Third Text
Issues
Volume 37, 2023
Issue 3
Number 182, May 2023
Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography 309–328
Cammie Tipton-Amini
British contemporary photographer Martin Parr’s collection ‘7 Colonial Still Lifes’ (2005) delivers banal and benign images of remnants of British colonisation in Sri Lanka. While Parr’s early collection ‘The Last Resort’ (1986) was harshly critiqued for its judgmental lens on the working-class British, some identified a contemporary ‘othering’ in Parr’s imagery. This line of reasoning was not explored to its fullest extent. Forming a postcolonial reading, I argue that what Parr’s critics have missed (or dismissed) is the historical legacy of British colonial photography. The images from ‘The Last Resort’ bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection ‘Street Life in London’ (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. However, in his still life photographs Parr trains his probing critical lens on empire itself, with much more successful results.
Cinematic Cartographies: Mapping the Queer Roma Spaces in ‘Brothers of the Night’ 329–345
Izabella Wódzka
Patric Chiha’s film ‘Brothers of the Night’ (2017) depicts a community of Bulgarian Roma sex workers in Vienna, all of them male and self-identifying as heterosexual although working in a gay establishment. Using queer theory and human geography, with particular emphasis on space and time, I analyse how the film shifts and contests the popular stereotyped cinematic representation of Romani people as well as homonormative and Western-centric notions of queerness. In its original aesthetic, narrative structure and hybrid genre it departs from a binary understanding of sexuality and identity, offering instead new ways of portraying queer and marginalised identities on screen.
Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Art as Messianic Spiritual Practice 347–371
Carolin Overhoff Ferreira
Arthur Bispo do Rosário is one of the best-known and most studied Brazilian artists. His work has been discussed and exhibited as art of the unconscious, popular art, modern and contemporary art and, more recently, as Afro-Brazilian art. In this article I will challenge these labels and the idea that Bispo had a psychotic health condition, namely schizophrenia. I discuss how Bispo, whose alleged mental illness was first acknowledged, then silenced or seen as a riddle, was constructed as a Western artist. In due course I dismiss the history of art labels and argue that he developed his work as a messianic spiritual practice and the result of trances. Finally, I suggest that in order to do Bispo and his work justice it is necessary to decolonise the Western history of art. Only if we take into consideration other cosmo-perceptions can we call him an artist and see his work as art.
The Slave Ship and Badagry in Ndidi Dike’s ‘Waka-into-Bondage: The Last 3/4 Mile' 373–390
Okechukwu Nwafor
In 2008 Ndidi Dike, a Nigerian artist, held an exhibition titled ‘Waka-into-Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile’. Curated by Bisi Silva, this exhibition, which responded to ongoing events between 2007 and 2008 as part of the Democrazy series curated by the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Lagos, also served to mark the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. The exhibition depicted the dangerous itineraries that characterised the capture and eventual departure of slaves through Badagry, in western Nigeria, to the New World. In this article I show how Dike deployed certain objects to visually and conceptually accentuate the significance of the slave ship as the epicentre of political and cultural crises during the heyday of capitalism. I argue that Dike reinscribes Badagry in the forgotten narratives of points of origin and attempts to counter a neoliberal reading of Britain’s bicentenary commemoration of the slave trade. In so doing, she presents contemporary society as one where the violent travails and political realities of slave ships are re-enacted.
The Aesthetic Rift: An Eco-Marxist Approach to the Capitalist Spatiality of Art 391–407
Alejandro Pedregal and Jaime Vindel
The development of industrial capitalism led to a reconfiguration of the social function of culture. A commodification of Western culture and fetishisation of art emerged that was inseparable from the expansion of this world system. This historical process consolidated insofar as it produced a series of material and imaginary rifts between interconnected spheres. In this article we analyse the way in which these rifts operated within aesthetics, economics and ecology, positing an eco-Marxist critique of the exhibition space and its associated social experience. Our analysis focuses first on the dawn of industrial modernity, highlighting the colonial and imperial matrix of this Eurocentric project. Secondly, the article underscores how contemporary art and the Great Acceleration of the ecosocial crisis are linked due to an exponential increase in the infrastructures of cultural industries. By exploring these connections, we show how the spatiality of contemporary art is linked to the dynamics that characterise the political, economic and cultural global system, interacting with the accumulation of ecosocial crises in which we are immersed.
Hyphenated Performance On-Site: Critical Movement In-Between Tel Aviv-Jaffa 408–428
Avital Barak and Daphna Ben-Shaul
This article contextualises and explores participatory site-specific walking performances created for the ‘hyphenated’ area between Tel Aviv and Jaffa in Israel – nowadays a space of trade and recreation, and which before the 1948 war was Manshiya, the northern quarter of Jaffa. In correlation with geopolitical hyphenation implemented through annexation and control, we suggest the concept of hyphenated performance. The performance embodies the urban and territorial connection while expressing a critical consciousness regarding the colonial paradigm of hyphenation. The reframed hyphen resides in composing present and past into a traumatic post-memory site; and in the tension – defined as ‘will-powering’ – between voluntary movement and its control in liberal space. Within this framework we discuss two performances: Miriam Schickler’s audio-walk ‘Echoing Yafa’ (2014), which explicitly triggers the critical events in Manshiya through collective and subjective enacted stories; and Rabia Salfiti’s ‘The Walk’ (2017), in which a small group of blindfolded participants were tied to one another and led by the artist along the un-told site.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group