Homi K. Bhabha

A significant and extensive book on a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008–2011), during which Simon travelled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. This volume accompanies the exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (May 2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 2011), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May–September 2012).… (mere)

The attention currently directed from the West to the Islamic world has profound ramifications for the art made by those who come from the region but live elsewhere: that origin is increasingly becoming a defining term in the consideration of works by artists such as Mona Hatoum and Shirin Neshat. Resisting any homogenizing impulse, Without Boundary recognizes a need to ask if this art is marked by an Islamic difference. Author and curator Fereshteh Daftari considers issues ranging from the aesthetic legacy of Islamic art to contemporary ideas of identity and faith. Essays by MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry, whose own academic and curatorial background involves traditional Islamic arts; Homi Bhabha, the preeminent theorist and scholar of the postcolonial condition; and the Turkish writer and novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the German Book Peace Prize and author of My Name Is Read and Snow. Artists include Jananne-Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Kutlug Ataman, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Mona Hatoum, Shirazeh Houshiary, Emily Jacir, Y.Z. Kami, Mike Kelley, Rachid Koraichi, Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Shirana Shahbazi, Raqib Shaw, Shahzia Sikander and Bill Viola.… (mere)

Oh, Homi Bhabha, you break my heart. Maybe it was your cuddly name; maybe it was your downness with Edward Said and Terry Eagleton and suchlike members of that most exclusive and almost oxymoronic fraternity, awesome critical theorists; Maybe just that I, stereotypically, automatically, Orientalistically, assumed a savvy post-colonial, post-colonized writer guy like yourself would care more about accessibility and effecting change than plumbing the murky depths up theory's collective ass. When you started out with an introduction full of pithy pertinent personalisms and a showtunez quote that was downright psychedelic in context, mind-expanding, I knew joy.

But then it's just islands from there on in. Occasional moment where you kick up your heels; more often, solid quotes ganked from unimpeachable sources, a skeleton of argument on which you hang your linguistic horror. For every little bit of Conrad or Fanon or your Indian poet friend (is every Indian poet your friend, or only all the ones worth quoting?), you set it in a grindery of knives and iron pestles and destroy it, bring it to heel in the service of that ever-more-contingent and tangential meaning/lessness that constitutes the critical sublime.

There are really worthy ideas in here, that need saying and repeating and reflecting on. Culture arising from the interstices, precursing Zizek kinda; the "Third Space"; the narrativization and performative nature of national and cultural identities; the exploded galaxy of post-colonial perspectives and their oppositionality to that other great hybridizing maw, globalism (the "bad multiculturalism"); others. But when you're peddling a book that's winning prizes for bad writing (specifically for the sentence "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality"), dude, aren't you doing the cause, be it of understanding or mere social justice, a lot more harm than good?… (mere)