Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
Video games have come a long way from the simple pleasures of the arcade, and especially in the world of art. The structures of commitment and involvement created by games offer fertile ground for artists exploring kinds of human experience well beyond the zero-sum shoot-em-ups of most commercial game play. The installations in this show are fun. They’re weird. They’re confounding. And they leave burrs in the imagination as readily as the gratifications of conventional games wash mindlessly away.
Owing in large part to Hollywood’s discovery of its infinite star vehicle potential, the “intersecting lives” narrative has become, in recent years, something of a cop out. When the A-story isn’t strong enough, simply prop it up with parallel stories B through F and have them all fatefully (and conveniently) collide about a third of the way through the final act. It’s a trite and often tiresome trick that, with few exceptions, sacrifices meaningful narrative at the altar of novelty.
In riffing on this form with his debut novel London Triptych (Arsenal Pulp, first North American edition, 2013), Jonathan Kemp is playing with fire. Mirroring its namesake, Triptych sweeps across the centuries, tracing the lives of three different men in three historically distinct Londons; men tied to one another by their shared experiences of queer desire and by their participation in libidinal economies of queer touch and feeling that, despite the best efforts of hetereosexual society, refuse to exhaust themselves.
“ History isn’t the lies of the victors … I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” – The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
On the last Sunday in the year, the Parisian bourgeoisie were out in force. The queue for the Impressionism and Fashion exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay moved in sudden leaps but still took over an hour to get to the security checks. For the Dali exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, those with pre-booked tickets queued for an hour, those without considerably longer
Meanwhile, across the Alma Bridge from the Eiffel Tower, all was quiet outside the Palais de Tokyo and the Musee de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Inside, the galleries hummed with an apprehensive curiosity as the patrons moved in physical comfort around exhibits that were anything but comfortable, couched as they were in the context of the annees noires of the Nazi occupation. L’Art en Guerre, France 1938 to 1947 was an opportunity for Parisians to confront a difficult past that lay within the memory of many of them.
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” -Walter Benjamin
Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty was met with both large audiences and waves of criticism for how the film depicted, and seemingly endorsed, the use of torture. While it’s not surprising that a film about the War on Terror and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has provoked controversy, what is rather troubling is that the majority of critics have chosen to focus their critique on the film’s questionable suggestion that information obtained through torture lead to finding Bin Laden, precluding any substantial ethical debate about the practice of torture itself.
The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is the second graphic novel from activist Gord Hill. It is a chronicle of several anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements over the last two decades, from the WTO protests in Seattle to the recent Occupy movements. Hill also places a great deal of emphasis on the violence that has accompanied these movements, regardless of whether that violence was perpetrated by police or protestors.
As a documentary account of these events, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book does a passable job. Hill was clearly involved in many of the movements chronicled in the book and is able to expose events that were under-covered or completely overlooked by mainstream media outlets at the time. This is the greatest strength of the book, which is at its best whenever it is able to provide first person accounts from inside the political actions it depicts.
As decent and occasionally eye-opening a documentary account as Hill’s book can be, it utterly fails for me as work of commentary. A brief history of capitalism and its myriad problems (and I’ll be the first to agree that there are many) is provided but very little in the way of solutions beyond blind rage is offered.
Last week I attended the Toronto theatrical premiere of Herman’s House, a thought-provoking documentary written and directed by Angad Singh Bhalla. This Canadian film tells the story of an artistic collaboration between Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace. Sumell is a multidisciplinary artist from New York. Wallace is a Black Panther from Louisiana who has been in solitary confinement for 40 years.
As a documentary filmmaker myself, I was curious to see what visuals Bhalla and his team would use to depict a missing main character, as we only get to know Wallace through his articulate voice over the phone. (I thought they did this well. Herman’s House is jagged, beautiful, and haunting.)
And because I am concerned about the issue of prisons, I wanted to learn more about solitary confinement and the human rights questions it raises. (Which I did, though maybe not as much as I was hoping.)
While some of postmodernism’s more vocal evangelists might claim otherwise, the post-Stonewall mainstreaming of queer sexuality has yet to deliver on its grand promise of erasing the gender binary. Politically, culturally, and socially, gendered differences and the power inequalities they uphold persist. Perhaps especially in LGBT communities, it is in fact masculine desires that continue to frame desire in general. The cis-male body and the attributes of “maleness” it carries continue to signify and perform operations of power; functioning as the allegedly neutral standard against which “deviations” like femininity, transness, and gender non-conformity might be judged, measured, and often attacked.
I’ll fess up at the outset: as a white hetero guy, the new Bond flick Skyfall is a great yarn. It hits all the right Bond notes: great soundtrack including, of course, Adele’s terrific theme song. It is chock-a-block with edge-of-seat thrills combined with well paced character and plot building sequences. And there are some really exciting stunts, including in the opening sequence a motorcycle chase on the ceramic tile rooftops over the grand bazar in Istanbaul. And, of course, the ever dapper Bond in his suits with his suave demeanor who serves up an excellent cool-as-a-cuke and patriotically loyal agent.
Yes indeed, this one works. Audiences are thrilled, the critics are a-swoon. But here’s what’s missing from the latest Bon(d)-fete: even a baseline of gender intelligence. Worse, there is the lingering smell of homophobia in the superbly acted supervillain (played by Javier Bardem). The villain is creepy, funny, psychotic — everything you could ask for, but whose characterization as evil is unnecessarily rooted in homoeroticism.
I am no stranger to war history or art history, having studied both in some depth at university. So the idea of attending a play based on Pablo Picasso’s painted representation of one of the most destructive acts in the period between the world wars, the bombing of the small Basque town of Gernika, sounded interesting. A play by Erika Luckert, Guernica attempts to bring life to Picasso’s grotesque cubist forms, bringing us the stories of five very different people as told to the mysteriously shirtless and watchful Candlebearer.
Thanks in large part to the hyper-mediated and celebrity-driven character of the contemporary LGBT movement, the issue of queer youth suicide has rightly found its way into the public spotlight. Stories of young queers taking their own lives as an escape from bullying have become tragically commonplace in recent years.
This newfound attention, necessary as it is, however, comes with a certain danger that isn’t often addressed. When a young queer commits suicide, a deluge of stories, news reports, memorial pages, scholarship funds, and images now steps in to fill the absence they leave behind. In what sometimes feels like an almost desperate refusal to admit the traumatic loss of a queer body, we tend to insist that the memory and presence of the victim will be carried on, that their spirit lives in us all.
Again, crucial as such acts of remembrance are, they raise for me an important question: if mourning must always be a kind of filling-in of the absence left by suicide, what space can there really be to meditate on the absolute trauma of death, to reckon with a loss in which we are all implicated? By never allowing absence to register as absence, do we deny and shirk responsibility for the actual gone-ness of the body?
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
