[from Bombsite]
I randomly fell upon a PBS show
"Art in the 21st Century" a few weeks ago. I will warn you that the intro is very long and boring and totally misrepresents how cool the content is. The episode I fell on is this one,
Transformation," and it featured
Paul McCarthy,
Yinka Shonibare and
Cindy Sherman. Aside from the first, I'm familiar with Shonibare and Sherman.
When I went to the Modern Art museum in Stockholm last September, one of the most intriguing works was Shonibare's
Un Ballo in Maschera. Scroll to about 2:19 to see a clip of it. Or if not, you'll have to bear with attempting to describe what I watched:
The setting was a masquerade ball thrown by some sort of old royalty. The men wore powdered wigs and cropped pants; the women puffy pompadours and huge ballgowns. Except instead of the typical silks and satins, the clothing of everyone is made of traditional African fabric. Initially, there's just noblemen and noblewomen dancing and then enters a person who looks like the court jester. This person eventually gets shot by a noblewoman. And the whole thing starts over from the beginning, over and over again.
The choreography is done in a way that it naturally reloops, so the jester comes back alive over and over again. Honestly, I probably stood there for 10 minutes and watched the jester come back alive maybe four times. For me it was just fascinating visually... the dancing, the beautiful costumes, the suspense before the jester is murdered (yes, even after four times, I still felt suspenseful. Maybe I'm just easily amused).
But after watching his bit on the PBS show, I was amazed with all the facets this piece presents that I didn't realize at the time. I figured from the European-style clothing made with African fabrics, there was probably some commentary going on with European colonialism. Below is a more obvious example of that idea.
[Scramble for Africa by Shonibare via Who Killed Bambi]
Here's Shonibare explaining
Un Ballo in Maschera in
an interview with Bombsite.
AD That’s quite a nice phrase—”fantasies of empowerment”—very Fanon-esque. I’m interested in this notion of carnivalesque masquerade, the way it inverts power relations. Do you see the political itself as a masquerade?
YS Well, Un Ballo in Maschera, believe it or not, was inspired by the current global situation, particularly the war in Iraq. I was thinking about King Gustav III of Sweden, who was fighting many wars on many fronts—with Russia, with Denmark—and spending a lot of money; as a result of this high spending, his population was impoverished, suffering. He was also an actor and a dandy, and he started the art academies in Sweden. He modeled himself on the French court and only spoke French. But he was fiddling while Rome was burning. There was a conspiracy to kill him. He loved masked balls, and he loved the theater, and it was while he was at one of those balls that he was assassinated. So I used him as a metaphor for power and its deconstruction. But there is an opportunity within my film for redemption. Things that happen get undone: the king gets killed, but he gets up again, and at the end of the film he steps backward, out of the scene. And, of course, I also played with gender positions, changing them around. The “power” in my film is a woman, and the assassin is also a woman dressed as a man.
Structurally, I didn’t want a narrative that was beginning, middle, end; I wanted to look formally at the way film is presented. In the museum setting, films are usually played in a loop. What I decided to do with this film was to ask all the actors to act the idea of the loop. What you see when the action comes around again is actually a reenactment of what went before; it’s not an electronic loop, it’s imitating one. I wanted the audience to participate, to try to work it out: Okay, the second time around, that actor was not quite where he was before. It was a way of looking at formal repetition and also the way history repeats. From the Roman to the Ottoman Empire, we have this repetition of power that always returns to the same point—the ambition to expand imperially is not very different from what’s going on now. As an artist, I won’t take a moral position; I think it’s important not to work for any one side politically. You need to keep your objectivity, unless you’re in Stalinist Russia. But what you can do is place a number of options in front of people so that they can think through them.
Hm... a bit of a long post. Maybe it's one that I posted just for me. Hahaha. But honestly, I would watch this show; I'm tempted to shell out the $1.99 to buy it on iTunes. The Cindy Sherman part was fascinating too. I was introduced to her in an Italian Renaissance art class, where we interpreted gender roles of the period through painting and various readings. I always wondered what her deal was exactly and now I know!
is for Christina. That is all.
