Thursday 23 January 2014

Cindy Sherman - Photography


Cindy Sherman: Me, myself and I

She is the star of her own photographs but claims they aren't autobiographical. Cindy Sherman talks to Simon Hattenstone about family, break-ups, $1m pictures… and why she can't keep herself out of her art





Untitled Film Still #3 (1977). Photograph: Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London and Metro Pictures. © Cindy Sherman


Guardian Article:
I give Cindy Sherman the once-over. Then the twice- and thrice-over. I know I'm staring more than is right but I can't help myself. I'm looking for clues. Sherman is one of the world's leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is.

She's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we've barely started.

In front of me is an elegant woman with long, blond hair and soft features. She's stylish – black jodhpurs, thick, white sweater, Chanel boots horizontally zipped at the top to make pockets, and a furry handbag that doubles as a great golden bear. She looks much kinder than in many of her photographs. She also looks petite – until you notice the big, strong arms: she used to box. She will be 57 next week.

Sherman emerged fully formed on the New York art scene in the early 1980s with a series of untitled film stills. It was a brilliantly novel concept – grainy shots of movies that never existed, created with such panache and knowing that you felt they must do. She was a dream for cultural studies professors the world over. Few artists embraced their contradictions so easily. She took photos of herself that were anything but self-portraits; photos that stuck two fingers at the then received wisdom that the camera never lies – her camera always lied. And, through her deceits, she looked for truths about identity, vulnerability and power. The feminists claimed her as theirs, as did the postmodernists, the post-structuralists, the post-everythings. But there was nothing clean or prescriptive about her art. Sherman's work has always been a vibrant mush of ideas.

We meet at Sprüth Magers, a tiny gallery in central London that is holding an exhibition of her new work. I first came across Sherman's photos 20 years ago at the Whitechapel Gallery. Back then, two things struck me about her – she was an astonishing image-creator (her stills were like complete movies, with their own narratives) and here was a girl who sure liked to dress up.

She smiles, and says it was always that way. As a little girl, she'd visit thrift shops with her mother for outfits and back at home she amassed a suitcase of prom dresses.

She grew up in Long Island, New York, the youngest by far of five children. The next youngest was nine years her senior, and Sherman felt she was on her own. Her mother taught children with learning difficulties to read, though strangely, Sherman says, she never encouraged her to read. As for her father, he had a hatful of issues. "My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he'd talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even. I was raised Episcopalian. In the nursing home [towards the end of his life], he had one of these electronic carts to get around and he'd be honking the people in their walkers and with their canes hobbling – so he was prejudiced even against his fellow old people."
Nobody in the family thought her dressing up was strange. In fact, nobody commented on it. They were simply glad she had found something to occupy herself. Was dressing up a means of escape? "It was partly that, but, to be really psychological about it, it was also partly, 'If you don't like me this way, how about you like me this way?' " Her voice rises with mock joie de vivre. "Or maybe you like this version of me." She felt disliked? "It wasn't that they didn't like me, but I came along so late and they already had a family. Four kids and a family, and I was like this total latecomer."
Did she go round chippily telling her parents it wasn't her fault, and she didn't ask to be born? No, she says, anything but. She was always blessed, or cursed, with an eagerness to please. "I probably went around going, 'It's OK, I'll fix it. I'll be better.' "
Of course, there is more to her work than dressing up. While she resists dogmatic interpretation, she accepts that so much of it has been an examination of identity and gender. Again, she says, it's rooted in the confusions of her childhood, and the political evolution of the 1960s and 1970s. As a teenager, she was obsessed with appearance. She can't believe now that at 14 she was wearing girdles and projectile bras. "When I grew up, I was watching all these glamorous women with all their make-up and their pointy tits. I'd put on make-up every day of the year because I thought, 'Well, you never know who's going to knock on the door.' I ironed my hair even though my hair was pretty straight. And then I went through a period when I went to sleep with great big curlers. But you couldn't get rollers that were big enough, so we'd wash out orange juice cans and even those big tomato juice cans, and wrap our hair around that to make it sort of curly, and I remember trying to sleep with these horrible curlers in my hair."
But by the time she got to college, make-up was a no-no among self-respecting liberated women. "I was really ambivalent about it because I still liked it, but you did not wear make-up, you did not dye your hair, you didn't wear a bra – we were all natural. Don't shave or anything. In some of the really early work, you can see my hairy legs." So even though it's not autobiographical, the work is about her sense of self? "I suppose. It was just something I was working out without being overtly political about it."
She still has a complicated relationship with make-up. "I hardly wear it in the day now." Because she spends much of her professional life overly made up? "No, I just feel that wearing make-up in daylight makes me look older. But at night, when the lights are low, I feel I can get away with it."
At college she studied photography, and failed her first exam. She considered herself an artist whose medium was photography, but most people thought she was bonkers. The art world was not interested in photography, while her fellow photographers were not interested in art.
Sherman had started out painting, and is still a good copyist. In a way, she says, that is her skill as a photographer – the ability to recreate things she has seen. "I'm good at using my face as a canvas… I'll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I'm really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are."
But painting at the time was a male preserve, she says. "There's a theory that there were so many women photographers at the time because we felt nobody else was doing it. We couldn't or didn't really want to go into the male-dominated painting world, so since there weren't any artists who were using photographs, we thought, 'Well, yeah, let's just play with that.' "
Cindy ShermanUntitled (2010) from Sherman’s latest work. After completing a ­series, Sherman says she often feels she never wants to take another photo. ‘I’m just like, forget it, I don’t want to put on any more make-up again, I’m so sick of those wigs, so sick of it all.’ Photograph: Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London and Metro Pictures. © Cindy Sherman
From the off at college, Sherman became her own subject. Her collection of eccentric outfits was growing, she was still into dressing up, and sometimes she would go out socially "in character". "The boyfriend I had at the time had pointed out that you're always putting on make-up – I would just go in my bedroom when I was depressed and I'd turn into characters – and he said, 'You should be documenting this. It's really interesting what you're doing.' It hadn't occurred to me that I was doing anything unusual."
The men in her life hover in the background of her conversation like ghosts. At times, they seem to have been virtually collaborators; silent partners in the work. We are looking through the earliest photographs – her series of movie stills – and she explains exactly how they came about. "I took one roll of film and maybe six shots, because I didn't know they were going to continue, and they were all supposed to be the same actress but in different stages of her career, so in some of them I thought she's an older ingénue, but she's trying to be the ingénue again. Then I developed the film in chemicals that were too hot, which cracks the emulsion, so they are super grainy, because I wanted them to look like cheap prints, not art; something you could find in a thrift store for 50 cents." The movie stills grew from there. More wigs, more outfits, more locations. "I was always shooting where I lived, then I was visiting a friend at the beach, so I did some pictures there, then I'd rearrange my apartment to make the bedroom look like a hotel room, and then I wanted to do something outdoors, so with my boyfriend I took some clothes in the suitcase and we drove around the city in his van and I'd say, 'OK, stop over here – that looks like a good location', and I'd get into character and he would take the pictures, and I'd say, 'OK, do close up, or stand over there" Sometimes, she directs others to take photos of her, but by and large she takes them by herself with the help of mirrors. All the photos are untitled – another way of distancing herself from the images.
She turns to the picture of herself as Marilyn Monroe. It's a good likeness, I say. She laughs. "It's all make-up." Is the cleavage real? "No, that's make-up and maybe some socks I put in my bra. Women used to do that – tissues and socks!" Does she like way she looks in these pictures? "I was pretty distanced from it. I never thought of these characters as being flattering to me maybe because I just didn't think it was me."
Sherman talks about other men who have played a part in her life and work. The few people she used in her photos apart from herself include her former husband (video artist Michel Auder, who was addicted to drugs at the time) and his two daughters. They were together for 17 years, and she always believed she could help him kick his heroin habit with love – it didn't work out like that and they no longer speak, though she remains close to the girls. Then there was a disastrous relationship with aspiring film-maker Paul H-O, which culminated in a self-pitying documentary he made about being the unsuccessful half of the relationship. Why on earth did she go along with the film? She holds up her hands in surrender. "That was a real fucked-up relationship. I was only with that person for so long out of guilt, and he played up to it. Then, after we were together for a year or two and all these projects fell through and he was acting like I'm such a failure and I was trying to help him – I thought, if he just had some help, he'd blossom and be a nice, decent person. Hey!" she laughs. Some you win, some you lose.
Does she tend to document relationships in everyday life? No, she says, she's rubbish with her camera, always forgets to take it on holiday, and she segues into a story about another ex, who's never without his. Who's she talking about? David Byrne, she mumbles. I can't hide my surprise and disappointment – she had been going out with the musician for four years and they seemed such a perfect maverick mix.
"I thought he's your current boyfriend," I say.
"Well, not so much any more." Without warning, she bursts out crying, and says they separated only recently. "I'd rather not talk about this," she says through her tears. "And we might still get back together – I don't know. We're just taking a break."
She gathers herself, and decides she doesn't mind talking about him after all. "The one weird thing about being with David Byrne was I'd be like, 'God, David, don't you get sick of these people coming up you?' In the beginning, it was kind of exciting like, 'Wooh – he's my boyfriend!', but then I felt, boy, if it was me, I'd be so sick of it, and I actually realised he likes it. I don't think he'd ever admit it, but I think he does."
Who was the nicest man in her life? "Definitely, he is," she says without missing a beat. "He's a real sweetheart." Even nicer than Steve Martin, another ex? "Oh yeah. Yeah!"
It was in the early 1980s that she began to make a name for herself. Success was rapid and massive, especially after the shock value of her Centrefolds series, which the commissioning magazine refused to publish. The title led us to believe that the pictures would be titillating, possibly pornographic. Instead, she created a series of terrified, exposed and hunted women. This was when she found herself at odds with feminist critiques. "The pictures were meant to be disturbing. You weren't meant to think, 'Ah, OK, who's this cutie here?' and then you go, 'Oh! I'm sorry! But I didn't mean it as dogma', and some feminists said men could look at that and think it's a turn on, and she should have a label to explain each piece. But you can't control how people view your work. Once it's out there, it's out there."
The more controversy the work generated, the higher the price it fetched. Before long, photographs were selling at auction for $1m. By now, her mother had died, but her father enjoyed her success in typical fashion. "He saw it all as reflecting on him." She tells a story about when he was in his nursing home in Arizona and she was planning a visit. "My sister warned me that he had arranged for me to give a talk there about my work and he'd put up fliers saying, 'Charlie Sherman's daughter coming to talk.' When I heard that, I said, 'Dad, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. I'm not coming there for business, I'm coming there to see you.' He was so mad at me he didn't talk to me for, like, six months and he sent me a nasty letter saying, 'You will hurt your career – some of these people could have bought your book.' For him it was all about him getting attention; this is my daughter, I am the father."'
Did she think it crazy that a single photo could fetch $1m? I expect her to say yes, but she's not having any of it. "Not really, because other painters my age with the same kind of success were getting that." So she deserves this? "Totally. I totally deserve this, I thought. People think because it's photography it's not worth as much, and because it's a woman artist, you're still not getting as much – there's still definitely that happening. I'm still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that's really unfair."
Did money make her feel different about herself? "No. My self-esteem still fluctuates." Anyway, she says, when she starts to congratulate herself, she only ends up feeling guilty. "If anything, I feel more troubled by feeling guilt for being successful because most of my friends are not." There have been times when she has not wanted to attend her own openings because she felt old friends were resentful towards her.
We go upstairs to look at the new exhibition, which papers the walls from top to bottom. The gallery consists of two small rooms decorated in custom-built Sherman murals. Against a black-and-white background of what appears to be forest (it is, in fact, New York's Central Park), a series of wacky characters stand their ground: there is a woman with a disturbing resemblance to Phil Spector collecting spring onions; an elderly woman who appears to be disabled; a boy-man who could be a knight wearing a body suit of breasts and vagina; a woman who looks as if she lunches in the highest circles when not seeing her plastic surgeon. Here she has created her "family" by digitally manipulating the faces – her face – so all the characters could be related to each other.
She admits that the longer she goes on, the harder it is to produce genuinely new work. After working on a series of photographs, Sherman often feels that she never wants to take another photo. "It might be a few months of concentrated work and then I'm just like, forget it – I don't ever want to go in the studio again, I don't want to put on any more make-up again, I'm so sick of those wigs, so sick of it all. I think a lot of artists are like that when they're in the midst of doing something."
In 1997, she directed a comedy horror movie, Office Killer, but there has been nothing since. "I recently bought a heavy-duty video camera, and took a class in video editing, but I can't think up the perfect idea for a story – that's what's holding me up."
But however much of a struggle it is, her art does continue to evolve. In the new work, she is more exposed than she has ever been before. There are no prosthetics, no make-up, not much in the way of disguise. And yet, with her subtle digital manipulations, it is still hard to find the real Sherman in these pictures. And she wouldn't have it any other way.
In fact, she says, it's not since her student days that the work has been about Cindy Sherman. Then, she photographed herself nude. "For the project I had to confront something difficult. Something I'd never want to do." And ever since, she says, she's managed to star in her pictures without giving anything away. She pauses and smiles. "I'm not about revealing myself," she says.




Friday 10 January 2014

Identity - Case Study (3)

John AkomfrahArtist/Filmmaker, works in Britain (b. 1957, Ghana)

Handsworth Songs (1986)

Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout Handsworth Songs is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence.The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. The ‘Songs’ of the title do not reference musicality but instead invokes the idea of documentary as a poetic montage of associations familiar from the British documentary cinema of John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings.


John Akonfrah: Migration & Memory

Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs attracted a huge audience when shown in the wake of last summer's riots. His new film, The Nine Muses, uses Homer to explore mass migration to Britain


Guardian article: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/20/john-akomfrah-migration-memory 
ohn Akomfrah, widely recognised as one of Britain's most expansive and intellectually rewarding film-makers, has never been afraid of a battle. Back in the 1970s, when he was barely out of his teens, he tried to screen Derek Jarman's homoerotic Sebastiane at the film club of the Southwark further education college, where he was studying. "There were rows. Black kids were throwing chairs everywhere. They were saying 'you can't show this'. So we stopped the film and had a discussion: what do you mean, 'We can't show this film'? It was clear there were forms of propriety for black spectatorship. Rather than run back into the field, I thought: let's just accelerate it. Let's push these boundaries a little bit more."
  1. The Nine Muses
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK
  4. Cert (UK): PG
  5. Runtime: 90 mins
  6. Directors: John Akomfrah
  7. More on this film
In 1982 he began to do just that, co-founding the Black Audio Film Collective with a group of friends he'd grown up with in London or met at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Over the next 16 years, moving as seamlessly between the form of cine-essay and what they called slide-tape texts as they did between the worlds of the gallery and the newly created Channel 4, they sought to create a new language for migrant cinema. They crafted diasporic films that eschewed social realism and agitprop, took aesthetics as seriously as they did subject matter, and were informed by the canon of non-western moviemakers (Ritwik Ghatak from Bengal, Senegalese Ousmane Sembène,Santiago Álvarez from Cuba), as much as they were by the giants of the Atlantic avant garde.
Not everyone thought this was possible. Akomfrah recalls that when he first approached the Arts Council for money for an avant-garde group, "they told us straight: you can't be avant garde because blacks can't be avant-garde film-makers". Others, such as Salman Rushdie, who wrote a much-debated essay about Handsworth Songs (1986) for the Guardian, felt the collective's work was pretentious and more preoccupied with theories of representation than with representing the second-generation migrants whose rioting had occasioned the film. In the US, according to the New York-based artist and writer Coco Fusco, the collective's work was almost inexplicable. "There was shock, incredulity, negativity. They encountered chauvinism from African Americans who wanted to know: who were these blacks with funny accents? They were thought to be too intelligent for 'the people'."
Akomfrah finds the charge of being an apolitical dilettante absurd. He was born in Ghana in 1957, and both his parents were involved with anti-colonial activism. "My dad was a member of the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah's party. My mum had met Malcolm X in Accra in 1965. We left Ghana because my mum's life was in danger after the coup of 1966, and my father died in part because of the struggle that led up to the coup. In 1976 my friends and I seriously considered going to enlist in theMPLA to fight in Angola. We wanted to be of use. I'm glad we didn't. The generation before us spoke of going home; we realised what fighting we were going to do in both a literal and a metaphorical sense had to take place here."
For Akomfrah, that fighting initially took the form of politics: "As a kid I went to an Althusserian study group; there were lots of young black kids there trying to get their heads around Althusser!" As a student activist he was a "serial occupier" and sit-in organiser, and consequently got expelled from many FE colleges. But the fight, for him, was also carried on in the realm of the imagination: he regularly sneaked in to seeTarkovsky and Fassbinder films at the Paris Pullman Cinema on the Fulham Palace Road. "I could see all these people were as fascinated with me as they were with the screen. They couldn't work out why this kid was so transfixed."
This commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films. Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) draws on the photographer James Van Der Zee's The Harlem Book of the Dead and Sergei Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1968) to fashion a probing, internationalist vision of the black radical leader that is far removed from the conventional hero projected in Spike Lee's biopicthe previous year; The Last Angel of History (1995) advanced the concept of the "data thief" as part of its argument about science-fiction elements in the music of Sun Ra, George Clinton and Lee Scratch Perry.
Akomfrah's new film, The Nine Muses, is a multilayered, gorgeously shot and affecting work that interweaves archival footage of black and Asian people travelling to and working in Britain with moody, elliptical shots of an anonymous black figure alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Split into nine chapters, each of which is dedicated to one of the Greek muses, and sprinkled with quotations ranging from the Odyssey to The Waste Land, it suggests that stories normally seen through the lens of postcolonialism could just as easily be seen in existential or mythic terms. In doing so, it invites viewers to reflect on the labels by which history – especially diasporic history – is framed and categorised.
"It's important to read images in the archive for their ambiguity and open-endedness," Akomfrah argues. "Migrants were often filmed in relation to debates about crime or social problems, so that's how they get fixed in official memory. But that Caribbean woman standing in a 60s factory isn't thinking about how she's a migrant or a burden on the British state; she's as likely to be thinking about what she's going to eat that evening or about her lover."
One of the most striking features of The Nine Muses is its sound design by Akomfrah's fellow Black Audio founder, Trevor Mathison, which meshes Arvo Pärt liturgical pieces with spirituals and Indian courtly music. The desire to create new kinds of Afro-Asian ambience stems partly from Akomfrah's youthful enthusiasm for post-punk bands such as Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire, which explored the subversive potential of noise. "The avant garde saw our emphasis on the audio as a thought crime, a heresy. It was all about the image for them. They frowned on the sonic, treating it as an impure intrusion into a hallowed field. It was a weird hangover from high modernism, especially as if you watch a Dziga Vertov film you'll see the early avant garde was as interested in sound as in images."
The work of Black Audio and Akomfrah has been increasingly celebrated by the art world recently. Kodwo Eshun, one half of the Turner prize-nominated Otolith Group whose experimental films owe a debt to Black Audio, says: "From the moment I first saw Handsworth Songs it became impossible for me to settle for anything less." Moreover, a new generation of film-makers and students, frustrated by the format-driven orthodoxies of mainstream TV and weaned on the serendipities of YouTube, is also discovering the work.
In the wake of last summer's riots, a screening of Handsworth Songs at Tate Modern attracted a huge audience, which then stayed for a three-hour conversation. "Especially after having spent much of the last 20 years being told by apparatchiks that there's no life in experimental film, it was shocking," Akomfrah says. "These were inquisitive, intellectual magpies confronted by the same questions as we were in the 1980s: how much can we call political, given that the powers that be are saying it's all criminal or without any basis in politics? They believed, like I do, that the moving image has a role to play in galvanising these debates."
• The Nine Muses was released on Friday 20 January 2012
EXHIBITION: 2013-4The Unfinished Conversation
Tate Britain
26 October 2013 – 23 March 2014

This three-screen video installation investigates cultural, ethnic and personal identity through the memories of cultural theorist Stuart Hall.



In the multi-layered installation The Unfinished Conversation, the British artist, film-maker and writer John Akomfrah (born 1957) investigates how identity is not an essence or being but instead a ‘becoming’, a product of history and memory. He explores the personal archive of the influential and acclaimed cultural theorist Stuart Hall (born 1932 Kingston, Jamaica), for whom identity and ethnicity are not fixed, but are the subject of an ‘ever-unfinished conversation’.
Unfolding over three screens, Hall discusses his discovery of a personal and political identity. Arriving in Britain from Jamaica as a student in 1951, by 1968 he would be one of the founding figures of the new left, a key architect of cultural studies and one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals. Akomfrah weaves issues of cultural identity using a wide range of references that overlay the soundtrack and archive footage of Hall, interweaving his biography with historical events. These include references to William Blake, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Mervyn Peake, Jazz and Gospel, set alongside news footage from the 1960s and 1970s.
Identifying with Hall, Akomfrah said:
To hear Stuart Hall speak about what it is to be different in society… gave you a sense not simply of self, but of agency, of what you could do with your life.
See: Tate Britain 

Identity Case Study (2)

Steve McQueen
Artist/Filmmaker


Caribs Leap/Western Deep (2002)
Artangel Project

http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2002/caribs_leap_western_deep





Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep comprises two complementary films that are shown together as a three-screen, synchronised colour video projection. The films were originally commissioned for the Documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 2002. They were then screened in London by Artangel in the former Lumiere Cinema on St Martins Lane in the autumn of that same year.
The film Caribs’ Leap is projected onto two of the three screens, which face each other. It was filmed on the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the artist’s parents were born, and memorialises a historical incident that took place there in 1651, over 150 years after the explorer Christopher Columbus first arrived at the island. For all this time the local Carib Indians fiercely resisted European colonisation, resulting in a temporary truce with the French in 1650 before fighting erupted again and the French triumphed. The last Caribs chose to jump to their deaths rather than submit to the Europeans, an event that is said to have occurred at a cliff in the town of Sauteurs, now known as Caribs’ Leap. McQueen’s film was shot at the site of this extraordinary act of collective resistance and sacrifice. The larger of the two screens shows the sky and its reflection in the shallow waters of the sea. Periodically the calm of the scene is disrupted by a figure falling vertiginously through the air. The figure is viewed mid-flight, never seen jumping or landing. The smaller screen opposite documents the passage of time in Grenada during the course of a day. The film begins in the pale light of dawn. McQueen captures life on the beachfront and the dock where boats pass by. Towards the end of the film the camera moves into a funeral parlour where the dead lie in highly polished coffins. McQueen was inspired to make Caribs’ Leap after visiting Grenada for his grandmother’s funeral; the subject matter of the film is therefore highly personal and elegiac.
Western Deep was filmed in the deepest gold mines in the world, the TauTona mines in the Witwatersrand Reef near Johannesburg in South Africa. Three and a half kilometres underground, the mines represent the deepest anyone has been into the core of the Earth. Working at such deep levels has serious and potentially dangerous consequences for the miners. The temperature can read seventy degrees Celsius. In the deepest parts of the mines the pressure above the miners is 9,500 tonnes per metre squared, or approximately 920 times normal atmospheric pressure. The film follows the miners as they descend into the mines in industrial lifts, and conveys the darkness and claustrophobia of the shafts as well as the dust and the noise in such confined spaces. One of the most striking things about the installation, however, is the sound. Art critic Thomas McEvilley has described the experience of watching the film:
Enormous jarring sounds of mechanical equipment and metallic screeching and crashing accompanied the descent into darkness, with occasional flashing lights offering glimpses of the miners as they descended ever farther, getting out of the lift at its occasional subterranean stops. The message seemed to be that labour in a capitalist society is a hell of exploitation and humiliation.
(McEvilley 2002, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/documenta_112, accessed 17 April 2012.)
The Western Deep mines have been functioning under the same management since apartheid. In the depths of the mine the predominantly black miners are shown performing supervised exercises, stepping up and down as red buzzers blare above their heads. Some of them can barely move. The blank and staring faces of the miners and their apparent impassivity to their inhospitable working environment suggest that they are rehearsing their own deaths and interments.
The strength and stoicism of the miners indicates the capacity of people to survive in extreme environments, and in this way relates albeit paradoxically to the Caribs’ bravery and defiance in choosing self-destruction over capitulation to a conquering power. The two films are structured around descent: the controlled descent of the miners travelling two miles underground inWestern Deep is a counterpoint to the free-falling figure in Caribs’ Leap. With this in mind, it is possible to see the people in Caribs’ Leap as Icarus figures or angelic messengers in contrast to the miners in the underground hell of Western Deep.
Further reading
James Lingwood (ed.), Steve McQueen: Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep, exhibition catalogue, Documenta 11, Kassel 2002.
Thomas McEvilley, ‘Documenta 11’, Frieze, no.69, September 2002,http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/documenta_112, accessed 17 April 2012.
Rachel Taylor
April 2012
See: Tate Archive