Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Zheng Bo

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Tony Cokes

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Joan Jonas

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Shimabuku

Tiffany Sia

Julian Simmons

P. Staff

Angela Su

Martine Syms

Kenneth Tam

Maria Taniguchi

Luke Willis Thompson

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Juria Toramae

Su-Mei Tse

Kawita Vatanajyankur

Isaac Chong Wai

Luke Ching Chin Wai

WangShui

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Peter Fischli & David Weiss

TJ Wilcox

Silent Spikes

sump

2021
Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship - Finalist, MN, US

2019
New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, US

2018
Artist's Lab, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California, US

2015
California Community Foundation Fellowship, US

b. 1982, New York, U.S.; lives and works between Houston, Texas and New York, U.S.

Kenneth Tam works across video, sculpture, performance, movement, installation and photography, and makes work about the performance of masculinity, spaces of physical intimacy and the transformative potential of private ritual. Tam’s work often takes the form of video installations that include moving image works and sculpture, and explores gender performativity and broader themes on the negotiation of identity.

Kenneth Tam's recent solo exhibitions include 

, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023); 

Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory

 Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020); 

, Visual Arts Center of the University of Austin, Texas (2019); 

, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota (2018); and 

, List Projects, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018). Group exhibitions include Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); 

 online at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); 

, Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2017); and 

, The Hammer Biennial, Los AngelesA (2016).

For further information about this artist please click 

In 2011, I went to a group exhibition somewhere in Los Angeles, at a space whose name I can’t recall and which no longer exists. The only work I remember seeing that night was Kenneth Tam’s video 

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force

, and I’ve never forgotten it. In my memory, it played in its own room, upstairs in a house, and I sat on a bench and watched the whole thing several times. In the video, Kenneth Tam, an Asian American man wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, walks around a large cardboard box on the carpeted floor of a room. There is a man in the box who speaks in a flinty voice. They met on Craigslist. The Man in the Box negotiates with Tam: 

Take your clothes off, come closer, let me touch your butt, I want to grasp your genitalia

. We see only his arms, which he puts through holes he cuts in the box. Tam circles, hesitates, gets close to the outstretched hand, then backs up. He becomes naked below the waist, then puts his underwear back on. The Man in the Box makes a forced laugh whenever Tam says no to a request, which Tam does often. You can feel the Man in the Box’s pervy frustration through the cardboard.

You worry a little bit for Tam as the Man in the Box pokes his finger in between Tam’s butt-cheeks, reaches out to hold his junk. It’s at once threatening and cringe, menacing and pathetic. The intimacy, the reach for intimacy, only unshadows the bare alienation and unwieldy distance between the two men. You tell yourself that Tam is in control – it’s his camera, his situation, his art – and you wonder at the kink of it, at who is getting off more. How do these kinks feed on each other? About the work, Tam writes on his website: ‘After repeated discussions [on Craigslist], we ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of our respective needs. His frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with my own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time my prerogatives as an artist required me to compromise my position and meet him halfway.’

The acutely uncomfortable vibe that pervades this video, as it does all of Tam’s work, has to do with this sticky point of collapse between refusal and acquiescence, of desires as demands, of satisfaction measured through tension, of the mild but oppressive suffering that lives in between awkward pauses, what lurks in what is not said.

In a word, it’s the ick that is the negotiation of masculine sociality. No other artist does this ick better. As his work has progressed since that early video of 2011 – moving from staged, performative videos like tone-poems suffused with sumptuous awkwardness, to more cinematic pieces that use edits and exquisitely coloured mise-en-scène to propel a muscular logic of storytelling – Tam has become his generation’s most fearless documentarian of the fact that masculinity structures our very world through this ick. It is the ick of how the softest, most hesitant parts of individuality are squashed and shaped through forceful, even brutal, concessions of socialization; and that this is not a side effect but the most necessary function of how masculine sociality is constituted at all. The ick comes from how one’s willingness to participate in this concession is the badge of honour with which masculinity rewards all of us forced to live under its regime. It’s the system that funnels everyone into hierarchical types, and then commends those whom it deems to fall into the type at the top (the leader, the alpha). In Tam’s work, we watch this negotiation of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, of leader and follower – whose hesitation or vulnerability can be steamrolled by someone more certain, more ruthless – and this plays out in situations Tam has pointedly constructed to always put the body on the line. The vulnerability of his male performers is enacted through various stages of nudity, or close proximity, or prompts to be tender and open towards each other. It is so visceral, it thumps in your throat while you watch. You feel as if insecurity is how men know they have bodies at all: there’s the embarrassment of having to live inside the body, the uneasiness of where to put one’s hands, how to hang one’s arms, how to stand in such a way as to appear – but never actually to 

Tam has always asked the question: How do men become men? Each Tam video work focuses on rituals that produce specific masculinities: father–son bonding (s

, 2020, originally a performance), male social clubs of the kind that gather in suburban basements (

, 2016). Throughout these works, he lets the question move from how much of this loss of autonomy is one’s choice, to how much it is the result of an individual bending and breaking under external pressures. From there, the question becomes how and why these external pressures came to be. Does anyone enjoy them? Who needs them? What do they cost us? How, and why, is this price not the same for each of us? How is it determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality? The fact of this price means that there is always the threat of violence, and Tam’s work is atmosphered with it, producing the fog of the question: Why does masculinity invest in rituals of violence as a way to get to intimacy?

Tam’s work does not offer declarative answers to any of these questions. Instead, he creates situations, images, and symbols that show how masculinity builds itself atop a foundation of boundaries being breached, or in danger of being breached. I think of how the idea of the boundary itself – a wall, a barrier, a membrane – feels especially constitutive of the masculine, insofar as the boundary functions as a thing to be destroyed, the thing towards which a penetrative force is aimed and propelled. Forgive my cis-heterosexual gender essentialism but, when I watch Tam’s work, I cannot stop thinking of how, when individual identity is constantly repressed for the benefit of the group – so that the group 

 the group – it produces a world where any moment of gentleness, trust, and connection is predicated on the awkward. Such moments function as wayward instances of consensual penetration; tender, shy emotion allowed to spurt through. Tam is a master at revealing the expression of this awkwardness, how risky anything sensitive, anything careful, is in this world. When the men in his videos are asked to compliment each other, you feel as though you’re watching someone carve out his own heart with a blunt blade and then ask if anyone might want to hold it.

When I watch Tam’s work, I think, ‘Is this gay?’ And then I realize that this is the exact question masculinity asks itself all the time. The threat of queerness is everywhere in a Tam piece, like an id, an elephant in the room, a Higgs boson particle that holds everything together but is unseen and can’t be measured with normative instruments. All of his male performers – who are unrehearsed, unscripted, and who, Tam makes a point to note, participate in the work not only for the money but because of their own interests and curiosities – seem very straight and very cis, but not necessarily by choice or desire. This sits on their frames just as awkwardly as tenderness does. It recalls the strings attached to puppets: the puppet master’s hands loom above, enacting the choreography of the patriarchy, and it’s the gracelessness as such of the puppets’ movements that gives them grace. The straight-cisness of these men is simply another aspect of their masculinity that seems to have been forged in the furnace of patriarchy’s hegemonic machinations – they’ve been burned by it, branded. When one man in 

, the video work about the high school prom, admits to wishing his prom date had been the girl’s best friend, who was a boy, it comes as a shock. There you are! I said to the screen.

, a two-channel video work from 2022, is Tam’s most cinematically accomplished video and also the most overtly queer in its symbolism. It proposes the figure of the Asian cowboy, what he might look and be like, what he might mean. Possibly the most redolent archetype of straight-cis masculinity, the cowboy can never not be camp – there is his colossal chin carved as if from stone, the legs splayed around a heaving animal, that walk that is all pelvis! – and Tam’s Asian cowboys are outlandishly camp. The dudes in the video are dressed like the Marlboro Man, though the costume seems ill-fitting against their non-white skins. They ride a mechanical bull in front of a fuchsia sound-stage sunset, and it made me think of how utterly unnecessary but very, very fun bull-riding must be. Their wavering voices speak towards prompts Tam has given them to describe sensuality, and again, we watch moments of tenderness ejaculate onto the scene in smears of gawky unease. These are interspliced with a long tracking shot through a mining tunnel, and then there are cuts to an Asian male dancer, deftly moving his body in the street.

, and pushes it into new territory for Tam in its engagement with a historical event, is a voiceover of a fictional text Tam wrote trying to imagine the first-person perspective of a Chinese labourer during the Transcontinental Railroad strike of 1867.

This text is fiction because, as Tam has noted in talks about the work, there are no first-person accounts from the Chinese workers themselves. There are only accounts from the rail company or white laborers, and Tam wanted to feel into this invisible history, let it hover in the air of those fuchsia sunsets that glow behind some of our most primary myths. By setting up this juxtaposition of the mythic Asian cowboy next to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American dream that is always powered by racialized slave labour, 

 brings us again to a close, squirming encounter with that primary mechanism of how any individual’s assimilation into a group is always an index of how much of themselves they must lose – but here it reveals the site of this encounter as a place of fiction, a storytelling device, a mythos of the fantastical speculation that is the spine of society’s most intractable beliefs.

What I mean is: Men aren’t platonically real, born that way, determinedly pure quintessences, no matter how much they insist they are. They are formed – we form them – as much as any identity. For all its taciturn silence, refusal to emote, and smothering of expression, masculinity is one of the loudest storytellers that’s ever been, and its favourite subject is itself. In fact, what masculinity as storyteller does best is to make every character, every subject, every scene, every trope become a reflection, either affirmative or negative, of its own function, secondary to the telling of its own tale. This is why identity is always defined by its relationship and proximity to the myth masculinity tells about itself: You’re either one of us, or you are Other.

What Tam’s work has made me understand, though, is that masculinity gets off the most on declaring that no one has guaranteed entry into its club. It is the kink of masculinity that a huge entry fee must be exacted from 

 trying to get in, and masculinity as such is the enforcement of this entry fee at every door – even, or especially, at sites that were never doors to begin with. Masculinity is the telling of its own story in such a way that every site of encounter, of possible connection, has been transformed into a threshold to be crossed, a boundary to be breached, an innocent to be conquered, a door with a lock and a price. The preferred method of payment is the currency of ick. How much of yourself are you willing to sell to get in? How much of your soft neck are you willing to let be crushed by the heavy boot of the group? Through Tam’s work, I understand that we are never only the soft neck being crushed, nor are we only the line of boots bearing down upon it – we are all of us the fact of masculinity making us become the meeting place of these two. What happens there, what is produced under that terrible pressure, what we tell ourselves it means: this is society as men have written it. Ick!

Notes

Biographies

Ick! How Men Become Men: On Kenneth Tam

screening

Multidisciplinary artist Kang Seung Lee has long been concerned with the creation of various rituals of celebration and mourning, largely of queer past lives. Though the material form that these rituals have taken has shifted over time – from painstakingly rendered drawings to delicateembroideries, and, most recently, performance, sound and moving image – a core intention has always remained throughout Lee’s works: to enact a practice of caretaking and recovery.

Delving into the lives of artists and cultural makers who have all sadly – and prematurely – passed away, Lee pushes against the limits of the archive by forming, in his own words, ‘relationships with the living and with the dead’

 These relational, affective and spiritual encounters imbue his artworks with an air of reverence and a feeling of loss, while also inviting us into a space of yearning and possibility.

(2023), a small group of contemporary collaborators embody the legacy of a dancer and choreographer from another place and time, and all of them cross paths with other artists at Lee’s invitation. Like in many of his other works, Lee here performs a sort of resuscitation, not of a personhood but of the essence of their life’s work, simultaneously merging different historical, geographical and cultural scenes through a process of fabulation and visual storytelling.

Eliel Jones:
Though I have always recognized a sort of performativity present throughout your practice, I was really excited to see dance appear in 

. You sought to bring back to life the practice of Goh Choo San (1948–1987), a pioneering Singaporean-born choreographer who, despite having choreographed and performed for prominent ballet companies throughout the world, is little known in dance and cultural history. How did you come across him?

Kang Seung Lee:
The way I learned about his life actually speaks to the core of my work. I first encountered Goh Choo San’s work through someone else’s, which was a documentary about Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Baryshnikov was principal dancer and artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York City. And because he was one of the most important figures in dance at that time, a British TV channel made a documentary about him. On the other hand, in the early 1980s, Goh was an emerging choreographer, though he was quickly considered to be doing things very differently, particularly because of his focus on hand gestures; he worked with his dancers to use their hands to express emotions. Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre commissioned a work by Goh in 1981, titled 

. At that time, Baryshnikov and the dancers of ABT were doing a lot of rehearsals with Goh, and so he appears briefly in the documentary. I first watched the documentary maybe fifteen years ago, and saw this incredibly flamboyant Asian person – in fact, the only Asian person in the whole documentary – talking about the piece and how he’s trying to use the male body as a focus of the work, which was also quite different from classical ballets at the time.

After watching the film, I tried to do some further research but I couldn’t find much more than a Wikipedia page. It wasn’t until 2019, when I connected with Singaporean curator and writer Binghao Wong, that I was able to get a better sense of the dance and cultural sphere in Singapore and make additional findings. During the pandemic, I was able to get in touch with Goh’s family and his best friend, Janek Schergen, who’s now creative director of the Singapore Ballet. Goh’s family is large: he had nine siblings, including his sister Goh Soo Khim, who is only a couple of years older and who’ss also a ballet dancer and co-founder of Singapore Dance Theatre (now Singapore Ballet). She’s been actively pushing to keep his legacy alive, partly through the creation of the Singapore Ballet but also by dancing Goh’s works posthumously with other dancers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Soon after, I visited Singapore to do further research at the Singapore National Archive, and I also received materials from the family and Janek. What I learned in the process is that Goh Choo San was very successful in the USA, particularly in the early and mid-1980s, so this made me really wonder why his legacy was non-existent, particularly in the queer context here in the USA today. He’s more celebrated back in Singapore, because of his family but also because of this nationalistic tendency to celebrate someone who has been successful in the West. I asked quite a few people why he might not be remembered better elsewhere, and one reason is obviously that he was this person in diaspora, so his work never really existed in one single country or place. But also, a lot of dancers, historians and critics of dance at that time were wiped out during the AIDS epidemic, so there weren’t a lot of people who were able to record and write about his work. This has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the historical citation of not only Goh’s work but also many of his peers in that generation.

EJ:
I’m interested in how you’ve approached this loss of citation as an opportunity to imagine how to cite 

you invited Brussels-based Filipina dancer and choreographer Joshua Serafin to respond to and embody Goh’s 

from 1981. You also collaborated with KIRARA, a composer and musician based in Seoul who produced the accompanying soundtrack for the piece. I find it very beautiful that the gesture of your invitation to these and other collaborators for the film is from a lens of responding to Goh’s life and practice, rather than from a desire to create a ‘straight’ re-enactment of 

as an existent piece. Your approach demands a different kind of involvement with hiswork; it calls for embodiment as a form of study. How did you approach working with your collaborators as an invitation to create their own relationships to Goh Choo San?


KSL:
From the beginning I wasn’t really interested in reperforming Goh’s works. For one thing, that’s already been done by other ballet companies. Also, I was very interested in the idea of queerness as something that is constantly in transformation, thinking here of José Esteban Muñoz and his theorizing of queer futurity as something that will always be changing. I really wanted to speak about Goh’s work in this way, in relation to queerness and how it’s constantly evolving. I felt that had to come from multiple perspectives other than my own, and by bringing in someone like Joshua, for instance – who is trained as a ballet dancer but is also a nonbinary person who is making work from that position and identity – it happened very organically. We did study Goh’s work and his process very intensely at some point. But always the invitation was towards asking ourselves, with the legacy of someone like Goh, what kind of future(s) do we want to imagine through the gestures of our bodies? I wanted to think through this question in the film as something of an embodied experience, while at the same time expressing a homage to Goh’s work as something that’s about the present and the future. In this way it became a sort of collective reimagining.

EJ:
This approach towards producing a collective reimagining of something or someone through interweaving different practices appears in your work in other ways. For 

,there are other artists with whom you collaborate outside the form of an invitation like the one you extended to Joshua and KIRARA. For instance, the title of the work itself is borrowed from a poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–1950), and verses from that same poem appear at the beginning of the film transcribed into artist Martin Wong’s (1946–1999) American Sign Language ‘font’, which you very carefully adapted from Wong’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. Again, to me these presences feel less like re-enactments of works and more like invocations; material and affective explorations that call the artists in question into the room, or in this case onto the screen or the stage. In the past, you’ve similarly introduced the work of other artists who never met each other in real life, and you make them correspond through your artworks in the most beautiful and poetic ways – such as in your other moving image piece in the Akeroyd Collection, 

(2018), where you bring together the work of Korean writer Joon-soo Oh (1964–1998) with that of British filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994). Could you talk a little bit about how you approach this process of introducing other artists’ work into your practice, and to each other?

KSL:
My collaborations have always been both with the dead and the living, because I revisit the works of artists who are no longer with us, but indeed, as you say, thinking of them as collaborators in my work. That perhaps does go back to Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and the invitation to visit that came from Keith Collins, who was Jarman’s partner (he himself died in 2018). What I was fascinated by at that time was how the garden, which is really beautiful, comes back every year despite almost all the plants having been first planted in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The roots are there, and the plants grow back every year or every other year, and they flower. They’re not exactly the same plant, but they come from these same roots and seeds, and they’re evolving all the time. So, I was thinking about how memories and histories are sort of in transformation and being written and rewritten; how they’re moving all the time.

Similarly, I’ve always understood that our thinking or art making is influenced by people who came before us. Even when we try and make something that people call ‘original’, it actually comes from all the education we received, the books we’ve read, the knowledge that was created before us. So, it’s never just our ‘own’ in that way, it really is heavily influenced. I think I wanted to speak to that in my work, particularly in relation to queer histories. Also, histories that are not from one place: a lot of the time they’re transnational, so I’m always trying to talk about more than one person from different continents, cities, locations and how their legacies are connected through history and through people in the next generations, including myself. I think the idea of creating genealogy has always been really important, whether they’re of my generation or the ones before me; this concern has continued over different projects and collaborations.

EJ:
How do these fabulated encounters take shape?

KSL:
In a way, they often happen through a series of accidents. I’m interested in many people, and I’m doing research constantly. But they happen mostly through relationships that develop in the process. In many cases I reach out to estates, or family members or friends of the departed, and I try to establish a relationship with them and let them know what I’m trying to do. In some cases, there is trust instantly, in others it takes time to create that. It’s similar with my collaborations. Sometimes I have very strong connections; other times it takes longer.

EJ:
I think it’s possible to draw out some specific threads here. What all these artists have in common is that their work has faced or risked possible erasure due to their various marginalized positions, with the common experience among them all being that they’re all queer; many also contracted HIV and died of AIDS-related complications. In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman reflects on her work of narrating counter-histories of slavery as having always been ‘inseparable from writing a history of present’.

This came to my mind in relation to your own work, which is not only concerned with acts of revisiting or restaging but with a desire to reflect on what’s stake in invoking these lives now. What does it mean to you to write these histories into the present?

KSL:
On the one hand, there are some functions to my work that are very practical. I always think about my own research process as a personal learning process. I do research, and I meet with these people, and I learn about people who are not with us. I’m literally learning the histories, bringing the memories out, and in some ways writing about them in the form of visual art. Because almost all my works have references to someone else’s work, whether images, writings or other forms of production, it can also introduce their work to new viewers: some people definitely learn about these other artists’ work through my work, and that’s actually a very important function that I’m aware of. There are so many artists who we think are well known but are in fact new to a lot of people. Goh Choo San is one example. For some people it’s their first encounter with his work, which I take very seriously.

I also want my work to go beyond the introduction. I want to talk about how we can turn to these artists’ practices as an invitation to imagine something – and in many ways somewhere – else. I’m interested in talking about these artists’ work as part of a conversation about the present, about the politics of our time. In this way, by rewriting and rethinking these pasts and our histories, there’s also a possibility and potentiality to create a different future. My work exists within that conceptual framework, particularly one that insists on not forgetting. Because my works take visual form, rather than being purely historical or social, I’m also asking for a different type of encounter. It’s an invitation through the visual, the poetic and, in this film, through movements made by different bodies to interrogate how and what we feel, which to me is as important as the histories that I’m bringing in. How do we live with this feeling? Sometimes this feeling can be about mourning and loss; at others it can be the feeling of different possibilities for the future. I believe both of these have the potential to change something about the future, or at least bring forth an urge to do that.

EJ:
Indeed, aside from the importance of introducing these artists to a new audience, you also ask us to think about what their loss means to us and others. How do we mourn those whom we do not know and whose experience is entirely different from ours? How do we react and respond to realities that are not immediately happening to us or the people we know, or the geographies that we’re familiar with? Who gets to be commemorated, memorialized and remembered within an affective space, and who doesn’t? I find these questions to be deeply political and urgently rooted in your work as well as our present moment. Palestine is a painful example of this right now – certainly of the starkly different standards that are applied to commiserating the loss of human life.

KSL:
Something like the AIDS epidemic really defined a generation at a particular time. I strongly believe what’s happening in Palestine is going to define us, and the ways that we are complicit now are going to be like generational trauma. I think about the unknown, the erased through my practice all the time. Even when I’m bringing in images of people who are more familiar to us, I introduce them also as an invitation to look at the others who have been less seen; the erased, the unknown, the bodies that we do not recognize or know. It’s about creating an entry point to really think about who is not actually remembered, and to ask now: who will not be remembered? But also, it’s about suggesting new possibilities and ways to remember as well. My work is an invitation to start a conversation and create that possibility. I think this is ultimately the most important process in my work for me: how we can collectively think about the unknown.

Notes 

The Heart of A Hand

I


Revolt against the sun, 
our desert of the sky.


If land is an image, landscape is a film,
a sea shell collection of single images, letters


From, light. To, night.


Twenty-four frames per second of a thousand and
one nights, one night, light spliced a dark cave, cinema.


Celluloid of silver halide crystals
and the glittering of sun on the sea.


Desert eyes longing for wet images
of the sea, see on screen:


a scale that only landscapes can conjure, films
lengthen time, which we call slow cinema, slow sentences,
commas, until we can’t spot the difference in the same scene:
landscape edited slowly over centuries, at the speed of detail.


Stretching time across landscape like a canvas.


Stillness is deceptive, moving images into a political
movement, from Tassili n’Ajjer to the Beqaa Valley
to a film, mapped for those who measure scale, who
move against the measures we are forced to live by.


That air blows,
That air blows,


Leave with a grain of sand, or
remain an inner-city citation.




II


Two films are rugged landscapes tracing methods
of colonial-era archaeology, of oral histories,


Two landscapes are chasing traces of local phantoms 
of knowledge, mapping the spirits of art histories.




where is the physical boundary, of the edge
of possibility, of a metaphysical geography?


The spiritual dimension of film

l-encompassing landscapes.
They are all so myst

, our experiments


are visible our myths are visible, our experiments


slipping from rock to land to landscape, filming 
an image factory of the unknowable.


Night vision in 16mm, a strict choreography 
of resource management, of camera movements.


Seeing is an act of physical endurance, look:


at the glint of paint in caves 
that art history never wanted us to see.




III




 of the Beqaa Valley
between arid and arable, human and BMW car,
drifting around and around and around and around
dusty contradictions that we hold close to our chest.


The custodians of ruins, the gleaners of history
who care, so we do not. The filmic landscape of
desert guardians from Niha in 

 who remember so we


do not have to do anything, only forget,
just drift, what car enthusiasts call drifting,
car tracks are a souvenir of the city.


Repair and restoration is a labour of land,
we grip onto land using the soles of our feet and
the wheels of our car, afraid that it will disappear
or shift in to another gear, another political car crash.


Wait in the differences between human and land
Write in the landscapes about an embodied pain
Whisper in the film about the plain disembodied
Parts of car and of limb and of sand.

The Drift

Tassili

Landscape Studies

Trance or transmission, so James Richards’s irradiating film operates, at once some signal and some spell. A lyric, forensic account of a homebound body and its transient unconscious – optical, of course, per Walter Benjamin, but not only – 

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

 (2022) offers recent epidemic-era reportage streaked with the glitchy panic of the paranoiac, the ardent refrains of the romantic. (That is, those figures who insist on patterns where, perhaps, there are none.) If the delivered intelligence is both abject and pleasurable – in its deep carnal levity, in its spectral belief in bodily knowledges and the enigmatic messages of their attendant objects and images – what is such a signal or spell meant to summon, communicate, incur? Why this strange employ of surveillance genres and rituals, more self-survey here, but still? What quality of life is this?

Endoscopies and MRIs, pills and masks, pale and reddened hands and feet, stained toilet bowls and cracked sinks, diagnostic tests and sex toys, dirty slides and tubes, aesthetic inheritance and viral speculations, fears and patterns, stories of gendered ant colonies and bees, all poor images and aching songs: the manipulated images fall down the screen like some glitching waterfall. The forms and colours are pulled like candy, mirrored like nature. The images secrete colour or form, suggesting flows: of blood, semen, piss, images, sounds, light, thought, feeling. Objects and images that are scanned, panned, glitched, montaged. Loops of breath and lyric and some humid sound, the dry clicking of delay, pricking then settling then opening the nerves.

Rhythm makes the man, I kept thinking, lulled into seeing patterns where there were none, hearing loops, lyrics, auditory illusions where there were. ‘The cinematic apparatus produces a special kind of trance,’ Ute Holl writes. 

Cinema is aligned with the nervous functions as a series of impulses. If

we view cinema as a psycho-physical machine, this not only shows

images to be rhythmic impulses, it also shows that certain brain 

functions can be triggered by means of cinematic tricks.

Under what sign has Richards made this eros-laden film? What tricks, what triggers? I think about apocalypse. I think about apocalypse in its original sense, as the excavation and revealing of secret knowledges via language itself. ‘On my mind, apocalypse’, Bill Callahan sings, ludically, laconically, feverishly, across one of Richards’s spectral sequences. (He’s riding for a feeling, Bill is.) In this passage of 

, a black sky fills the screen – dark ground of the scanner evoking zero gravity – studded with buoyant, floating objects of indifferent beauty and current ruin: Q-tips, electronic thermometers, iPhone photos of white young men and their animal slaughter, cables, condoms, scissors, Euros, a green foil mask, black leather-daddy belts, postcards, shots, keys, more blue pills, a photo of a man dressed as Dracula in the wine aisle of a bodega, a broken red splat at his feet. Iconic images and objects of ritual all.

Elsewhere in the film, as Richards literally and figuratively tunnels into and among bodies, objects, rooms, materials, images, songs, sets, constructed worlds at once pharmacological and domestic, sacred and aesthetic, apparatuses both technological and tedious, his research takes him to the closest field. Is this, then, I wonder, an autoethnography of the dissembling corpus and its psychic and built environs, employing a new formulation of the ciné-trance – some filmed possession phenomenon à la Maya Deren and Jean Rouch? Or is it an auto-sacrifice for present pandemics and autofictive anti-aesthetics? To what gods is the artist trying to appeal? What is he trying to coax, to summon into existence?

‘Cinema belongs to the trance techniques of our culture because it systematically treats and shifts the normative and imaginary time frames, in which we remain subject to conscious daily production, in all the disciplines of our bodily knowledge,’Holl notes. Discipline, nervous functions, and the hyper vigilance they betray and manifest, seem to strobe and structure 

. Shot through with feeling (flooded with it, as we say), the film works by additive processes that run on parallel tracks of eros and anxiety, topical in its subject and applications. So much skin, so many surfaces (to inspect, to pan, to glitch, to suture together). If the artist appears to be in his atelier, not quite sheltering, he also seems to be in his feelings, making use. I am reminded of the advice William Godwin apparently once offered Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness “out of a set of materials within her reach.”

 (Advice that makes me laugh, wince, work. Maybe Richards too.) Holl writes:

What we call our own feelings can be objectified and adapted to the

technological state of time in cinema. Camera and editing techniques

accelerate our bodies’ own frequencies of shivering, vibrating, and

flickering. … The technology of montage lies at the border between

conscious and unconscious transmission in cinema.

The possibility of transmission – of signals of sound and image, of illness and language, of love and violence – incurs an alertness in its possible transmitter and receiver. Such vigilance might make one tunnel deep. Indeed, like so many of our possessed, with their cults and rites, their exalted objects and icons and imaginaries, Richards uses the material world, with all its highly visual orders, at once rough-hewn and brilliant, to invoke the immaterial world of our spectral doubles. That is, our psychic orders, our invisible feelings. An unconscious world of connections at once spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, brought into view (well) by some apparatus (entangled, as always, with us).

So his film goes. Scanning, panning, tunnelling, breathing, singing, washing, pissing, worrying, convalescing, dissembling, blurring, streaking, glitching, mirroring, seizing, smearing, fucking, talking, writing, making. The illusion and disillusion of movement, of transitioning from one state (of material or being) to another, a transience that can feel static, pure stasis, propels Richards’s film, collating its myriad ideas and images, not quite cleanly. The digital threads and edges come loose, stutter across the screen. The movement, shuddering then soothing then back again, feels embodied, projecting its hallucinatory, elliptical feelings back onto the viewer, making her – that is, me – shiver and calm. An ecstatic self-soothing, almost narcotic. Tricks and triggers of all kinds, indeed.


*

Entranced, lulled, and under the sign of transmission, of technological tunnelling into some forensic poetics, I decide to compile my own report on this film. Prose does not match the poetics ‘at work’ here; I need a more fragmentary form, nonlinear. I need to see the words like shards (floating across the pale field of the page). So I make a list of what I see:

All irradiating images, pill-strewn, glitching and seizing and mirroring.

Skin and porcelain, equally pale and broken, stained and smearing across

the screen, a kind of digital bleeding out. That is, filthy sinks and toilets,

in the centre of the frame, like crass pools for a debased Narcissus.

A red toilet, smeary as a lipstick’d mouth, or an ’80s-era Richter

squeegee painting, then some montage of b/w pills being manufactured

Kenneth Tam

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