Philip Bodger
Richard Hamilton
Gerhard Richter
Border as Method
Francis Alys, The Green Line
Border Control
The following books, artist and exhibitions have strongly influenced my working practice and warrant deeper analysis.
Border as Method, or the multiplication of Labor
The book written by Sandro Mazzadra and Brett Neilson called Border as Method, or The Multiplication of Labor, discusses and explores, contemporary globalization and its role in creating an explosion of borders, the book charts this explosion, investigating the implications for migratory movements, political life, and capital transformations.
Indeed the authors set their sights on a series of borders that not only divide people from other, but includes the borders that separate colonizer from colonized, present from past and memory from reality.
Arguing that borders are and have become social institutions, which participate in the production for governance and governmentality leading to a discussion, which uncovers an illuminating insight into the way migrant camps entangles there inhabitants in a legal order for the purposes of excluding them from that very same order.
Indeed, by using the border as a method, it allows Mezzadra and Neilson a tool to analyze how the opposing patterns of border reinforcement and border crossing produce and generate border struggles, hence subjectivity.
Undauntedly this is an agenda-setting book which has its sights deeply focused on the global movements of labor, legal or illegal, skilled or unskilled and mounts the most ambitious attempt as yet to promote the idea and concept of the border into a key theoretical device for the study of global capital. Therefore adding a powerful rich voice to contemporary arguments on globalization, migration, labor, subjectivity, and capital surrounding borderlands and border struggles across a wide range of geographical scales.
Violent Borders.
The book violent Borders written by Reece Jones is important because Jones draw attention to the worrying trend that sees an increase in the expansion and growth of walls and borders across our planet. The popularity of political parties who are anti-migrant and right wing, while discussing issues surrounding the British people’s decision to break ties with and leave the European Union.
The book also brings to light the way states use and enforce borders to contain populations and limit access to opportunities and resources while helping to bring about the deaths of many migrants. Jones argues “we may live in an era of globalization, but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.”
By highlighting the expansion and growth of enclosures and borders, the book argues that the deaths of many migrants who seek a new beginning become closely related to climate change, environmental deprivation and the inequality of global wealth while documenting the billions of pounds used on border protection and security.
Indeed, within the pages of this book one can discover a world where borders not only keep people out, but a world where borders keep the unprivileged in, therefore bringing to the reader's attention the realization
that sees the exploitation by many corporations who use the multiple labor pools and free trade agreements to operate across borders, while regulators and workers are contained by them.
Undeniably the book uncovers the violence, exploitation, and domination, which connects and constructs lives and relations that become played out on and across borders worldwide. Indeed this centers the reader in a contemporary experience, in which one finds themselves confronted by the multiplication of different and diverse types of borders that are no longer fixed but have become unstable and unpredictable, and which foster and bread new forms of exploitation and domination.
Gerhard Richter.
As you move through Tate Modern turning a corner and entering a space one finds themselves standing before six large painting, which directs the eye and moved it through the composition to areas full of color, contrast, and textures.
Indeed, the six works were created by the artist Gerhard Richter as a coherent cluster of paintings named after the American experimental composer.
Richter from the late 1970s onwards regularly created abstract paintings, applying layers of paint to his canvases before wiping, scraping and dragging the paint across the surface.
This approach is really interesting to me, in that it allows for the earlier marks and movements within the painting to resurface, as the upper layers are scraped dragged and transferred across the work.
Therefore, the cage paintings and indeed many others works by Richter are constructed from many layers of paint, which become applied, erased, reapplied and erased again by the hand of the artist, leaving the surfaces animated by tracks and strokes left by Richter's scraping and dragging movements. Indeed, this leads to a number of areas where the skin of the paint ripples and where it seems soft or fluid and in other parts it seems more solid, rough or unfinished.
Although the music by John Cage-inspired these six painting, there is no direct link, linking any of Cage's music to the paintings. However, Richter was known to follow Cage’s concepts and ideas around ambient silence and sound along with his controlled use of chance, indeed the creative driving force and energy, which formed many of Cage’s musical compositions.
Cage-1
Cage-4
Cage-2
Cage-5
Cage-3
Cage-6
Richard Hamilton, The Citizen.
At the Tate Modern hangs the work The Citizen by the artist Richard Hamilton. Hamilton in the 1970-80s situated himself and his art around the sectarian violence surrounding the Northern Ireland border issues, known as
He is probably best known for his collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, which was produced for the This is Tomorrow Exhibition in 1956 and classed by many as one of the first works.
The Citizen was constructed from stills surrounding news reports from the 1980s, which reported on the dirty protest carried out by the IRA inmates at the Maze Prison. The inmates had been awarded special political classification status, but when this was removed and they became treated by the state as a common criminal, they responded by going on hunger strike, only wearing prison blankets and by covering their cell walls with their own excrement. Hamilton said, "that he could not condone the methods for the IRA but was struck by the resemblance of Christian martyrdom."
Hamilton applies colors, forms, and shapes within the composition of this work, which he combined on both sides to create balance and space.
But at the same time, it seems the artist has avoided creating formal unity on each of the sides, therefore creating feelings of tension and anxiety within his viewer. Indeed, the work combines this tension and anxiety alongside directness and confrontation as the IRA inmate stares out with a defiant gaze surrounded by a blanket and excrement covered walls.
In point of fact, Hamilton has captured so effectively within this work the rebellious defiance that longs for freedom, but only on the condition that sees Ireland free from British rule.
The Citizen 1980-3
The Northern Ireland Troubles In Britain.
The Book entitled The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain, brings to light and develops an understanding through a unique insight, which not only explores how the Northern Ireland troubles affected imprisoned and controlled the population of Northern Ireland and indeed southern Ireland, but also how it affected and controlled the people within Great Britain. Therefore, this text explores the legacies of the Northern Ireland border troubles in terms of its political and social correlations in societies and cultures within the United Kingdom. Investigating how the population in Britain have lived and acted and engaged or not within the context of the political narratives constructed by the state and its antagonists. Thus, bringing together a framework which holds within it the diverse experiences and perceptions of the border troubles, the lives of the people who were involved in the hostilities, and those who were killed injured or affected in any way by the troubles.
The book then has four main intentions: to uncover this history and its engagements and responses of the conflict within Britain.
To expose weaknesses and absences or silences within this history.
To encourage and incite public debates involving the importance of this history.
To reflect on the significance of the uncovering of unexamined memories and understandings of the past histories and how all this might be addressed and negotiated.
The Green Line.
The Artist Francis Alys’s work called The Green Line (Sometimes Doing Something Poetic can become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic) is central to discovering the inverted geometry were crossing the urban borderland is reinterpreted, recomposed and short-circuited as it continuously becomes flexible unstable and almost liquid.
Indeed in the work, Alys has captured this unstable, flexible liquid movement of a blurred borderline, dripping green paint from a pierced can as he walks along the which became known as the green line, drawn on the map in 1948 by Moshe Dayan at the end of the conflict between Israel and Jordan. But this only remained the case until 1967 following the Six Day War when Israel inhabited and occupied the Palestinian land east of this line.
By leaving a trace of green paint across the landscape, Alys’s underscores the Green Line in its historical connotation, which becomes an act that determines power as an economical political practice or procedure ruling over differing social classes and groups. Indeed, one could say Francis exposes power relations that become filtered out re-reading the set of barriers, borders, and geographic limitation as tools of repression.
Therefore, within this work, Alys draws our attention to The Green line along with the other borders that represent a global system of manipulation and control that create an unfair, unbalanced instrument for the circulation and division of global regions and territories across our world.
Eight Borders Eight days.
Eight Borders, Eight Days is a documentary directed by Amanda Bailly, a story that uncovers how a determine Syrian mother and her two children after being denied resettlement in America risks their lives on an eight-day journey through land and sea to reach safety.
Sham’s, a single mother fleeing war in her home country of Syria, applied for asylum in the U.S, where she submitted medical test records, attended many interviews was sent to language and culture classes, but she still was not accepted and denied citizenship.
As a consequence, with now answers for resettlement and every other path to safety closed off, this fiercely- determined mother of two could only see one way out, born from desperation, Sham risked her and her children’s lives by paying smugglers for a place on a small raft, destined for Europe.
Their story gives us an insight into some of the many direct or indirect consequences cussed by building borders or by shutting and closing our doors to people fleeing violence, persecution, and war.
Sham’s story is one that brakes through misinformation and fear to humanize the issues within an audience. A strong and resourceful woman who is unwavering in her quest to find a safe space in- which she and her children can thrive and become self-sufficient
This documentary and story are hugely relatable, as it shows, like all parents, Syrian parents want the very best for their children and at the same time communicates a strong message around the escalation of border struggles and deaths, which occur across the borders of the world each year.
Border Controls
Born from a world that has seen a rise and a continuation of restricted political borders and border controls regarding migration and the increasing alienation, both in Britain (with Brexit) together with the wider affairs and concerns in Europe and America, Border Controls is an exhibition that sees Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs in collaboration at the No Format Gallery in London.
This exhibition brings together two artists who both have separate careers and have worked informally together for many years, sharing a studio space together they set and negotiate boundary and where necessary question where and how to set these boundaries.
The exhibition is formed and consists of a number of arranged sculptures, mirrors, shelves, wall drawings, assemblages, which operates somewhere between art object and arrangement on display.
Like Donald Judd’s work, which was discussed earlier, it relate to the audiences perceptions as you physically interact with the artwork, giving it meaning as one adapts to the structure as you move through both real and idealized concepts of space, leading the viewer to question and negotiating perspective between being outside of the structure and our experiences of interacting with it.
This work then questions the concepts of power and control in the contemporary world and where and how we draw boundaries in a developed society and how society exist within these boundaries, confines, and limitations.
