What aesthetic strategies can make sense of an unstable present? Adam Thirlwell looks to forms of art with a strong theoretical component
In the Royal Academy’s current show, Entangled Pasts, you can see John Akomfrah’s video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) – a three-channel work that uses the sea of the Middle Passage to think about the destruction of human and nonhuman life, while also practising a kind of multiple richness of presentation. Coming near the end of the RA’s giant show about the institution’s complicity in slavery and racial hierarchy, it has a kind of migraine intensity of hallucination. And I loved this, it unnerved and destabilised in the same way that the show itself constructed its own larger montages. In Vertigo Sea Akomfrah stages Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography of life as a slave – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano – while in a nearby room Isaac Julien in Lessons of the Hour (2019) restages the visit of Frederick Douglass to Britain. The eeriness of these twin figures, with actors allowing historical figures to come back from the dead, made the gallery space a kind of afterlife. Or there was the way opposite the screens that displayed Akomfrah’s aquatic montage they had hung Frank Bowling’s giant abstract painting Middle Passage from 1970, so that two oceans reflected each other.
In the bookstore I picked up a transcript of a conversation between Akomfrah and curator/writer Johanne Løgstrup, published by Sternberg, where I came across Akomfrah’s beautiful idea of montage. Initially, he says, ‘it felt like an approach rather than a technique. As I grew older, I realised that it’s actually an ethic. It slowly dawned on me that this was about the way in which one accepted the coexistence of difference.’ Or, in other words: ‘The montage is a kind of method of persuasion. The editing is a method of persuading different slices from different projects, some I originated, some somebody else has shot, others I bought, to sit together.’
Maybe that’s a hopeful way of thinking about the show itself, although I’m not totally sure. In its effort to think about its compromised existence within the crime of empire, the RA has come up with a very strange exhibition, where morally offensive art coexists with artworks whose essence is based on an ethical refusal of complicity, a need to expose the untold or undertold stories of the oppressed (Akomfrah again: ‘The question of the untold is obviously an important one, because in a way it so much describes what constitutes a diaspora’). In its absolute idea of history as value, I felt what was missing was a more precise idea of aesthetic strategy, or an approach to the question of whether there might be ethically unimpeachable art that is nevertheless anodyne in its effects. I guess in some way I wanted the history to be inflected with more theory. A line by American academic Saidiya Hartman kept coming back to me: ‘I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it’. In such a future, the idea of complicity feels too neutral or even tautologous to be useful.
And obviously we are also living in the future created by the Shoah. Earlier this month I went to see my friend, the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, give a lecture in a church (a church!) in Clerkenwell, after the Barbican had cancelled it when they saw its title: ‘The Shoah After Gaza’. It was a lecture given from a rightful place of immediate grief and solidarity for the people of Gaza, and also written from within Pankaj’s own autobiography, as someone who grew up ‘imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India’. So much of what he said was excellent: the argument that the best witness to the Shoah may be a dissident Jewish heritage of radical thinking and resistance; the insistence on the way survivors of the Shoah, such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, refused the idea that the Shoah could be used by rightwing Israeli governments to justify any mistreatment of the Palestinian people; and the overwhelming fact that to many people outside Europe the fact of the Shoah as a kind of overwhelming negative sublime was simply absent, and that therefore many European assumptions about the existence of Israel were also absent on a global scale. But I also found myself worried by contradictions or non sequiturs. The largest non sequitur was the fundamental argument of the lecture – that ‘a necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory’. I couldn’t see the logic of this. If the Shoah created a reparative idea of universal justice, however flawed in its implementation, then it cannot be endangered by the Israeli state using it for its own propaganda. All that’s necessary is to attack the extremist politicians who create that propaganda, just as Améry and Levi did back in the 1960s and 70s. Or, if the universal is in fact flawed, then the question of Israeli horror and propaganda is irrelevant. The contradiction felt related to other local problems, like the contorted syntax of the following sentence (again from the lecture), which also felt less convincing than it wanted to be: ‘Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe.’
What I mean is: if the future we are living in is created by slavery and by the Shoah, it’s also a place where language is placed under giant pressure. So I admired how directly the lecture tried to think about the contemporary – and its problems came from the way the contemporary is a place in which everyone finds themselves proceeding along different historical trajectories, which means that any present moment is ontologically unstable.
The other book I’ve been reading is a new translation of an old text by the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: La Rabbia, or Anger, published by Tenement Press. It’s a book Pasolini designed as an overlap and a complement to his 1963 documentary – trying to figure the conditions for revolution on a global scale, and which identified the illusion of race as the ultimate problem: ‘A new problem breaks out in the world. It’s called Colour. / The new extension of the world is called Colour.’ In response, wrote Pasolini, an artist has only one feeling: anger.
‘What causes the poet’s discontent?
An endless series of very real problems that no one is able to solve…’
Adam Thirlwell is a novelist based in London
