Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis

Aesthetic Resilience

Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven, Marijke de Valck, Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven, Marijke de Valck

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000195491
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Kunst
• Thema: Kunst & Politik

This book examines how renewed forms of artistic activism were developed in the wake of the neoliberal repression since the 1980s.

The volume shows the diverse ways in which artists have sought to confront systemic crises around the globe, searching for new and enduring forms of building communities and reimagining the political horizon. The authors engage in a dialogue with these artistic efforts and their histories – in particular the earlier artistic activism that was developed during the civil rights era in the 1960s and 70s – providing valuable historical insight and new conceptual reflection on the future of aesthetic resilience.

This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, history of art, film and literary studies, protest movements, and social movements.

Part I

Resilience: Searching for New Weapons While Fleeing

1Resilience Thinking, Storytelling, and Aesthetic Resilience

Marijke de Valck

Resilience is a buzzword. Its popularity surged in the period following the financial crisis of 2008. The widespread use of the word resilience signaled an urgent need to explore ways in which people, communities, and businesses might bounce back from shocks and failures at a time when the capitalist system seemed to falter. The term resilience was adopted with particular enthusiasm in development circles, where it was used to warn of a series of looming crises: ecological, demographic, technological, and pandemic. If our systems can and will fail, the warnings went, we better be prepared, and redesign them with an eye for the flexibility and adaptability that is required to survive turbulent times.

Within five years after the beginning of the financial crisis the term resilience had taken firm root in the management speak on global challenges. It had become common to talk about resilient cities,¹ resilient communities,² resilient design,³ and treat resiliency as a cure for twenty-first-century problems. However, while initiatives, programs, and schemes aimed at making a variety of things more resilient blossomed, criticism of the ill-defined use of the term surfaced as well.⁴ Katrina Brown, professor of Social Sciences and resilience expert at the University of Exeter, for example, criticized the use of the term in policy discourses of international bodies like the United Nations, World Bank, and OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).⁵ She argues the turn to resilience largely failed to mark a radical moment and bring about structural change.⁶

That interpretations of resilience differ may be seen as a consequence of the plurality of its uses and aims. Resilience thinking today occurs in a variety of societal fields and academic disciplines. With genealogical roots in ecology, engineering, and (child) psychology, the concept of resilience has traveled prolifically, and can be found in areas as diverse as health care, urban planning, disaster risk management, and social ecology. However, in the realm of art and culture a similarly enthusiastic embrace of the term is yet to come. Mostly its use is associated with instrumental approaches to the arts, like art therapy, where resilience is adopted by practitioners moving away from psychoanalysis and other pathology-based therapies,⁷ or community art projects concerned with healing and social work for (minority) groups. Sometimes, arts and culture are granted minor projects under the umbrella of a grander urban planning or development scheme. The 100 Resilient Cities organization, for example, “puts the arts to work for city resilience”⁸ by engaging artists to contribute to the creative place-making of the city. In this chapter I am interested in addressing the broader permeation of resilience thinking in contemporary visual culture and artistic practices, and exploring whether the surge in attention for resilience might be appropriated by the arts in meaningful and critical ways.

Taking two recent art films as case studies, the chapter offers illustrations of what we have tentatively proposed to call aesthetic resilience in this volume. The films are chosen because both are set in a time of crisis and feature resilient characters in situations of high impact, but differ in their use of aesthetic strategies to engage viewers’ political imagination. Thereby they will offer complementary examples to think through the potential of the concept of aesthetic resilience. Dirty God (2019) tells the story of a young British mother who tries to rebuild her life after an acid attack by her ex-boyfriend. The lead role is played by first-time actress Vicky Knight, who was badly burned in her childhood. Dreamaway (2018) stars a group of Sharm El Sheikh resort employees who are faced with the rapid decline of the Egyptian Red Sea coast as a tourist destination. Throughout the chapter I will draw attention to the development and production of these stories in addition to their contents and textual form because, I will argue, it is with such a dual approach that we may begin to appreciate how a tactic of aesthetic resilience allows these films to forge meaningful relations between art and politics. I will use other examples, including an episode of the BBC nature documentary series Dynasties (2018), to clarify how resilience themes in themselves are quite common in contemporary storytelling, and warn that one should be wary of conflating them with ideals of emancipatory political imagination.

Dirty God

The opening sequence of the film Dirty God (2019) moves in extreme close-up over the skin of the main protagonist Jade, played by Vicky Knight. In the story world Jade is an acid-attack survivor, who struggles processing her trauma. The first images of the film offer a tactile encounter with the physical disfigurements of her body. You do not immediately recognize what you see, and for a while the abstract patterns are reminiscent of the painterly images of the subgenre of absolute films of the 1920s. In much the same way as the eyes are drawn into the play of light and form in the works by Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann, Dirty God begins by pulling viewers in close and stripping the scarring of its narrative context. Stylistically it is an intriguing choice that allows viewers a brief moment of pure emotional response to a texture. It won’t take long before the question of what it is one is looking at takes precedence, and the surface shown on screen is decoded as skin that deviates from the norm. The brief moment suffices to convey a key political message of the film: bodily images are constructed culturally, and it is the social stigma created by negative cultural attitudes that causes disfigured people to suffer severe psychosocial problems and distress.

For director Sacha Polak (born 1982 Amsterdam, Netherlands) it was crucial to cast someone with real scarring in the role of Jade, someone “who could relate to the story.”⁹ Vicky (born 1996 Essex, England) was found because of a video she had posted online about her experiences as a burn survivor. Vicky survived an arson fire when she was eight years old. She suffered 33 percent burns to her skin, which left disfigurements on her chin, neck, arms, and torso. At school she was bullied and abused both verbally and physically. Going out meant having to prepare herself for looks and often nasty name-calling. Vicky’s real-life experience of being repeatedly called a monster is echoed in an early scene in the film, when her one-year-old daughter Rae starts wailing when she sees Jade wearing a plastic mask after her release from the hospital. “Monster,” the little one cries. Trying to save the situation, Jade’s mom soothes it’s a “nice monster.” It is one of many scenes that makes the viewer flinch.

Dirty God premiered as the opening film of the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019 and was shown at festivals in Europe, the US, and Asia, and cinemas in the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, France, and Belgium. In interviews and talks that accompany the film’s circulation, Vicky emphasizes how the film has changed her life.¹⁰ She suffered from a very low self-image and depression, and used to hide her scars, trying to protect herself from the staring and insults. Even though she’d been fighting hard to come to terms with her looks,¹¹ she self-reportedly was in a very bad state before agreeing, without any acting experience, to perform in the film.¹² Dirty God helped her overcome the fears of living with disfigurement, and provided empowerment in tapping personal traumatic experiences for the benefit of putting the issue of scarring on the agenda.

Resilience as Concept

Vicky and the character she plays show the capacity to recover from difficulties; they show resilience. What resilience precisely is diverges between fields and disciplines. Despite differences, one can identify shared elements. The following four elements constitute the main components of the concept across most of its uses:

1. Resilience is manifested as a response …
2. … to either immediate or longitudinal adverse changes that are imposed …
3. … in a context where conditions are complex and uncertain …
4. … that is successful in restoring stability.

Resilience is always accomplished in relation to an external force or forces, and studies of resilience therefore tend to focus on resources available to be(come) (more) resilient. The concept can be used for individuals, groups, communities, and peoples. In addition, one can speak of resilient organizations and cities, as well as resiliency in all types of human-made systems, engineered or designed. In the natural world the term can be applied to species, populations, and ecosystems. There are two important assertions to make regarding the term’s applicability on different scales. One, resilience is not synchronized between levels. Individual species may fall prey to disease, while the population survives. Two, resilience cannot be isolated on one level either. The threat that caused the extinction of a species demands the ecosystem to adapt.

In psychology, studies on resilience originated in the 1970s with work on individuals, in particular children who were believed to have a natural invulnerability.¹³ The initial approach of psychologists then was to regard resilience as a personal trait, locating it on the individual level in resources like intelligence, sociability, and personal attributes (self-esteem, tolerance for negative affect, fortitude, sense of humor, etc.). When psychologists learned children’s ability to adapt was closely connected with social dimensions, research expanded to include larger units likes the family, school, peers, and other groups or communities. Much of the work in the 1980s was spent uncovering protective factors on the different levels that promoted resilience in children and adolescents.¹⁴ To the level of individual, family, and community, that of culture was added more recently.¹⁵ For example, research showed that traditional cultural resources like spirituality promote resilience in Indigenous communities.¹⁶

Despite academic awareness that resilience is best understood when personal as well as social dimensions are considered, a strong tradition of treating resilience as a set of individual resources continues. Exponents of this tradition are found in therapies that connect resilience to personal growth. It is this resilience-as-individual-trait approach that also dominates the popular self-help literature dealing with forms of resilience.¹⁷ Mark Manson’s bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck (2016), for example, rehearses some of the key ideas, such as that there is value in suffering, that failure can improve the quality of your life, and rejection will make you better. The book’s main message is to accept your limitations and take responsibility for your choices. Manson writes: “The more we choose to accept our responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.”¹⁸ It has often been pointed out how neatly the underlying assumption that people can discipline themselves—or use self-technologies in Foucauldian terminology—corresponds to the political rationale of neoliberal democracies.¹⁹ Such critique also contends the contemporary emphasis on self-mastery relinquishes governmental responsibility for social and systemic problems.

Dirty God is not soft on society. It features Jade as a resilient character, but is also a strong manifesto against the structural disrespect for body differences. The story is grim, gripping, and uncompromisingly honest in its depiction of the social and psychological misery suffered by victims of disfigurement. The text offers viewers few opportunities to read against its activist grains. However, there is also a second, pa...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Taking Aesthetics from Resistance to Resilience
• PART I Resilience: Searching for New Weapons While Fleeing
• PART II Global Conjunctions of Aesthetic Resilience
• PART III Artistic Practices of Embodied Resilience
• Index