In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

The post Political Agony and the Legacies of Romanticism in Contemporary Art appeared first on post.

This picture is a thirst trap, a clusterfuck of Day-Glo-dipped lucky charms that you just can’t look away from. Everything seems to swirl around a bull’s-eye target rendered in neon red. You are told that this is a “chair” and that this chair is “empty,” which is an implicit invitation to take a seat. Two feet (actually, wooden shoe trees) positioned on either side of the circular form provide a rough guide for how to orient yourself in relation to the picture. You must straddle and squat, assume the position. In the middle of the target—right at the bull’s-eye—there is a disk-shaped piece of coral, perfectly round, puckered, and rimmed with jewels, resembling a royal-class anus. The anus punctures the chair. It carves out an orifice, a squinting, portal-like hole seemingly held open by four rusty nails that have been hammered into the bejeweled perimeter. What is this anus to yours? Will they kiss in your mind-space?

Empty Chair or The Last Colonial (1969) reframes the act of looking as an act of intimate communion—both spiritual and bodily. Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), the artist who created this picture, compared this mode of looking to that of peering through a telescope or microscope: “It is flat but it is also transparent and enables you to see more than you would with your naked eye. That is the way the picture plane should be looked at in most of my work. The surface is very much there, it is emphasized with protuberances, but it is also meant to be permeable. It is dense and permeable.”¹

This paradoxical approach to modernist picture-making was shaped by a similarly paradoxical set of life experiences. Alfonso Ossorio was born in the Philippines in 1916 to a wealthy mestizo family that would soon become central players in the local sugar industry. But he would leave the country as a young child to study abroad, eventually gaining US citizenship. During the ’40s and ’50s, he moved between North America and Europe, establishing himself in the vibrant avant-garde art scenes of New York and Paris—as an artist, collector, and cultural mediator—and maintaining especially close relationships with artists Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). It is easy to see the formative influence that the aesthetic philosophies of Abstract Expressionism and l’art brut had on his work. But despite his deep involvement, we imagine that Ossorio must have been a particularly queer figure in relation to these muscular Euro-American formations, difficult to fully assimilate both socially and artistically. Besides being extremely wealthy, a diasporic Filipino, and persistent in his devotion to explicitly Catholic themes, he was also, in fact, homosexual or bisexual. After going through a failed marriage, he met male ballet dancer Ted Dragon (1921–2011) in the summer of 1947, and they remained together until the end of Ossorio’s life.²

The psychic tensions resulting from this particular confluence of ethnicity, class, spirituality, and sexuality can be sensed as aesthetic tensions in Ossorio’s work: Density and permeability. Protuberances and orifices. Often there is a complicated interplay between looking as an act of penetration and looking as an act of being penetrated, giving and receiving. Not surprisingly, Ossorio professed an interest in both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis.³

As you approach the Empty Chair more closely, various phallic objects seem to aggressively thrust toward you, jutting perpendicularly from the picture plane—a thick and veiny piece of driftwood in the upper left, a slim red stick with a smoothly rounded head in the lower right, and more. The picture delivers a variegated set of libidinal triggers, each object yielding its own erotic texture: The driftwood and the stick offer totally different thrills, as do the jewels, the nails, the shoe trees, the seashells, the bones, the glass eyes, the machete, and the lobster claws that are dripping with red paint. How will you receive these things, and how will they receive you? A skeletal foot appears to be nailed in place above the royal anus, recalling Christ’s divine suffering. Pain and pleasure bleed into one another in an orgy of polymorphous perversity.

Ossorio called these kinds of works “congregations,” implying a sense of spiritual purpose that couldn’t quite be captured in the more familiar “assemblage.”⁴ He began making them at the very end of the ’50s, after a period of producing thickly impastoed gestural abstractions, and he described how they developed organically from this prior series of works: “Then slowly objects started to get imbedded into the impasto until I had to make a choice whether I would give up doing this or use a medium that was more suitable.”⁵ Objects for his congregations were sourced from urban junk shops and remainder stores selling army, navy, or industrial surplus. They were foraged from the beach, from the taxidermist’s workshop, from his circle of friends. “Kind ophthalmologists would send me crates of glass eyes.”⁶ Distinctions and hierarchies between the natural and the synthetic, the functional and the decorative, the banal and the precious, were dissolved. Everything could be integrated because everything mattered. This was, in many ways, a culmination of his artistic commitment to tracing a continuum between materiality and divinity, which had driven his practice since the beginning: “It is simply that it is all one unity. Even a little waste piece of plastic or a bone is just as much alive as the abstract concept of God, which is meaningless unless it is incarnated.”⁷

Ossorio commented that his lifelong investment in religious matters stemmed from “a continuing interest in problems, which religion covers, such as birth, death, sex—these particular aspects of humanity.”⁸ Clearly, he liked to speak in terms of big, universal themes, a sign of the extent to which he had absorbed the values of Western humanism through his upbringing and education. And yet confronting the specific tensions in Empty Chair seems to elicit a more historically bound reading, one that rubs against the artist’s universalist proclamations.

You are told that this could be an “Empty Chair”—or that it might be “The Last Colonial.” The alternative title dangles like a piece of bait. There is a teasing suggestion here that the pains and pleasures embedded in this congregation of objects are not just “aspects of humanity” but rather aspects of a perverse historical encounter. The work was, after all, produced in the late ’60s, a volatile moment of sociopolitical reckoning charged with the energy of recent revolutions and anti-colonial liberation struggles, when the civil rights and antiwar movements were radically reshaping the public sphere in the US. In a 1968 interview, around the time that he would have been producing Empty Chair, Ossorio noted that he was “a conservative person in many ways” and that “one has to allow things to change if you want to keep essentials the same.”⁹ And yet his response to a question regarding the relationship between artistic practice and the intense social upheavals of that era seems to hint at an unconscious insurrectionary drive: “On all of this the artist has to focus in the way a lens focuses a ray of sunlight to make the thing underneath burn.”¹⁰

Look again at the anus. It seems to be clenched with tension, as though struggling to hold the entire picture together, as though it might burst wide open at any moment from the sheer excess. What divine state waits on the other side of this impending explosion? Will it feel like freedom? If it is possible to transcend the brutal histories that bind us—histories of invasion, rape, enslavement, genocide—surely this will only come through a violent process of sacrifice. And since these histories have soaked through to the very core of our being, this process must ultimately be one of self-sacrifice. In this war of independence, you too must assume the position. The picture sucks you into a sadomasochistic kind of role-play, but one in which there are no preestablished boundaries, no safe words, only encrustations, penetrations, oozing. “In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.”¹¹ Your attention lingers on the two wooden figurines stationed at opposing corners of the picture, tourist-kitsch memorials to the indigenous cultures that have been dismembered and degraded over centuries. They seem to be suspended in a state of dreaming. Outside of the picture, history continues to unfurl, never quite arriving at the moment of transcendence but still holding open its possibility.

The post Revolutionary Anus: On Alfonso Ossorio’s <i>Empty Chair or The Last Colonial </i>(1969) appeared first on post.

Muslim gravesite-shrines dot the rim of the Indian Ocean, where they lie nestled in the culturally and geographically textured meeting point of water and land. This essay is concerned with the shrines that connect the Malay world, across the vast oceanic expanse, to southern Africa. The Malay world, in this instance, is the archipelagic region constituted by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The essay highlights shrines to two individuals in particular—Habib Noh in Singapore and Tuan Guru in Cape Town—and explores them as visual markers of sacred geographies and histories.

As is the case with other Muslim shrines, the figures they honor are regarded as awlīyā’, the term in Arabic for those who enjoy a closeness to God and serve as the guardians of believers. Many attribute the power of mediating between mortals and God to a walī (singular of awlīyā’). Hence, the term is frequently translated into English as “saint.”

Habib Noh and Tuan Guru are also both looked upon as keramat. This Malay term is derived from the Arabic karāmah, or the miracles attributed to a walī. Keramat means an otherworldly potency in Malay and refers to both the figure buried in the grave and the site itself. For centuries, Muslims as well as people of other faiths have offered votive prayers at such potent gravesites. Belief in awlīyā’and keramat draws from Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and is popular among Muslims but viewed with caution by religious authorities.

Built Archives

Keramat can be regarded as the built archives of both sacred geographies and histories. Geographically, they serve as built archives because they mark in the landscape a form of popular veneration. The shrines draw the eyes of viewers to low-lying visual markers of long-standing sacred sites that are human in scale rather than monumental as in the commemorative structures of nation-states.

Historically, keramat are the built archives of migration and exile in the Indian Ocean. Habib Noh and Tuan Guru began their journeys from the west and east, respectively.¹ The former arrived in Singapore in the nineteenth century as part of the Hadrami diasporic networks that expanded out of Yemen into the Indian Ocean. Tuan Guru was forcibly shipped from the island of Tidore, in eastern Indonesia today, to Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century. When Tuan Guru and other political leaders were exiled to southern Africa, they brought with them the practice of keramat veneration.

Keramat become visually compelling built structures when they are regarded not in isolation but rather in close relation to the landscape. Habib Noh inscribes histories of popular veneration and oceanic journeys amid the tall and hypermodern cityscape of Singapore while Tuan Guru inscribes the same in the natural landscape that rises dramatically around Cape Town.

Tuan Guru

The music begins with gentle and soft notes on the piano and is soon met by drumbeats that gradually make their presence known. Abdullah Ibrahim, the Cape Town–born musician, is on the piano and gradually builds up the pace and intensity of his playing. The drums fall into the background before returning in a rapid and vigorous battle march; they take center stage. The piano steps up its pace on an ascending scale to spar with the drums. Both instruments play to the finish, and the piano brings it all to a close softly, before coming to an abrupt stop.

Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Tuang Guru,” a variation of “Tuan Guru,” is a jazz composition created in the mid-1980s and synonymous with the Islamic leader who was exiled to Cape Town.² The Dutch met with resistance as they expanded eastward into the Malay Archipelago in the competition with other European powers for control over the spice trade. Tuan Guru and the other leaders who opposed the Dutch were removed to Cape Town, the Dutch outpost at the southern tip of Africa, to keep them at a great distance. Abdullah Ibrahim’s composition is not always an easy or melodious listening experience as it sonically re-creates the forced exile of Tuan Guru and the remaking of his life in another world.

Tuan Guru (1712–1807) played a foundational role in the establishment of Islam in his place of exile and came to be commemorated as a keramat after his death. He established the first mosque in Cape Town and transcribed several copies of the Qur’an from memory for the use of Muslims.³ Besides these and other accomplishments, he is remembered for the miracles he performed.

The visual experience of Tuan Guru’s keramat is closely tied to that of the striking landscape of Cape Town, as the shrine is located on a hill above the city center, facing the iconic Table Mountain to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west (figs. 1, 2). This is the setting of a notable number of paintings and photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of which were reproduced on postcards that were widely circulated.

The shrine once had a thick, low white wall with corner pillars along its perimeter, like a miniature fortress, with trees around it (fig. 3). At present, the wall has been replaced by a half-built brick structure that recalls the pyramidal tombs of eastern Indonesia, where Tuan Guru came from. A few palm trees are found nearby. The shrine has retained its human scale throughout the changes it has undergone.

The aesthetic of the gravesite is inseparable from the cemetery in which it is located. Tuan Guru’s shrine comes into view upon stepping through the arched concrete gateway into the burial ground. Countless gravestones dot the hillslope that rises up from the gravesite; these are very old as it is the site of one of the earliest Muslim burial grounds in Cape Town. The cemetery is aptly named “Tana Baru,” or “New Land,” in Malay.

Tuan Guru’s gravesite contrasts with the understated Muslim gravestones on the hillslope beyond, some of whose inscriptions are no longer legible and others that are practically submerged in the earth (fig. 4). The keramat serves not only to commemorate Tuan Guru as a pioneering Islamic figure but also to offer a collective name and visual marker to the forgotten dead, many with origins in the Malay world.

The presence of the keramat in the cemetery overlooking Cape Town is not only a visual and historical marker of the forced transplantation of Tuan Guru and countless others. The gravesite is within reach of the people who reside in the area and thus also a place where they are able to pay their respects to their forebear.

Habib Noh

Like Tuan Guru, Habib Noh was buried on high ground overlooking the sea. The latter is said to have chosen the particular spot in Singapore because it was where he often spent time in contemplation before his death in 1866.⁴ The British East India Company established an outpost on the island in 1819 and, in time, decided that Mount Palmer, the hill that once rose above Habib Noh’s favorite spot, was suitable for the construction of fortification for the defense of their harbor town. The British leveled part of the hill for this purpose, leaving the area around Habib Noh’s gravesite untouched.

According to one hagiographic account, Habib Noh was born in 1788 on a ship from the Hadramaut bound for Penang.⁵ People of Hadrami ancestry, like him, were part of multilingual and transcultural diasporic networks and became well-known religious adepts, miracle workers, traders, and diplomats across the Indian Ocean. Many were descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and thus carried the honorific “Habib” before their names. Their skills and exalted genealogy had been highly valued by a number of coastal polities of the Malay Archipelago for a couple centuries already. Thus, Habib Noh arrived in a world in which he cut a somewhat familiar figure.

Habib Noh is believed to have come to Singapore in the year the British established their trading outpost, and over time, he developed a reputation as an Islamic ascetic who through his extraordinary devotion to God, was given the gift of performing miracles. He is said to have used his powers to assist the sick as well as the seafaring merchants and crews of the bustling harbor.⁶ By the time of his death, Habib Noh had become well-known not only in Singapore but also across the Malay world, and people visited his gravesite from far and wide out of veneration.

The motif of a keramat overlooking the sea was idiomatic of awlīyā’ across the Indian Ocean. Habib Noh’s gravesite thus symbolically connected Singapore to an expansive sacred geography across the watery domain. An early twentieth-century image of the keramat shows a seascape with ships in the distance. The seascape disappeared from sight when land reclamation works were undertaken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a highway was constructed in the late twentieth century; the maritime connection to the expansive sacred geography was thus severed.

The architectural features of the keramat are a blend of the cultural influences that have been present in Singapore since the nineteenth century. The large dome at the top is representative of Islamic architecture across the Muslim world, and the columns recall classical European buildings (fig. 5). In broad terms, the structure today remains the same as it was more than a century ago. However, the louvered wooden windows and what appear to have been whitewashed walls have been replaced by glass shutters and olive-green tile walls.

The visual experience of the keramat has changed radically in the past 150 years. The infrastructural expansion begun in the nineteenth century has been carried on into the twenty-first century. The cityscape of Singapore—a wall of concrete, steel, and glass—fills up the sky near Habib Noh, and today, the shrine sits on a small plot of land with the highway on one side and a train system under construction on the other (fig. 6).

The spot where Habib Noh chose to be interred has remained in place in a landscape that has probably seen some of the most radical transformations in Singapore’s recent history (fig. 7). It is located on a knoll, which once abutted Mount Palmer on the southern coastline of the island, and a short distance from the buzzing financial center. Mount Palmer has been mostly leveled, and the historical harbor Habib Noh once overlooked has become reclaimed land. The keramat is the only remaining visual marker of a sacred geography and oceanic history whose traces have been erased.

The persistence of the shrine might perhaps be attributed to the respect with which it was held by British and Singaporean authorities. Rather, the stories that circulate by word of mouth and appear in hagiographies attribute its persistence to miraculous powers. For instance, heavy machinery is said to have failed when, in the 1980s, construction was begun on the highway to pass through the sacred site.⁷ Work resumed only after a ritual was performed and the highway was redesigned to skirt the keramat.

The Sacred in Our Times

Tuan Guru and Habib Noh lie on opposite ends of the Indian Ocean, separated by thousands of kilometers, and their biographies and historical contexts contrast sharply. There would appear to be little reason to compare the two. The transplantation of the popular practice of keramat veneration from the Malay world to southern Africa, however, allows us to view the disparate sites within a single frame.

Set against Table Mountain and the hypermodern cityscape of Singapore, respectively, Tuan Guru and Habib Noh are visually striking built archives of popular Islam. The focal points of these contrasting landscapes are the keramat themselves. Each is only a speck in the landscape on the scale of continents and oceans, but each is nonetheless potent. The keramat are repositories of devotion to God and miracles as well as oceanic histories whose visibility in the landscape matters. Whereas the sight of a mosque could inspire piety or awe, seeing a keramat is to connect with memories of a gifted human being, one who offers intercession between mortals and God.

To write about the sacred geographies and histories of keramat is not to claim primacy for them by privileging them as a particular set of built archives. Others have walked the earth and sailed the seas before them in Singapore and Cape Town. Tuan Guru and Habib Noh inscribe in the landscapes of these cities a time in the last millennium when the popular veneration of Muslim shrines was as ubiquitous across the Indian Ocean as Islamic networks were. The keramat are visible representations of this long-standing sacred geography and history within urban landscapes that have been transformed as radically as their political and social lives by colonial and national states.

Tuan Guru and Habib Noh open the doors of our imagination to other ways of understanding human relationships with the world, and to a much-needed mitigation, if not rethinking, of developmentalist ambitions. The sacred thus continues to assert its presence in our times.

The post The Built Archives of Popular Islam in Singapore and Cape Town appeared first on post.

The album War was created by the Russian avant-garde artist Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) with the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968) at the onset of World War I.¹ Between 1914 and 1915, Rozanova worked on the album in her hometown of Vladimir, a city located east of Moscow, while Kruchenykh composed the verses in the Caucasus during a deferment from military service.² Published in early 1916 in Petrograd, the album contains a letterpress–printed table of contents, fifteen sheets of linocut Cubo-Futurist illustrations, Suprematist collages, and poems in the transrational language of zaum’ (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”).³ Inside War, images of harrowing battle scenes, cannonballs being barreled into cities, soldiers being pierced by bayonets, and free-falling airplanes alternate with poems that fire a barrage of unorthodox language, syntax, and semantics unique to Russian Futurist verse from anthropomorphized battlefields. 

Rozanova and Kruchenykh met in 1912 and began collaborating the following year with various artists and poets including, among others, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Velimir Khlebnikov, producing nearly a dozen illustrated books and albums not long before they worked exclusively with each other.⁴ Their collaboration stood the test of war as they worked separately and remotely on the album by exchanging letters with each other as well as with the financier of the album and noted proponent of Futurist books, Andrei Shemshurin. The artist-poet duo, whose creative and romantic partnership continued until Rozanova’s death from diphtheria in 1918, tell the story of war that is simultaneously imagined and real, mythical and historical. More than a denunciation or celebration of war, the album is an exploration of war when it is agonizingly present and yet also distant, for the artist and poet living away from the frontlines.

War combines collage elements with linocuts made using sheets of mass–produced linoleum flooring, adopted by artists as an alternative to traditional methods of printmaking, and printed in red, green, and black ink. The album’s frontispiece shows an unfurled banner with the word voina, Russian for “war,” hovering above a triumphant woman brandishing a sword and trumpet (figs. 1–2). This call to war conjures mythic and modern visuals and semi-scrutable verses meditating upon the cataclysmic forces of modern war technology that is to come in the album. With its small distribution of one hundred copies (two of which are in MoMA’s collection), the album likely reached a close-knit audience of artists, poets, and collectors, which lends itself to an intimate affect. At the same time, as a work of art that combines the separate arts of printmaking, collage, and poetry into a unified whole, it embodies the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art. The album’s interplay between media, it can be said, presages the multimedia print publications incorporating photomontage and photomechanical reproductions that flourished in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution in the Soviet Union and abroad. Out of this synthesis of the arts, the album’s iconography and style further contribute to another totality known as “total war.” A concept that gained popularity during World War I, “total war” was understood as mobilizing all aspects of society to partake in the war effort. In effect, the war unsettled the emotional distance between home and frontline, combatant and civilian, to produce what literary scholar Mary Favret describes as “wartime affect.”⁵ Such affect can be observed in the letters exchanged by the artists and their relatives and colleagues. In one letter addressed to Kruchenykh, Rozanova anguishes over the possibility that his position on standby could change into ready reserve, catapulting him to the frontlines.⁶ Such documents reveal that their wartime experiences fell several removes from the frontlines, rendering the couple physically far but psychologically close to the conflict.⁷

Following the call to war, civilian spaces are rendered fair game in Destruction of the City (fig. 3) as cannonballs level buildings in an unidentified city. Similarly, the collage Airplanes over the City (fig. 4) depicts fatal clashes, in linocuts, of propellers, airplanes, and a body with shrapnel-like shapes cut from paper and glued to the sheet. In these figurative and abstract forms, Rozanova may be seen as negotiating the means of representation when one bears witness to the traumas of war. During the production of the album, Rozanova experimented with a nonobjective idiom of painting and contributed work to the landmark 0.10 (Zero-Ten): The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting in Petrograd in December 1915.⁸ The search for a visual form to communicate the horrors of war is matched in an alliterative onslaught of abstracted verses in Kruchenykh’s “Jump from an Airplane:”

The poem combines fragments stemming from the Russian words gryzt’ (to gnaw or devour) and batalon (battalion) in an attempt to construct a new language to describe the nature of war.⁹ The irregular spacing of one line advancing and another one retreating further evokes the movement of a battalion on the frontlines. 

In another poem that diverges from the indeterminate zaum’ verses, Kruchenykh delivers a cacophony emerging from the battlefield using conventional Russian:

Through the alliteration of Russian consonants, the poet anthropomorphizes iron, which played a major role in the production of weapons during the war, as offering a plea for life. The scabrous green lettering in the linocut further enhances the sonic effects of the verses and evokes script styles found in Russian woodcuts known as lubki or, the singular, lubok (fig. 5). While the illustrations and poems alternate in a rhythmic pace—with several verses printed in the table of contents—two sheets include text that Kruchenykh extracted from a newspaper bulletin that Rozanova then rendered in the illustrations (fig. 6). One of these sheets contains an image of a German soldier stabbing an opponent with a bayonet while the text reads: “With horror he recalls personally witnessing those crucified upside down by Germans.” In addition to references to the unfolding war, Rozanova intersperses classical motifs throughout the album, such as the horse and rider, which symbolize an aesthetic and spiritual confrontation, appearing in the illustrations of fallen equestrians in Battle, a transcendent face-off between fighters on rearing horses in Duel, and bayonet-wielding equestrians charging at helpless figures in Combat in the City (figs. 7–9).

Such spectacular, if not sublime, visuals of battle rooted in both a mythical and historical moment, along with the anthropomorphized battlefields in Kruchenykh’s verses erupt across the album’s final illustration, titled Battle in Three Spheres (Land, Sea, and Air) (fig. 10). The red outlines of man, machine, and nature collide into one totality that creates, perhaps, the clearest visualization of “total war.” Here, the boundaries of figures with weapons, the propellers and wings of aircrafts, a stylized sun and smoke clouds are brought into a fractured whole. The echoes of the trumpet pressed against the lips of the powerful female warrior from the beginning of the album comes full circle via its sounds reverberating across land, sea, and sky with a resounding quandary. Do we heed the call of the trumpet to pause or do we take irreparable action with the sword? The album emerges as an unconventional war story of those living through but away from war, told with varying degrees of proximity to the violence of the frontlines.

The post Away from the Frontlines: Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1916 Album <em>War</em> appeared first on post.

The title of Liubov’ Popova’s painting Objects from a Dyer’s Shop (Fig. 1) prompts the viewer to decipher the work’s imagery as a collection of fabrics, threads, and other objects, such as gloves and newspapers, piled on a table. The painting pays homage to both French Cubism and Italian Futurism and exemplifies a high point of Russian Cubo-Futurists’ absorption of both.¹ In her autobiography, Popova distilled her artistic concerns: “The Cubist period (the problem of form) was followed by the Futurist period (the problem of movement and color).”² The painting’s still life—supplemented by isolated floating letters (П Е Р), a newspaper recognizable by its title and font (Rannee Utro [Early Morning]), (Fig. 2) and an illusionistic tassel—constitutes an overt tribute to Cubism. Yet what strikes the viewer most is not the work’s ostensible subject matter but rather its dense accumulation of shapes, colors, and textures that appear to be swirling in a shallow space. Sharp diagonal lines pierce the mass of colors and forms, structuring the work’s alternating volumetric and flat surfaces while contrasting with the painting’s curvilinear lines, such as the wide colored ribbons, enhanced by a strong chiaroscuro. The visual sense of overcrowding is further heightened by the bright and unnatural colors: blue, pink, orange, and, especially, yellow; the title’s explicit reference to a dyer’s shop—krasil’nia, also inscribed on the back of the stretcher—foregrounds Popova’s deliberate experimentation with color. Equally important is the play of disparate textures: one can guess the curly gray shapes might refer to woolen threads, but the brown fibers of the table subvert any resemblance to perceptible wood and highlight its material properties instead, in sync with the preoccupations of Popova’s fellow artist and studio neighbor, Vladimir Tatlin.³ Rather than dissecting the composition into formal elements, Popova actively constructed it. Densely populating a shallow space with swirling objects of varied textures, she gave dynamism to form, masterfully combining the findings of both Cubism and Futurism and beginning to develop her own pictorial idiom.

Popova was an avid learner, and her privileged background (she was born into a rich and educated merchant family highly interested in the arts) gave her an early and diversified exposure to the arts. By 1912, when she was 23, Popova had studied Old Master paintings and Italian Renaissance works at both the Hermitage Museum and at sites in Italy during a family trip there in 1910. Moreover, she had carefully examined medieval Russian paintings in situ while visiting a number of old Russian cities and had methodically studied the Post-Impressionists she thought most important: Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and, especially, Paul Cézanne. Between December 1912 and May 1913, she immersed herself in the cosmopolitan Parisian avant-garde, studying with Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger at L’Académie de La Palette and befriending numerous French, Russian, and Italian artists and critics. Back in Moscow, Popova fueled artistic exchange, working in shared studios alongside Tatlin, Nadezhda Udal’tsova, Aleksandr Vesnin, and other ambitious vanguard artists. (Fig. 3) In March 1914 she returned to Paris and travelled on to Italy, together with her sculptor friends Vera Mukhina and Iza Burmeister. There they studied the Italian Renaissance and absorbed the advances of the Italian Futurists, visiting 15 cities before the outbreak of World War I.⁴

Popova first exhibited Objects from a Dyer’s Shop at the First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings Tramvay V in Petrograd in March 1915. The painting was listed in the exhibition catalogue as Object from a Dyer’s Shop and was preceded by another Popova work entitled simply Object (Predmet). The painting’s next known showing was at Popova’s posthumous exhibition of 1924, now titled plurally Objects from a Dyer’s Shop (Predmety iz Krasil’ni) and followed by a sketch for it (now lost) in the catalogue. The painting is visible in the installation photo alongside a number of formally similar works. (Fig. 4) (Two visually comparable examples among her preserved works are Italian Still Life (Fig. 5) and Objects (Fig. 6).) Tramvay V was an important turning point in the history of the Russian avant-garde: there Tatlin showed his first abstract reliefs, while Malevich exhibited paintings he called “alogical” and accompanied them with a handwritten sign on the wall that read “the content of the works is unknown to the author.” Tatlin and Malevich were then on the brink of abstraction, which they would present on a large scale at the famous Last Exhibition of Futurist Paintings 0.10 in December 1915.⁵

While Objects in a Dyer’s Shop shows Popova as a diligent student of European avant-gardes, it also reveals the rigor of her pictorial practice that soon led her to create her own distinct abstract visual language. As she described it, “The principle of abstracting parts of an object led, by logical necessity, to the abstraction of the object itself—this is the path to nonobjectivity. The problem of representation is replaced by the problem of construction of form and lines (post-Cubism) and of color (Suprematism).”⁶ Popova’s precise articulation of the inner logic of her artistic evolution revealed the complementarity of the methods developed by Malevich and Tatlin, which were polarized by their rivalry into Suprematism and “Tatlinism.” Popova’s next step was to take her keen sense of faktura⁷ and color into three dimensions. In 1915, she made an abstract Volumetric-spatial Relief (Ob’emno-prostranstvennyi Rel’ef) (Figs. 7-8), and at the 0.10 exhibition she showed works subtitled “plastic painting” (plasticheskaia zhivopis’). These works integrated a sensibility to faktura and space with a keen sense of color and pictorial planarity.

Through a gradual process of abstracting from objects and focusing on the construction of an integrated pictorial form, Popova developed a unique and compelling abstract idiom, which reached its peak in her series Painterly Architectonics (Zhivopisnaia Arkhitektonika) (1916–19) (Fig. 9) and Spatial-Force Constructions (Prostranstvenno-Silovyie Postroeniia) (1920–21). (Fig. 10) Just as she wove together the principles of Cubism and Futurism from 1912 to 1915, later that decade she successfully synthesized the essential attributes of Suprematism and Tatlinism—their focus on color and plane, materiality and faktura—thus exposing the formal commonalities between these important trends. Always valuing artistic exchange, Popova worked closely with Tatlin from 1913 to 1914, then with Malevich and his group of Suprematists during 1916 and 1917, and then joined the emerging group of Constructivists at GINKhUK (the State Institute of Artistic Culture) from 1920 to 1921. She went on to pioneer Constructivist theater design with Vsevolod Meyerhold and, finally, moved into production before her sudden death from scarlet fever in 1924. Her artistic path was in tune with the most vanguard ideas of her contemporaries, while also being confidently independent.

The post Liubov’ Popova’s <em>Objects from a Dyer’s Shop</em>, 1914 appeared first on post.

In the installation shots of past MoMA exhibitions dedicated to abstract art and the Russian avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White(1918) and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black)(1918), both in the Museum’s collection, are inseparable. The importance of MoMA’s exclusive opportunity to display these two paintings side by side, thus reconstructing “an original installation” from the Tenth State Exhibition: Nonobjective Creation and Suprematism (1919), is accentuated by Aleksandra Shatskikh in her book Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (2012).¹ Yet in the current hanging at MoMA, White on White and Black on Black (which are part of Malevich’s larger White on White series and Rodchenko’s Black on Black series, respectively) are split by Lyubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1917), prompting a reexamination, on the centennial of the Tenth State Exhibition, of the relationship between white and black paintings, including their historical and cultural contexts.

Varvara Stepanova, whose diary is a unique source for this endeavor, assessed the Tenth State Exhibition as “a contest between Anti [Rodchenko’s pseudonym expressing his nonconforming stance] and Malevich. The rest is nonsense.”² In this categorical summation, she dismisses the other participants’ works, including her own, for the sake of the approbation of a black-and-white dialectic. Denying Rodchenko’s black paintings their own meaning, she adds, “Anti wanted to hang . . . his black things next to Malevich . . . so that these blacks do not go to waste.”³

Malevich first used the term “nonobjective” in his brochure “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1916), writing in advance of—but also as though about—his later white paintings: “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to . . . nonobjective creation.” This endorsement of a ground-zero regime of painting amply corresponds to a post-revolutionary atmosphere marked by erasure of the toppled political system, including its cultural institutions. It also explains why the phrase “nonobjective creation” was adopted by avant-garde artists. Under this banner, which synthesized both a worldview and the role of experimentation in nonrepresentational art, they ascertained their identity in the newly established state. 

This broader and more politically potent meaning of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism, which in turn implies that painting was near its exhaustion, was endorsed by Stepanova after the opening of the Tenth State Exhibition. “Nonobjective creation,” Stepanova wrote, minimizing (like Malevich) the use of the word “art,” “is not only a movement or a tendency in painting, but also a new ideology born to destroy philistinism of spirit, and maybe it is not for the social system, but for the anarchic one and an artist’s nonobjective thinking is not limited to his art, it enters his entire life, and under its flag all his needs and tastes proceed.”⁴ Stepanova’s reading of nonobjectivism as a synthesis of formalism and politics promises a means of identifying an alternative subject for post-revolutionary nonobjective practice in general, and for the white and black paintings in particular. 

Malevich and Rodchenko produced their respective series between mid-1918 and the beginning of 1919, a period of violent social and political ruptures in modern Russian history. The October Revolution, World War I, in which Malevich served, and the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, made it impossible for the two artists to remain nonpartisan. Avant-garde literature has routinely positioned the two as supporters of the Bolshevik regime.⁵ However, as Stepanova suggested, the theoretical basis of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism may in fact be rooted in anarchist aspirations, which is indeed confirmed in Rodchenko’s first contribution to the newspaper Anarchy: “We are coming to you, beloved comrades, anarchists, instinctively recognizing in you our hitherto unknown friends . . . The present belongs to artists who are anarchists of art.”⁶ The section “Creation,” established in Anarchy for artists’ writings, avoided old terminology associated with fine art, and in this, went against the newly established Department of Visual Art in Narkompros (under the People’s Commissariat for Education) established on January 29, 1918. The title “Creation” specified that the true objective of contributors Aleksei Gan, Malevich, Aleksei Morgunov, Rodchenko, and Nadezhda Udal’tsova was to defend artists’ rights to freedom of expression, which they felt were equally threatened by the prerevolutionary institutions and the newly established commissariats. Their goal was to achieve unmediated creations that would replace any form of “prostituted”⁷ art. Above all, they thought, artists should pursue their own revolutions against artistic conventions and restrictive institutions. The Soviet government’s later repressive cultural policies proved that this early concern with freedom of expression was prolifically critical. 

Manifesto-style texts such as Rodchenko’s “To Artists-Proletarians” and “Be Creators!,” and Malevich’s “Declaration of Artist’s Rights,”⁸ all three of which were written for Anarchy, positioned artists as an oppressed and enslaved class akin to that of the proletariat. Rodchenko’s terminology, including “creator-rebel” and “revolution-creation,” radicalized the creative process and shifted it from an isolationist practice to a socially active one. Malevich’s text is more concerned with practical aspects such as the protection of artists’ work spaces and their right to maintain control over profits from sold art. Malevich preferred public collections to private ownership. 

Equally oppressive for both Malevich and Rodchenko was the view held by some critics at home and abroad that Russian modernists “imitate[ed] the West!”⁹ Malevich’s term “Suprematism,” coined to describe flat geometric painting, encodes an assertion of originality and preeminence over Western movements.¹⁰ Yet some nonobjectivists, including Rodchenko and Stepanova, resisted Malevich’s claim for “supremacy” in nonobjective circles by reason of suspecting him of mysticism,¹¹ and they were unwilling to accept his Black Square (1915) as their trademark. However, Rodchenko’s desire to free himself from the cultural bondage of the West outweighed this kind of issue with Malevich, as he realized that cooperating with him would guarantee the formation of “an entirely original identity in Russia’s art” and position them as “the first inventors of the new, as yet unseen in the West.”¹² Pledging to be Russia’s “own art,” and thus a national style, it asserted a competition with the West and, significantly, declared a position of difference from a Bolshevik internationalism that is embodied in, for instance, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920).

Initially viewing the anarchist groups as allies in the fight against the old regime, by the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks were ready to dissolve them and their critical forum Anarchy.¹³ Shatskikh dates “the emergence of white Suprematism” from this time.¹⁴ This means that Suprematism was conceived when Malevich could no longer write for Anarchy, and when the possibility of a “working anarchism” had dissolved. A retreat to “pure anarchism,” that is, “abstract, utopian, and realized only on paper,”¹⁵ was the only remaining option. White paintings were as pure and nonconventional within the conventions of modernist painting as Malevich could come up with. He succeeded in producing a work “as yet unseen in the West.”¹⁶ He also constructed a visual metaphor of an unmediated, autonomous creativity, which he had defended in Anarchy. But the subject of white paintings is additionally discernable from Malevich’s text “Declaration I,” written on June 15, 1918, around the time Malevich executed them. In this text, he describes the current state of Suprematism as a blend of formal and political concepts—a “Suprematist federation of colors of colorlessness,” and a “new symmetry of social paths;”¹⁷ and he sees “socialism illuminating its freedom to the world,” and “Art falling in the face of Creativity.”¹⁸ The result is a fervent socio-formalist concoction that, mirrored in white Suprematism, once again positions art and creativity as opposing concepts: the former systemic and institutional, the latter unmediated and under artists’ control. 

This new model of post-revolutionary Suprematism—and the creation of White on White—was Malevich’s act of spite toward Black Square, a trademark of pre-revolutionary Suprematism that had begun to alienate him from the Moscow nonobjectivists. In White on White, Malevich bleached Black Square, turning it into a pale shadow hardly distinguishable from its white background. The remaining black outlines around the square function as a referent to the subject of contention. Skewed, and edged closer to the picture frame, White on White upsets the steely stability of Black Square, moving toward new borders that are beyond painting. 

By the end of 1918, Rodchenko had definitely seen Malevich’s white paintings. He wrote, “Malevich paints without form and color. The ultimate abstracted painting. This is forcing everyone to think long and hard. It’s difficult to surpass Malevich.”¹⁹ Rodchenko’s statement confirms his acceptance of Malevich as a guru of “the new,” and an artist who is hard to outdo—and with whom he himself now wanted to collaborate. “Malevich and I decided to write and publish as much literature as possible,”²⁰ he wrote regarding the content of the catalogue for the Tenth State Exhibition. Rodchenko’s genius lay in realizing that all he had to do was invert Malevich’s new creation: to come up with a concept that, together with Malevich’s series, would construct the dialectical condition rife with overcoming negation. With this in mind, Rodchenko flung himself into hyper production, and by New Year’s Day, 1919, he had done “[a]bout twenty-nine to thirty new pieces.”²¹

Rodchenko painted Black on Black during this marathon, yet he commenced his contest with Malevich with a retort not to White on White, but rather to Black Square. This made White on White a dialogical painting, synthesizing nonobjectivists’ voices of discontent toward this passionately debated canvas as anti-painting, as “nothing,”²² “philosophy of a square,” “a graphic scheme.”²³ Rodchenko ignored Malevich’s defensive warning that it would be impossible to avoid the square’s effect, and “destroys”²⁴ it by swirling its shape, rounding it off, and replacing the Suprematist trademark with a circle. Rodchenko turns Malevich’s “color realism” —“a smooth coloring in one paint”²⁵—into “painterly confusion,”²⁶ destroying the divided positions that the black and white colors have in Black Square. His palette in Black on Black reverberates his excitement about being able to buy “a few tubes of marvelous oil paints, including “black, ocher . . . whites,”²⁷ luckily obtained amid the “constant looking for food”²⁸ that was necessary during the Civil War. The fortunate abundance of painting materials (Rodchenko also obtained fifteen stretchers) resulted in an “exhaustion from painting” that Rodchenko described as “the most pleasurable thing.”²⁹ Black on Black exudes, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, “the pleasure of the painting.”

Yet some sections of this work contradict this kind of painterly sensation; these are covered with an unmodulated, dull black color, at times applied thickly, and like Black Square, full of craquelures. It is this “most unthankful”³⁰ form of the color black at which, to rephrase Rodchenko, color and brushwork die, that he employs in order to create the ultimate color reverses to Malevich’s White on White paintings. These are monochromatic compositions nos. 81, 82, and 84, for which the collective title Abstraction of Color and Discoloration, under which Rodchenko listed his black-on-black series in the Tenth State Exhibition’s catalogue, is particularly apt. Rodchenko describes them as “Black on Black. Elaboration of one color by means of different surface conditions. Destruction of color for the same material treatment of monotonality.”³¹ These canvases lack painterliness and gesticulation, and they offer no visual pleasure. They are not photogenic. The color black is a priori more aggressive than white, and perhaps this is why Rodchenko compensates this cold color with warm forms of “ovals, circles, ellipses”³² (similar shapes, can be found in Malevich’s white paintings now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). 

Black-on-black’s antagonistic aura served “Anti” well in his anti-Western agenda and also in his goal to create an artwork that no one would deem an imitation of Western art. Stepanova affirms Rodchenko’s success, saying that he “gave in the ‘blacks’ what the West has dreamt about, a true easel painting brought to the last point . . . one can now speak about new painterly realism.”³³ “The peculiarly Russian conceptions of faktura [texture],”³⁴ which preoccupied many leading avant-gardists in Russia, played a role in Rodchenko’s achievement. In fact, Malevich’s indifference to the effects of faktura was another reason why nonobjectivists criticized his work. This continued with the White on White series that, to them, lacked textural interest. Instead of painting, they said, Malevich covered works in paint. In contrast, in the black paintings, Rodchenko charted gradations within a single color by rendering it “shining, matt, faded, rough, smooth.”³⁵ This “triumphed”³⁶ faktura, and created a more complex relationship with the viewer. Stepanova observed that during the Tenth State Exhibition, “More serious [viewers] were less resentful of the black [paintings], which they perceived as something particularly abstract or maybe they simply did not see them.”³⁷ Presumably, viewers were not always able to focus on the black paintings due to the lack of familiar pictorial characteristics, in the absence of which, the paintings merged into actual space, revealing the objectness (predmetnost) of nonobjective forms and alluding to the end of painting. 

Unlike Malevich’s White on White series that I earlier referred to as an allegory of autonomous practice, the Black on Black paintings were not. This is because they were conceived within the logic of supplementarity in relation to White on White paintings. However, while making many black canvases, Rodchenko also conceived of his own example of pure anarchic creation. These are white sculptural objects, described as Assembled and Disassembled, that originated Rodchenko’s three series of “spatial constructions” and launched the laboratory period of Constructivism. It is conceivable that in his Assembled and Disassembled objects, Rodchenko was reacting to Malevich’s non-geometric and even non-Suprematist forms, which are rendered in a different shade of white (I am again referring to the paintings from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), this time recognizing the sculptural potential he fulfilled before Malevich made his “architectons” (1920). Stepanova describes Rodchenko’s state of joissance from process rather than product: “Anti is constructing sculpture, he loves it . . . it takes nothing for him to break everything and make the most amazing thing again. . . . he is so confident in the power of his creativity.”³⁸ For Rodchenko, the “game”³⁹ (his expression) of the materialization and dematerialization of an aesthetic object raised the degree of creative anarchism that he and Malevich propagated in their writing for Anarchy. Their shared platform of anarchist utopia allowed them to reconcile their differences with regards to nonobjective practice, establishing a dialectical and agonistic relationship. Malevich seemed to agree that the two-color match ended in a draw. “We should appear together,”⁴⁰ he proposed to Rodchenko after the exhibition’s opening.

Rodchenko’s comrade Osip Brik, a formalist critic and editor of the newspaper Art of the Commune, visited the Tenth State Exhibition and, according to Stepanova, the “‘Blacks’ brought [him] into amazement.”⁴¹ Perhaps Brik’s keen, leftist eye (brilliantly conceptualized by Rodchenko in an unpublished cover of LEF in 1924), observed a looming transition from faktura to factography in Rodchenko’s black paintings.⁴² Indeed, his later street photography, such as the series of images of the Building on Miasnitskaia Street (1925), the Brianskii Railway Station (1927), and Pine Trees (1927), filled Rodchenko with an unbounded sense of independence and creative freedom, as he wandered the streets of Moscow, climbed rooftops, and lay on the ground in resistance to photography’s conventional belly-button perspective. On becoming a commissioner of SVOMAS (Free state art studios), where Malevich already had a studio, Brik invited Rodchenko to join. For both artists, the school’s agenda of “maximum freedom for artists,”⁴³ the availability of work space, and the independent teaching curriculum, complemented their model of liberation from institutional constraints, middlemen, and anxiety over the production and distribution of art objects. “Nonobjective painting has left the museums, it is—the street, the square, the city and the entire world,”⁴⁴ asserted Rodchenko in 1920. With this statement, he reaffirms Malevich’s craving for an objectless avant-gardism, which the latter expressed two weeks after the Revolution, when he said: “I decided to declare myself the chairman of space. It makes me at ease, withdraws me, and I breath freely.”⁴⁵ Such a fantasy of nonobjective creation without borders was also invested into the white and black series, making them a symbol of the gap between what Malevich and Rodchenko had imagined and what the Bolshevik apparatus was preparing for them.

The post The Subject of Nonobjective Art appeared first on post.

The proliferation of diverse photographic practices across the world soon after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 is by now well-known. For example, Deborah Poole’s pioneering work on the early history of photography has shown that the movement of photography between Europe, North America, and Latin America constituted the making of a transcultural visual economy, one that was very much about deploying the “truthful” optics of the camera to justify discrimination and imperialism.¹ Photographed people became visual data in the making of modern scopic regimes of difference. For example, photography made race a visible “fact,” and slaving societies, such as the United States, used photographic representation to legitimize slavery and later segregation. But photography also engendered unforeseen horizons of visibility and agency. Portrait photography as an expressive force of modernity was embraced by many. By the 1850s, commercial photography studios could be found all across the globe, including in Buenos Aires, New York, Shanghai, Cairo, Bombay, and Accra. It is striking that in all of these cities, many separated by two oceans people posed for similar portraits, often holding identical standing poses in front of standardized backdrops. Yet rather than being peripheral simulations of the European experience, these pictures are representative of a complex web of connected, yet different image worlds.

However, what is much less known is that eastern Africa, especially the Swahili Coast, was also a fulcrum of the consumption and production of photography. Here photographs did not connect to local practices of picture-making, as in Asia, West Africa, and the Middle East. In fact, Swahili Coast culture was generally aniconic before the nineteenth century (although sculptors did create low-relief semiabstract zoomorphic carvings in architectural settings). This suggests that not all histories of photography are about pictorial illusionism and the mimetic capacities of photography. Rather, photography’s role as a thing in the world, as matter and materiality, played a significant role.²

The Swahili Coast of eastern Africa is one of the most fluid nodes of the Global South, where people, ideas, and materials from all over the world converge and intermingle. A Muslim cultural complex, its ports have acted as intersections of vastly different social and economic systems for more than a millennium. The region has long connected the African heartland to places across the Indian Ocean, especially to the coastal regions of South Asia and the Middle East. As a result, local people are masters of the in-between, easily negotiating between different worldviews and cultural traditions. The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed moment in a long history of transcontinental connectivity. The North Atlantic world, including would-be colonizers and capitalists, increasingly focused on controlling the trade and resources of Africa and the Indian Ocean world. When Zanzibar became the seat of the British-backed Busaidi Sultanate of Oman in 1837, the entire region became the center of competing imperial projects. While its main port towns, such as Zanzibar and Mombasa, have always been vanguard places, during this time, new technologies and infrastructures of movement, communication, and mass media rapidly accelerated transcontinental exchange, contracting space and time with unprecedented intensity.

By the 1870s, photography, one of industrial modernity’s most revolutionary mediums, was essential to local aesthetic practice. The first photographs likely arrived in markets of the region’s port towns from Bombay and other South Asian and Middle Eastern trading centers, although Zanzibaris had already been photographed in 1846, when a visiting French naval officer created a series of anthropological daguerreotype plates. Initially, locals did not have access to original photographs but rather to mass-produced picture postcards, or cartes de visite, and chromolithographs. Photographs were printed onto card stocks and paper using various photomechanical processes. By the 1900s, such small-format cards were circulating in the millions across the Indian Ocean and along the caravan routes of eastern Africa. As elsewhere in the world, photography was about both oppression and liberation in myriad ways.

While some locals had the ability to commission their own portrait photographs, many more could buy photographs of strangers, along with other cheap commodities, which were flooding the local markets at this time. Small, mobile, and easily amassed and collected, these pictures connected to older traditions of displaying transoceanic commodities in one’s home. For local consumers, photographs were tantalizingly exotic, endowed with a foreign materiality that made them perfect artifacts for display and pleasure.

By the 1870s, commercial photography studios also proliferated, serving a diverse clientele. At first, local photographers primarily catered to European immigrants, colonial officials, and Omani Arabs, but by the turn of the twentieth century, mainland Africans, Swahilis, and South Asians all frequented them to have portraits made or to buy images of others. Goans, who were Christians and Portuguese subjects, opened the first commercial photography houses in Zanzibar and Mombasa. Although it is often assumed that they came directly from present-day India to the Swahili Coast, many had been living in other ports of the western Indian Ocean. For example, A. C. Gomes first opened a studio in Aden (in present-day Yemen) in 1869, where he also served as a photographer to the British government. He and his family migrated to Zanzibar sometime in the 1870s, when British interests in the Indian Ocean region shifted from the coastal towns of the Arabian Peninsula to the Swahili Coast. In fact, Goan photographers also sold affordable imports, including textiles, household wares, and fashionable items of adornment, such as jewelry and perfumes. They were key agents and purveyors of the commodity culture of the Indian Ocean.

During their early history, studio photographs functioned as portraits and also as objects of good taste. In fact, the ruling elite and wealthy merchants often displayed framed studio portraits of their family members in carefully curated domestic spaces. The photograph in figure 1, for example, shows an interior view of a multiuse room in a large mansion in Stone Town. The room is filled with European glass chandeliers, Middle Eastern carpets, Goan furniture, export-ware porcelain, and German factory-made chairs. Studio portraits are also central to the room’s decorative program. Three large, mounted, and framed portraits of men in Omani dress are set on the ornate Indo-Portuguese cabinet in the right foreground of the image, and another occupies the small nightstand next to the bed. Versions of this photograph exist in many archives across the world, and it was published in a British book in the 1890s, where the byline noted, “The conflict between Oriental and Western civilization is clearly discernable in the decorations of the chamber.”³ Yet this layering of diverse cultural strands in Zanzibari homes did not represent a conflict to locals. The young man sitting in the center of the room, his name no longer known, exudes confidence and authority. His body language is relaxed as he leans against the curve of the chair’s back, extending his legs slightly before him. The carefully arranged collection of prized furnishings and objects d’art reflects his globally inflected aesthetic sensibility. Here photographs, although certainly portraits of family members, also worked in tandem with the collected items that filled this room, to create a layered space of exotica.

For more than one hundred years, until around the 1990s, locals avidly posed for (fig. 2), collected, and created elaborately staged studio portraits of themselves and others for an array of reasons. The great majority of studio photographs from Africa still in circulation today, especially those in European and North American private and public collections, are the historical picture postcards that fall in the “native studies” category (figs. 3-10).⁴ The postcards themselves are very much part of the leisure and collecting culture of Europeans and North American audiences; although, most feature photographs taken by the most successful commercial photographers of the Swahili Coast, including A. C. Gomes, Pereira de Lord, and J. P. Fernandes. They simply sent their photographs to Europe, where they were reprinted as picture postcards, which were then shipped back to eastern Africa to be sold to visitors, who in turn sent them back to Europe and other places overseas. As postcards, local photographs circulated across oceans with unprecedented ease. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a regular schedule of steamships connected the main ports of the Indian Ocean with those of Europe, including Hamburg, London, and Marseilles. Interestingly, before the 1890s, the majority of Swahili Coast commercial studios worked with German postcard printing houses, especially those located in Hamburg.⁵

Studio prints and postcards depicting local people wearing elaborate costumes and holding contrived poses were especially popular during the colonial period, when the coast was part of the British protectorate (1890–1963). Many show local young women, because they evoke a much-loved phantasm of exotic feminine sensuality. The women’s bodies and clothes are sometimes hand colored in luscious hues (figs. 4, 5, 7-9), endowing them with a compelling realism. Clearly, many compositions met the desires of North Atlantic audiences, although scholars and oral histories suggest that postcards also featured photographs that locals had commissioned of themselves; it seems that commercial studios had portraits reprinted as postcards, likely without the permission or knowledge of the sitters. We cannot be sure which photographs were once personal mementos because locals also sometimes posed and dressed in ways that played with North Atlantic photographic tropes. In fact, through photography, diverse clients mixed Swahili aesthetics of self-display, local rules of public propriety, colonial categories of race and identity, and modern notions of the individual.

Although today we have access to thousands of picture postcards in both private and public archives, the lives of those photographed remain largely opaque. We also can only guess about the kinds of negotiations that took place between photographer and photographed.⁶ The majority of postcards, especially the nameless “native type” postcards, show poor people and young women, who were likely hired or forced to perform in front of the camera. Especially the most Orientalizing and seductive compositions (fig. 6) are part of a long history of transforming people into pretty pictures and delectable objects. Today we like to imagine that the sitters in these photographs had some agency in their self-presentation. We see something confident and powerful in these women (especially figs. 4 and 5), believing that they are somehow subverting the oppressive force of the colonial and male gaze defining them. Because of the mimetic realism of photography, we interpret gazes, postures, and gestures as intimating a trace of a sitter’s inner and intimate life. In fact, in many cases, the people who could choose to remain invisible had a great deal more autonomy than those pictured in such postcards. This does not mean the pictured women do not require our serious consideration. They lived complex lives and struggled for self-determination in ways that these photographs can never reveal. Yet, paradoxically, they are also often all that remains of their historical selves, and as such, archival traces of their lived experience. Reading such postcards against the grain of objectification is an important project.

Tourists who bought and sent picture postcards likely did not consider the sitters’ subjectivities or life worlds, but rather saw them as souvenirs, or nameless bodies. As postcards, they are comfortably distant and purely ornamental. The desire for pleasing ornament was why many postcards featured theatrical arrangements of women’s bodies, which were transformed into striking arrangements (figs. 9 and 10). The captions never provide the names of the subjects, but instead a more generic description, such as “Swahili Beauties” (fig. 10), for example. Some reference to “beauty” is printed on many postcards (fig. 8). The subject’s individuality is subsumed by their perceived visual attractiveness; each person is transformed into a pleasurable component of a composition. These postcards are in many ways exemplary of the violence of photography, pandering to the voyeuristic desire of viewers for possession of and power over others.

Many of these women, and also young men, were vulnerable to other forms of violence, including economic, bodily, and sexual violence. These photographs perhaps do not overtly suggest extreme subjugation, but without a doubt, many of the sitters were touched by the violence of slavery. It was a local tradition for retinues of bonded or enslaved women, wearing elaborate costumes, to perform pleasing dances in public. Their dress and jewelry spoke of the wealth and good taste of their enslavers. They often wore matching turbans, body skimming caftans, and tight pants, as seen in figure 10. There existed even a specific category of enslaved women, wapambe, which means “the ornamented ones,” whose primary role was to beautify parades and festivals. Also, as historical recent research has shown, enslavement and its many legacies shaped daily life in myriad ways for decades after the Abolition Decree of 1897.⁷ Abolition was especially ambiguous for women. For instance, the decree officially offered freedom to all, except women categorized as concubines. In fact, many powerful locals declared all enslaved women in their house to be concubines to forestall their manumission.

These postcards therefore hint at the continuation of extreme injustices and hardships, even as the sitters’ smiles and delightful poses suggest play and fun. They very much reveal something about local histories and legacies of violence and are not just about the predations of colonialist photography. They certainly continue to reverberate in Zanzibar today because painful questions about who enslaved whom still shape local interpretations of the nineteenth century.⁸

Clearly these postcards are complicated objects. They are not simply about the North Atlantic taste for exotic bodies, although that is their most obvious role. They are also composites—“local,” “Western,” and “colonial” —all at once. The camera turned living people into mediated effigies, objects that adopted the shape of human beings, that in turn could be shipped across oceans in mobile postcard form. But they also hold onto real lives and specific histories, histories that suggest individual experiences of dehumanization—not just photographic violence.

The post Subjects and Subjugation: Swahili Coast Studio Photography in Global Circulation appeared first on post.

In this video, Boris Groys speaks on the biopolitics of technological immortality and resurrection; Arseny Zhilyaev considers the aesthetic ideals of Russian Cosmism including “life building” in collaboration with God; Hito Steyerl talks about continued quests for the elixir of immortality, euthanasia, and genocide; and Anton Vidokle presents a recent short film called The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun. Ksenia Nouril moderates a concluding panel discussion among the participants.

The post post Presents: Russian Cosmism appeared first on post.

Fire and the Cinema

Like many film histories, India’s silent cinema inevitably intersects with stories of fire. When silent-cinema pioneer Dhundiraj Govind Phalke remade his debut film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra, 1913), four years later, in 1917, it is widely assumed to have been because a fire had destroyed the original. 

A century later, in 2013, when Phalke’s film was officially declared the moment when the “Indian” cinema was born, it would become a touchy question whether the crown jewel of the National Film Archive of India’s (NFAI) collection was indeed the 1913 original—or, in fact, a remake by its author and thus a copy or a kind of fake, albeit by its original maker. Missing in that controversy was, however, a second development: a more recent fire, on January 8, 2002, which may have destroyed around 1,700 nitrate prints, including the original print of whichever Raja Harishchandra was held in the NFAI. 

Much of the popular news coverage of the 2002 fire claims that “all” of India’s silent cinema had been destroyed. This wasn’t, of course, untrue, and yet to most Indian film historians, it appeared to be a curious claim. We have grown up with the firm belief that almost nothing beyond the much-vaunted Phalke had survived of Indian silent cinema, and so there could not have been much to lose. The NFAI itself covertly furthered this belief, belittling the damage and claiming that everything had been transferred to acetate, that nothing of value had been lost. This was surely a dubious claim, and not just for the obvious reason that a copy can never compensate for the loss of an original. Long before the 2002 fire, Phalke’s films had been duplicated by the NFAI with the sound gate closed, which meant that around 20 percent of the left side of the screen was lost in the transfer. This problem was never solved and the 2002 fire now meant that it never would be. Further, in 1965, Satish Bahadur, venerable professor of film appreciation at the Film and Television Institute of India, had cannibalized all of Phalke’s short films into a single compilation, which he titled D. G. Phalke: The First Indian Filmmaker, using English and French intertitles, apparently for International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) conference he attended. None of the fragments Bahadur used, including clips such as How Films Are Made (1917), which shows Phalke editing, shooting, and instructing his actors, today exist other than in his compilation. 

How Films Are Made/How They Live On

Phalke knew that he was making history with his first film, as he showed on February 13, 1928, when he uttered the famous words, “Yes, I began the Indian film industry in India in the year 1912” in response to a comment from the colonial government–appointed Indian Cinematograph Committee, “I suppose you began the film industry in this country.” 

As we link the more overt process of “making history” with the silent cinema’s more covert, crustacean-like resilience— in refusing to die, in crawling out of disaster both natural and man-made—it is tempting to include another fire in the saga: the famous fire of the sage Vishwamitra, in Raja Harishchandra, which is almost a premonition of how Phalke’s cinema would survive in the decades to come. When the king, out on a hunt in all his regal glory, clashes with the spiritual universe of the sage Vishwamitra, who has trapped the “three powers” in a fire, it is hard not to see the “powers” of the cinema itself as trapped in the fire. Premonitions, or fantasy flash-forwards were, one adds in parenthesis, well-known to Phalke (see the famous scene of the evil Kamsa in his Shri Krishna Janma, 1918).

When, as historians, we try to reconnect the Indian cinema’s own history with the larger history of the twentieth century, which it necessarily captures, we inevitably face the difficulty of having to square cultural survivals on film with the quixotic saga of the actual survival of film. When in 1994 the 14th Giornate del Cinema Muto (aka Pordenone Silent Film Festival) showcased India, many historians were surprised to see what the NFAI had come up with. At least twenty-five silent films apparently existed, either fully or in fragments. Only eight of these were Phalke’s. They were a mere drop in an ocean (India made upwards of 1,300 silent films between 1913 and 1931) but they were surely something! But what did these bits and pieces add up to in the end? 

It is in light of the sordid saga of the thrice-destroyed that we turn yet again, in the early twenty-first century, to the ravaged films. We do so now with some additional resources—and also the knowledge that these films are now in the public domain. They are available for research, using new digital platforms—such as the independent, noncommecial site Indiancine.ma—that provide for detailed viewing and annotation possibilities. With this we ask, certainly not for the first time, where we stand with regard to Indian silent–cinematic history. 

Baburao Painter’s Own Survival

Resources like these allow us to address the several “non-Phalke” silents that have come into public view with, and shortly after, the 14th Giornate—especially and above all the two films of Baburao Painter (1890–1954) that were reconstructed by the FTII’s former cinematography professor K. P. R. Nair. Painter began his career a few years after Phalke, and so might not have been able to make the claim of having “started” anything. But as one of the leading painters of stage backdrops in western India, and later producer and director at the Maharashtra Film Company, he was almost certainly the bigger name of the two—and would have been a much more substantial presence but for the historical accident that none of his films had apparently survived. 

Until now. Until, that is, the NFAI assembled in-house, under the supervision of the great K.P.R. Nair, Painter’s 1927 film Muraliwala. How Nair did it is, in and of itself, quite a story: it appears to have been with the lowest tech imaginable, literally a physical cleaning and frame-by-frame duplication—importantly, with the sound gate open, so that we have the complete frame—even as the original print fragmented in Nair’s hands, already lost, long before the 2002 fire.

In one way, Muraliwala is, of course, straightforwardly mythological, and indeed the resemblance to Phalke (the Kaliya sequence being almost a direct nod to Phalke’s Kaliya Mardan made nearly a decade earlier though not nearly as spectacular as its predecessor) permits Painter to be easily absorbed into the nationalist stream. But let’s pause for a moment. Painter has a social context that is certainly not Phalke’s: he is not Brahmin but comes instead from the low-caste carpenter community; he is, in the end a “technician.” Phalke had neither students nor disciples. Painter had both. His own work straddled technological skill and an aspiration toward artistic authorship, the mold for almost everything produced by what would later become one of India’s best-known film studios, the venerable Prabhat Film Company. 

Painter’s leading student, future director and actor V. Shantaram, who made his debut in Muraliwala, would later embody his teacher’s legacy, in all its contradictions in terms of caste and otherwise, in a way that I lack space here to explore. Suffice it to say that the tension between fantasy (which, here, means special effects, dissolves, and trick scenes, which in turn bring in a lower-class artisanal skill and, of course, thrills for a “cheaper” class of audience) and realism (the gesture toward thematic interpretation, the literary legacy, and eventually nationalist purpose) would only grow as Maharashtra Company shaded into Prabhat. 

Might we now read, as we read Painter’s curious rebirth in digital platforms a century later, some of this self-doubt, this doubt as it stands between the mesmerizing pyrotechnics of the little Krishna and the more adult responsibilities of conjugal relations—the tension between fantasy and realism—in Shantaram’s extraordinary performance as Raman in Muraliwala? What does a man do, we may ask within the full-blown subjective realism that such a performance permits, when his wife is so obsessed with a child? What does it mean when the child tells her that she must learn to look at him with the eye of wisdom?

Let us analyze the sequence. The children have just completed yet another of their endless pranks. A cut. Raman and Radha are together, sharing for the first time genuine conjugal happiness. But then the demon resurfaces; as the nightmare continues, Raman dissolves yet again into the child Krishna. The problem has not been solved. What happens thereafter we don’t know (though we can surely guess), for after some fairly intimate exchanges with the child, Radha falls into a dead faint. Raman reappears, and he and Krishna have a confrontation. Krishna waves an accusing finger at Raman before stalking off. Raman, now helplessly standing before the unconscious Radha, keeps fantasizing that Krishna is standing there, when suddenly there is a flash of lightning and thunder; Raman is blinded and falls down, as Krishna is seen descending down what seems to be a gigantic crevice. 

Krishna is now in the throes of his epic and terminal battle with the snake-demon, from which he emerges vanquished—also having, presumably killed the demon, surely the very demon plaguing Radha’s life?

However we understand this extraordinary staging of the ethical dilemmas that precede the epic battle, it is surely unprecedented in Indian cinema. In fact, I know of little that has followed Muraliwala that so remarkably explores the ethics of the love story between Radha and Krishna. Certainly there is very much more than an incipient realism at work here: there is, precisely, the aspiration of a cinematic form to work out of its formal location—fantasy—and to arrive at a properly realist text. Is there (and I leave the question open in this brief blog-note) any possible historical connection we may now make in terms of how this film came to be, and then came to be before us, with the dilemmas of modernity that ravaged its protagonists at the time it had been conceived and made? Whatever the answer, the question at least directs us toward the sorts of dilemmas that await India’s silent-film historians once we have gotten our heads around all those fires, the lightning, and the thunder. 

For a complete list of Indian silent films on Indiancine.ma, go here.

The post The Film Fragment: Survivals in Indian Silent Film appeared first on post.

Many avant-garde movements in Europe around the time of World War I were linked to radical politics, and in those stormy years, a generation of artists in Budapest created provocative newspaper illustrations, banners, and public posters in a new genre of graphic design that was both artistic and unequivocally political.

In recent years, MoMA has been able to build up an important collection of these early modernist Hungarian materials, including posters from the collection of Julius Paul (1867–1938). Amassed during Paul’s lifetime, his was one of the great collections of Central European posters from the early twentieth century. Born in Hungary, Paul owned a cigarette-paper distribution company based in Budapest and Vienna and was a founding member of Hans Sachs’s Verein der Plakatfreunde. ¹ Among the works acquired by MoMA are a series of visually compelling posters created by prominent Hungarian artists Mihály Biró, Sándor (Alexander) Bortnyik, and Bertalan Pór in the buildup to 1919, the year of the rise and fall of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet regime.

On March 21, 1919, Bolshevik forces led by Béla Kun declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic, replacing the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic. Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór all fought with the Hungarian Red Army as combatants and graphic propagandists. They were offered direct roles in shaping the culture of the new society and sought to mobilize thousands of unemployed workers, idle soldiers, and war invalids in the struggle for a world revolution. But the takeover lasted a mere 133 days, at the end of which first the Romanian army and then a counterrevolutionary regime seized power. Fleeing the “white terror”—a wave of vicious reprisals that followed the collapse of the Bolshevik republic—Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór became refugees, moving among European countries to escape arrest and execution and contributing to avant-garde developments in centers including Vienna, Moscow, and Berlin, and in the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany.

Before 1919, Budapest, the thriving metropolis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was already developing as a center of modern poster design, and Mihály Biró was one of Hungary’s best-known graphic artists for commercial and political commissions. Through distortion of scale and angle, and dramatic simplification of form and color, Biró created an image of a delivery boy leaping toward the viewer, scattering Pauker stationery products in his haste. Such posters vividly communicate a sense of the congestion and frenetic pace of business in Budapest before World War I. Alluding to his bold use of color, the German magazine Das Plakat (The Poster) described Biró’s visual language as throbbing with “the syncopated rhythms of the Hungarian folk songs.”

Among Biró’s most iconic images is Red Man with a Hammer. Originally designed in 1912, it became inextricably linked with the 1919 Hungarian Revolution, appearing in huge numbers and varied formats—overprinted in this case with an issue of Népszava (The People’s Voice), the newspaper of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. The image established Biró’s name internationally and has been much repeated in Central European political iconography up to the present day. As an apprentice in Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft in London, Biró learned the craft of printing and absorbed the socialist ethos and utopian ideals of the British Arts and Crafts movement. His earlier training as a sculptor is also evident in the assured handling of the iconic red man, the model for whom was his lifelong friend, the Hungarian wrestling champion Tibor Fischer.

The designing of political posters demands not only technique and ability to draw but also that the artist should be in close touch with the masses of the people to whom his poster is to appeal . . . These posters intended to work upon the masses must be true art, drawn as simply as possible, and always taking mass psychology into account. “Sachlichkeit” [descriptive representation] puts a brake upon the artist’s energy and hinders every vigorous stroke with which he ought to hammer his poster into the public’s head.

—Mihály Biró, interviewed in the German periodical Gebrauchsgraphik, 1932

MoMA is also fortunate to own a later adaptation of Red Man with a Hammer, one of many produced during the tumult of Hungary’s 1919 revolution. The poster advertised May Day, a holiday associated with the international worker’s movement, the celebration of which would be the biggest public event during the 133 days of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Embodying the energy of the revolutionary masses, Biró’s red man glorified the common worker as the equivalent of a mythological figure such as Hercules, or Vulcan at his forge. The concept of posters as public decorations for May Day was at least partly inspired by Soviet Russian precedents. “The defiant simplicity, the removal of peripheral things, and the menacing power of the delivery—all these are the hallmarks of Biró,” wrote the critic Pál Nadái at the time.

Another poster that remains one of the most memorable images associated with the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 is Világ Proletárjai Egyesüljetek! (Proletarians of the World, Unite!). Striding forward in tandem and bearing elongated red banners beneath the title’s slogan, two nudes of epic scale, set within in a whirling composition, communicate nervous energy and urgency. Naked and classicized, the figures recall Cézanne’s Bathers, but they also symbolize the universality of the revolutionary impulse. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bertalan Pór spent more than a decade as a political refugee before returning to Hungary once a Communist regime was established following World War II.

This rhythmic and intense composition featuring energetic figures contained by a rectangular field captures the turbulence of the era and a burgeoning taste for Futurist and Expressionist design. The poster publicizes an exhibition by Ma (“Today” in Hungarian), a group that emerged during World War I and which quickly became a leader in the Budapest avant-garde. The first issue of its journal set its revolutionary tone and simultaneously sums up the role of these graphic arts during this era of revolutionary fervor: “The new painter is a moral individual, full of faith and a desire for unity! And his pictures are weapons of war!”

Within a few years, Bortnyik had broken from the Ma group, and in 1922, he joined the flow of Hungarians (among them Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, Ferenc Molnár, Gyula Pap, and Andor Weininger) to the Weimar Bauhaus. He remained on the periphery of this group, however, and in 1924 returned to Budapest where he set up his own art school based on Bauhaus principles in 1928. After World War II and the establishment of a communist government, the paths of Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór briefly converged once more in Budapest. Biró, his health now irrevocably damaged by incarceration, was literally carried back from Paris by his wrestler friend Tibor Fischer in 1947, only to die shortly thereafter. Pór also returned from Paris to take up a post in the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where Bortnyik had become the director. Both remained in Hungary until their respective deaths.

The post Hungarian Posters from the 1910s appeared first on post.