Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local | Taiye Selasi | TED Talks

Suggested by Ben

Mark Wallinger, 31 Hayes Court, Camberwell New Road, Camberwell, London, England, Great Britain, Europe, the World, the Solar System, The Galaxy, the Universe.

MARK WALLINGER: FLAGGING ALLEGIANCES

from Chris Gilbert ed., Contested Fields (Iowa: Des Moines Art Centre 2004 pp. 81-89)

Mark Wallinger’s 1994 photo-mural Mark Wallinger, 31 Hayes Court, Camberwell New Road, Camberwell, London, England, Great Britain, Europe, the World, the Solar System, The Galaxy, the Universe.

Interviewed by the Los Angeles TImes in 1990, the Conservative politician and Thatcherite Norman (now Lord) Tebbit decided to air his opinions about the attitudes and allegiances of Britain’s immigrant communities.  “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail [sic] to pass the cricket test” he asserted.  “Which side do they [sic] cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are?”.  Reported in the UK, Tebbit’s comments caused immediate, widespread offence and his “cricket test” has become a leitmotiv in discussions of race relations, national identities and the sociology of sport (see here for example Okwui Enwezor, quoted in Chris Gilbert’s essay).  Clearly, the then-Honourable Member for Chingford (Tebbit’s constituency) could not conceive that performative gestures such as “cheering for a team” or “flying the flag” might be relative, shifting their significance according to the position from which they are viewed.  One can only wonder how – were he ever to encounter it – Tebbit might negotiate the ambiguities of Mark Wallinger’s 1994 photo-mural Mark Wallinger, 31 Hayes Court, Camberwell New Road, Camberwell, London, England, Great Britain, Europe, the World, the Solar System, The Galaxy, the Universe.

Mark Wallinger, 31 Hayes Court… was taken outside London’s Wembley Stadium just before a ‘friendly’ England v. Poland football match.  It documents the artist and an accomplice either leading or obstructing a column of fans as it enters the stadium.  Team Wallinger occupies the middle ground, brandishing a large Union Jack suspended from poles in the style of a trades-union banner; patchworked across the flag is the artist’s name.  Prior to the taking of the photo, the pair had manhandled both flag and two approximately ten-foot long poles across London on public transport, then paraded the banner from Wembley station to the football ground.  Behind it, some waggish fans have improvised a chant that treats the artist’s name as if it was that of a football club: ‘WallingGER, WallinGER, WallinGER…’.  As the camera’s shutter clicks, an England supporter in the foreground grabs the limelight, spreading his arms in a gesture that unwittingly mimics the form of the Union flag.

Is it worthwhile to ask, Tebbit-style, whose “side” Wallinger’s piece is “cheering for”- what allegiances or convictions it exemplifies, what cultural or critical agendas it’s advocating?  Wallinger’s home town of Chigwell, Essex, borders Chingford, but the ideological closure underpinning Tebbit’s statement and the mobile, ambiguous address of Wallinger’s piece exist (metaphorically speaking) light years apart. Wallinger himself maintains that a “properly aggressive, critical and ironic [art]… doesn’t announce the position it is coming from” and ths work, it’s argued here, intrinsically resists the application of an art-critical equivalent of the cricket test. This is not to say that the artist himself has no convictions or political motivations, but to take seriously bot the artist’s words and the interpretational challenge his work offers – and, in doing so, to avoid the type of art criticism that regards artworks as vehicles for moral messages, or as the bodyings-forth of radical social schemata.

A recurrent feature of Wallinger’s work is the handling of imagery contaminated with right-wing associations (relating to class, religious orthodoxies, nationalism, imperialism) without, as it were, “protective gloves”- that is, without tidily legible visual commentaries or caveats serving to contain and neutralise the problematic connotations of these subjects.  In ‘real life’, Wallinger is a keen follower of various sports, including ones that feature in his artworks (racing, football), yet his artistic presentation of those sports communicates a clinician’s dispassionate precision rather than a fan’s enthusiasm.  Thus, in Mark Wallinger, 31 Hayes Court… the artist appears in person, amongst the crowd of fans, and his name- effectively, a signing of the work- is writ large across the Union Jack.  However, uncertainty springs both from a duplicity in his relation to the crowd – he is physically a part of it, but at the same time separate, exploiting it for his own artistic ends – and from his noncommittal deployment of the flag.  It looms incongruously large, but (beyond confirming a banal fact that we know already- that Wallinger is British) the image betrays no clues as to the interrelation of Wallinger as a subject and the symbol that bears his name…

Continue reading in Chris Gilbert ed., Contested Fields (Iowa: Des Moines Art Centre 2004 pp. 81-89)

Using Twitter for Research Projects

Twitter can add extra value to most research projects. It is especially powerful when used in combination with a website and blog. See below:

The role of the website is to house official information about the project in its full form.
The blog is a great way to connect with the research community and build a narrative around the evolution of the project. Blogs are a good place to summarise articles, get feedback and have online discussions.

+
The Twitter account is perfect for engaging with others in the field and releasing bite-sized project updates, for example a new publication, event, or development. When referring to project documents the tweet should refer to full versions held on the website.

+
Using these three platforms in combination will increase the digital footprint of your research project and help maximise online awareness of it. For example, if you’re looking for feedback a tweet could link to your research blog and ask your followers for their comments.

From: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/cap/marcomms/communications/social/handbook/twitter/using-twitter-for-research-projects

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

‘The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.

Kublai asked Marco: “You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.”

“For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said.”

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.“‘(Calvino 1972)

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino http://monoskop.org/images/0/0e/Calvino_Italo_Invisible_Cities.pdf PDF

“In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a car­ pet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become con­vinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye dis­tracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or ma­ genta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects- the oracle replied-has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human cre­ ation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the uni­ verse is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.’ (Calvino 1972)

Framing by Mieke Bal

‘But, as I observed later, an interaction and experience with the prac­tice that was the object of study was lacking in Double Exposures. This was unfortunate, because the possible convergence of academic and practical agency constitutes a great challenge. The second ‘discipline,’ if that word may be applied in this context, that my interdisciplinarity solicits is, then, not academic but practical ‘art history.’ Positing that the study of practices in art museums pertains to two disciplines, not one – that is, separating art history from its ‘natural’ affiliation with museums -constituted the primary severance that made the case stud­ies in my earlier book inter-disciplinary. I will perform the same sever­ ance in this chapter by going on a field trip to better understand the object of study. The relationship between analysis and practice – first opened up, then negotiated – constitutes the area where framing might emerge as a concept that helps to define the parameters of interdiscipli­narity in a radical sense.’ (Bal 2002:138)

Framing by Mieke Bal PDF (Please read pages 133-138 for next week’s session)