Film Review

Documents of Dissentiment, by Tom Jennings. DVD review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 12, June 2006.Documents of Dissentiment by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 12, June 2006]
 
 
London Counterculture and People Power of the Nineties, by Stefan Szczelkun, Redz under Bedz DVDs, Nos. 1 and 2
 
These skilfully shot and assembled video documents each contain two short films depicting important events and grass-roots protests and campaigns from the last decade. DVD 1 starts with a digital video record of “J18: the post modern revival of Stop the City, enacted on the streets of the City of London, 1999. The experience of one person with a camera at this historical and unique protest against global capital. The closest thing to being there yourself”. Mixing impressionistic still images with an evocative soundtrack and direct point-of-view edited footage as the day progresses, moments of celebration increasingly overlap scenes of confrontation with police, hinting at the darkening mood which characteristically accompanies carnival’s tendency to overflow the limits set for it by power. The second film, shot on Hi-8 and entitled ‘Memorials to Diana: spontaneous popular expressions of loss and treason in Hyde Park, September 1997′, is a contemplative forty minutes with Szczelkun’s camera roaming in a leisurely fashion among acres of floral tributes and scrawled doggerel dedicated to the maverick so-called ‘people’s princess’.
DVD 2 includes a short edited Hi-8 video (shot with Thomas Zagrosek) at a South London eco-warrior camp in 1998/99, including on-site interviews with two of the protesters. This was a successful action against the development of a multiplex cinema on a wild corner of Crystal Palace park, showing how dedicated determination – especially given widespread local support and suitably imaginative tactics – is capable of warding off the depradations of capitalism in its ongoing global quest to enclose the commons for primitive accumulation. Then, ‘Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool Dockers’ (April 1997) celebrates the first large-scale example of the spectacular demo technique which emerged in 1990s Britain from a resurgent class awareness among newly-politicised younger generations, allied with the traditionally radical communal militancy of this locked-out workforce in “the temporary occupation of urban areas by huge playful crowds – a  kind of instant carnival that came out of the eco road protest movement”.
Subjects of forthcoming DVDs include campaigns around disability activism and inclusive education, grass-roots film group Exploding Cinema, the Sharsted Street shared ownership self-build co-op, and archives from Kennington Park – along with a new series of digital video artworks by Szczelkun starting with Housework X, a project in which a plywood shed on wheels was dragged across South London in an exploration of second generation immigrant loss and relocation, continuing with an archive of self-produced t-shirts hinting at the creation of culture through the social production, negotiation and recognition of meaning and difference. This impressive breadth and depth of coverage shows the general significance of work such as the Redz Under Bedz project in supplementing the negligible inclusion in the existing historical record of self-produced representations of working-class experience, struggle and cultural expression – where the scant information that can be gleaned is typically framed within the agendas, tastes and structures of knowledge of middle-class disciplinary interests.
 
Stefan’s website (www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk) explicitly deals with these larger philosophical questions as well as containing a wealth of texts and images enlarging on some of the themes tackled in the DVDs – employing throughout his enjoyably down-to-earth practical utopianism which, combined with serious theoretical ambitions, always avoids patronisation or academic obfuscation. Of particular interest here is the fascinating short essay on Diana, which explores the ambivalent and contradictory significance of the strong feelings generated among ordinary people. This really ought to be included with its DVD – in fact both would benefit from extra material aimed at viewers unfamiliar with thinking seriously about the kind of collective action portrayed. The films do stand up by themselves as effective physical records, supplementing the memories of those involved and interested which might otherwise fade in these times of incessant mediated novelty trivia. However, their utility in encouraging the potential for future activism might be enhanced with carefully chosen text and images –  within the DVDs and/or as printed inserts.
                The website is packed with various highly original and thought-provoking reviews and short essays on art and folk expression, discussions contrasting popular and high culture, taste and aesthetics, and a history of Working Press –  a working-class writers and artists self-publishing group responsible for unique and valuable output which would otherwise never have reached the public domain. In line with the author’s emphases on grass-roots self-organisation and on the production of culture as well as its consumption and policing, there is also a comprehensive account (also submitted as a PhD thesis) of his own involvement in umpteen local artistic collectives in the 1980s and 1990s. And, contextualising these recent narratives with those from earlier in the twentieth century, there are links to his documentation of self-build shanty communities, including images of surviving examples at Shepperton-on-Thames, near Edinburgh, in the Tyne Valley, and on the Gower peninsula.
The most substantial and important contribution to the site, however, is the revised version of his book ‘Conspiracy of Good Taste: Class Oppression and Culture’ (Working Press, 1993; with a new Conclusion added in 2001), laying bare the role of professional arbiters of artistic value in modern Western society – dictating from above acceptable forms of expression and lifestyle, thereby disallowing the creation of culture and the material lifeworld by ordinary people from the bottom-up, and consequently softening us up for the intimate government of everyday life. The British examples of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts proto-fascist purification of vernacular design, Cecil Sharp’s sad evisceratation of folk culture, and Clough Williams-Ellis’ bureaucratic wage-slave housing plantations illustrate the early tactics used – firstly to tame the rebellious dispositions perenially rooted in working-class culture; then as templates for the more sophisticated imposition of consumerism to short-circuit the re-emergence of its autonomy. Stefan Szczelkun’s multi-faceted deconstructions, reclamations, celebrations and exhortations to sociable human imagination represent a thoroughgoing and effective corrective to the inhuman consequences of class elitism and state prescription.
 
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Gene Genies, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005
Gene Genies  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005]
 
 ART Anti-GM event at RISK: Creative Action in Political Culture, CCA, Glasgow, April 2005
 
A fascinating presentation and debate around genetic modification was held on 2nd April at the CCA, Glasgow in the midst of the collectively self-controlled chaos of the RISK art exhibition. Present were Carey Coombs from the Soil Association lambasting the patently despicable multinational copyrighting of genetic material (thus outlawing farming mutual aid such as seed sharing); and Susan Bardocz and Arpad Pusztai – sacked in 1998 from the Rowett Institute, Aberdeen for speaking publicly about findings of damaged growth and immune systems in rats fed GM food – on the political restrictions imposed on researchers. Also detailed was the arrest and prosecution of CAE’s (Critical Art Ensemble) Steven Kurtz for possession of harmless common bacteria and an over-the-counter device altered to detect the presence of GMified cells.  His emergency phone call (after his wife had just died) – was answered by a SWAT team who confiscated his gear (and her body). The Fed retreated from their trumped-up bioterrorism charges to mail and wire fraud (maximum 20-year stretch). You couldn’t make it up … At least the CAE support campaign has heightened awareness of anti-terrorism laws used to harass artists and restrict public discourse.1
The CCA debate – with CAE’s Free Range Grain banners in the background – started from the best ultra-scientific guesses (little meaningful research having been commissioned) on likely effects of GM: growth promoters accelerating cancer progression; antibiotic resistance and allergies mushrooming; interrupting the sequence of gene functioning causing multiple and catastrophic organ and developmental failure, etc, etc. This is all bewilderingly complex as science, let alone common sense; but genetic control basically operates by switching key chemical processes on and off – which are usually implicated in many bodily processes simultaneously, not just the one you’re modifying (a far cry from the triumphalist one-gene one-cure balderdash peddled by education, the media, and corporate interests). A heartening variety of tactics for contestation and levels of attack were then illustrated, including those mobilising the artistic and cultural – rather than merely the traditional agitational – imagination. We need these things in our (political) lives. 
In general the RISK programme has offered immense free-range food for thought – not least on artistic activity itself away from the usual snooty careerist middle class networks. Likewise, government definitions of the role of arts in ‘social inclusion’ never engage with the real politics of power. This project manages to do that, and more, in the realms of direct action, protest and political change – with some success in terms of genuine participation.
Regrettably though, when it comes to science, the development of fully-rounded grass-roots mobilisation is often hamstrung by entire schools of red herrings (e.g. rationalism vs. mysticism or  primitivism, as in recent debate in Freedom). And, fair enough, some folks are partial to herrings. But if rationality can only solve problems when its limits are acknowledged,2 then letting elites decide what those limits are will be suicidal politically (maybe even literally). And if creativity and passion are just as important as brains, credit goes to RISK for getting to grips with all such good stuff. Some wisdom just can’t be put back in the bottle.
 Notes 1. also a convenient excuse for blind sweeps on poor inner city neighbourhoods, deporting tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees (terrorists found = 0): see, e.g. Alisa Solomon, ‘The War on Immigrants’, Mute 29, pp.8-9, 2005.
2. see Mike Michael’s excellent ‘The Power-Persuasion-Identity Nexus: Anarchism and Actor Networks’, Anarchist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.25-42, 1994.
  
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MsJudged Blandishments, by Tom Jennings. Music Review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005
MsJudged Blandishments  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005]
 
 
MUSIC
 
Ms Dynamite, Judgement Days, Polydor, 2005
 
Tom Jennings judges Ms Dynamite’s second album a mismatch of unremarkable smooth music and remarkably self-indulgent rant.
 
Exploding out of a vibrant UK Garage underground in 2002 with A Little Deeper, Ms Dynamite injected conscious womanist ire and exuberant streetwise mischief into the ever-moribund mainstream of British popular music, with hit singles like the anti-bling ‘It Takes More’ garnering industry awards and highly creditable sales. Since then, things done changed (slightly) thanks to her success, and record company doors have opened a crack for talented and more-or-less socially-aware British female urban artists: in hip-hop (the superb Estelle, and M.I.A.’s innovative stylistics), the drum-and-bass-derived hardcore of Grime (Shystie, Lady Sovereign), and R&B (Jamelia and Terri Walker in addition to queen Beverley Knight). Now returning after babymother business, Dynamite’s new album is touted as a milestone as significant here as 1998’s magnificent Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was stateside. Sadly, Judgement Days squanders its good intentions and self-righteous fury on what amount politically to little more than lame liberal laments.
True, the blistering attacks in the album on the state of the world are refreshing compared to the prevailing pop gloss and glitter and ‘indie’ whingeing and posing. The title track opens by juxtaposing the collective abuse perpetrated by the global system on women, children and the poor with that experienced individually in personal relationships. But rather than exploring the connections, the different levels are simple-mindedly equated and those responsible castigated as sinners requiring absolution. And because “in permittin’ greed and violence, then we got blood on our hands too”, the appeal to conscience fatally misinterprets government, religious, corporate and military violence by confusing politics with voluntarist ethics. The obliteration of complexity and refusal to envisage alternatives persist through a withering anti-ode to an absent ‘Father’, the heartfelt ‘Put Your Gun Away’ and unflinching ‘Self Destruct’, culminating in ‘Mr Prime Minister’ – cataloguing the failings of representative democracy before fading into fatalistic whining:
“How many hundred seats in parliament / It’s so unfair but so clear / Don’t none of them represent me / And ain’t one of them represent my peers / And it don’t matter who we vote for, nor who gets in / The poor keep dyin’ and the rich keep livin’ / … You said things would change when you wanted our vote / But it stays the same, Mr Prime Minister / And we continue to die, Mr Prime Minister / Not a damn thing changed, Mr Prime Minister / Nobody hears our cries …”
 
Punctuating the focus on ‘issues’ are more wistful songs of love and loss, representing staple R&B fare. These are pleasant enough but scarcely distinctive, with neither the strength and depth of vocal rendering to convince as soul, nor much correlation with the anger and bombast elsewhere – helping explain why Judgement Days is so disappointing. The formulas of the best black music have been adopted, but to serve such clumsily imposed ‘lessons’ that the unselfconscious energy of the first album disappears. Instead of integrated thematics mingling private and public, hard and soft, love and pain – no doubt crystallised from the dynamic give-and-take of an organic underground scene – we have an awkwardly-assembled commodity.
                 Next time, let’s hope Dynamite returns to biographical reportage emphasising experience rather than cod-ideology, involvement over detachment, and complicity as opposed to priggishness. Thereupon witnessing and testifying to struggle articulates women’s complaints from a sympathetic ‘round-the-way-girl’ perspective rather than generalised feminist dismissal; representing ‘reality’ from the neighbourhood reflects social embedding rather than separation or superiority; spiritual suffering keeps redemptive hope alive for earthly change; and ‘talking to the enemy’ doesn’t just vent moral spleen. As a genuine emissary of your people, the pretence is of engaging with power – but actually you’re reinforcing grass-roots awareness of the pointlessness of the conversation unless it’s on your terms. At all levels, when this rich tricky texture is absent, mimicked or exploited as commercial gambit, hollow gestures result – or smug platitudes, if the arrogance of the artist overshadows immersion in signifyin’ tradition.
 
And unfortunately, Judgement Days just plays it straight. The subtly deceptive multiple meanings generated from black culture’s historically-honed rhetoric are squashed flat almost as thoroughly as manufactured stars cluelessly expropriating the artful kudos of blues, soul, funk, reggae and hip-hop. However, even your average NY studio pseudo-gangstas acknowledge the tragedy of selling their souls for the bottom dollar, exemplifying in lyrical lifestyles the all-round damage that’s done. Whereas this album’s simplistic blame-game echoes conventional discourses of the moral inadequacy of the poor, while imploring power to self-reform. Maybe Dynamite has swallowed the style-mag adoration, celebrity hyperbole and promotional  hullabaloo – like Geldof and Bono et al, mistaking maudlin’ sentimentality for analysis, powerful fair-weather friends for influence, self-importance for seriousness, and media presence for strategic action. Hell, her pompous circumstance has even suckered her into corporate charitability and the SWP’s Love Music Hate Racism recruitment drive. Naff or what?
Further signs of commercial domestication have blunted the sharp edges of a bragging rapper skewering her peers with wit, now replaced by humourless bluster from the pulpit. Sonically, the first album mingled drum-and-bass-tinged urgency with inventive melanges of ragga and hip-hop beats to counterpoint expert rapid-fire lyrics, among which even the mellow cuts sparkled. Here the radio-friendly R&B-lite production from Chink Santana, Bloodshy & Avant and Reza Safinia is slickly competent but won’t light up any party outside suburban teenage bedrooms. In such markets holier-than-thou histrionics might pass for politics, and MTV consumers weaned on pretty vacant pop idols may not register her reedy singing as infinitely weaker than the trickster MCing she’s traded for preaching. Overall, Judgement Days is far too bland to pass muster as action thriller and much too po-faced to inspire. More damp squib than Dyna-mi-tee – despite her potshots at elected leaders – for now she’s lost the gunpowder plot.
 
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A (New) Message from Rudy, by Tom Jennings. Book /music review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 6, March 2005
A (New) Message from Rudy  by Tom Jennings 
 [published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 6, March 2005]  
BOOKS / MUSIC 
Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash sees contemporary reggae as rebel music, still. Tom Jennings is mightily impressed. 
Britain, the 1970s: skinheads rocked steady to ska and punks embraced reggae as their dance music of choice. Disaffected white youth across the UK embraced these Jamaican ghetto fables set to irresistibly pulsing beats, primarily due to the resonance they felt with the incendiary politics woven into the lyrics alongside spiritual yearning for unity, love and relief from suffering. Then – after Bob Marley’s international canonisation and the multicultural populisms of two-tone and UB40 – UK roots, dub and lovers rock production, recording and performance thrived for a while among Jamaican diasporans and the new converts. Over time, though, much of the youthful energy dissipated into trip-hop, jungle, bhangra and drum and bass, leaving reggae as another nostalgic niche commodity for collectors …
… Except in West Indian communities, where the explosive 1980s Kingston dancehall style known as ragga quickly took over – paralleling the rise of hip-hop in America, and sharing its cutting edge minimalist aesthetics, vocal gymnastics and scandalous lower-class content. Largely ignored or dismissed by the commercial mainstream and critics, reggae dancehall is now entrenched in urban club playlists, and strongly influences R&B and rap on both sides of the Atlantic. Even better, like its predecessors, it embeds uncompromisingly radical sentiments in its profane and sensuous sound and fury.1
 
Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is the first book-length critical examination of ragga’s ambivalent cultural politics. The social space of the dancehall is contextualised as an authentic and vigorous response of the postcolonial Caribbean urban poor to their repression by vicious governmental gangsterism bolstered by utterly regressive and hypocritical class/race elitism and reactionary official Christianity. The author captures the ways the dancehall vibrates with tensions juggling acceptance of the status quo (such as in scapegoating unacceptable lifestyles or glorifying consumerism) and containment via the safe release of frustration (hedonism and the carnivalesque traducing of authority) – a dialectic common in genuinely grass-roots cultural forms.
What elevates Sound Clash beyond academic interest, however, is its careful attention to the emancipatory potential arising from this unruly environment. Drawing sustenance from the mismatch between the hatred and disgust shown by their ‘betters’ compared to their own passionate enjoyment, audiences and performers mutually nurture and reinforce each other’s prowess. In the process abolishing boundaries between production and consumption, success is measured concurrently as a dance event for punters and in the lyrical and musical dexterity and creativity of selecters and DJs, so that experimentation, provocation and excess are (within the collectively agreed rules of the sound clash) required on both sides.
 
As a scholar of literature, the author carefully inscribes superstars like Marley, Shabba Ranks, Bounty Killer, Capleton and Lady Saw in their backgrounds and milieux rather than the unique creative geniuses preferred in bourgeois worldviews. Their sophisticated poetics evoke and evolve the oral, rhetorical strategies and devices originating in Africa and plantation slavery so as to encapsulate modern versions of impoverishment.2 Dismissing Western politically correct liberal distaste as merely high-and-mighty ignorance echoing Jamaican elite class hatred, Cooper interprets the lyrics’ grounding in Jamaican ghetto life, where even the most troubling themes – such as violent macho, homophobia and misogyny – reflect ‘border clashes’ negotiating the deepening fractures and fissures in the island’s increasingly brutal and desperate body politic.
The dynamic of border crossing also illuminates the global migration of ragga and its adherents, smuggling its intrinsically oppositional stances into local fusions with rap and Asian styles, for example.3 The metaphorical patois allusions to guns as verbal weaponry, the righteous burning of Babylon merging revolution with hardline Bobo rastafarianism, and, especially, the obscenities of sexual slackness, all serve as ‘hidden transcripts’ defeating the understanding of detached observation – allowing and reinforcing flights of free expression in a heavily policed party scene: “simultaneously resisting and enticing respectable culture” (p.2).
 
The close analysis of sexual politics in dancehall lyrics will surprise many readers the most. Despite both forms reserving their harshest critique for middle class morality, classic reggae largely conforms to traditional patriarchal conventions whereas ragga celebrates realistic and egalitarian relations between the sexes. True, male performers seem to gleefully and duplicitously wallow in the objectification of women’s bodies while also urging strength, pride and independence. But the personification of all these traits by hugely popular and immensely powerful women artists like Patra, Tanya Stephens and Lady Saw – who are, if anything, even ruder while fully maintaining integrity and class clarity – demonstrates that the language of display, pleasure and erotic commodification is deployed precisely to subvert the sexual (and the social, economic and political) status quo.
Of course, formations such as reggae cannot map directly onto political struggle and movement. But whether in Jamaica, the Caribbean diaspora or via wider influences in popular genres and subcultures, the achievements of this music can continue to inspire out of all proportion to the clout of its humble downtown creators. Their exhilarating reformulations of the contradictions inherent in our increasingly polarised world under barbaric 21st century capitalism transform daily life emotional and material agonies into collective imagination and possibility – when the sneering of the superior denies such potential altogether. Respect is due to Carolyn Cooper for going against the prevailing grain, arguing so fiercely and cleverly on behalf of the dispossessed.
 
Notes
 
1. see Norman Stolzoff, Wake The Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2000) for a comprehensive history of the dancehall industry. Reggae’s general significance for today’s urban music is discussed in my ‘Dancehall Dreams’, Variant No. 20, 2004 (www.variant.org.uk).
2. the literary angle being fully covered in Cooper’s equally groundbreaking Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Macmillan 1993).
3. and in films such as Dancehall Queen (dirs. Rick Elgood/Don Letts, 1997) and Babymother (dir. Julian Henriques, 1998).
 
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Rodent’s Eye View, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005
Rodent’s Eye View  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 14, July 2005]
 
 
ART The Gerbil’s Guide To The Galaxy by Sally Madge, Bookville, High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 20051
 
Who thinks postmodern art is so much smug pretentious vacuous wank? Not always. Here, a pet gerbil enthusiastically munched its way through The New Illustrated Universal Reference Book – recycling via its physical labour the arrogant presumption that collections of information can encompass history and teach anything worth knowing. Who controls what goes in; what’s left out; how it’s presented and used? This rodent representative of the teeming masses followed its own universal agenda to keep warm, comfortable and secure – with no respect for the supposed wisdom and disciplining power dispensed by elites.
Unfortunately far too many exponents of contemporary artistic practice prefer to pose in the safety of their self-important cliques, venturing out only occasionally to lick the recuperative arses of art’s institutional markets. However, its unique capacity to condense, explore and encapsulate ideas and feelings means that art can critique the intersections of life, culture and politics in such a way as to intrigue and affect us – rather than bludgeoning us with the preachy self-satisfied ideological bullying that politicos are occasionally (!) guilty of. In this case the deployment of ironic reflexivity also illustrates an understanding that aesthetic manipulation (as in other kinds) always entails a rhetoric of power. So, as a ‘pet’, the gerbil has no ultimate control over the contours of its lifeworld. Instead these are provided by an apparently omnipotent superior agency claiming to be well-meaning but serving its own interest … Remind you of anything?
Footnoting the artist’s marvellous Underdog,2 this exemplary and humble bookwork straddles and references conceptual art and popular culture with more biting political pertinence than Douglas Adams’ middle class dressing-gowned slacker tourist3 ever dreamt. Beautiful. Go gerbil!
 
Notes
 
1. The gerbil gets a second bite at the cherry throughout July when the exhibit resumes at the Waygood Gallery, High Bridge Street, Newcastle.
2. a 1999 video installation remake, with Sam Hooper soundtrack, of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s classic surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.
3. in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
 
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AeroSoul, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005
AeroSoul  by Tom Jennings  
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005]  
ART 
Stencil graffiti by Arofish often succeeds in transcending formula and cliché, according to Tom Jennings Arofish is a London-based stencil graffiti artist whose output ranges from slogans and cartoons to more abstract and opaque designs and imagery.1 Diverse traditions of political art are referenced – from satire, surrealism and the modern tweaking of mainstream or commercial discourse and iconography (Adbusters, Banksy) – whereas more tentative, existential subject matter (akin to the Paris work of Blek le Rat) is reminiscent of the Situationist critique of everyday life. Throughout, the limits are tested of the political and visual subtlety which can be achieved using this artform, given the constraints on its clandestine, unofficial decoration of public space.The London graffiti includes anti-war and Palestine solidarity graphics, plus ‘Alien Contact’ – masquerading as a cashpoint machine (i.e. of the Fortress Europe people-bank) with instructions to asylum seekers highlighting the intrusive surveillance spreading through our carceral society (the “liberty zone”). ‘Waves of Terror’ retreats from literal clarity to evoke the menace of colonial adventure, and various other examples are even more indirect and suggestive.  Impressionistic flashes of mournful figures appear in limbo, enduring the meaninglessness of life waiting to happen. Some of the website texts echo these themes, but far more angrily – denouncing the drudgery and misery visited on so many (insult seen as added to injury by, for example, crap TV and pop music). Rage thus provides creative energy, but the painstaking stencil process and precarious realisation seem to drain the excess. Vaguely sinister, ghostly renderings remain, bleeding out of the solemn surfaces and rough edges of city landscapes. The specificity of place imbues each scene with a sense of the weight that has to be borne – both by the dead physical infrastructure of mass society, and by the living souls of those flattened into conformity with it. The ephemeral nature of the original brick and concrete canvases (more so than their reproductions in gallery shows or on the website) only intensifies the pathos. 
The device of portraying single or small groups of figures in subdued intimate relationships with neighbourhoods  proved especially fruitful in the winter of 2003/4 when the artist joined International Solidarity Movement direct action activities in Palestine and Baghdad. The straightforward agitprop images mobilising elements of local customs (and their Western connotations) would work equally well as posters or cartoons, with punchlines stressing the venality of Israeli/US imperialism. So ‘Ali Baba’ (Iraqi slang for thief) deploys enjoyable irony in the Arabic caption, “Hey American, take your oil!” (in the story the oil was used to kill the forty thieves and save Ali). All well and good. But there are much more moving pieces combining personal empathy (concerning the calculated horror and madness of military occupation) with a precision of location – each effectively conveying the predicament of that place, and the anguished experience of being in it.
Arofish starts from his own responses to particular sites and situations. If the images awaken their curiosity, passersby may then connect with the more or less submerged concepts underpinning them – without experiencing this as posing, preaching or stating the obvious.2 The evocative poignancy of the Middle East figurative work is especially powerful in this regard – manifesting creative engagement during the otherwise brutal routine of conflict, and prompting direct and immediate feedback from local viewers. Perhaps overwhelmingly obvious oppression provides a clearer backdrop for focusing on the human condition via the interaction between sympathetic outsiders and those bearing the brunt. I look forward to the artist developing further this dimension to his palette at home, where the postmodern apparatuses of power magnify the rootlessness of existence in our fragmented communities. Here, questions of agency, domination and creativity easily dissolve in hubris, hysteria, narcissism and psychosis; the positions of artists, viewers, producers and consumers being so difficult to disentangle. In this context, shunning the stifling seduction of institutions – while spraying onto their external surfaces shared emotional contours of suffering, despair, hope and solidarity – seems a highly promising endeavour.
 
Notes
 
1. collected at www.arofish.org.uk.
2. from an email conversation, January 2005.
 
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Random Signage and Secret Acts of Beauty, by Tom Jennings. Art / book review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005.

Random Signage and Secret Acts of Beauty  by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005]
 
 
ART / BOOKS
 
Wall and Piece, by Banksy, Century, 2005
 
Renowned stencil graffiti exponent and all-round public art prankster Banksy continues his long march into the (anti-) establishment with the publication this month of the glossy coffee-table volume Wall and Piece – a compendium of three previously self-published efforts, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism and Cut It Out, plus more recent material from forays into official and unofficial gallery exhibitions in London, New York and Paris and defacing the apartheid wall in Palestine. He’s presented painted farm animals in a warehouse in the fashionable yBa East End, remixed and updated classical and modernist painting and sculpture (for example with 200 live rats as attendants in a posh gallery in the West End), snuck fake artefacts into Tate Britain and other museums, and generally thumbed his nose at the great and the good.
Despite the necessity of anonymity given media hype, moral panic and police attention to such ‘vandalism’, his prolific, exuberant and subversive street output in Bristol and London for over a decade has generated increasing media celebrity – which has encouraged the entrepreneurial turn. His work now commands respectably high prices when offered for sale as contemporary ‘high-concept’ commodities, such that his proclamations against both the mainstream art market and the ‘brandalism’ of corporate advertising are starting to look somewhat threadbare. But he’s a lot less precious than many adbusting types whose moral superiority about the ‘unfairness’ of capitalism leads them to sneer at the proletarian vulgarity of direct expressions such as tagging (like Dr.D, who nevertheless unfailingly adds her ‘signature’). Whereas Bansky hints far beyond such liberal queasiness in critiquing the control of material, spatial and symbolic resources – plus, being more of an ordinary bloke, he’s not coy about needing to get by.
 
Fortunately the substance of Banksy’s project retains its integrity, largely through the wit and warmth of its commonsense anti-authoritarian sensibility and the intelligence of his deconstructions of governmental complacency and corresponding public passivity. Whether images of hip-hop rats and sinister chimps symbolise the lowly masses intimating their impending takeover of urban areas; or when fun is poked at the evil, stupidity, duplicity and arrogance of the police and state violence; or official signage is travestied to encourage other graffitists, harangue touristic attitudes, or highlight the general creeping fascism of the times – the question of who is allowed to occupy, mark their presence and preoccupations upon, and take self-determined action in our shared space remains central.
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.
Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet”.*
Most of all, Banksy wants more people – many more – to take up his call. And they are. For this generous spirit and humility I’d forgive a lot – and if he wants to sell his soul for Damien Hirst’s dollars … well, that’s his spiritual funeral.**
 
Wall and Piece was published by Century on November 3rd, price £20.
 
* text with Rats: see www.banksy.co.uk
** Hirst is rumoured to be investing in Banksy ‘originals’ at around £25k each.
 
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Can’t Knock the Hustle, by Tom Jennings. Book /music review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 24, December 2005
Can’t Knock the Hustle  by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 24, December 2005]
 
 
BOOKS / MUSIC 
Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap, by Eithne Quinn, Columbia University Press, 2005, price £15.
 
This superb book presents a fascinating and comprehensive account of the development and mainstreaming of what came to be called gangsta rap, showing how and why the political engagement of preceding American civil rights, Black Power and soul/funk generations shifted towards a disillusioned and apparently individualistic culture glorifying drugs, violence and misogyny. The author convincingly shows how, from its origins in the urban blight of 1980s California, the class-conscious Crips and Bloods LA gang-related realism of NWA, Eazy-E, Ice Cube and Dr Dre cross-fertilised with African and blues lyrical traditions of trickster, badman and pimp (represented for example by Ice-T, the Geto Boys and Tupac Shakur) – challenging for commercial supremacy hip-hop subgenres such as the party pop of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, rock crossovers like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, and the more explicitly politically conscious Black nationalist afrocentricity of Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul.
                Integrated into the historical texture is the parallel emergence of new forms of industrial structure and organisation prompted by the entrepreneurial guerilla tactics of independent record labels grass-rooted in neighbourhood networks of enthusiasts and artists, which succeeded in maintaining significant degrees of autonomy while simultaneously circumventing all corporate and state offensives to silence and/or recuperate them. This puts into context more recent developments in the worldwide commercial takeover of MTV-style ‘hip-pop’, such as ghetto fabulous bling-bling aspiration (Puff Daddy/P.Diddy, Jay-Z, etc) and the grotesquely exploitative nihilism of 50 Cent et al and the proliferation of wannabe studio gangsters. However, Quinn’s subtle and insightful analysis also consistently highlights the persistent presence of radical impulses and voices in the music and lyrics which sensationalist headlines, racism and pro-censorship coalitions conveniently ignore.
 
Of course, an academic study of the production of cultural commodities and their intrinsic qualities can only speculate on how the music resonates with its audiences’ lives in becoming popular, and Quinn resorts to concepts of subcultural superiority rather than social class in understanding rap’s appeal. This rather undercuts her implication throughout that hip-hop has gained and retained the affiliation of lower-class youth worldwide for over twenty years precisely by renouncing and travestying both conformism to respectable social hypocrisy and the packaged taste sold to elitist niche markets by multinationals. Major record labels are obviously primarily concerned with pandering to the pocket money of middle-class white kids seduced by stereotypical racialised exoticism, and the profitability of the results dovetails nicely with the requirements of governments and sundry pressure groups for moral panics and scapegoats. But the book rightly emphasises that, to those at the bottom of the heap, the ramifications of global postindustrial – as well as local dog-eat-dog – barbarisms are far closer to lived reality than glossy fantasy. So rap’s narratives represent postmodern folk tales of these benighted times – with all the violent exaggeration, ambivalence, desperation, potential and yearning this implies – for millions in the ghettos, estates, shanty towns and projects of every continent; and in the UK just as much as the US.
 
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V Signs and Simulations, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006.‘V’ Signs and Simulations by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006]
 
 
V for Vendetta, dir. James McTeigue
 
This hopelessly incoherent mish-mash of random elements from comic book superhero back catalogues – combined with various soundbites from and random references to recent and contemporary political fiction and real-world circumstances – is stitched together with the most superficial philosophical musings about freedom and justice. Writers Larry and Andy Wachowski were also responsible for the trivial pursuits of The Matrix, with similarly absurd pretensions of reflecting on media-saturated culture, but at least faithfully following its computer-game logic. Whereas in V for Vendetta the narrative demands of blockbuster oversimplification are met by making complete nonsense of history. So freedom fighter Guy Fawkes rounds off his four centuries-old project in blowing up the Old Bailey and Houses of Parliament  (now redundant symbols in a near-future police state) and assassinating a sample of political figureheads and functionaries – justified with a jumble of pompous platitudes wrenched from literary sources and thrown together to resemble sophistication.
 
On one level an enjoyably daft and meaningless cartoon mess, the film nevertheless purports to smuggle salient social questions – of violence, terrorism, and the passivity of populations cowering in complicity with fascism – into the consciousnesses of millions of multiplex punters. And that doesn’t happen every day, even if these filmmakers lost the plot in mistaking an avalanche of disconnected details for complexity. Such hysterical postmodern pastiche can be a strength, if the ensuing indecisive open-endedness prompts exploratory interpretation among viewers. Unfortunately Vendetta’s recuperation of its chaotic impulses reproduces, rather than subverts, the authoritarian strategies supposedly subject to critique. A graphic novel’s fractured format forces readers to elaborate its story in a manner film rarely matches (an honourable exception being Robert Rodriguez’ uncanny translation of Frank Miller’s noir nightmare, Sin City). Here, the seamless cinematic flow merely encourages submission to lazy, careless, dishonest (dis)simulation in celebrating the superiority of cynical quietism.
Most disgracefully, the glossy fantasy aesthetic obliterates material and economic degradation or struggle, leaving for motivation only a tawdry bourgeois Oedipal Stockholm Syndrome between aristocratic (anti)hero and nubile middle class disciple. Although an amusingly gratuitous insult to leninist vanguard vanity, this corresponds to the depressing representation of a passive (and strangely lilywhite) multitude of couch potatoes confronting the military in the finale. With no grievances beyond dissatisfaction with spin, the zombies march in uniform desire for better media and ringside seats at the spectacle. Given the volume of explosives trundling towards Whitehall along the disused underground, all that awaits them is ecstatic annihilation along with most of central London. Any remaining quibbles about the nobility of revolutionary idealism are therefore ultimately superfluous in V for Vendetta’s utter contempt for its audience. After all, the mischievous potential of trash lies in travestying – not reinforcing – the delusions of grandeur of power.
 
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The Discreet Karma of the Bourgeoisie. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006.The Discreet Karma of the Bourgeoisie by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006]
 
 
Hidden, dir. Michael Haneke [orig. Caché; in French with English subtitles]
 
This unsettling masterpiece continues Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke’s merciless dissection of middle-class complacent complicity. An implacable domestic thriller, Hidden exploits contemporary paranoia around video surveillance, with tapes of their stylish Paris home delivered to the Laurents – highbrow TV presenter Georges (Daniel Auteuil), publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their twelve year-old son Pierrot. The affluent intellectual couple’s relationship unravels as they wrestle with memory, guilt and denial once the anonymous ‘stalker’ also shoots Georges’ childhood home and a grubby high-rise flat. The latter is the present address of Majid, who was banished to an orphanage by Georges’ parents after his own (their domestic servants) were among hundreds of Algerian immigrant protestors killed by Parisian police in the ‘Black Night’ of 17th October 1961. In exploring how individual biography and social hierarchy dovetail in producing history, the film provocatively punctures the self-serving vanity of Western liberal superiority.
The manipulation accomplished by its meticulous structure exploits the encroachment of media simulation on our understanding of reality – with the efforts of the Laurents to conceal from themselves and each other the centrality in their lives of their various evasions, hypocrisies and duplicities paralleling the audience’s puzzlement. The static high-definition video photography blurs boundaries between different levels of representation – natural footage and staged action; external event and replay; internal experience of dreams, fantasies and flashbacks – with similar symbolic codes mobilised in visual design, perspective and editing. Being unsure of the status or significance of what they/we see fuels feverish imagination, failing communication and tragically escalating misunderstanding.
 
Compared with, say, Hitchcock’s reactionary conservatism or Lynch’s mystical fetishism, Haneke’s forcefully innovative cinematic sadism is more expansive and forward-looking. If the clinical deconstructions of miserable bourgeois inadequacy in his earlier films indulged neurotic obsession, here the integrity of younger generations refuses the parent society’s dishonesty. The suggestiveness of Georges’ infantile envy and resentment wrecking Majid’s life may seem an unsatisfactorily heavy-handed allegory for differential power and the class and race hatred still fundamental to mainstream Western society. However, emotional and cognitive patterns conducive to domination are nurtured early in the egos and cultures of the respectable middle-classes – operating precisely through misrecognition, displacement, denial and projection overlain with rationalisation and aestheticisation. Whereas the children’s rebellion (signposted throughout, and with their collusion explicit in the end-credits) shatters smug pretensions via direct solidaristic engagement – but decidedly not when Hidden by higher tastes and dissembling moral dispositions amongst those whose comfort necessitates ignoring the social roots and ramifications of its constitution.
 
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