Images and Writing
Grief for the Masses, TANK, Issue 92, 2022
“I am homeless now. Now I can never go back to Korea,” my mother said to me the day my grandmother died.
What opens up between a loss and its story is a shared history of alienation: looking at my mother, I saw her for the daughter she once was and never would be again; I felt the distance between the country I call home and the one that calls her a stranger.
How to belong without longing for identity? Navigating within a politics of exclusion, a marginalised immigrant can play along to become part of something, but this comes at the cost of lacking agency to define the terms of her belonging – after all, the origin of “assimilate” is “to feign, pretend”; “belong” stems from “to go along with” or “be property of”. Perhaps, for justifiable reasons, some of us operate under the assumption that identification with domi- nant norms is something desirable, because it is achiev- able. Arriving in West Germany in 1970 as a healthcare guest worker, my mother’s journey tells a common tale of a one-way journey to the West, in which a right to citizenship had to be earned through cultural assimilation, severing attachments to home, language or family in the process. Bearing the scars of postcolonial violence, such moves are common and strenuous exercises in assimilation, wherein the very people and objects that are tethered to an iden- tity are being perpetually lost and forgotten. Our vernacular misconceptions of such innate hopes is telling of the indi- vidual and collective histories that inform our limited under- standing of loss and grief. Ingrained in everyday language, yet unable to fulfil its semantic promise, the uncertain path of assimilation towards a sense of belonging reveals the extent to which we cannot speak of our losses.
“I think you’re doing well,” proclaims the swelling volume of Sophie Aked’s voice, at once woeful and nurturing. Performing as Little Endian, the Australian born, London- based singer songwriter gives language to what can only be approximated through such benevolent words. In the hope that undeterred optimism can make up for an unimaginable absence, “I think you’re doing well” makes do with the gesture of thought when loss occurs. “I know that’s not saying much,” Aked adds, conceding to an ineffable longing for togetherness. But “I think you’re doing well” also signifies a peaceful surrender: I know we are alive now and we are surviving the now, together. “Grief for the Masses”, the synth-pop track produced by FC Kahuna (aka, Daniel Ormonroyd), is a borderless anthem that allows for collective dwelling in the face of loss, when the objects of our desires have transformed from graspable to ephemeral: “Like melted ice cream, what once was sweet is now sticky and I can feel it getting over everything you’re touching.” Homeless, passed or melted away: once the subject of our loss has vanished, its conditions remain, and we are left to assess the objects that determine how we may continue to relate to a world where grief goes unnoticed. The ambivalence in this search for continuity marks the starting point in the works of artist R.I.P. Germain. Weaving together discontinued narrative threads of people lost to state-sponsored domination and gang violence, the Lutonborn artist invites his audience to contemplate the signifiers that invoke one’s experience of death. Like the pressure of a line break in a poem, works like Sonny (2020) are self-operatic assemblages: cosmetic products, toys and school uniforms are carefully placed at a dinner table, emotively tapping tenderness with precarity. Tyson X (2018) is one out of four karaoke videos that displays a sequence of social-media content, providing a backdrop that mirrors the lyrical violence of UK drill tunes. Entertainment fraught with traces of loss acts as coping mechanisms for communities whose experience of death is incompatible with any blanket conceptions as how to grieve and whose lives are deemed grievable. Vibrating within the thrall in which the subjective experience of grief holds us, these works defy any desire to understand them as opaque representations of Black grief.
Instead, they are sites that challenge preconceived notions of what grief ought to feel or look like. Looking at the objects that make up the flat scenery of everyday life through the lens of affect – steering against predominant structural tendencies – the work of the late Lauren Berlant places the body in its vulnerable totality at the centre of our sense-making. “We used to live as well as we knew the landscape,” they wrote in their 2008 essay “Thinking about feeling historical”, a prelude to their seminal work Cruel Optimism (2011). A premonition of what is to come, or rather, of what’s at work beneath the landscape of the everyday, Berlant’s project understands the workings of our habitual processes (anxiety, anticipation, sensing) to be in an ongoing negotiation with a felt, imminent crisis (loss, personal failures, a virus, global warming, civil unrest). The “cruel” in cruel optimism describes the perpetuating anguish of wanting to belong to a system that has fundamentally already rejected you – influenced, if not determined, as Berlant argues, by an (American) ethic that rewards blind ambition with financial and emotional security and defines citizenship as a merit, rather than a right. The four works in Germain’s 2022 exhibition, aptly titled Four Bedrooms With an En Suite, a Garage & Garden in a Nice Neighbourhood at London’s VO Curations invert the promise of the so called “good life.” An earth mound speckled with toys, ALLAH Burned His Brain (2022) obstructs the path to a deserted camping site, where a hat, bandana, a bulletproof vest inscribed with invocations, and a mask show traces of identity through an absence of life. ALLAH explains identity as something one is in fear of exposing as much as losing. By extending his invitation to cross the mound and overcome one’s trepidations, Germain suggests that representation and participation are dependent: If unwilling to communicate with and through our bodies, we cannot speak for those of others. Indifferent to the arcs of its scenery, accustomed to its vista, she who looks indifferently at her landscape lives a narrative without having to question the reasons for its telling – familiarity is a situation uninterrupted by loss. But to think about grieving is a means to assess one’s felt relationship to a landscape that bears no trace of our losses. The task at hand, according to Berlant, is to come up with a new coalition of genres through which an unthinkable event or unwanted transformation can unfold.
In returning to that which feels at once intimate and distant (“Now I can never go back to Korea”), the ancient technology of ritual provides an alternative to the binary relationship between space and constraint. Germain’s new film mew (2022), a continuation of his practice with burning rituals, is set in the Caribbean and borrows traditions from Orisha religion. Through an open call, the artist collected letters from anywhere – notes of grief, hope and desire that burned together. How we negotiate the crisis of mortality mirrors the ways in which our affective management turns the ordinary gesture of thought (“I think you’re doing well”) into an extraordinary devotion. “[M]eeting the present is like meeting a new lover,” writes Berlant, “telling the story of how you get to be this way in the present moment suddenly changes its usual cadences because of the occasion of the telling.” Where loss and ongoingness may seem incompatible, rituals shed light on their contingency. In resisting the urge to search for its cure, we consider what the wound of loss can be generative of – here, grieving together has the power to imagine a different kind of scene. Aked’s lyrical confessions navigate the recognisable soundscapes of pop: “We know too much about this … I think I don’t know anything.” Like Germain’s sites and rites that extend our understanding of Black grief for its relationality rather than its determinacy, such a pairing of familiar song with the alienating nature of loss resonates in the affective registers of grief. Instead of making up words when trying to sing along to an unfamiliar song, we redefine the misnomers that describe grief and loss in our cultural and political lexica. Through listening, sensing and giving new form to death, wanting to belong can overcome its solitary connotations.
Flyoverland, Public, 2018
“The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since theirvery contours roar….”
Jean Baudrillard, America, 1988
DESERT FOREVER
1988: French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) publishes America. The ‘superstar of the simulacrum, shaman of the virtual, evangelist of the hyperreal’, as introduced by Geoff Dyer in the book’s 2010 edition, takes the reader on a journey through the cultural and socio-political landscapes of New York to Los Angeles, to Monument Valley and Salt Lake City. Verbal snapshots of his surroundings scrutinise the ‘America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces.’ In the book, he tells the story of an abstract nation, draped by a handful of motives such as cinema, space, technology and, most of all – the desert.
According to Baudrillard, the vast dullness of America’s deserts does not allow for cultural titillation – their unfruitful soils prevent human desire from blossoming. The desert’s endless indifference towards stimulating thought is the paradox that lies at the heart of our very fascination with it. In this sense, Dyer rightly assumed Baudrillard’s belief that American deserts were created precisely in order to “satisfy the cloud-stifled yearning of Europeans” – dullness challenging the search for meaning and originality. And it is in the deserts of the Southwest where he identifies an emptiness, a “brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity.’’ He characterizes the desert as the country’s “primal scene,’’ the root of its culture, politics and even its sexuality.
The 1900s marked an explosion of outdoor advertising and cinema, symptomatic of the arrival of the motor car in the form of Henry Ford’s Model-T and the subsequent emergence of countless highways drawing through America’s landscapes. As cars and motorcycles raced ahead with accelerated speed, its drivers were seduced by a sheer magnitude of advertising. Then 1934 marked the emergence of the Drive-In Cinema. Teenagers once pursued and consumed their bodily desires in the privacy of their parent’s cars before and beyond the very screens which served as backdrops for larger-than-life projections of John Wayne spanking Maureen O’Hara’s bottom with a spade in the Western McLintock! (1963).
Today, the pristine white surfaces, where iconic cowboys once romantically disappeared into glowing sunsets have become lonely cultural ruins of a nation’s former endeavour to conquer its own landscape. And ever since, those parts of the country that some only ever view by air – never actually experienced in person at ground level – those deep pockets of rural America, are speckled with the tatty and derelict screens of old cinema drive-ins and billboard advertising facades. And what remains; for something must remain in order for us to speak of a ruin; the devastation has been less than obliteration. They are now signposts pointing backwards to missing desires long departed. These looming skeletons are complete on one side with a screen instead of skin. Gargantuan homunculi dwarfed by the surrounding landscape stand as the relic of an image, testifying that a genuine life has come to an end.
RESURRECTION OF DESIRE
2018: The very screens that once seduced passerby to spend their money in outlet malls are now blank sentinels of the desert with no sales pitch or image of life. But a new invitation to stop and observe has appeared. Gracing billboards across America’s Midwest, the face of a young woman stares up to the clouds. A beauty mark appears in the landscape. Her unique anatomy accentuates the crisp line of the horizon, where mountain tops meet muted blue skies. She lolls in the comforts of her own four walls. They are the eyes of Aomi Muyock (b. 1989), a Swiss model-turned-actress, who has just completed her second feature, Jessica Forever (directed and devised by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vine), in which she takes on the lead role of Jessica, who leads a group of lost boys with a violent past towards a peaceful and harmonious existence, bringing them love and understanding.
Her 2015 debut in Gaspard Noé’s provocative and controversial film Love catapulted her to the screens of Cannes. In the film Muyock’ plays Electra, a Parisian art student, who has shaken up the life of a young aspiring American filmmaker. The couple, driven by the pursuit of romantic ideals and their bodily desire for one another, finds itself in a constant battle between passion, jealousy and drugs. Muyock fiercely dominates the screen – her portrayal of the troubled yet determined Electra feels undeniably raw and candid – fully exposing her body in the most intimate moments between lovers and various sexual partners.
However nonchalant and natural Muyock’s performance may seem, the young actress remains self-reflexive, especially when finding herself in extraordinarily challenging projects such as Noé’s. Her honest presence and on-screen performance in Love unite complexity and a sense of airy indifference at the same time. “You need a strong sense of humour to survive your own perception of yourself,” she says. “Be it still or moving images, I sometimes recognise myself and sometimes not at all… Oftentimes you recognise yourself in images you would prefer not to, and other times you do not recognise yourself in images you would like to.” When asked what first drew her to Noé’s daunting project, she simply answers: the director. Like Muyock herself, the notorious Argentine filmmaker does not shy away from exposing authenticity over Hollywood fakery. In a 2015 interview with the Irish Examiner, he emphasised that: “You never see any girl having her periods and you never see a girl with regular pubic hair. It’s like a separate world that has nothing to do with normal life (…) In most societies whether they’re Western or not, people want to control sexual behaviour or to organise it in a precise context. Sex is like a danger zone. Sometimes class barriers fall down and it scares a lot of people. It’s about states controlling their systems, like religion.” Sited in the American Mid-West, the images Muyock has collaborated on assume the fury of an avenging phantom of desire proposing to re-fertilise a land barren of sexual desire. Stoking the embers of life as depicted in Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show (1971), where sex had been an intimate mystery of misunderstood exchange and mistrust, these newly elements in the landscape reanimate the qualities of the life-force which the land itself pressures humanity to resign. With these recomposed rectangles of imagination filled with angular limbs and warm intimacies settling in pockets of flesh and hair, the “danger zone” of sex has been demarcated. Muyock’s ambitions as an actress – and as a female in today’s rapidly changing Hollywood landscape – remain genuine and humble. “An actress needs to be generous, courageous, sensitive, natural, and hard working. What good actors have in common is a certain form of empathy.” As such, Muyock defines her own Femininity through cultural heritage, rather than stereotypical qualities: “Femininity is not a delicate flower,” she says, “to me, it is one of many ingredients in the making of a human being – no matter their gender. It’s just a collection of traits that we associate with women rather than men.” No “delicate flower” is able to reanimate the infinite death of the dust-bowl’s libido. It takes empathy, active participation in the re-creation of one’s image, and a life force on par with Muyock’s. By using pictorial fantasy to materially invert the internal and external, to the extremes of exteriority, these feminine qualities abolish lifelessness, carelessness, and the otherwise unyielding indifference of the western expanse.
