C to the power 4

I was out for a walk the other day and, quite by chance, came across this challenging and exhilarating piece by the Scottish street artist Fiona Menzies-Cunningham. Her graffiti work, currently on view at various locations around Glasgow, is charged with powerful ideas which force us to think about the nature of power, oppression and patriarchy. 

Menzies-Cunningham, by refusing to exhibit in bourgeois galleries, is one of the few modern artists willing to make resonant her participation in a genuine critical dialogue around toxic masculinity and white hegemony by taking art to the people. Her free-to-view graffiti skillfully interpolates notions of power, class and sexuality into a cultural paradigm which not only transcends materialism, but rages against the malignant logic of the hetero-patriarchal male gaze, all the while acknowledging that social constructs (like gender) are part of the fatal flaw of language and can only be mediated by heuristic approaches to ontological inquiry.

This piece, entitled C to the power 4, is located near Knightswood Park and has already attracted quite a bit of attention. The first thing one notices is that she has chosen to adorn a building in which the windows are protected by wire mesh. The curtains are permanently drawn, a perfect illustration of Brexit Britain's closed-mindedness and isolationism. Each window is, in fact, a unique 'territory' marked by an individual 'cunt'.

At first glance, these four cunts appear to be more or less identical, but closer inspection reveals a devious simplicity in the remarkable way that Menzies-Cunningham manages light. There is a certain morbid fluidity to the brushstrokes, a subtle grading of rage, the insidious chiaroscuro forcing us to acknowledge and confront the nature of oppression. There is an almost subaqueous quality to the spatial relationship between the individual letters in each word, but one might also say that the space between the cunts, the lucid purity of those gaps, delineates a rigorous substructure of deeply critical thinking. 

 

We expect each cunt to offer a glimpse into its own hellish world, but when we try to look through these windows there is no ‘view’ to be had. The mesh, the glass and the grey curtains merely confront us with a brutal reflection of our own opaque paranoia. It would be relatively straightforward to interpret these cunts as being the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Trump, Brexit, toxic masculinity and white privilege), but a closer examination forces us to consider the subtleties of the artist's worldview.  There is a sense in which these cunts visually and conceptually activate a distinctive formal juxtaposition, asking us to consider whether culture really is interchangeable with truth; only from such a position (which is, surely, a position of trust), can one truthfully forge a constructive feminine paradigm of legitimate expression.

This piece is both menacing and playful because of the way the artist uses the reductive quality of her motifs to spatially undermine the exploration of our response to discursive trans-misogynistic violence. For what it's worth, my reading is that the 'left to right' running order of C to the power 4 would be: white privilege (leading to) toxic masculinity (which in turn leads to) Trump (which is accompanied by) Brexit, but I know that other interpretations are available. One is teased, for instance, by the ambiguous calligraphy of that last cunt on the right; it might actually be 'Clint', which could be an allusion to misogyny and homophobia in Hollywood westerns. 

C to the power 4 bridges the gap between our notion of 'the powerful' and our everyday lived experience. Through the disjunctive perturbation of this negative space, Menzies-Cunningham has asked questions to which we previously had no answers and provided answers where previously there had been no questions. Her beautifully congruent synthesis of consciousness and narrative presents us with a stark choice: succumb to the oppressive constructs of patriarchy or embrace the liberating paradox of fragmentation within an inter-sectional landscape. It is now, surely, time for us to foreground the intrinsic apparatus of equity within a renewed, empowered, 'higher' consciousness in which cunts can only be understood within the critical framework of dialectical third-wave feminism.

On not being 'there' there

If you have parented a teenager, you will know that there is a difference between going out and going out out. Going out means you are leaving the house to do something with friends, but that ‘something’ won’t involve much in the way of drinking and clubbing. Going out out, by contrast, will involve both of those activities, along with some others that parents would rather not know about. There are certain aspects of modern life which require a similar nomenclature.       

If you’ve been to a concert recently, you may have noticed the phenomenon of people recording the event on their tablet or phone. They will have paid money to be there, but chosen to limit their participation in the gig by mediating the experience through an electronic device, presumably so they can watch it later. But the ‘watching it later’ can only be a facsimile of the actual experience. Someone might claim about a concert that “I was there … look at what I filmed”, but I’d suggest that their decision to film it means that they weren’t there there. The memory of recording an event is not the same as a memory of watching it; by definition, the former will be of a lower resolution.       

I used to think that not being there there was something of a bug in a 21^st century life shaped by technology, but I’m now more inclined to interpret it as a feature. For many folk, it seems that any event (a night-out, a birthday meal, a picnic in the park) hasn’t really happened until it has appeared on Facebook or Instagram. But if you’re using up time and energy trying to get the perfect image to post on social media, if you’re already curating an experience you’ve yet to have, you’re not really there there at all. Being there there would not involve putting the actual experience on hold while you recorded it, turning it, effectively, into something else.

This curating culture extends to recording stuff as mundane as people ‘reacting’ to something. You can find hundreds of videos on Youtube of so-and-so reacting to Arsenal’s third goal against Tottenham; or so-and-so reacting to the 'Red Wedding' in Game of Thrones; or so-and-so reacting to the trailer for the new Avengers film.

We are social animals and we crave communal experiences, but where exactly does the pleasure reside in watching someone else react to something? What’s the thrill in observing other folk doing mundane things? The judgemental part of me fears that it’s a bit like sub-contracting your own response to a third party, but the charitable part would concede that it probably just helps some people authenticate a shared experience. Or perhaps it represents something more significant. Maybe digital curation is part of some evolutionary process whereby our species will develop the appropriate neurological software to allow us to become truly technological beings.    

The ‘observing other folk at the mundane’ phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated by Gogglebox, a TV show about people watching TV in order to talk about it on TV. I’m not entirely sure where the appeal of this show lies (I don’t think it's with the sparkling wit of the participants). Is it, perhaps, that we are comforted by seeing other people doing the same lazy stuff as us? Does it somehow validate our decision to sit on the couch and watch rubbish on the telly because we can pretend that what we are doing, like those Gogglebox folk, is having a communal experience, observing and commentating on our cultural milieu? If it is true that watching TV is a passive experience, then how should we describe the act of watching other people watching TV? Not that long ago such an act would have been considered absurd.

Where can it go from here? Are there meta-contexts of curation, observation and reaction that we’ve yet to explore? With a little imagination, we could easily expand our curated universe.  

Perhaps someone should make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the people who have to edit the footage for each edition of Gogglebox (that must be quite a job, wading through hours of material to find the entertaining bits). Then we, the viewers, could watch this programme and create some home-made content by recording ourselves reacting to a show about the trials and tribulations of the people who edit the footage of the people who watch TV in order to talk about it on TV.

This new programme (let’s call it 'G-Box Infinity') would feature us reacting to watching the people editing the Gogglebox footage. Once that was shown on TV, the Gogglebox people could watch 'G-Box Infinity' in order to talk about it on TV.  

Then, in the comfort of our living rooms, we could watch the Gogglebox people watching and talking about us reacting to watching the trials and tribulations of the people who edit the footage of the people who watch TV in order to talk about it on TV.  

I could go on, but there is a danger that I’ll accidentally set up a temporal feedback loop and blow a hole in the fabric of time.