hurts!” (Eric Dean Rasmussen, 2003, www.lacan.com/zizekillinois.htm). See also Zizek: ‘I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Doug Henwood’, Bad Subjects, No. 59, 2002, http://bad.eserver.org (and in Joel Schalit, ed., The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, Akashic Books, 2002); and ‘Art: The Talking Heads’, in Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge, 2004. For the director’s take on his film, and the controversy it spawned, see: James Swallow, ‘Hit Me’, in Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, Reynolds & Hearn, 2003.
9. Significant exceptions being City of Hope (dir. John Sayles, 1991), Lone Star (dir. John Sayles, 1996) and Sunshine State (dir. John Sayles, 2002) – like Silver City, financed by John Sayles’ journeyman scriptwriting and independently produced and distributed by his and partner Maggie Renzi’s company, The Anarchists’ Convention.
10. See: Christina Lane, ‘The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron’; and Steven Shaviro, ‘“Straight from the Cerebral Cortex”: Vision and Affect in Strange Days’; both in: Deborah Jermyn & Sean Redmond (eds.) The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, Wallflower Press, 2003.
11. See Robert Allen’s and my comments on V For Vendetta in Freedom magazine, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006.

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Competing Narratives Exposed: Did you hear that two Palestinians were captured the day before that Israeli soldier was?
Rena Bivens
As it turns out, journalists do not climb to the top of their respective headquarters each day and direct large, all-seeing mirrors towards each region of the globe before effortlessly broadcasting the most compelling images onto your television screen later that evening, complete with straightforward, de-politicized descriptions of their content.
As soon as the newsroom directs its focus towards news items that involve war or conflict, particularly one that is as hotly disputed as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many more decisions are involved. As it turns out, the news that streams onto your television screens each night is no mirror of the world – it is the result of an actively manufactured version of reality.
Many issues problematize the mainstream media’s coverage of conflict. Time constraints in television, word limits in newspapers, ideologically-laden yet politically-endorsed and relatively unquestioned terminology, a seemingly never-ending range of differing historical accounts that no two groups are likely to ever agree upon, and the influence of public relations and intense pressure by well-organised lobby groups are just a few. Still, reporting conflicts is one of the most important tasks of mainstream media, since the majority of the public will only receive information about foreign crises from this coverage. Television remains the main source of world news for the large majority of the UK population.¹ Therefore it is absolutely vital that television reporting of conflicts is analysed and broadcasters are pressured to maintain balance and a high standard of impartiality.
If the news was just a reflection of images caught in a mirror, news agencies like Reuters and Associated Press would cease to exist. These organisations fuel the news that we receive and the consequence of this dependency is a lack of diversity between news outlets and, more crucially, a restricted and politicized information flow. While the domination by only a handful of news agencies can result in a selective representation of the globe and has the potential to advance only certain political and economic interests, news is still largely the result of public relations. It may appear as though news is spontaneous and investigative, but in fact the majority of content on mainstream television broadcasts is planned.² Certain events, like the World Cup and the Queen’s birthday are clearly known in advance, but much of the rest of news is a direct result of public relations management. Groups make statements to the media – from governments to corporations to scientists – and each maintain a vital interest in promoting a particular perspective of an event.
Particularly when military conflict is involved, these groups share a fundamental concern that the resulting news coverage will be structured around a narrative that shows their exclusive group in a favourable light – often to the detriment of others. It is also often the case that one group involved in a conflict will be better resourced and therefore have superior public relations capabilities. With respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most journalists will acknowledge that Israel has a more efficient public relations machine.³ Therefore Israel’s ability to supply journalists with information that supports their favoured narrative is significantly increased. Also, most correspondents live in Israel when covering the conflict and the BBC is the only Western broadcaster that retains a permanent presence within Gaza.⁴ This fact alone disrupts the flow of information. Greg Philo and Mike Berry published a study in 2004 of content, audience reception, and production factors involved in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the oubreak of the Palestinian Intifada or uprising in September 2000. The following quotes are from journalists who have experienced the different nature of each side’s public relations management:
"Palestinian spokesmen are their own worst enemy. They often come across as boorish, the message is often incoherent." (Interview, June 2002)
"Palestinians don’t have a clear public relations approach. They [Palestinians] start from a reactive approach. I get 75-100 emails a day from official Israeli sources and organisations which support [Israel] (about 15 per cent from government, the rest lobbyists and supporters). I get perhaps five a week from Palestinian sources." (Interview, June 2002)⁵
These production factors influence the way in which events in the ongoing conflict will be covered – particularly how they will fit into a favourable narrative for one group or the other. The task of mainstream media organisations is to ensure that balance is maintained – that the full range of differing perspectives of events and overall narratives are featured in their reports regardless of any potential inequality on the public relations front.

A brief illustration of US coverage of the 2006 Israeli-Gaza crisis

The famed slogan of the United States’ leading news program, Fox News, reminds its audiences: “We Report. You Decide.”⁶ Below is one example of their coverage that occurred during the first few weeks of the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began at the end of June 2006:
A Fox correspondent stands in Gaza, describing the empty scene in which Israel has reportedly ‘cut Gaza in half,’ when shots appear to be flying towards him and he is forced to end the report:
Presenter A: Scary.
Presenter B: But I just don’t understand. They have...it says ‘press’...that’s the colour, that’s international...
Presenter A: Bad guys shoot at anything.
Presenter B: Right...but it’s Israel.
Presenter C: Uh…but it’s also...if, if he’s correct and again, we don’t know who exactly was shooting at him...but the other guys there are trying to protect themselves-
Presenter A: Completely shifting gears, are you a rotten speller?
(Fox News, 13th July 2006)
Presenter A appears extremely confused and cannot comprehend the events he witnessed. Helpful Presenter B tries to ease his confusion by putting the situation into a dialectic that resembles President Bush’s rhetoric of good vs. evil – hence “Bad guys shoot at anything.” But this just baffles him even further since “it’s Israel” and therefore, it follows, Israel can not possibly be shooting since they are not the “bad guys”.
Granted this example is not the result of an in-depth analysis of Fox News’ coverage of the most recent incursions into Gaza by the Israelis, nor is it meant to paint a definitive picture of their reporting. Still, it provides a demonstration of the construction of reality that takes place by presenters on behalf of the audience and the danger of neglecting contextualization in favour of what appears to be a preconceived narrative.

UK coverage of the 2006 Israeli-Gaza crisis

While not as explicit as the seemingly impulsive and simplified dialectic applied to coverage of Israel’s actions by Fox News, as presented above, coverage within the UK is fraught with a common narrative that is left almost entirely unquestioned.
In every headline, in every teaser, in every opening remark, the 2006 Israeli attack on Gaza was narrated as a response to the captured Israeli solider, Cpl Gilad Shalit. It is certainly the case that hours after the capture of Cpl Shalit by the military wing of the ruling Palestinian Hamas party, Izzedine al-Qassam, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and the previously unknown Army of Islam, “dozens of Israeli tanks, backed by helicopter gunships, pushed into the Gaza strip” (BBC News online, World Edition, 25th June 2006).⁷ From that point forward the narrative was set: the ensuing conflict between Israel and Gaza began with the June 25th capture of Cpl Shalit by Palestinian militants.
This narrative fits the common stereotypical scenario of action followed by response and retaliation. This scenario is inherently simplistic and lacks context, but more importantly it mimics the narrative pattern that has been consistently found in previous analyses of UK coverage of this conflict: precisely that the Palestinians perform an ‘act’ of aggression to which the Israeli’s must ‘respond.’⁸ By selectively concentrating on Palestinian action (here: the capture of Cpl Shalit), even though in this case it directly proceeds Israeli action, a cycle of violence is again solidified in the minds of the audience and blame inevitably falls on the Palestinians without consideration of the context nor any historical conditions. Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s audience research demonstrates how this narrative pattern is transferred⁹ to the audience and revealed in focus group discussions such as this conversation with a student group in Glasgow:
Female Speaker: You always think of the Palestinians as being really aggressive because of the stories you hear on the news. I always put the blame on them in my own head.
Moderator: Is it presented as if the Palestinians somehow start it and then the Israelis follow on?
Female Speaker: Exactly, I always think the Israelis are fighting back against the bombings that have been done to them.
(Philo and Berry 2004:222)
The same narrative is also exposed within a news writing exercise where focus group members were given photographs from TV news coverage and asked to write a news item. Narrative-consistent phrases that continually arose within content analysis of TV coverage (following September 2000) appeared in the output:
“Israeli army retaliates”, “[Israeli] government reaction”, “Israeli army retaliated”, “Israelis responded”, “In response to Palestinian attacks” (2004: 228-229, original italics).
So why did this narrative damage public understanding of the conflict on this occasion? Because the context within which the apparent beginning of the conflict (Cpl Shalit’s capture) transpired is extremely relevant to an understanding of the crisis – particularly since significant Israeli actions against the Palestinians in Gaza occurred during the month leading up to Cpl Shalit’s capture. The following are excerpts from BBC News online articles that appeared during the month of June, leading up to Cpl Shalit’s capture on June 25th.
Wanted militant dies in Gaza raid
"A senior Palestinian official in the Gaza Strip has died in an Israeli air strike in the town of Rafah.
Samhadana, a senior security chief in the Hamas-led government, was one of four killed in the attack on a training camp, which injured seven others.
He was one of Israel’s most wanted men in Gaza, and was thought to be involved in a 2003 attack on a US convoy.
A spokesman for the PRC vowed to “open the gates of hell” in response.
They fired their weapons in the air and swore that they would strike back at Israel, our correspondent says."
(BBC News online, World Edition, 8th June 2006, added italics )¹⁰
Palestinians killed on Gaza beach
"Seven people, including three children, have been killed by Israeli shells which hit a beach in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials say.
At least 30 people were wounded in the shelling, they say.
In a statement, the military wing of Hamas threatened to resume attacks on Israel in the wake of “massacres”.
The group has been observing a self-imposed ceasefire for more than a year.
'What the Israeli occupation forces are doing in the Gaza Strip constitutes a war of extermination and bloody massacres against our people,' Mr Abbas said."
(BBC News online, World Edition, 9th June 2006, added italics)¹¹
Israel captures pair in Gaza raid
"Israeli soldiers have seized two Palestinian men in an overnight raid into the southern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said the two brothers were members of the militant group Hamas and were planning attacks on Israel.
Hamas said they were sons of a member but were not involved in Hamas. It called the abduction a crime."
(BBC News online, World Edition, 24th June 2006, added italics)¹²
Before exploring this context, it is critical to note that Israel also has grievances of their own, even though no articles detailing them occurred during the month prior to Cpl Shalit’s capture. While suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians are extremely poignant events that should be categorically condemned, Hamas renounced suicide bombing as a strategy of resistance against Israeli occupation and entered into an unofficial ceasefire in the spring of 2005.¹³ But Islamic Jihad rejected Hamas’ ceasefire and has continued this strategy. Also, Qassam rocket fire has become a mounting concern for the Israelis as this Palestinian militant activity of firing what many media outlets refer to as “crude missiles” began to increase in June 2006. Still, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 8 Israeli civilians have been killed by Qassam gunfire during a 25 month period of June 2004 to July 2006 while Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) actions within Gaza claiming to be an attempt to stop these Qassam rockets during a much shorter 4 week period of 26th June to 24th July resulted in the deaths of 126 Palestinians.¹⁴
Although a comparison of casualty figures lacks important context, it is still valid to note that according to B’Tselem, between 29th September 2000 and 15th September 2006, 3,824 Palestinians were killed by Israelis while 1011 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. Included in these figures are 764 Palestinian minors and 119 Israeli minors. This is particularly important in light of the general public’s lack of understanding of this conflict, which finds beliefs among many British, German, and American students that more Israelis have been killed than Palestinians or that both sides have suffered equally in terms of casualties.¹⁵ Many more issues are involved in this conflict that are too complex to discuss within the space available here (Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, water, restrictions on Palestinian movement, residency, destruction of property, detainees and prisoners, east Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, the separation barrier, to name a few).
To explore the missing context that is implied by the inclusion of the above BBC online articles, it is important that UK television news reporting¹⁶ of these events that preceded Cpl Shalit’s capture during the month of June 2006 as well as the coverage of the first few days following his capture is analysed (up to and including 29th June¹⁷).
The first story found on BBC News online regarding the death of senior Palestinian official Jamal Abu Samhadana on 8th June 2006 was not covered except when mentioned the following day in relation to the “Gaza beach violence”. For this report, all news outlets showed the gripping footage of the young girl Huda Ghalia wailing for her father on the beach as she discovered her dead family members. Of course good pictures are a prerequisite for television news and Huda’s exasperation was highlighted. Blame for Israel appeared to be the running headline but within each report, with the exception of ITV,¹⁸ Israel’s responsibility was questioned in some manner. Since this time the Israeli army’s investigation has unequivocally concluded that they should bear no blame since they did not even fire any shells at the beach that day. Opposing this, Human Rights Watch military expert Mark Garlasco claimed that Israeli shelling was the cause after an examination of forensic evidence at the scene, doctor’s reports, and witness statements which he claims were unavailable for the Israeli investigation.
Also, each station’s coverage is more defiant than BBC online reports regarding the end of Hamas’ ceasefire.¹⁹ This is significant since the end of Hamas’ self-imposed ceasefire and vows to attack Israel could have later been used as reference points when Cpl Shalit was captured in order for the audience to gain a greater understanding of the context within which this operation occurred. Samhadana’s death is also mentioned²⁰ as well as the deaths of 3 more Palestinians by Israeli air strikes that same day (9th June).²¹ These references create a climate in which the public might expect a “response” by Palestinian militant groups, a “retaliation” against Israeli “actions” – yet references to these events are nearly imperceptible once Cpl Shalit is captured and the crisis appears to, according to the narrative, officially begin. Lastly, on the same day of Gaza’s “beach violence”, Jeremy Bowen – the BBC’s Middle East editor whose role was “enhanced”²² in response to the BBC Governors Impartiality Review of BBC Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, published in April 2006²³ – sat in the BBC studio and rhetorically asked if Israel is acting disproportionately, and if this is the case, accusations of war crimes could occur under international law. He also likened the recent Israeli actions (that day’s killings and Samhadana’s death) to a “particular advantage” for the Palestinians since, for a while at least, “Palestinians internationally will have a sense of being on the moral high ground” (BBC1, evening news, 9th June 2006).
The third story referenced above in the BBC online excerpts regarding the Israeli raid into the Gaza Strip (despite their withdrawal from the region last September 2005²⁴) and the seizure of two brothers on the day before Cpl Shalit’s capture by Palestinian militants was not reported on TV news. MIT Professor Noam Chomsky regards this Israeli action as a more severe issue under international humanitarian law than the Palestinian militants’ capture of Cpl Shalit since these acts took place under the context of a conflict wherein the Palestinian brothers are civilians yet Cpl Shalit is a soldier.²⁵ At the time of the incident Israelis claimed that the two brothers were members of the militant wing of Hamas, as quoted above in the BBC online news source, but no further Israeli comments have yet been found.²⁶
Once Cpl Shalit is captured on 25th June, statements from Hamas regarding reasons for this action appear on BBC News online but are rarely mentioned in any televised coverage.²⁷ The death of Samhadana, recent deaths of civilians, and targeted killings of militant leaders are quoted online as instigators for Hamas’ “response”. What is not revealed to viewers is that the termination of Hamas’ approximately year-long ceasefire in “response” to Israeli “actions” and hence the expectation that a “retaliation” (note the reversal of the traditional mainstream narrative) could occur, which might include this very incident of the capture of an Israeli soldier. The only references to Israeli actions that could have inflamed Palestinian militants are found deep within reports – generally in terms of “celebrations” inside Gaza following Cpl Shalit’s capture, said to likely be related to the “more than a dozen Palestinian civilians” recently killed by Israeli forces (BBC1, evening news, 26th June 2006). Most of the time the reports begin with descriptions of the continued “hunt for the soldier” – for instance, BBC correspondent James Reynolds says, “Somewhere here in Gaza, amidst the flames and the dark there is a kidnapped Israeli soldier. With bombs and shells Israel is trying to get him back.” (BBC1, evening news, 28th June 2006).
Channel 4 News offers the most critical coverage by often fiercely questioning guests from both sides of the conflict. Presenter Jon Snow begins to make reference to the hidden context during an interview by mentioning the conditions under which citizens of the Gaza Strip have “not been safe ever since the [Israeli] pullout” since there has been “tremendous military activity above and from the land against them” (Channel 4 News, 26th June 2006). As well, Channel 4 refers to previous prisoner bargains that Israel has partaken in, thereby reflecting upon alternative options that may be available (27th June 2006) and goes so far as to mention that it “seems more like an exercise of retribution rather than a well-planned rescue mission” (28th June 2006). And finally, the most significant contextualization occurs again on Channel 4 when Jon Snow asks an Independent MP in the Palestinian Parliament, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, if “it wasn’t great timing” for the Palestinian militants to capture Cpl Shilat since a major breakthrough between Hamas and Fatah had just been occurring.²⁸ Dr. Barghouti responds with a list of grievances against Israeli actions that have occurred (air raids, artillery bombardments, large numbers of civilian deaths, etc.) and in so doing provides a context for the operation in which Cpl Shilat was captured that extends the narrative beyond the traditional media interpretation and allows for flexibility in the view that Palestinians have simply “started it again”. While Channel 4 News has provided the most instances of these types of revelations in comparison to the other news outlets examined, they are still buried within interviews and far removed from the headlines, teasers and opening lines that tend to receive the most vociferous attention and thereby are more likely to solidify the traditional stereotypical narrative that often accompanies coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On a final note, the BBC Governors review of coverage of this conflict recommended that ‘a stronger editorial “Guiding Hand”’ be provided, which has come in the form of the newly “enhanced” role of BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, as well as encouragement that the BBC “be more proactive in explaining the complexities of the conflict.” It was suggested that the latter could be fulfilled through “directly linking broadcast programmes to related background available online.”²⁹ As the above analysis of the BBC’s online coverage demonstrates, there is certainly more information online and presenters on the evening news programme have directed viewers to the website on occasion – but the stereotypical narrative still remains. In fact, it is even enhanced when multiple stories are interrupted within the webpage by a “Gaza Crisis Timeline” that unambiguously reaffirms the traditional narrative associated with this conflict in that Palestinian “action” begins a crisis, inevitably to be followed by Israeli “response” and “retaliation”.³⁰ With respect to the former recommendation, Bowen appears regularly on BBC evening news programmes in addition to correspondents and offers deeper analysis of the conflict. While he does mention important issues such as the Geneva Convention which prohibits “attacks on objects indispensable to civilians” and “collective punishment”, they appear dislocated since they are vague references with only implicit reference to Israel (BBC1, evening news, 29th June 2006). If the intention is to maintain a safe distance from direct accusations against one party in the conflict, including more studio guests, akin to Channel 4, could provide more opportunity for deeper analysis of such issues. On another occasion Bowen gives an emotive, very detailed description of a suicide bombing from 9th August 2001 as a means of clarifying Israel’s stance towards Hamas,³¹ which provides appropriate context but unfortunately neglects to inform viewers – many of whom are already struggling to comprehend the situation – that Hamas has not been involved in suicide bombings since August 2004. However, the same style of emotive, very detailed descriptions of Israeli actions against Palestinians was not included when Bowen shifted his “balance” to the other foot (BBC1, evening news, 28th June 2006).

Final remarks

Even though mainstream media broadcasters assert their commitment to balance, fairness and impartiality, covering conflicts as politicized and hotly contested as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a challenging venture. It involves a difficult process of not only identifying the range of views that are present regardless of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the relative public relations machines involved, and ignoring the external pressure of well-organised lobby groups, but also a concerted attempt to fully represent this range of perspective. Also, since much of the public suffers from a lack of understanding, broadcasters should be encouraged to adopt new strategies to combat this problem in order to provide a more appropriate historical and contextual analysis. Advising viewers to “go to the website” for further information cannot be the only solution – particularly when a personal computer and availability of the internet is not accessible to everyone. Nevertheless, the existing factors that continue to push potentially well-intentioned broadcasters to embrace stereotypical patterns of narratives within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be further explored.

Notes
1 As of 2005, 72% of people mention television as their main source of world news and 94% believe it is important for TV news to be impartial (compared to 90% for radio and 84% for newspapers). Source: Office of Communications (2006) The Communications Market 2006. London: Ofcom.
2 Of course accidents, natural disasters, and other such phenomena occur and are likely to be newsworthy enough to be covered. Yet even once they have happened – and the same holds true for an ongoing military conflict – a mainstream news organisation will assign someone to cover it and therefore planning begins immediately and staff will know that news relating to the event will be inco