WdW Review

The Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, the Plastic Soul man, and Major Tom would not look out of place on a list of professional wrestling’s greatest roles, nestled alongside sinister Elvis impersonator The Honky Tonk Man, embittered ex-prison guard Big Boss Man, anti-American Iranian oil dealer The Iron Sheik, and Jerry “The King” Lawler, who famously landed a neck-breaking pile driver on Andy Kaufman during the David Letterman Show in 1982. David Bowie’s personae had backstories to match—alienated European crypto-fascist aristocrat; Martian rock star; dystopian future-bohemian; junkie cosmonaut—and observed the same theatrical principles. Professional wrestlers, as Roland Barthes observes in “The World of Wrestling” (1957), create characters that advertise in advance the content of their performances. Their costumes, ring walks, and names are carefully engineered to prep the audience for their behavior inside the ring. Whether a bastard, a face or blue eye, a heel or rudo, an enforcer, or any of the other parts familiar to today’s fans, the wrestler must act in a manner consistent with his or her particular gimmick (the phrase is used non-pejoratively in the game) and within the codes that govern the form. The engagement of the spectator is predicated upon the satisfaction and security of knowing that the narratives constructed around the fights will resolve in accordance with these underlying standards, and the tension is generated by the knowledge that the wrestlers must ultimately—however much the fight seems to have strayed from the script—return to them. The adoption of a persona is equally a catalyst to creative invention. The wrestler’s role comes with a set of constraints—the heel, for instance, must antagonize the audience through cheating or cowardice—that can provide a space for the actor’s own interpretations and inventions as long as they are consistent with their given history and credentials. The wrestler’s genius consists in exploiting the dramatic potential of his or her backstory without giving in to the conscientious nineteenth-century novelist’s temptation to feign psychological credibility, authenticity, or depth. Moral indecision works against the fatalism of the form and makes it difficult for the spectators to read and interpret the signs on which wrestling depends; for a character to seem real does not require that it be lifelike. The wrestler must resist the urge to merely imitate life because he or she “fails to put the part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism,” as Barthes puts it in the same essay. Attempts at interior psychological complexity do not, in this context, make for great art. Actions are determined by appearance; personality is not expressed in but rather manufactured by costume. “It is clothes that wear us, and not we, them,” as Virginia Woolf puts it in Orlando (1928), “we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” The Thin White Duke—a coked-up Mitteleuropean misanthrope, invented after a meeting with Christopher Isherwood—could not have written, as Bowie’s earlier hippy-ish longhaired incarnation did, a dreamy tale of a man drifting around in space. The signatory particulars of dress, manner, and political and ostensible sexual orientation of his various personae are the machines of Bowie’s great artistic achievements. The mask is a catalytic part of the creative process, not merely a veil drawn over it; identity is externalized, following from appearance by necessity, rather than transcending it. Four months after his death, it seems that Bowie’s greatest legacy was to popularize this notion of the performed self. He demonstrated to a society still hungover from the 1960s that identity is not determined by gender, genetics, or perhaps most importantly class (this was Britain, remember), but rather by what you wore, said, and (were seen to) read. He imparted to a disillusioned and disenfranchised generation the conviction that by assuming the vestiges of the part—adopting the mannerisms, outward attitudes, or appearance of, for instance, the cosmopolitan intellectual—it was possible to become the self that you aspired to be. Bowie meant that you no longer needed to attend Oxbridge to be a romantic; to live in Paris to be a bohemian; to summer in Marrakech to experiment with sexuality. Suddenly these possibilities seemed available to the working-class teenager in a provincial town, as long as he or she had access to a bookshop, a sewing machine, and mom’s makeup drawer. Bowie’s personae were not transferred to other performers—the symbolic mask handed down to a successor, as in the European and Mexican traditions of wrestling—but to his audience. He inspired his spectators to cut and dye their hair, to make up their faces, to buy new wardrobes, to read Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and HP Lovecraft, to seek out the German Expressionists, and to experiment in a society otherwise paralyzed by unemployment, industrial unrest, and the collapse of empire. Immigration in the early 1970s was changing the way that Britain looked and acted; the hegemony of the upper classes over national life had been (it now seems temporarily) disrupted by two world wars and the postwar social democratic consensus. Bowie emerged at, and documented, a time of crisis and change in British society. And then he assisted in the breakdown of that social order. It is a fact of British life that one is judged with reference to the behavior (career choice, dress sense, marital status, accent, mannerisms, haircut, preferred drink, favorite sport) expected of the class from which you are perceived to have emerged. Our preoccupation with being perceived as ‘acting up’ is all-pervasive, governing, or at least framing every imaginable social transaction, from ordering a drink at the bar to making a professional introduction. By making available an alternative system of authentication based on whether you had read a certain book, watched a certain film, or dared to wear silk, Bowie offered the simultaneous possibility of escape and belonging. He did not challenge the notion of what it meant to be ‘real’ so much as launch an attack on its metrics. He was not immune to the British obsession with indicators of status. His accent—perhaps the most obsessed-over barometer of fidelity to one’s social status—fluctuated quite alarmingly in the interviews conducted over the course of his career, as he freely and indeed cheerfully admitted. The floating accent is symptomatic of an unease with or dissociation from (or, as in the case of the famously polydictive David Cameron, a desire to conceal) the circumstances of one’s upbringing. It would be fair to assume that Bowie—born in Yorkshire to an English father and Irish mother, uprooted as a child to the streets of south London, conspicuously odd—was more sensitive than most to the vagaries of class membership because he did not obviously belong to one. It always struck me that Paul McCartney—who has impeccably working-class credentials—and Mick Jagger—securely of the aspirational middle class, albeit that he played the rebel beautifully—should have so happily accepted their knighthoods. The honors system confers upon the individual a new place in the social order while reinforcing its overarching structures, which is perhaps less obviously objectionable to those who have never questioned their proper place in it. Bowie dismissed the offer peremptorily: “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. It’s not what I spent my life working for.” Central to Bowie’s enduring significance was the fact that he never abandoned his position outside or beyond those conventional societal constructions. He remained endowed with the allure of a spiritual representative, unsullied by the compromises and hypocrisies that damn so many other members of the post-baby-boomer establishment. As a consequence, Bowie has often been referred to as a cultural lodestar (his lyrical preoccupation with celestial bodies made the comparison inevitable). The analogy seems to break down when you consider that the defining characteristic of the polestar is the consistency of its position in the night sky, while Bowie is the archetypal agent of change and reinvention. Yet we know that the heavens are fixed only in relative terms—Polaris is not pinned to a speckled canopy—and, by the same reasoning, Bowie’s position in the cultural firmament remained broadly consistent. He resisted the pull of the center, the capacity of late twentieth-century culture to appropriate, normalize, and defang even the most radical or heterodox behaviors. It did not always work, artistically speaking. His formation of a heavy metal band in the late 1980s, and then his experiments with drum and bass in the 1990s, seemed at the time misguided (though there will inevitably be reappraisals). But that seemed to matter less than his ability to open up new horizons for his fans, even in failure. Each incarnation established a new space with which to experiment, and exemplified the ease with which it was possible to move beyond and between positions that would traditionally have been understood as contradictory. If the experiment failed—or when it succeeded—he simply packed it away and moved on. These exercises in inauthenticity might explain why Bowie is so often characterized as a prophet of the current age of precariousness, gender fluidity, nomadism, and globalized digital communities in which identity is invented as much as assumed. In that respect, his legacy makes for an interesting comparison with another of the great twentieth-century pop cultural icons. When Prince passed away last month, a video clip did the rounds in which he was asked by an interviewer how artists can protect themselves from being ‘played’ by the record industry’s famously unscrupulous elements. “I can’t be played,” he said, “a person trying to play me, plays themselves.” That Prince could not “be played” carries a neat double entendre. He could not be turned, twisted, or deceived; he was not susceptible to tricks or gimmicks. Neither, to read the phrase another way, would it be possible for anyone else to play him as an actor ‘plays’ a role (Prince starred in four films, in three of which he played himself or a very thinly veiled version of himself—the exception, 1986’s Under The Cherry Moon, was a disaster). His identity was unique, coherent, and—while extraordinarily complex and multivalent—ultimately indivisible from his self. He disdained masks, while Bowie depended upon them. It is interesting to note that it was the bisexual African-American man who so powerfully affirmed his individual selfhood—asserting a right that the history of his country had done much to deny—while the white Londoner used his career to dismantle the very notion of an essential self (Bowie was, it seems pertinent to note, a Buddhist from his teens). For all the difference in approach and context, however, it seems that both were addressing the same problem by different means: how to transcend or subvert the narrow destinies ascribed to us by social circumstance. Bowie slipped out of the bonds; Prince burst them. If his life was devoted to mercurial experiments in character and form—“I’m Pierrot,” Bowie told the Daily Express in 1977, “I’m Everyman”—then his death might be the most enduring of a series of performances that subjugated material circumstance to the logic of theater. Listening to his final two albums in the wake of his passing, it was hard to avoid the feeling that death—which came just a day after the release of his final album, and to the shocked surprise of a global media which can normally be relied upon to know when someone of Bowie’s celebrity has contracted a cold—had been to some extent stage-managed. The control exercised over even this most non-negotiable of nature’s contradictions to the belief that we control our destinies was testament to the artist’s extraordinary ability to theatricalize, to make narrative sense of an experience of being alive that feels to most of us so frighteningly contingent and unmanageable. Bowie had been addressing quite explicitly the implications of mortality and a life’s reckonings. The Next Day (2013) reclaimed the iconic photo from the cover of Heroes (1977) and superimposed a white square; Blackstar (2016) is filled with musical riffs from his back catalog that suggest a life flashing before one’s eyes. Given that Bowie was often accused of being willfully oblique, it is funny to recall that he called his final single (and an off-Broadway musical!) “Lazarus” and then, as if that was not enough, made a music video in which he featured in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages. Death was welcomed into the ordered realm of a performance, made into one of a set of signs consistent with their character and his narrative arc. “I can’t answer why,” he sings, “but I can tell you how.”

—Desk#:Moscow

Russia on the Run

By Natalia Antonova

“You can’t accomplish anything in war without love!” exclaims Lieutenant General Roman Khludov, a character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Run, a play that dictator Joseph Stalin personally banned from appearing on the Soviet stage. Stalin has been dead and buried for decades, but his ghost still haunts the Russian landscape. I would not describe the ghost as friendly, but neither is it some kind of all-powerful demonic force. More often than not, it seems like a spirit confused, rattling chains to much effect in the attic but also wondering why it is fated to do so. If Russia had moved on from the wounds of the twentieth century—both self-inflicted and otherwise—The Run would be an entirely uncontroversial play today. But that is not the case, so star theater director Yury Butusov decided to adapt The Run for the modern stage at Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater, and you cannot watch the resulting production without shuddering. There are definitely some things wrong with Butusov’s adaptation, not the least of which is the fact that the production clocks in at an exhausting three hours and fifty minutes. Russian theater is dominated by directors—a fact that I, as someone who writes plays in Russian, have struggled with—and sometimes that works out for the best, while at other times the amount of leeway they are given is just irritating. Still, the way in which Butusov combines surrealism with dark humor in The Run is so biting that it feels as though its literally drawing blood, and this does give the adaptation an awe-inspiring power. The Run, one of Bulgakov’s lesser-known works, is a collection of dreams, or, more aptly, nightmares, centering on people fleeing the Red Army’s advance as the Russian Civil War draws to an agonizing conclusion. For those who make it out alive, there is no comfort or dignity or absolution. It is no wonder that Stalin wanted the play banned. Whatever part that remained human in the blood-thirsty, paranoid dictator, was a fan of Bulgakov’s work—this was probably the main reason why Bulgakov did not get shot during the Great Terror—but The Run drew too real and personal a portrait of those who opposed the Bolsheviks and lost. Butusov draws on the chaos and confusion of Bulgakov’s play and amplifies them to an overwhelming effect. You do not always immediately know what is happening onstage, but you know how it makes you feel; the dread is a constant, dark, fuzzy aura that encircles every actor and prop. A few days before my husband and I went to see The Run, I had a jolt of exactly the kind of dread Butusov conjures. I was walking out of the building we stay in when we are in Moscow with my son, who was chattering away; I adjusted his jacket and chattered back, answering his Russian with my English, as I always do, since we are raising him to be bilingual. Then I became aware of being watched. An elderly neighbor I had spoken to exactly once in my life was standing on the sidewalk, affixing a heavy stare on me. “That’s her!” she exclaimed to a woman I had never seen before. I looked behind me, thinking she had meant someone else, but there was no one else. I could not hear all of what my neighbor was saying about me, but I definitely heard the words “English” and “foreigner.” Even before Russia’s relations with the West deteriorated as the result of the Ukraine crisis and the annexation of Crimea, people in Moscow would frequently notice and even remark upon the fact that I speak English in public. Most of that was simple curiosity, as normal as a person turning their head upon hearing Russian spoken in a place like North Carolina. This was different. There was aggression and suspicion to my neighbor’s talk, I could tell. The old woman in her too-warm coat just stood there, staring, not saying anything, not moving, her eyes fixed on me, an expression of hatred. I made eye contact with her several times, raised an eyebrow, and turned away. “I think there’s something wrong with our neighbor,” I told my husband as I got in the car. “She’s pissed off at me for speaking English.” He told me that I was probably just imagining it, or else that it was some kind of a misunderstanding. Fair enough. I have lived in six different countries and can be sensitive to my status as an outsider, or, as Zadie Smith once put it, a person that belongs nowhere and hence belongs everywhere, but not without also annoying people who take comfort in homogeneity. So much of what Bulgakov wrote about in The Run has to do with the cold, bereft feeling of not belonging anywhere. When the country you are defending, the country you love, ceases to exist is there anything left of you? For that matter, is there anything left of you by the time you have gone to horrifying lengths in order to defend this country? Nearly a century after the events described in The Run, Russia has not reckoned with its past and therefore remains a place that inspires many strange dreams. Nobody really knows what this country is going to do next. I particularly doubt its leader, his courtiers, and his revisionist version of the past: that Lenin was a dangerous revolutionary, while Stalin was basically “alright.” Sure, everyone admits he might have “gone a little too far” with repression, but he is still seen as a decent bloke, a “complicated” guy. The reason is simple: there is no political will to really deal with the legacy of the repressions and force the nation toward a catharsis on that account. Under Putin, relations with the West have rotted, but an alleged pivot to Asia has yet to produce any tangible results. Power struggles rage within an elite that is so completely removed from daily life in the country that it might as well be living on Mars and flare-ups of violence are a testament to that. Repressions are so random that they almost seem accidental. Domestically, historic narratives about a noble, blameless, yet misunderstood and betrayed Russia are so exaggerated by the state media that they have begun to take on a tragicomic effect. Butusov is aware of all this, of course, which is why the thread of anxiety that runs through his adaptation is, in fact, a live wire. The audience is constantly jolted, prodded, practically abused by his visual and auditory metaphors. “This is your story too,” the hanged soldiers and maniacally grinning dancing widows are basically saying. “You can’t get away from the past.” During the intermission, my husband and I rush outside, greedily gulping down the April air. It is a lovely evening in the Russian capital, all inky skies and city lights trembling in puddles. It was just a few days after the neighbor incident, but we were not thinking about it. My husband is a director, I am a writer: we began to debate what it was we were seeing—whether it was working, whether it was overdone—when our nanny called. “There is an old woman standing outside, pointing at our windows and screaming that a foreigner lives there and that she’s going to get ‘to the bottom of it,’ and have the police investigate,” our nanny reported. “I’m nervous.” It was as if Bulgakov himself had been resurrected and was now standing with us in the gentle spring rain, smirking. Was the play overdone? How can something be overdone when it correctly reflects the absurdity of the present? I did not even notice my eyes filling with tears. Perhaps I ought to be too ashamed to admit it, but I can get genuinely spooked by the police. “Hey, hey,” my husband said. “What’s this? We have to laugh about it. I love you, by the way. But we really have to laugh about it.” I later found out that several other neighbors expressed outrage at the woman’s behavior, which included both screaming about me and about a family from central Asia, who happen to live a few floors above us. In the small building we stay in, everyone mostly keeps to themselves—requests to turn down each other’s music notwithstanding—which is, perhaps, the problem. In the absence of normal people being civically active, or, for that matter, merely neighborly, the vacuum is filled up by hysterical old ladies who grew up in a culture of denouncements and are comfortable carrying it over into the twenty-first century. Sometimes it takes a public spectacle to remind people that community, the simple act of refusing to despise each other, should not be taken for granted. In Bulgakov’s play, General Khludov asks God to “give us the strength and mind to live through this Russian time of troubles.” Teasingly, Butusov asks his audience to contemplate whether or not they are living in a time of troubles too. They are. We are. But it is trouble that has returned as a wan and frequently disoriented ghost. Ask the old woman why she hates me, for example, and it is doubtful that she will be able to give a coherent answer (apparently, some have tried). She just feels that she has to. It is the done thing. She has seen it on TV. Unquiet spirits come back to demand something of the living, so that they may do the work the dead had failed to do. In Russia’s case, the work can begin with acknowledging the shame and sorrow buried in the national subconscious, rather than vigorous denials thereof—denials that result in a blind sort of pain, turned both inward and outward, clawing at itself even more effectually than it claws at others. Ultimately, Khludov was right to point out that war does not work without love, especially a war with oneself. But modern Russia is in a place where it must stop trying to read Bulgakov’s metaphor backward. Love is doable without any war whatsoever.

—Desk#:Delhi / Calcutta

Winter in Calcutta

By Ruchir Joshi

This winter Calcutta is festooned with lights for what is called the “festive season.” The lights have been a feature for decades, but in these last few years the illumination has been only blue and white, the color scheme chosen by Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister who ended the Communist party’s thirty-four-year rule of the state in 2011. The two-color combination has no roots in any Bengal tradition but is now to be found on many official structures and buildings, both governmental and private, the owners of the latter having been offered a tax reduction if they paint their houses in the ‘state colors’. Banerjee regards herself as an artist—she makes daubs of flowers and such as a hobby—and central to her ‘branding’ are the cheap rubber slippers she always wears. Called “Hawaii chappals” in India, these slippers usually come with a white base and turquoise blue straps: the inspiration for the color scheme she promotes. Beyond painting government buildings and road dividers in the Argentinean football team’s colors, one of the first actions Banerjee took when she became the chief minister was to install trishul [trident] lampposts on all Calcutta sidewalks. The lampposts are lower than the old ones, give less light, and are burdened by an awful, twee, three-prong design that gave them their name. Again, the Trinamul Congress Party (TMC)’s symbol is a three-clover flower designed by Banerjee, and is the basis for the lamppost design. Banerjee’s TMC cheerleaders argue that these posts are their leader’s attempt to bring an artistic, decorative sensibility to the street. Cynics want to know who exactly got the contract to manufacture these abominations, along with asking who has the contract to sell the blue and white paint now covering Bengal. In mid January, there was no sign the lights were going to be removed. Walking down the streets of south Calcutta, the pillars of the trishul lampposts are also festooned with creepers of blue and white lights to enhance their inadequate illumination. The city slums may not have any more sanitation than five years ago, when Banerjee took charge. Certain areas of the metropolis may regularly resound with gunfire as various TMC-affiliated gangs fight for territory. The state may not have seen any of the promised injections of free-market money for new industry, nor any serious planning changes or investment in the agricultural sector. But many streets of the state capital are definitely cleaner and these blue and white lights accompany the Calcuttan most places she goes. The rise in crime, corruption, and political violence, however, go hand in hand with the chief minister’s sense of herself, and of Bengalis in general, as the cultural torchbearers of India. All over Calcutta one finds pictures of Rabindranath Tagore on billboards and posters. Blasting from the loudspeakers at traffic lights, and interspersed with music, a voice tells you to obey traffic rules, the previous government’s preferred Fur Elise has been replaced by recordings of Tagore’s songs. At bus stops and metro stations another cultural figure, the painter Jamini Roy, appears through reproductions of his thickly outlined rural figures pasted on light boxes. The leader and her government are trapped in a sterile, kitschy nostalgia. However, as we have seen before in other contexts and moments in history, it is an ersatz construction that provides the rulers with an alibi to avoid addressing any genuine contemporary constituency and the questions it must necessarily ask of those in power. That these bizarre South Asian urban scenarios are not the sole preserve of Calcutta or West Bengal is amply demonstrated in an exhibition by Pakistani artist Bani Abidi (January 18–28, 2016). Funland – Karachi Series 2 (2014) is a six-channel video installation on view at the Government College of Art and Craft, the oldest art school in the country. In a decrepit classroom in the nineteenth-century building, Abidi projects a cluster of video meditations on her home city of Karachi. Disparate sequences and single shots are projected onto strung-up bed sheets and other improvised screens: a camel chews the cud by the seaside, a pair of men sift through the debris in a burnt-out cinema hall, some librarians stow away controversial religious books for safekeeping, presumably to be brought out at a more tolerant time. The installation carries quite direct echoes of Calcutta’s decrepitude and the relentless encroaching of real-estate development projects. The pockets of solitude and poetry you find in a seaside city at one end of the subcontinent talk quite directly to the ones in a tropical, riverside urban metropolis at this end. Discussing the exhibition with students of the art college, Abidi speaks of nostalgia and its uses. She is on a panel comprised of artists and filmmakers (including myself) where the participants explore the need—or urge—to move away from traditional art forms when trying to engage current realities. Unlike with students in Delhi, Bombay, and Baroda, there is clearly a need in Calcutta to lay out a brief history of film and video art. Some bemusement, some absence of conviction that film (or now video) can really be allowed to enter into the club of acceptable art forms still hangs in the air. During the talk, this attitude seems to shift, and there is a realization that conservative thinking in the pedagogy of art making traverses the entire subcontinent, from Calcutta to Karachi and Lahore. Abidi has a concurrent show at Experimenter Gallery, “The Man who clapped for 97 Hours” (January 15–February 27, 2016). It continues the artist’s exploration of the peculiar cat’s cradle of popular culture, politics, and the media that we find in South Asia and more specifically in Abidi’s home country, Pakistan. In this show, Abidi departs from the South Asian obsession with challenging or creating new entries for the Guinness World Records. There are watercolor portraits: small studies of imaginary figures, all male, attempting to break fictional world records for clapping, yawning, splitting hair, walking in circles, or even hiding your world-record mustache so it does not get shaved off. In The most amount of people standing still, screaming, laughing… (2016), three hanging screens show loops of a crowd going through different reactions as they look on at something outside the frame. After a while, you see that the crowd is made up of composite videos, using the same actors again and again, sometimes in different magnification, sometimes in different clothes. Looking at these is tangentially reminiscent of Bill Viola’s slow-motion videos of crowds, but they carry a far stronger reference to the many retouched photos that were circulated by Hindu right-wing groups during the last Indian general elections, images purporting to show mass attendance at Narendra Modi’s election rallies, and which people exposed on social media as having used repeated photoshopped clumps of the same groups to bulk up the crowd. If the watercolor portraits are a semi-fictional take on the illustrations in the Guinness World Records, The most amount of people… is a kind of moving portrait of the ‘payload’, the gullible, awe-struck audiences that gather to ingest spectacles they believe to be real, unmodified events. Both the small paintings and the loops lead up to (or, away from) the large projection that covers one whole wall of the gallery space. Watching An Unforeseen Situation (2015), you are not clear at first whether you are looking at a documentary or documentation of a performance. Two or three men wander between rows and rows of plastic chairs arranged on an open lot; as the sun beats down, the men stack the chairs into small towers; after a while they cart them away. A title card informs us that the event depicted, organized by a government agency, was a failure—not enough people showed up to break the record of the most number of people singing a national anthem together. In the next sequence we see a close-up of hands packing gift items—cheap clocks in the shapes of apples—into little boxes; as the boxes move in and out of the frame, every now and then the hands insert a round stone instead of a clock. A title card informs us that the anthem-singing-record-breaking attempt failed because the gift boxes used to lure people to the event contained the occasional dud. In another video we see a man doing push-ups in a run-down apartment. The cut moves to a shot of a TV broadcast covering an event where a man smashes a number of walnuts in a certain amount of time with his forehead. We are told his record was nullified because the jury was found to be suspect. The man in the room lines up walnuts on a table. He is planning to take on the walnut-smashing record. The man now gently bangs his forehead against a wall: he is training. Abidi’s large video projection is, for me, the most realized of the work she is showing in Calcutta. Understated, completely deadpan yet booby-trapped with drollery, it continually unearths the absurdities, delusions, and different kinds of sadness that constantly burrow through our TV-bludgeoned subcontinental societies. It is a funny and thoughtful work that not only stays with you, but continues to twist and turn as Calcutta simmers in its own brand of populist politics. This city was once the capital, not only of Britain’s empire in India, but of (quite wide and rich) cultural production in the area, as I have written about for WdW Review previously. The end of that era came about forty years ago. Now the ratio is that for every ten genuinely interesting shows of contemporary art in Delhi or Bombay, Calcutta maybe gets one. This season, there is an indication of things perhaps looking up a bit. Besides Abidi’s parallel shows there was also “Jeevanchakra” [life-circle], an exhibition of contemporary Indian art made around the cycle of life and death (January 18–February 17, 2016). In her introductory note, Delhi-based curator Latika Gupta lays out the scope of the show which: “[P]resents the experiences of those involved in the transit of the body into or out of the tangible world,” while speaking about “conceptions of the body as informed by gender, class privilege, religious beliefs and the cultural precepts of different communities.” It is a small exhibition in the lovely, intimate space of Akar Prakar Gallery. Ten artists—nine women, one man—with two of them, Sheba Chhachhi and Gargi Raina, showing more than one set of works. Looking at the show from a Calcutta point of view, several things stand out: the texts around the exhibition (the introduction, the captions, the publicity) make modest claims while actually delivering far more, whereas the general tendency in this city is to do the opposite. There is a quiet unity to the show, with works forming both direct and subtle connections among themselves, so that when you emerge out of it there is a proper oscillation between the sum and the individual parts, again not something we see too often around here, where the habit seems to be to stuff as many contrasting and clashing artists as possible into salon-style or survey shows. At one end is a darkened room in which polycarbonate silos stand, lit from within. In Raktpushp [blood flower] (1999/2015), Delhi-based artist Sheba Chhachhi plays with images of women and words, “Raktchandan,” “swayambu,” “kusum,” “cheti besi,” labels and slang that Chhachhi has unearthed from different languages denoting menstruation and coming of age. In between are two photo series, Chhachhi’s “Initiation Chronicle” (1998–2001), where she photographs initiates being inducted into a traditional ascetic sect of women, and a set of pictures by Sooni Taraporevala who, in the 1980s, spent time photographing the men in Bombay who carry out the Parsi funeral ritual, where the body is left for vultures to devour. At the other end of the show, in a womb-like room, is a photo series by Gauri Gill, “Birth Series” (2010), documenting midwives delivering a baby in a village hut in Rajasthan, laying the infant in a crib made of sand scooped from the ground. In between there are beautiful small paintings by Neelima Sheikh, floor-to-ceiling drawings by Mithu Sen, You Owe Me (2009), and photo documentation by the artist Srinivasa Prasad, Known to Unknown (2008), who took the ashes from unclaimed bodies cremated at a local crematorium to mark the walls of his studio with his fingertips. Indian contemporary art, especially by women artists, has for a long time interrogated the exchange between the traditional and the modern, and likewise between old modes of art production and the media and technology available to us now. In putting together these intergenerational conversations between photography, painting, drawing, wall sculpture, and video, “Jeevanchakra” gives us the pleasure of simultaneously experiencing two or three cycles: the journey of the body from birth to death (and back), the journey in the last few decades of the poetic mapping of birth, life, illness, and death, as well as the arc between the deeply traditional and the far more contemporary, in terms of the materials deployed. Outside on the streets you are reminded of the fact that another cycle is coming to a close. Banerjee is about to finish her first stint as the chief minister of West Bengal. Her government came to power five years ago, with a lot of fanfare, hope, and elation for having seen off the ghastly neo-Stalinists who had ruled the state for the best part of half a century. Now, the state elections approach again. Polls will probably be held in April, and by mid May a newly elected state government will be sworn in. Walking away from the art space, you can hear the sounds of political speeches coming out of loudspeakers, of rhetorical recordings traveling through the street crossings, amplified on the backs of small trucks, you can see the posters going up as the various parties fire their first salvos for the approaching death and rebirth of the state’s government. A very interesting winter art season may be over in Calcutta, but an engrossing battle between all kinds of political ‘artists’ is promised as summer comes knocking.

—Desk#:Athens

Re-Orient

By James Bridle

In the Interfaith Worship Room at Athens International Airport, someone is disagreeing with the architect on fundamental matters of faith and geography. The Athens interfaith room is among my favorites of all the airport chapels I have visited, and I make a point to stop by it every time I come to what is now my home airport. Up a set of stairs away from the main concourse, it is an entirely white room with smoothly curving corners, gently lit by large, shaded windows. The room’s designer, interior architect Dimitris Plageras, cites his own fear of flying as one of his main inspirations, resulting in a smooth, distraction-free space intended to foster a sense of calm and quiet. It certainly does the trick. Mr. Plageras took his lead for the interfaith room from the United Nations Meditation Room in New York, personally designed by the Swedish secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld and dedicated in 1957. In his dedication, Hammarskjöld wrote, “We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence. This house, dedicated to work and debate in the service of peace, should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.” The only features of the UN room are an abstract painting and a six-and-a-half-ton block of iron ore, serving as an altar “dedicated to the God whom man worships under many names and in many forms.” In a tradition continued in Athens, benches rather than chairs are set out for visitors. Mr Plageras’s greatest achievement in the Athen’s interfaith room is to make its one distinctly religious architectural feature into something accessible to those of all faiths and none. The qibla—the direction which Muslims should face when performing prayer—is indicated by a green stripe on the floor, which terminates at the foot of a vertical strip of white light. This groove serves both as mihrab, the niche in a mosque that indicates the qibla, and a sort of surrogate Dan Flavin, pleasingly echoing both the “diagonal of personal ecstasy” and the Tatlin monuments. Light, says Mr Plageras, is something which all faiths look to, and even the green, usually associated with Islam, is also based on the shade used in nurseries for its its calming influence. On my last visit, however, there was evidence of discord. Just to the right of the qibla/Flavin, on the carpet and above the skirting board, twin arrows rendered in thick blue biro cross-hatching have been used to indicate a direction some ten degrees further south than the architect’s stripe implies. When you start to look for them, the qibla-scribblers are all over, as qiblas are apparently a contested part of interfaith chapels. In the Stille Rom at Oslo’s Gardamoen Airport, two prayer mats lie alongside one another at angles to one corner of the space, but no qibla is evident, until, once again, you crouch down and peer at the floorboards, to find another set of arrows—this time in black biro—gouged into the woodwork. At least three different hands have been at work here, with another arrow in blue above the skirting board, and the word “قبلة‎‎,” itself, in black again, next to it, to remove any doubt. In London Stansted’s Prayer Room, the qibla is a laminated piece of gray paper pinned in a corner (another Flavin reference?). In Amsterdam’s Schiphol’s Meditation Centre it’s a white plastic compass rose on the floor. At London Gatwick’s Multi-Faith Chapel, a laminated notice pinned to the wall reads: “For Qibla / Please look up at the ceiling.” And you do, and there it is, a star and crescent moon bisected by an arrow, screwed to a ceiling tile, in a style uncomfortably reminiscent of Ceiling Cat. The reason for this strange placement is unclear, but the need for the notice is betrayed in smaller, bright-red type: “DO NOT WRITE ON THE FURNITURE OR ON THE WALLS OR SKIRTING BOARD.” In the standardized multi-faith prayer rooms in each of London Heathrow’s terminals, which incidentally have absolutely the worst carpets of any prayer rooms or maybe generally any room ever, the qibla is indicated by no-nonsense metal studs set into the floor. There is something very British and discreet about these, particularly as they are, in each room and for no apparent reason, paired with identical studs indicating north. A possible clue to this is another floor sign, which accompanies some but not all of the Heathrow medallions: a plaque that reads “Compasses do not work in room.” This may be significant. The direction to Mecca indicated by the qibla has been reckoned in many ways over the centuries. Science has been applied, in the form of the astrolabe, an ancient Greek invention which was further developed by medieval Islamic scholars, and which has the ability to both define the times of day for prayer, and to adjudge its direction. Many learned theses have been written on the subject, by such notables as Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who gave his name to the algorithm, and Shams al-Dīn al-Khalīlī, who, in the fourteenth century, calculated 3,000 separate and highly accurate qiblas for every latitude and longitude in the Muslim world (to this day nobody is entirely sure how he did it). In 2006, the Malaysian National Space Agency sponsored a conference of scientists and religious scholars to decide in which direction an astronaut should face to pray in space (Malaysia sent Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the ninth Muslim in space, to the International Space Station in 2007). They decided that they should face Earth. Today, the qibla is most often reckoned in the same way that we decide everything else: by using a smartphone. A search for “qibla” on Apple or Google’s app stores returns hundreds of results with titles like iSalaam and Muslim Pro. I have three on my own phone, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but which involve the White House. Smartphones use their own internal compass to determine direction, which measures the deviation of an electric current caused by the Earth’s magnetic field. When I show him a photo of the defaced qibla, Dimitris Plageras claims that the proliferation of smartphones, and their technical limitations, is behind the disagreement in the interfaith room. Having tested a number of these devices himself, he believes they are easily and obviously confused by the profusion of competing signals and metal shielding in contemporary airports. The alignment of the Athens qibla was personally calculated by him based on the highly accurate architectural plans for the room, an arrangement of some importance and which he took very seriously. I am inclined to believe him. Plageras is now employed full-time by the airport, and the correct alignment of the qibla is no longer the most pressing issue for its architecture. Opened in 2001, five months ahead of schedule after a decade of planning, the airport has seen greatly increased traffic over the last few years and is in a process of continual renewal. One of the architects’ goals is to introduce more of a Greek identity into the international airport style—Plageras cites Spain’s Madrid-Barajas Airport, with its primary colors and extensive views, as an example in developing a local vernacular for national infrastructure. As a result, newer areas of the Athens airport are based on rounded and geometric Cycladic forms, a recognizably Greek style which prefigures contemporary minimalism. But international politics play a part too: as new plans for the revamp of the airports intra-Schengen areas start to be made, there are already concerns over whether Greece will still be benefitting from passport-free travel in the European Union when the renovations are complete. Flying out of Athens in the last few months has shown that such worries are reasonable. At every supposed Schengen airport I have flown into, passengers from Greece are confronted by a hastily assembled checkpoint. It is, certainly, a minor inconvenience compared to that endured by those facing far harsher measures at many of Europe’s supposedly open borders, but it is telling. And so I seek out the airport chapel, interfaith space, prayer room, or meditation center, and see how each country’s particular tics and prejudices play out as spiritual architecture in technopolitical space. I rarely see other people in my visits to these places. Most common is to see people sleeping under the prominently displayed “No Sleeping” signs, or Muslim staff members at prayer times. When asked, Plageras reveals that, alongside the tired and devout, the most frequent visitors to his room in Athens are amorous couples. “They think there isn’t a camera, but there is. And then they hear the Voice of God from the speakers…”

—Desk#:Nusantara

The Inbetweeners

By Adam Bobbette

I moved to the volcano in the fall of 2015. I wanted to study climate change from an unusual angle. Not from projections, models, and probabilities. I was looking instead to understand how people today made lives with extreme environmental uncertainty. The volcano, Mt. Merapi, in Java, is one of the world’s most dangerous. It has been packed with people for over a hundred years. I thought they would have something to teach the rest of us. That in some sense this volcano is our future. It was soon obvious that extreme environmental uncertainty is pretty banal. Living on the flank of an active volcano involves a lot of shrugging it off. To, say, enjoy dinner with friends, tend the garden, or give the middle finger to a bosses back, it helps to forget that the place may at any moment erupt in violent explosions.

Most people don't care about the volcano until it starts rumbling. Until it barges in on their lives. But there are others who spend most of their time preoccupied with it. They are called inbetweeners.

There are lots of them. There are the scientists with seismographs and fancy GPS devices. They feel the ground move, test the gasses in the air, look through telescopes. Then there are rescue workers. They have ideas and plans for eruptions. There are the village heads that keep an eye on the volcano in case the government tells them to evacuate. Sand miners look forward to eruptions because it means they will have more material to excavate and sell. The shamans, there are many of them, in almost every village, speak with the spirits inside the volcano. These are all inbetweeners. What are they between? A nature that talks too much. It constantly emits obscure signs for deciphering, acts with little forewarning and changes all the time. And the people, the millions of people, who live on it. They are between the clouds, winds, mud slides, and violent eruptions of rocks and lava. They are between the devices that try to predict it and the constellation of words, symbols, and barely material entities like ghosts and spirits. Inbetweeners build intimate relations with the volcano. Their intimacy reaches out to trees, rocks, landscapes, even the hidden interior of the earth. Inbetweeners hold wild, hard, and intimidating things close. They make the untamable livable. They fold in and make proximate what we might normally think of as the furthest things from us, like rocks and clouds. This is, as I am coming to understand, an act of mediation and media. To bring close. Inbetweeners are humans becoming media. They bring the distant, non-human close. It is a bit like domestication, but only if we understand the process as a constant push and pull between the tame and the wild, happening in the same thing and at the same time. It is never a state that is achieved. It’s a bit likepets. We bring them close but they retain wildness. The domesticated is braided with the wild. The domesticated thing is always pushing against its taming. Inbetweeners provide forms of consistency and continuity among change. While millions of people live on it, farm it, and drain water from it, the volcano is barely there. Most days, the peak is covered in clouds. It is easy to forget, even if it erupts every four or five years. It is easy to slip into everyday life and its demands. Only once in a while does the jagged mouth appear in the middle of the day and people are reminded of its scale. But it is too big to ever get a handle on. It is wider than Manhattan is long and 3,000 meters tall. It has about the same population. As much as we try to understand it wholly, it escapes and retreats. Inbetweeners take on the burden of drawing out the continuities between life and the volcano. They give presence to the invisible. I began hanging out in a village called Keningar. It is about five kilometers from the caldera in 'Zone 1,' the most dangerous area to live in according to the government. The village dates back to a big eruption in 1930, when its old location was destroyed and they relocated. There are about seventy-five houses. I met and became friendly with Suparno, in training to become the village inbetweener. We would sit in his narrow living room with a table of snacks, sweet tea, thick black Javanese coffee, and sweet cigarettes. Men within his circle would rotate in and out of the room, crossing their legs, chatting. His mother would fix us snacks. Over a period of a few months my Indonesian became strong enough to go there without a translator, spend the night, and join for events. Suparno introduced me to Sukidi, the current inbetweener, who in another lexicon would be called a shaman. He is about seventy, thin, with a stringy neck. He is warm and when he laughs he pushes his head forward and leans so far he may lose his balance on his crossed legs. We spent hours talking about spirits and ghosts in the volcano and village. Spirit possession is a way that he communicates with the volcano, and finds out what it wants and will do. Villagers become vessels for them. Through possessions he speaks with the volcano, translating it for villagers. But his practice is waning. Few young people believe it anymore. To be possessed you need to be open, your body and mind ready to become a vessel. He invited me to a dance called jatihlan. It took place at the end of Suro, the first month of the Javanese calendar when the world is especially porous, the barely material world swirling within ours. It hovers around objects, trees, graves. During the jatihlan dancing becomes a way for the body to empty out. Sounds and smoke become mediums for the barely material. Dancers become mountain dogs and hungry volcano spirits. The dance went on all day and into the night. It was loud and relentless. It was violent and at times scary. Children collapsed, possessed. Fights broke out between villagers and a dragon puppet. The costumes were assemblages of old and new imagery referring to the state, local history, ancient empires, and myths. People recorded it on their phones. The young and old were there. I joined Sukidi in his back room, a kind of operating theater of spirit possession populated with fruit, tobacco, bowls of chicken blood, and flowers. With these instruments he manages and communicates with spirits. What follows is a description of the jatihlan from the perspective of a volcano spirit that I witnessed possess a villager. I followed him back into Sukidi’s operating theater where he was given over to Sukidi’s care. The whole interaction between them lasted about five minutes. Afterward, I spent a few hours with Sukidi talking about what happened. He graciously fed me and discussed the philosophy of the barely material. This is what I understood had happened. Now you are the barely material. *** There is a blue canopy with a dirt floor. It carves a location into the vastness. It makes a point stable enough for you to enter it. But you can only smell and hear it. It is a cube. In it there is space. Up and down, forward and backward. One side and another. Space like the kind you wave your arms in, a kind of emptiness that fills what is around you. In there, there is a time that goes forward while the present burns away into the past. The past is where you go looking for the missing bits of the present. There is a hard, pounded earth floor and a blue tarpaulin roof. Metal rafters and beams. Fluorescent lights. Six of them, in two rows of three. It is a rental. Under the canopy you cannot be in two places at once, not like before. In it you become a shape. Which you appreciate. It is different from over there. There, you grow bigger and smaller at the same time. And you are wanted in this cube. Called for. Loved like an old friend. Sometimes you get out-of-hand excited. A little unused to your strength. Constraints are hard to accustom to, to fit into. You gain flesh. It is soft and does not always fit. It stretches, bulges when it inhales. Its walls are round and pulpy. The loopy ventricles spinning out of the heart confuse you. The esophagus’ ribbed rhythmic contractions pressure you, slip you around, pull you along, stretch you. And you can walk again. But you are no good at it. You are a spasm. A fretting, wretched spasm. You jut your unlikely arms forward but forget how to bring them back. You remember some things from so long ago, what so many have forgotten. But that does not mean you remember how to move your arms. These things are not related, memory and movement. They need to be relearned every time under the canopy. In this flesh casing you are new to the world again. You have been here before but every time is so short you cannot master its mechanisms. You are always part stranger. You are greeted as the awkward visitor you are. Like a friend, yes, with care and love, but also with the suspicion that all strangers may act in ways we cannot anticipate. The stranger is scary but has something to teach. Terrifying because no one knows what the stranger has to teach. Cream. You are cream. You are the liquid at the edge of a lip of an open mouth with white teeth, one slightly crooked. You are situated below eyes without lids to seal in the cream. You are the horse that pisses warm piss on all the fields at once. The esophagus you are is curled around and bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the horse. The horse is 1,263 years old, woven of thin bamboo strips. It is two dimensional, only length and height. It has no thickness. Its hooves, the size of a child’s foot, are hitting the hollow earth. The esophagus you are is wrapped around a two-dimensional horse in the cube under the canopy. You have a body, a location, you are the cream at the edge of a mouth. You bring old stories snapped from the bundle of the past. The esophagus spurts those stories one syllable at a time, keras, long, harsh syllables, noises truncated at the end. They enter the world as blocks. None of your friends know how to understand them. It takes someone else to coax you to slow down, to get used to the esophagus you are, to learn its ribs, to give you time to trace how to move with it, to carve micro indentations and inclinations into the blocks of syllables. To form of the blocks things that remind us of words. The man shows you an egg. He places it in the empty orb between your cupped hands. You close them around it and slowly roll. The shell is soft and cracks in the middle. It splits like wet paper in pieces that fall to your lap and the floor. Inside the egg is a curled black-feathered rooster. Its eyes translucent purple orbs. You slowly and gently straighten the body and cup your hands to your face. You smell it. Its body is still warm in your hands and on your face. You show the man its face. He looks for a long time then he looks at your cream eyes. He tells you, you must not eat it though you want to. Instead you drown it in a mixture of red and white flowers, water, oil, and burnt wood. Its death is a moment that pounds you and tightens the esophagus. It takes you from its wet undulations. The cream at the corner of the mouth falls to the ground, you follow the rooster into the liquid, out of the cube. Outside, the sounds and smells become distant and you are back to the world where all shapes are in one shape. Though they are not made of the same stuff and they barely stick together. There, there is both fast and slow at the same time.

—Desk#:London

Adding Colors to the Chameleon

By Ben Eastham

The incumbent British government has embarked on a mission to reduce, marketize, and ultimately privatize those sectors of society currently administered or subsidized by the state. This is nothing new: for the past forty years, the Conservative Party has been closely aligned to, indeed a driving force behind, a neoliberal consensus in Anglo-American economic affairs, an ideology built upon the dismantlement of the state apparatus in order to make space for the free operation of the market. Having gained an outright majority in the general election of last year standing on this platform, the government has a mandate to realize the policy on the terms outlined in the course of its campaign. Yet recent, popular expressions of anger at the changes wrought upon higher education, welfare, and particularly the NHS (National Health Service) make it clear that the British public’s interpretation of what constitutes the proper sphere of implementation for these actions is not shared by the government it has elected. This gap between the public’s expectation of what it is voting for and what that vote entails has, I would suggest, been engineered by a delicate sleight of hand on the part of the government. This consists of a semantic fudge—a deliberate conflation of what we mean by the economy and what we mean by society—that the Conservative Party has exploited expertly in the course of its modern history. The gradual expansion of the proper realm for the application of free-market economics to include every part of the human community is dependent upon a rhetorical strategy that is now being applied to the provision of funding for the arts, and which deserves our attention because it has as its aim the suppression of dissent. The approach is marked by what seems initially like a remarkable failure of logic, according to which the government relentlessly praises the contribution of the creative industries and humanities to the British economy while systematically undermining them. In 2010, when the Conservatives first came to power as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Arts Council England—the country’s major funding body—saw its budget cut by 29.6 percent. Earlier that year David Cameron had written an open letter to The Sun in which he made clear his wholehearted support for the arts, arguing that “British culture is second to none.” To drive home his point he cited J. K. Rowling (a single mother who wrote the first of her Harry Potter novels while on benefits, she has been among the most vocal critics of government policy on welfare), “huge BBC exports” (the Conservative Party is notoriously hostile to the BBC), and various tat comedies that served to “remind [him] of one of the best things about our country—we love to laugh at ourselves.” The love bombing continued, without reciprocation (senior BBC news presenters twice on one day suffered “slips of the tongue” that confused the then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s surname with a vulgar term for female genitalia). Meanwhile, Conservative members of parliament continued to draw attention to the strength of a cultural sector it seemed determined to diminish. In its manifesto for the 2015 general election, the party stated that: “our museums are second to none. In music, art, fashion, theatre, design, film, television and the performing arts, we have an edge.” Beyond the positive words, the manifesto provided hard evidence for the party’s steadfast commitment to arts and culture: “The creative industries have become our fastest-growing economic sector, contributing nearly £77 billion to the UK economy.” Indeed, while making his first autumn statement after the Conservatives’ election victory, Chancellor George Osborne argued that “one of the best investments we can make as a nation is in our extraordinary arts, museums, heritage, media and sport.” In almost the same breath he announced further cuts of 20 percent to the budget for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. How to square the two positions? Why would the government impose austerity on one of the few sectors of the economy that it maintains is functioning admirably? Vaunting the contribution of the arts and humanities to the country’s gross domestic product is to reduce them to engines of economic growth. This is in part symptomatic of an established pattern in Conservative policy toward national infrastructure, which is to quantify the industry in market terms, then slowly underfund it until it does not work anymore, followed by the announcement of vast and unsustainable losses, in which case privatization looks to everyone like the only available option. The disastrous (by any metric) privatizations of the rail network and the Post Office might be taken as examples. In each case long stretches of inadequate investment were accompanied by a campaign to reframe the discourse around these institutions away from their broader (and admittedly more nebulous) service toward the public good and toward their nickels and dimes contribution to the Treasury. By characterizing the value of social endeavors as quantifiable exclusively by economic indicators—semantic fudge—one creates the conditions for their privatization when it becomes unviable according to those same indicators (easily achieved, of course, by cutting funding). By drawing attention to culture’s substantial contribution to the national purse, the strategy invites a counterattack for which it has already legislated, like a chess move that opens a trap. The temptation is to quote the government’s own statistics back at it as evidence that the arts deserves funding precisely because it represents such a good investment. On the very terms laid out by the government, it seems obvious to point out, it makes no sense to cut support for the arts further. Look at all the money it makes via tax revenue, its employment figures! Look at its investment potential! Look at its capacity to push forth your agenda! It is very hard to resist pointing out the glaring logical inconsistency, even while a part of your brain must recognize that the governmental definition of arts and culture is much wider than that which you are really intent on defending. To do so, of course, is to tacitly accept that culture can and should be tied to a market model. The relentless bombardment of statistics tying ‘the culture industries’ to various economic indicators serves to establish a correspondence between the two that colors every future argument about the viability of the arts and not only the amount of funding that it should receive but what qualifies as a worthy beneficiary of that funding. We risk colluding in the creation of an attitude to arts and culture that judges it exclusively according to the financial returns it offers on investment, and that therefore privileges artistic and cultural activity that delivers those returns over that which does not. In a recent piece for e-flux conversations, Morgan Quaintance makes a compelling argument that the recent award of the Turner Prize to Assembly made precisely this misstep. The imaginative redevelopment of a run-down Toxteth housing estate by a collective of socially responsible young architects and designers is an inarguably Good Thing. So it seems counterintuitive to argue against its recognition by the committee and the attendant publicity it received. Yet the collective do not self-identify as artists, nor do they conceive of their work as art. By categorizing their practice—which is ultimately about the provision of decent housing for the British population—as art, the Turner Prize committee might be seen to be trying to demonstrate art’s usefulness to society, its ability to contribute to the infrastructural and economic health of the nation. By these means it plays into the hands of any argument for the relevance of art that depends upon its ability to achieve results justifiable on the Right’s own terms. What seems like a critical position is in fact a compliant one. Marketization is a remarkably effective and flexible instrument for the suppression of dissent. Margaret Thatcher used the basic principle that markets are inherently self-regulating—and therefore purer and more efficient means of administration than centralized government—as the ideological position to justify the break-up of the industrial unions that opposed her. Now this approach is pressed into action to suppress any activity that might constitute a more diffuse kind of opposition to the government. We need only look to the marketization of higher education in England to see how popular sentimental attachments to the role of an institution can be swept away in the wake of such tacit surrenders to the framework (if not the conclusions) of neoliberal discourse. Staff are employed according to the likelihood that they can bring in research grants; money is redirected to advertising and promotional departments that secure new students (who pay full whack irrespective of whether they complete the year); the employment of administrators vastly outnumbers the uptake in academic staff; professors are overburdened with bureaucracy while corporate-style CEOs take home six-figure salaries. As Arts Emergency—a charity established in 2011 in reaction to the imposition of tuition fees and the consequent crisis in access to third-level education for students from working-class backgrounds—puts it, “people [now] view degrees, as a financial trade off based on perceived employability.” The upshot is that universities are now organized according to the same neoliberal economies of value that the government adheres to. Having accepted marketization by degrees, the higher education system has effectively become an instrument of government policy, focused on delivering ‘value-for-money’ (meaning, money-for-money). Humanities departments bear a disproportionately high brunt of the cuts in funding because it is difficult to demonstrate how its clients can easily integrate into a system for maximizing profit when they leave. It is no coincidence that these faculties, whose mission is to instruct students in ways of thinking other than the dominant one, have traditionally been the drivers of student activism. This combination of factors means that the universities’ capacity for independent thought outside the prevailing market ideology—and by extension dissent—has been neutralized to an astonishing degree. The university as a seat of learning outside the immediate pressures of the market is no more, for all that we would like to believe otherwise. I do not intend here to try and identify a single alternative set of metrics according to which we can measure the contribution of the arts and humanities to our societies. For the purpose of this piece, it is enough simply to show how successful the current British government has been in imposing its own, and how this serves a broader ideological purpose. With the reduction and redirection of central subsidies according to the outlined principles, it will become increasingly difficult to create, exhibit, publish, or otherwise disseminate works of art that are not immediately commercially viable. Self-evidently, the practices least suited to the market economy are precisely those which seek to imagine alternatives to it. It is a beautiful double bind, and one which operates at a rhetorical as much as a financial level. The ultimate aim is to renegotiate the very way we evaluate art’s importance to our society. These are not new dilemmas but they do seem pressing today. The best means of opposing these changes may simply be to keep talking, meeting, making, writing, thinking, reading, challenging, arguing, and gathering; proposing and defending as many different ways that art can be valuable to society while refusing as much as possible to accept a single monolithic interpretation of how to quantify its contribution. As ever, the best way to defend art is to keep making it.

—Desk#:Nusantara

Where does the Water Touch the Bank?

By Adam Bobbette

“How do things touch?” Arie asked. “And,” she paused, absent mindedly nudging dark orange delta sand with her foot, “where do they touch?” We were walking along the edge of the Ciliwung river in Jakarta. She had been telling me about the recent big-news eviction and demolition of an old neighborhood on the banks. She’d lived there for some time, working in grassroots organizations trying to build networks of mutual-aid between neighborhoods. She’d moved back after finishing graduate school in London. We wandered and caught up. The banks of the river had been, as city bureaucrats say with a straight face, ‘normalized.’ Canals were being concretized and dredged, residents evicted and their housing demolished. Street fights were erupting between residents and police. Arguments were still unfolding in the courts over the legitimacy of evictions and ownership of riverbank land. Opposite us was the old neighborhood, now a field of shrapnel and the jetsam of livelihoods. The roads hum with the pitch of 150cc engines. Men and women don windbreakers, and sometimes gloves and facemasks as protection from the sun and haze. The horns are constant. The roads holey, packed, and always surging. “The river expands and contracts throughout the year,” she went on. “In the rainy season it bulges, carrying water, sediment, trash, and sewage from upstream hills and neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are catchment areas. Like tributaries but of asphalt. Every surface: roofs, cars, the tops of walls, garbage can lids, everything becomes a conduit when it rains. The river widens its territory.” “Does a river have a territory?” she asked. “Does it makes sense to talk like that?” “So when it widens in the rainy season all these houses get flooded. Sometimes for days at a time. People wade around this water. They are no longer on the banks, they are the river. They become sedimentary particles for a few days. When the floods subside they go back to participating in daily life in the ways they normally do. But there is something about this becoming the river then becoming its banks that is really weird. That is, that the people, we’ll, us, living here, oscillate between being the river and its banks. Like we are deposits. Plus, we are also connected and disconnected from people up river. This is a difficult thing to do, to try to make more meaningful connections between neighborhoods here and neighborhoods around the bend. In ways that link us. The river links us. It moves us around, determining how we can operate, how to survive. It’s not we who make that decision. Our fields of action are constantly determined by it. As if it were our unconscious. But it's hard to make up river connections between people." I jumped up onto the new concrete embankment to walk along it. The color of the world was orange as it turned towards late afternoon. Along the side of the road, small hastily constructed restaurants made from wood, metal, and fabric, often with banners for drinks or tobacco used as partitions, shaded inhabitants taking their lunch. “So what happened with the eviction?” I asked. “Well, it’s been a long, tiresome, and frightening process. The city decides it needs to demonstrate that it is competent. To give the impression that it is capable of doing stuff. So the first people it goes for are the poor. They are the easiest to move around. They can’t put up much of a fight. And the sign of a flattened neighborhood is evidence of progress. It’s all a big display, a spectacle of change. A crane, even if it just sits there for years, or an elevated expressway column, standing with the re-bar sticking out, is the sign of progress. It’s all about governance as the emission of signs.” She shook her foot to loosen sand lodged in her flip-flop. “They change the meaning of the river, what belongs to the river and what belongs to them. The banks become the river and so therefore a space of the state, its property. So they can do what they want with it.” I told her about the bank of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a dispute when a local rich guy bought a bank of the Mississippi: the batture. It was newly created by the river. Its hydraulic action constantly moves sediment from one bank to the other along its entire course. On the inner banks of a bend water moves with greater intensity, on the outside it slows down in the wide swing. In slowing down it can’t carry the same load and deposits sediments, building land. The bend grows inward pushing against the oncoming energy until the river snaps, straightens and starts to meander again. City bureaucrats normalize, rivers meander. The militarized (and deeply paranoid) colonial fort of New Orleans was set on the outside bank of one of these curves; a high-pressure space with a continent’s worth of sediment bearing down on it. The city grew along the edge of this curve into the swamps, spilling over the natural (and dry) levee of the earliest settlement. With enslaved labor, it drained the swampland. By the mid-nineteenth century the city had developed a dense row of slave plantations along both banks of the river and among the ports’ thriving commodity trade. The muddy, thin piece of land that was the Batture, was built by the deposition of the river. It was dynamic with the seasons. An enterprising lawyer from New York wanted in (my favorite description of him: “Livingston brought with him to New Orleans an American perspective on property rights, a New Yorker’s eye for the value of riparian land, a debtor’s nose for easy money, and one of the keenest legal minds in the nation”). He was promised some section of mud by his friend who owned waterfront property on the condition he took it to court and fought for it to be recognized as private. The opportunities were obvious in the country’s fastest growing city. The court ruled in his favor and he quickly showed up to his new land with laborers and construction material to build a private port. He met a riot. Nothing was built. The pitch battles went on for a Summer. The president was called in and argued in favor of the Batture as public commons. It remained so for years until the legal battle eventually swung in favor of both the lawyer and the public. The batture was built out by both the river and the residents. It turned into commercial areas, neighborhoods, wharves, and dumps. And it was no longer a river. But the problem, of course, is that while it flipped into something else it never stopped also being the river: when the spring came and water levels rose parts of the batture flooded. When hurricanes came the river pushed over the sediment barriers, overtopping its banks. New Orleans and Jakarta are both delta cities made in this strange space between river and land, land becoming river becoming land. They flip back and forth all the time. Sometimes we call that a flood, the wet season, a disaster. But then, we also call it a delta. This process has almost everything pitted against the hopes and aspirations we imbue in the idea of property. That wants to be fixed for land to stay as land, not to become river. It is supposed to be a little piece of constant onto which we get to pile up hopes for prosperity or at in a liquid world. Antagonists are these two, land and property. Bluffs On a Sunday, years ago, we visited the bluffs at the far eastern edge of Toronto. We were on a kind of date, an unspoken one. There’s an affluent neighborhood of Victorian houses on the shores of Lake Ontario, which is so large it reaches the horizon. One of the houses used to belong to a well-known landscape painter Doris McCarthy who in the mid-twentieth century would set up her easel on the edge of the bluff. Today it is some of the most expensive property in the country. The bluffs reach up to sixty-five meters high, are sandy and regularly loose chunks to the lake currents which churn them up and deposit them on an archipelago of nearby islands. Those islands also have very expensive properties and old families with money. People on the bluffs hate the islanders for growing as they shrink. So they started to build walls out in the lake. Then the islands began to shrink and the islanders to hate those on the bluffs. At the end of a quiet street we found a little cottage owned by a television personality who had seen some fame in the 1970s. Chatting with a neighbor we learned he’d recently died and left the ownership of his cottage unspecified. This same neighbor also told us about the last biggest slip of the bluff. He’d been sitting on his porch reading the newspaper. It had been raining on and off for days, nothing too unusual for the fall. Then his large beloved willow tree sank into the ground. He watched it. It took two hours. It disappeared uncomfortably like prey into a snake’s mouth. “Did it make a sound?” I asked, to which he replied, “It was mostly silent but the branches brushed the ground. Then sometimes it would crack.” There was nothing to be done. No reversing it. He just sat and watched. “The lake will eventually take our house,” he said. “We’ve probably got a decade, though. I’d say. We’re old, so by that time we might be ready for a nursing home. Go check out old Ken’s place, his went on the same day as the willow. I heard it from here.” Ken, the old TV star, his small blue clapboard siding cottage from the early 1960s was at the end of a narrow overgrown driveway. As we approached we could see the horizon of the lake through the front of the house. There was no rear wall. The ground had fallen halfway beneath the house. It slumped the structure and forced the wall to pop off. We walked to the new edge of the land. It was jagged like a page torn against the grain. We could see the dinner table still there. Cups and saucers still on the counter. Shredded pink insulation hung out of the poché and shingles draped from the roof. The rest of the debris scattered down the bluff toward the shoreline where the remnants of the willow, now a whitened, denuded log, mixed in with the bits of the house and lake currents. We talked about decay and how things break and Virginia Woolf. She also loved shorelines as a space of unlikely things touching and turning into each other. The spaces on which stability, beauty, and hopes are projected and into which they can’t hold, broken apart by the intervention of unlikely things, eddies, sediment, the rip of waves. One of the shorelines succumbing to the lake is a few kilometres away from Ken’s house in Lyme Regis; it’s named after the town in the UK with an equally volatile shore. Like the rest of British Upper Canada, Scarborough’s place-names were imported from the old country. See also, London, Peterborough, Kent, Kingston, and Waterloo. Lyme Regis, in Scarborough, is peculiar because it actually looks like the Dorset Coast, only less accessible. The British Lyme Regis was also an epicenter of the development of ideas about shorelines because of the wealth of fossils exposed by the fragile Jurassic and Triassic aged cliffs. They too constantly fell into the ocean. One notable event occurred on Christmas Eve 1839. The land began to crack in long wavy fissures, slipping down a few feet. People could hear it as it tore. Later that night a large piece of land including pasture and wheat fields split like an iceberg from a glacier and sunk down hundreds of meters into the ocean. It was so heavy that it compressed the land in front of it into an archipelago of islands and earthen columns. The next day a few geologists visited the site and wrote that the 200-foot cliffs were features of a “beautiful ruin.” Quoting an unnamed poet, the “crags, mounds, and knolls confusedly hurled presents at once a complete picture of the characteristic features of this broken ground.” The shoreline, rifty with “indentations, and often deep troughs, [earth] pipes… [that] often extend far into the subjacent cherty sandstone,” communicates between layers, mixing them. The “undermining effects of water” had riven through the top layer of earth to the “fox mould” (a local term for sand) below and the clayey under-structure, turning it into the texture of peanut butter. The enormous weight pressing upon it slid down to the ocean. Accompanying the geologists’ text were drawings rendered in the style popular before Doris McCarthy’s modernism. One that stood out was of two figures getting intimate with the new shoreline. They were in the foreground, small, in the vastness of the dusky, fragmented landscape. One was standing, the other lying on his front with his hands draped over the edge of the cliff. They stared together as if at an amphitheater. People came from across the country to see the "beauty of the failure." The fields were preserved, still growing wheat, but now in the ocean. Celebratory harvests were held and they sold the products as catastrophe wheat. Word travelled across England. The fissures exposed new fossils of ammonites and fish with feet. People peeled them out of the crevasses and sold them in the fossil shops in town. The catastrophe was linked to the past, as if it were one of a long series. What occurred on Christmas Eve was no exception, it belonged to a depth that was the whole world and all of its past, as if history is a shoreline. Touch Over a year ago I was walking in Jakarta along the Ciliwung watching the machines and people remake the walls of the banks. I stopped in among a crowd who were all watching, and leaned up against a chunk of concrete, beside me a guy sat on a stool smoking. “What’s happening?” I asked. “Normalization.” A hydraulic excavator was set on a floating platform. It gnawed at the banks and the river bend, straightening them. On another platform behind it was a pile of six-meter-long white concrete slabs. Behind on a third platform an excavator picked up the slabs with a metal cable. They’d swing in the air like a pendulum counterbalancing the bobbing of the platform on the water. Sometimes they’d swing so far I imagined the loader toppling into the river and a slab ramming into the wrong thing, like us, the spectators nonchalantly watching. The sound of generators beat against the heat and workers directed the slabs into place with their bodies, slowing the swing’s arc with their weight. Some smoked, sitting down, relaxing, with black caps on and flaps guarding their necks against the sun. I pitied the loader drivers. Their expressions made it look as if working that job was an eternal punishment set on a river that never ended, forever struggling against a buoyant machine. Once the slabs were set in place the bucket of the loader would drive them into place like a hammer. Each slab added a meter to the length of the wall in only a half hour. Fourteen meters a day. No matter the distance, this isn’t about efficiency. It is the spectacle of progress and the building of a new normal, an announcement made in puffs of black generator smoke, the loud pounding of concrete in mud, and fragile bodies. We all watched as the city was inserted between the river and its banks. This space between the river and its banks has a brutal history in Jakarta too. When the Dutch first built their (also paranoid) fortified settlement they brought with them hydrological engineering from home. It was originally a murky entanglement of canals and solid ground. Water carried ships in and out loaded with commodities, and waste and sewage flowed out into the bay. It was located at the meeting point of several rivers that drained the volcanoes and hills to the south. This mixture has always stunk. Some of the earliest travelers’ accounts of the place describe how bad it smelled. It was also a malaria den. As the city grew deeper into the delta the canals expanded with it. By the twentieth century, the bulging city was still using the canals for the same purposes. By the twenty-first century the shipping had largely shifted to industrial ports, the population was pushing thirty million and the old canals, barely modified, had to carry all that extra weight. Throughout the rainy season the city was constantly flooding. The riverbanks maintained a legal uncertainty. Who did they belong to? Migrants would fill the banks with cheap housing as a way to jump-start new lives. Some settlements would flourish into complex, longstanding neighborhoods liable to legal recognition under state settlement rights. What was initially infrastructure became property. Or rather, it operated as both at the same time. In the eyes of some it was infrastructure, for others it was home. For many of the urban poor home was simultaneously infrastructure, as if the factory of industrial times had shifted to the canal. Working on, living in, becoming part of the city infrastructure was the new factory floor. Arie’s two questions: How do things touch? Where do they touch? This is why they’ve stuck: they seem so obvious they must be hiding something profound. The second one is usually where I begin. Is it the whole river or lake that touches the bank? On the Ciliwung, is it the whole of the catchment area, all the way up into the volcanoes in Bandung? Do the volcanoes touch the bank? Are they also the bank? Or is it more discrete. I’m not sure. Does it not depend on the scale at which you look and what it is you hope to find? Where does the whole start and stop? Part to whole relationships are mysterious. How much of our talking about a whole is just a result of our laziness, of not knowing how to actually account for the individual relations between parts. Presumably, relations between parts are not the same as they aggregate up in scale. How do we know that objects don’t supersede their relationships? The Ciliwung has eddies in its corners that act in ways different to the whole, they transcend it and create a new environment. In that eddy a kid might go harvesting plastic, which he will sell for cash. Parts enter relationships that don’t exhaust their parts. When the relationships perish, like when the kid moves on, the parts remain, the eddy continues to eddy. How do things touch? I’ve realized that this question is what I’ve been trying to figure out in Nusantara. I keep coming back, my thinking circling around bodies, rocks and how they touch. Sometimes it’s big rocks; like volcanoes, and how bodies touch them. Sometimes it’s islands, mountains, quarries, and bodies. And all the things that come in between them, that mediate their touching and that transform what bodies can feel and how. This is the problem of intimacy. That’s what happens when a body touches sand, a volcano, sees it through binoculars, or holds a seismograph. Driving a concrete wall between the river and the bank is a form of intimacy. Pitch battles are forms of intimacy. Private property is a form of intimacy. Intimacy is the attempt to make things touch. It’s only through an intimate act that the river is turned into the bank, only intimacy enacts forms of mediation that allow things to touch in certain ways. Only through intimacy do unlikely things touch. Seismologists know all about this. My friend Cordula showed me a film she had made showing the hands of seismologists moving while they describe how earthquakes work: they always shove their hands together, fold them and slowly run one underneath the other. And this is supposed to be the mantle of the earth? But it is through this minute and fragile gesture that we are sent to imagining the scale of the planet. This is the act of intimacy, to translate across scales, to bring the scale of our bodies into contact with bigger scales. That’s the space where something passes. A quantum of sensation that bears in its form and content: contact. Perhaps sense is this contact. Yet the river never reaches the bank and the river is only the bank.

—Desk#:Moscow

The Russian Revolution in Dreams and Reality

By Ilya Budraitskis

In January 2014 the world held its breath and observed the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The spectacular opening ceremony, “Dreams of Russia,” was not simply a technical triumph but also a marvel of national history building. The depicted historical events acquired connections and a certain mutual continuity, building a chain of bright and majestic images told through a vision dreamed by a young girl. It must have been difficult for the modern Russian state to find a better form to invent its own place in history, one cleansed of any contradictions and conflicts, than the reconstruction of a dream. It is precisely in this space, which Freud called “the dream work,” that it is possible to realize the most cherished of repressed desires. The place of authentic history is taken up by an imagined history in which dreams form a “logical connection by approximation in time and space.” Freud compares the energy of dreams with an artist portraying all the poets who, in reality, had never been assembled together, on the summit of Parnassus in a single group. The restless dream state in which slumbering Russian society continues to dwell remains the strongest substance with which the Putinist state connects the disparate and successfully resolves the agonizing issue of its own legitimacy. Indeed, it was precisely according to a Parnassus-like principle that the program of historical exhibitions of recent years have been constructed and organized by the combined forces of church and state, in particular the exhibitions devoted to the Romanov and Rurik Dynasties. Hand in hand, though they belong in different epochs and often find themselves antagonistic toward one another, the knights and tsars, in unison, greet the museumgoers rushing to an appointment with their own history. It is in this harmony, created by the fantasy of the Russian state, that the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet epochs or Nikolai II, Stalin, and Putin all rub shoulders. This imagined unity is bound by one thing only: the displacement of revolution, a historical explosion which must be consigned to oblivion and have an anathema pronounced upon it. Countering the revolutionary threat in Russia is one of the pillars of the present reigning ideology, accompanied by a strategy of repressive work on the past. This work acquires special significance with the approach of the centenary of the second Russian Revolution. At the end of last year, Putin, meeting with historians, spoke of the necessity of “an objective evaluation” of the events of 1917 from which lessons could be learned, by which he means to find a way to ensure there would be no repeat revolution in the future. Shortly after, Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s odious minister of culture, who lays claim to the role of chief ideologue of the ‘historical policy’ of the current regime, outlined the main theses of these ‘lessons’: recognition of the continuity of historical development from the Russian Empire, through the USSR, to contemporary Russia; recognition of the tragedy of social schism; understanding the error of relying on the help of foreign allies; and condemnation of the ideology of revolutionary terror. The culmination of this government program, according to Medinsky, should be the inauguration of a monument to the “reconciliation in the Civil War” in the Crimea. In Medinsky’s view, “a visible and powerful symbol established there where the Civil War ended will be the best way to demonstrate that it really has ended.” So the main lesson which society, in accordance with this plan, should draw is not only that the revolution was terrible but also that it was superfluous. It turns out that 1917 had no constitutive meaning (even though one pays one’s dues by mourning its unnecessary sacrifices), it was not the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one because fortunately both are united in the logic of the existing state whose monument will be the reconciling ‘Parnassus’ of Crimea. In this way, the ‘objective evaluation’ that Putin expects from historians comes down to proving that the revolution was the result of a foreign conspiracy and the extremist ideology of a bunch of malefactors. It is already clear that the old myth that financial support from the German General Staff was the main reason for the Bolshevik success is once again gaining traction. Among historians, Boris Mironov, a professor from Saint Petersburg University, stands out. In his sweeping work The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia 1700–1917, aided by a massive quantity of anthropometric data, he attempts to prove that the weight, height, and quantity of calories consumed by the majority of the population in pre-revolutionary Russia was inexorably rising. According to Mironov, even World War I did not prevent the Russian peasantry from enjoying their abundant diet. Poverty and the exploitation of the peasantry in the Russian Empire is a myth implying that the revolution was nothing other than the result of the active role of ‘Russian radicals’. Mironov constitutes a particularly impressive example of how a vulgar materialist analysis can be successfully combined with an equally vulgar conspiracy theory. The revolution took place only because the conspirers were not rendered harmless in time. So the ‘lesson’ of the revolution is intended, first of all, for the police. Again returning to Freud, one can compare it to the ‘censorship’ function of the dream, a function that includes a repressive crackdown on any unsanctioned interventions in its field. Before us is a new model, striking in its coherence and base nature, of the ‘normalization’ of the revolution with which Russia will greet its centenary. Outside the limits of this model there is nothing but a tinkling of tacit approval. The liberal opposition, for all its hatred of the existing regime, is remarkably ready to accept this version of events: One must liberate oneself from the revolution. Such liberation from the revolutionary legacy is seen by the Russian liberal as a necessary part of the program of ‘de-Sovietization’ (close in spirit to the current Ukrainian reality), which proposes the dismantling of ‘Soviet’ institutions and monuments symbolizing revolutionary violence against citizens. The functionaries of the Russian Communist Party (KPRF), who almost vanished from the public sphere, are also ready to accept the ‘lessons’ of the revolution proposed by Putin and Minister Medinsky. If liberals choose to disavow the revolution along with displaying a willingness to demolish statues then the communists choose to preserve the monuments while renouncing revolution. Buried alive in the monuments and symbols of the Brezhnev era, now entirely devoid of political meaning, the memory of the revolution morphs into an organic, seamless part of the conservative, anti-revolutionary, ruling-class project in Russia. This emerging consensus of consigning anything reminiscent of the revolution to oblivion is connected with the displacement of politics in contemporary Russia. In Echoes of the Marseillaise, Eric Hobsbawm presents a substantial picture of the transformation of interpretations of the French Revolution in the subsequent two centuries. The great revolution of the eighteenth century remained an incomplete project, but its significance and meaning was constantly subject to redefinition while remaining at the center of political discussion and of utmost significance at each new historical turning point. According to Hobsbawm, “in the year of its bi-centenary the French Revolution was no jolly old holiday at which millions of tourists gathered […] for it represented a set of events so powerful and universal in their influence that they had transformed the world in many ways and roused […] forces which continue this work of transformation.” These “roused forces” that revealed new elements of the revolutionary legacy, became manifest in the uprisings of the nineteenth century and the Paris Commune, in the struggles of the Communists in the 1920s, the Resistance during World War II, and the students protests in May 1968. The recognition of the French Revolution during each of these periods was in constant flux but nevertheless remained a territory within which one could continually reevaluate the main protagonists and parties. Yet there was an unchanging appreciation that this was a large-scale event after which nothing could remain as it was before. The revolution remained on its path as memory, preventing society from falling into slumber, time and again marking points of discord and thus creating obstacles to the installation of any post-political consensus. Toward the end of the 1980s, when French intellectuals registered the crisis of mass movements, traditional political parties, and the devaluation of political meaning, “the fidelity to the event” (in the words of Alain Badiou) of universal revolutions—both the French and the Russian—remained a constant horizon of hope that history would continue on its path and that the sacrifices had not been in vain. Today in Russia the sense of ideological deadlock and a deep political crisis is felt more acutely, dramatically, and with greater pessimism than in France on the eve of the bicentenary of its revolution. The desire to bury the revolution by erecting a preposterous monument of ‘reconciliation’ on its tomb is a desire sealed by fear. An attempt is being made to persuade us that violence and terror are the only results when society reawakens and that this fact is the main ‘lesson’ to be learned from the revolution, and we are all obliged to learn it. Yet what happened in 1917 is already impossible to expunge, not only from the past but also from the future. Revolutionary events, anathematized or hidden under lock and key, probably have not yet had the moment when they can be revealed and grasped. Translated by Giuliano Vivaldi

—Desk#:Istanbul

Human Traffic

By Alev Scott

In Istanbul there is an elite band of commuters, a lucky few who pass serenely from one continent to another in an unbroken path. While their terrestrial counterparts stagnate in miles of miserable traffic, ferry passengers ride in the slipstream of Jason and the Argonauts and Mehmet the Conqueror, crossing a stretch of water that cuts majestically through the most congested city on earth and disappears into expanses of sea at either end. The Bosphorus is the subject of countless romantic clichés. It is also the school run, the shuttle to work, the twenty minutes factored into an errand. It is a ball gown worn every day, a beautiful constant in a city held hostage by a mania for concrete expansion. Istanbul’s residents treat it with fond practicality; in recent decades, they have crossed it ever more resourcefully, over a choice of two bridges—soon to be three—or via a newly constructed submarine tunnel. True to its unlovely etymology (βους-πορος, ancient Greek for “ox passage”), it is still used primarily for trade, carrying vast tankers and cargo ships whose crews consult a daily timetable to keep track of traffic. Watch the straits for any longer than five minutes and you lose track of individual vessels—the seemingly random trajectories of ferries, cargo ships, and fishing boats traveling at varying speeds interlace the water with choreographic skill and remarkably little incident. The municipal ferries that currently dominate the Bosphorus were designed in 1961 in a shipyard in Glasgow. They are long, elegant steamers painted white, green, and black, three stories of open-air deck for summer days and enclosed wooden seats for winter, when the old men who walk among the crowds advertising “Tea! Delicious toast!” attract the most customers. As the boat chugs away from shore, seagulls swarm above the stern, wheeling and diving competitively for the hail of sesame-covered bread pieces thrown into the wind by a delighted audience. Leaving Europe, the boat passes Byzantine churches on the cusp of the Marmara Sea, beyond them a sprinkling of waiting tankers from Panama, Hong Kong, Moscow; ten minutes later, a huge dockyard full of Chinese cargo crates on the Asian shore gives way to a neoclassical train station, the nineteenth-century northern terminus of the extinct Baghdad Railway. A few seasoned passengers do not even lift their eyes from their newspapers or phones to take in this spectacular historical slideshow; most do, looking up instinctively at their favorite points or simply staring out to sea. Tourists and children become positively overwhelmed, hurrying from one side of the boat to the other, greedily snapping with their phones or stretching over the side, transfixed by the furious froth of the churned-up water, white over green. As the boat approaches land, the al fresco passenger notes the dying of the wind and the accompanying lull of the engine, before stepping onto shore, exhilarated by relentless exposure to the elements. Now picture an ergonomic catamaran resembling a Nike trainer. I was unreasonably upset by the appearance of this new kind of ferry, especially by the darkened windows of the hermetically sealed seating space, which confines passengers to an air-conditioned, portable waiting room with vending machines and flat-screen TVs advertising cleaning products while the glories of Constantinople pass by unheeded. Almost more offensive was the token handful of outside seats on the tiny top deck, allowing interested customers to avail themselves of the sights at a safe distance from the sea: a waiting room with a view. Many have written on the experience of travel, on the value of a sense of movement and space, and, conversely, the ‘unreal’ experience of traveling by car or plane. Recently, I flew from Turkey to South Africa and watched, like a trapped fly, the progress of an animated plane flying over the vast expanse of Africa on a tiny screen inches from my face. As the hours slipped by, so did the countries—Egypt, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe—weeks of earthbound travel compressed neatly into nine hours and forty minutes of pixelated progress. It encapsulated what Will Self calls “the discombobulation of space and time effected by modern transport,” and in me, it produced a feeling akin to the guilt of cheating. There I was, flitting passively into the airspace of these incredible countries, mentally ticking them off as the computerized plane left them trailing behind on a finger-smudged map. In no sense was I a ‘traveler’ at that point, merely someone who had clicked judiciously on a computer, one of the frequent flyers described by Self as “wholly credulous consumers of the Promethean charade, ever on their way to wrest the Calibri lighter of the gods from a duty-free shop in Dubai Airport.” I am not advocating airline abstinence. But when we are offered an opportunity to travel actively—taking in the sounds and smells of the sea, for example, rather than sitting blankly at the portable waiting room—should we not seize it? Or is this the same, sentimental attitude expressed by critics of the first automobiles, the conservative lovers of the horse and cart? Am I an old fogey? What makes my preference for the old ferries even harder to defend are the undoubted benefits of the new model, which was introduced with great fanfare by the Istanbul Municipality in May. Grudgingly, I enumerate them here: The catamaran is capable of taking off without turning round and is therefore more fuel-efficient and faster. It also allows easier access for passengers in wheelchairs, and is equipped with baby changing rooms. All excellent attributes and more immediately obvious than the indefinable qualities of the traditional ferry trip, which is itself, of course, probably a pale imitation of the wooden paddleboat trips of the early nineteenth century. All the same, like Dylan Thomas I “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” the spray, the wind, the gulls and the cormorants—the entire cast, sound, and lighting effects of the cinematic crossing I described earlier. The new catamarans will gradually phase out the old ferries, joining the modernized fleets already operated by private boat lines—the Istanbul Sea Bus company (IDO), for example, has used catamarans for years. The Bosphorus is a teeming battleground for rival enterprises, the latest of which is none other than Uber, which now offers a private water taxi service. “Uberboats” have immediate appeal, if you can afford them. What could be more hedonistic than summoning a private speedboat with the tap of a finger, stepping into a Bond film as the wind whips your hair and a uniformed captain transports you to your coast of choice as others queue up for the half-hourly ferry? Uberboats are the most obviously glamorized example of the commercialization of the Bosphorus, freeing moneyed travelers from the turnstile and the timetable, the grubby reality of a public service. Money—there’s the rub. If you have money, you can hire a speedboat anywhere in the world and you will always feel like Bond. What is special about a Bosphorus ferry is its communality, the fact that everyone from a grumpy worker to a bleary-eyed fashionista can be found on the same early morning commute, on a stately boat that has been a familiar sight for more than fifty years. The ferry is part of the rhythm of the city, of the practicality and sense of purpose that makes the Bosphorus much more than a scenic stretch of water. Rob Horning, who writes about the hypocrisy of the ‘sharing economy’ of which Uber is a prime example, points out that “actual sharing is inexplicable, unreal.” Uber sells itself as a community that harmoniously promotes everyone’s best interests, but Horning calls it “an anti-community in which empathy and conviviality are tactics and no succor may be extended without a price attached.” In other words, give me my five stars or you will not get yours—and if you think I will not charge extra when demand is high, you are adorably naive. Alternatively, if you want to travel cheaply, welcome aboard the new, sanitized space capsule, which will transport you as efficiently as possible between the shores of the most romantic city in the world. We have always used the Bosphorus for transportation. Today, we are in danger of becoming Ubercargo, paying βους. So if anyone is listening, SOS.

—Desk#:Nusantara

Fuck your Culture: Nudes in Four Landscapes

By Adam Bobbette

Can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste? —Charles Darwin, 19 March 1835, on the HMS Beagle Ontario I grew up in southern Ontario’s vast deciduous forest. One side of my house faced down a hill into massive swampland, the other side a glacial ridge that had been turned into a ski resort. Everywhere in between were suburban housing tracts: clover leafs, four-way-stops, and cul-de-sacs with names like Forest Hills and Acorn Lanes. Most were built during the thirty-year slow leak away from urban cores, the same story as just about everywhere in rural North America: the deindustrialization of resource-based economies. Simultaneously there was the timid inching away from the countryside to urban peripheries as farming was industrialized and small operations evacuated. Many of the forests I knew intimately were created in this process; they were tree farms of conifers planted in grid patterns like Manhattan streets. Their repetitive form and vast scale expressed their industrial origins. The forest grids abutted cul-de-sacs, uncultivated bits, the state spaces of parks and reserves, patches that uneasily came together in an assemblage of memory. As teenagers we were drawn to the older, wilder forests vast enough we could escape our obligations in them. By returning to them on weekends to camp and on weekday evenings until sunset drove us home we would slowly domesticate them by bringing their wildness into us. We went back to the same dead tree to dive our heels into its rotting flesh, to the same bank of a creek to pick its stones and toss them into the forest. We wanted the dense red sound of rock hitting wood. There was also the abandoned tree house made of a couple of moldy boards on which we would talk or lie down and hear the leaves. We familiarized ourselves with the contours of the forest by slowly venturing off our regular pathways, taking in new slices, driven by boredom or special occasions like showing off to new friends. This work of domestication was ongoing, sometimes through surprising strategies. Nick, a friend, lived a few miles down the road from me. Our houses were connected by the same train track so we would often walk along it to meet each other, which took about an hour. It was a corridor with one wall of forest, the other of concrete separating a suburb. We would talk while rhythmically stepping on every second or third railroad pile or trying to balance along the steel track. One afternoon my friend told me a story that happened a few days earlier. He was nervously confiding in me but also trying to boast. We could speak with a tentative honesty about fragile things, groping through the differences between shame, pride, and humor. A few days before, he told me, he had been wandering alone in the woods. As was customary, he was listening to very loud music, his mind barely in the landscape. Instead, he was daydreaming, thinking about school, about the comics he was drawing that involved lots of olives. Then his batteries died and his mind was back in the forest, its sounds of broken branches and rustled leaves. He was overcome by the sense of solitude and openness, or a strange sense of being in public while absolutely private. It was summer, bright and hot. He sunk into it. He undid his pants, still unsure of himself, worried that someone might appear. His hearing heightened to every crack and rustle. He grabbed himself, slowly oscillating between anonymity and the fear of reprisal, the intrusion of a stranger, until the forest disappeared again and he was alone in his pleasure. He came on the forest floor. Quickly the room of branches and patterned birdcalls returned. In the calm, and half naked, the busy life of the forest floor snapped into focus. The world of ants and mushrooms. The texture of bark on the hand. He scanned the background once more for onlookers, with a sense of guilt, and inseparable from that, exuberance. In the silence of the afternoon he pulled his pants up, exhaled, and slowly continued walking. Mt Kinabalu In June 2015, a group of Western tourists went hiking up Mt Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo, Southeast Asia’s highest peak. When they arrived at the summit they took their clothes off, then took a group photo. Their backs turned to the camera, their fronts facing the valley below. A few weeks later an earthquake struck the mountain. Guides and hikers were killed, but none of the tourists. During the relief efforts the photos of the Western tourists were leaked and it was speculated that there was a link between their nudity and the earthquake. The minister of tourism in Sabah, the region of Kinabalu, suggested their indiscretions had angered the gods of the mountain. People wanted vengeance, that they be tried in local courts. The Malaysian police caught the tourists as they were trying to flee the country. They went to trial soon afterward amidst a media storm in Malaysia and abroad. The cover of the British tabloid The Sun read: “Your Boobs have Angered Mountain Gods.” Ronny Cham, a British-trained Malaysian barrister, practicing in Sabah since the early 1980s, defended them. He pressed them to plead guilty or face a drawn-out trial of six months to two years and an extended stay in prison without bail. They were fined a little over $1000 USD each, spent a few nights in jail, then were deported. Cham is a born-again Christian and when I asked him about the links between nudity and the earthquake he said: “I can tell you what the Bible says about earthquakes, but this is something nobody is interested in. However, could it have happened if it was not God who had moved the foundation of the earth and the heavens? Mount Kinabalu was shaken, shattered, bruised!” In the middle of this, Emil Kaminski appeared on the scene. He is a wayward, international troll with pretensions as a cultural critic and 10,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. His videos are of his buddies and him traveling around the world showcasing their irreverence. They move with the desultory air of nineteenth-century colonials cross-pollinated with Jackass machismo and faux-hawk rebellion. On his Facebook and YouTube pages he intervened in the unfolding of the accusations against the tourists by posting nude photos of himself on mountains he claimed were Kinabalu, though he was never there, as if he felt a duty to intervene. He made commentary videos insulting the “stupidity” of Malaysians, slashing their “superstitions” with the pride and self-righteousness of a Richard Dawkins. In one, he stated, “Fuck your culture!” claiming they did not know anything about plate tectonics, nor that gods no longer have agency in our world. It was a successful trolling campaign that attracted thousands of frustrated comments and threats of violence from Malaysians on his Facebook page. He had successfully amped his fame and by accident broadened the reach of the story of the nude photos in the press, which, for the most part, mistook that Kaminski was actually in the photos and part of the group that stripped. Five days after the earthquake he posted a manipulated photo of himself on his Facebook page. He was shirtless with camouflage shorts and a gun in each hand. His arms were spread and he stood in front of a valley. Photoshopped flames erupted in the foreground while fighter jets crashed in the back and Godzilla peeked over the horizon. In the early 1990s the French sociologist and anthropologist of science Bruno Latour published We Have Never Been Modern. Its central argument is that Western modernity was founded on the idea that there is a fundamental distinction in kind between nature and society. He called this the “modern Constitution.” This Constitution was drafted in the halls and backrooms of states but also circulated through scientific laboratories. So thoroughly did it operate, according to him, that, on the one hand, science saw itself as accessing the natural world and bringing back its results to the human world, while, on the other, politics concerned itself with the operations of human beings and the so-called social. The two were never to mix. This Constitution underpinned the very distinction we often hold between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. His contribution was to point out how false this distinction has been. That while the Constitution has been handed down over generations of sociologists, politicians, and scientists, that it is folded up in their wallets with their family photos, it never adequately described reality. Instead, science and politics have produced all sorts of hybrids of nature and culture, unholy mixtures, Frankensteins. That has been the real work of the modern Constitution, claiming the separation of the spheres, policing them, while at the same time producing hybrid mixtures of nature-cultures. It just cannot recognize them because it does not know how to look for them or talk about them. Kaminski is one of the police of the modern Constitution, or, perhaps better, its rent-a-cop. Of course, he says, the causal chain between bared naked bodies, gods, and plate tectonics is an illusion. It just does not fit the modern Constitution. Nature is on one side, with its own peculiar laws and culture is on the other. Never shall they mix. He arrived to clear away all the bad mixtures, to correctly align causal chains, to separate earth systems from religion, from social acts. And it is no surprise this was a violent act. The enforcement of the modern Constitution is often an act of denudation, of exposure, of baring it all. This is a modern conception of truth, that truth is nudity and that once we expose nature for what it actually is, we will all agree because it will be in plain sight. There will be no basis for disagreement because truth as nudity is indisputable, unless, as Kaminski says, you are an idiot. But the modern Constitution does not actually work like this. Instead, it creates more beguiling creatures of nature that refuse to be exposed, bared, nude. Nature forms deep alliances between unlike things. This is the queer Darwin. Darwin on the HMS Beagle, of The Origin of Species, Darwin with his worms late in life: a nature that is over productive of mixtures, not fixed forms. A nature of ever more complex agencies in which taxonomies are convenient fictions that soon become obsolete tales and begin to sound like fantasy.

To see in a way outside of the modern Constitution, I suggest we start thinking more like an earthquake. This will also nudge us understanding these four vignettes of nudity in nature.

Kinabalu is a granite pluton, a cooled magma mass pushed up through the crust. It is seismically active because of its position (as with all of Borneo) on the Sunda plate. A stressful plate to be. From the east, the Philippine plate is diving underneath Sunda, pushing it upward and to the west. From the south, the Molucca and Banda plates push it to the north. To the southwest, the massive Indo-Australian plate is also pushing it north. These are like vises on all sides of the Sunda plate, constantly cranking tighter. When it crosses a threshold of pressure, torsions and slippages shoot through the plate mass. Rocks are just really slow liquids. Shift your timescale and the whole crust of the planet is oceanic. Change your sensitivity to that of a seismograph and you will feel that the entire mass is heaving with waves. This is what an earthquake is, rocks behaving as waves. And like the ocean, it is happening all the time but sometimes they get bigger. That is an earthquake, a big wave traveling along a grain of rock like it is wood. Kinabalu is one of these slow-motion waves that sometimes other waves crash into it and budge it along a little further. The long colonial presence on Kinabalu has urbanized its flanks, cut in roads, camp sites, connected it to metropolises, sent a steady stream of observations and packages of its flora and fauna. Pre-colonial high-altitude excursions seem rare among indigenous and early Chinese settlers. The taste for high altitudes was a particularly nineteenth-century European invention. While mountains have long played a role in the imaginary of many traditions, it was not (with few exceptions) until the cosmological crisis of deep time and a waning Christianity that people began to climb mountains to see what was on top. In line with this, the first recorded European expeditions to the summits of Kinabalu left in their wake a topographical nomenclature of officers, capitalists, and royalty: Low’s Peak, King George Peak, Victoria Peak, St. John’s Peak. Naturalist and colonial administrator Sir Hugh Low and consul in Brunei Sir Spencer St. John made several expeditions to the summit for the view and to collect plant and insect specimens. Between 1850 and 1950 there were at least fifty-three major, recorded expeditions by colonials from Britain, Holland, Japan, the United States, and Denmark. This does not count purely touristic or minor excursions, nor the hundreds of tourists every year in the later part of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Fifty excursions is a drastic understatement. Each expedition would bring back substantial specimen collections. For instance, in 1887 John Whitehead collected 300 birds. G.D. and H.A. Havilland in 1892, at least 197 plant species. C.M. Enriquez in 1925, 218 butterflies, 140 birds, 17 small mammals, uncounted mosses, insects, and spiders. In 1904 Goss and Dodge, at least 47 animal skins. Gibbs and Maxwell in 1910, collected 1000 plants. Clemens and Topping in 1915, at least 255 orchids and ferns. In 1933, Carr, 700 plants; Griswold 93 birds in 1937. And this total of 2967 specimens is a cursory and likewise substantially understated survey. Each expedition carried off significant numbers of plants and animals, and sent them back to botanical gardens, museums, and university departments around the globe. This cosmopolitanism of Kinabalu has reconfigured the ecology of the mountain itself. As tourists wore circulation paths into its slopes they created corridors for lowland wildlife to inhabit higher altitudes. For instance, rats have infiltrated the upper reaches. One 1969 expedition narrated by a Cambridge naturalist encountered this new cosmopolitanism: Though cold, we slept well. I was disturbed in the early part of the night by a rat, investigating my head. It snuffled and walked over me for some time, before giving the back of my neck an exploratory nip; my sharp reaction frightened it off for good. This was the only one of its kind that we encountered during the whole trip, although previous visitors have been plagued by them. Chickens have also long played roles in the tricky reversals of Kinabalu. Some people responded to the nude tourists by saying that local villages would have to sacrifice chickens to the mountain gods for forgiveness. Kaminski considered this proof of Sabah’s backwardness. In the histories of expeditions it was often repeated that Europeans had to give chickens to their guides for payment to the mountain spirits. An academic excursion in the 1960s raised a collective eyebrow and considered the possibility they were being scammed. No one had seen any of these ritual slaughters. What if they were keeping them for subsistence? A payment to the gods is an excellent additional cost that Europeans respectful of ‘ancient ways’ would find hard to refuse. The excursions and souvenirs of colonial visitors were broadly in the name of revealing the mechanisms of nature. As they exposed it they also reformatted the conditions for new and unexpected kinds of mixtures. The epistemological violence of Kaminski’s nude body frantically waving the modern Constitution is one retrograde response to this. When the vices of plate tectonics squeeze they exacerbate these mixtures and encounters that no denudation can overcome. A rat follows on your heels, bites you on the neck, and eats your dinner. A chicken dupes you. Your nude body suddenly becomes responsible for an earthquake. It begins to make sense retroactively. The earthquake mangles the orderly, linear progression of time, it loops into the past and situates those nude bodies at its origin. And it duped Kaminski. The earthquake is smarter than he. I wish Kaminski were charged. If only he were brought to court so Kinabalu could testify against him. I wish the tourists had to pay in chickens. Because they caused the earthquake. This is the genius of plate tectonics. Everest George Mallory’s body was found in 1999, seventy-five years after his death. A team on their way to Everest’s summit spotted it. He was face down, his skull buried in rock. His back was exposed, large and rounded, still fleshy, and shinning white. They said he looked and felt like marble. His clothes were shredded. The flesh on his legs gone, exposing only bones with fractures, splintered from his fall. Concealed and exposed by the mountain’s erratic but incessant patterns of snow, sun, wind; his body was slowly eroding like the mountain itself. Mallory's nudity was a form of slow decay. He was redistributed and recirculated around the planet. According to the philosophy of erosion, the world is a recirculating material, entering into ever-new arrangements and combinations. Every object, even our own bodies, are utterances of global processes of material mixtures. While each and every object adds something new to the world and a novel condition for the production of even more new objects. Mallory’s body is now Everest, as nude as the eroding mountain. Yet, it is eroding over the Himalayas into the Gobi. It is filling the dusty, particulate air of Beijing and the dust mask of a woman riding a scooter through its streets. In a letter from much earlier in his life to his father, Mallory wrote: “My generation grew up with a disgust for the appearances of civilization so intense that it was an ever present spiritual discomfort, a sort of malaise that made us positively unhappy. It wasn’t that we simply criticized evils as we saw them and supported movements of reform; we felt such an overwhelming sense of incalculable evil that we were helplessly unhappy.” Is the mountain anti-civilization? Maybe we can tell this story in a different way than “the mountain is retreat or escape” and put it right back in the heart of society while occupying a limit internal to it. A limit of organization and dissolution. The limit of erosion.

When he was young, Mallory wrote: “I am deeply interested in my nude self.” In a photograph that Duncan Grant took of Mallory, just out of Cambridge, he is nude and climbing an imaginary surface. It is one of a series that Grant sent to John Maynard Keynes, his occasional lover. He also knew Keynes would be interested in the beautiful young nude climbing. His body the shape of the mountain in absentia. A flesh diagram. What is more, Grant transported Mallory’s figure onto screens, those indoor partitions you change behind, often covered with landscapes, which interiorize the exterior, while you denude yourself, to change your clothes.

San Fernando Valley The films were destroyed, it is true, in a fire caused by an earthquake. Apparently, they were of Lillian and Charles Richter hiking naked in the valley. Long reels of walking. Rucksacks, no clothes. Scrub. They had spent a lot of time in the new nudist camps that had emerged in the valley in the 1930s, imports of the German Nacktkultur [nude culture]: vegetarianism and fresh air. Purity in the weather. Some early films were set in the camps, portraying the nudists cutting wood, riding bikes, cooking dinner. There is no sign of Richter, but he was often there. He is better known for developing the standard scale (bearing his name) that calculated the magnitude of an earthquake no matter its distance from the seismograph. Like most universal measures, it was a technique of translation: it made marks on the seismograph comparable and assigned them universal values in magnitudes. All earthquakes could be compared according to how they registered on the scale. Before, an earthquake was understood by the way it was felt and the traces it left in broken buildings and landscapes. In Europe and the colonies, individuals would submit to newspapers their reports of earthquakes, how long they were, what they felt like, where they were. There was a whole vocabulary for sensations of trembling. These were collated by scientists and reconstructed into accounts of movements of the earth. The early seismic maps of Switzerland for instance, were compiled primarily from witness accounts drawn across the countryside by wandering scientists. Bodily experience began to wane from seismology under the dual pressures of expertise and accuracy. They reinforced each other in such a way that only experts could guarantee accuracy. The personal accounts of people were considered too singular, eccentric, and prone to error. Though we should keep in mind that our maps of planetary fault lines and plate boundaries are based on data drawn from this period before accuracy became the ruling ideology of science. What we now see as the objective space of a map of plate tectonics is a post-facto assemblage of dispersed bodily sensations. Richter’s scale was an additional stage in this long process toward universal standards of measurement that removed the sensate flesh from its contact with the ground. He brought the modern Constitution to the San Fernando Valley. How could he build a tool that attacked the sensing body while insisting on his own nudist adventures, to bear it all for the valley while deeply distrusting the body as an organ of knowledge and experience? It is as if Richter’s nudism was a way to trivialize the body, to free it of its labor. Or, to allow it a simple kind of nudity, one that is defined negatively, as unchained, unburdened with the necessity to sense. Or, nudism as purity in the sense of the Garden before the fall, the nude which is not actually nude in a landscape because there is no knowledge of nudity. It is nudity beyond all flesh, before flesh becomes endowed with the possibility of any ‘exposure’ or ‘revealing’. This is nudity without world to intervene and mangle it. Getting naked in a landscape occurs in this state between exposure as vulnerability and exposure as violence. Exposure as violence is driven by a desire for opening and revealing, to create a world where everything is there to be seen, its machinations and inner workings all laid out, as if the world could become transparent. Nested in this is a desire for communication, to break down the distance between us and the world, for knowledge to act as a form of unification that would bridge an essential loneliness. Knowledge as nudity is seeking a form of communion, a kind of togetherness, a touch or embrace with the world.

—Desk#:Moscow

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